Chapter 4
The chapter opens with the nine‑year‑old narrator waking in a dark Virginia bedroom on a humid August night, hearing an animal’s distress. He follows the sound, discovers a red sliver of light from a cracked door, and pushes it open to find his grandfather Paul sitting in a reading chair, crying, holding a trembling Polaroid. The narrator realizes he is in his grandfather’s home during a summer break.
A flashback follows: Paul and Lan first met in 1967 while Paul was stationed at Cam Ranh Bay. They met at a Saigon bar, fell in love, and married a year later at the city’s courthouse. Their wedding photo hangs over the narrator’s childhood, showing a young Virginian farmboy with his Vietnamese wife, Lan, who already has a twelve‑year‑old daughter, Mai, from an arranged marriage. Lan recounts her escape from an abusive first marriage, her work as a sex worker for American GIs, and the stigma she faced in her village. The narrative details a night during the Tet Offensive when Lan and Paul huddled in a one‑room apartment, Paul with his pistol, as mortar fire rang outside.
Back in the present, the narrator and Paul sit together after the night’s events. Paul laments hearing the Vietnamese folk song “Ca trù” that the narrator sang earlier, recalling how Lan used to sing it. The narrator offers a short explanation of the song’s grim lyrics, and Paul, mistaking his own memory, claps and they share a bowl of Raisin Bran with water.
Later, the pair are in Paul’s garden harvesting basil for a pesto recipe. They avoid discussing the past, instead chatting about cage‑free eggs, antibiotics, and bee decline. While Paul bends to pull a ragweed, a Polaroid of Paul and Lan falls from his pocket onto the grass, showing the couple laughing and embracing. Paul quickly pockets it again.
In the kitchen, Paul prepares a joint, smoking it solemnly. He reveals that he was diagnosed with cancer, likely from Agent Orange exposure, underwent chemotherapy, and had surgery on a tumor at the base of his neck. While smoking, the narrator remembers a prior conversation with his mother in Hartford, where his mother dramatically told him “Your grandfather is nobody,” insisting that Lan had been pregnant by another American soldier when she met Paul, making Paul not his biological grandfather or father. The narrator processes this revelation, feeling the loss of an identity anchor.
The chapter then shifts to the narrator’s memory of a church service in Hartford, where he, his mother, and a friend’s Dominican‑Cuban family sing “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” He recalls his mother’s intense, tear‑filled Vietnamese plea for her absent father, the only time Vietnamese is spoken publicly in that church, and the emotional freedom the song affords her.
Interwoven are historical asides: a brief recount of General Curtis LeMay’s bombing campaign in Vietnam, Tiger Woods’ 1997 Masters win, and the 1998 opening of Vietnam’s first professional golf course built on a former bomb crater.
The chapter concludes with Paul, still smoking, telling the narrator “I’m not who I am,” and the narrator deciding to keep calling him “Grandpa” despite the truth, while a roach sizzles in water and the room is filled with violet stillness. The final image is of the narrator’s empty Raisin Bran bowl and the lingering sense of unresolved family identity.