The chapter opens with the nine‑year‑old narrator waking in a dark Virginia bedroom, mistaking a distressed animal for a cat, only to find his grandfather Paul crying beside a red‑lit doorway. Paul, a white‑haired US Navy veteran, holds a trembling Polaroid of himself and Lan. Through Paul’s recollections the narrator learns that Lan met Paul in 1967 at a Saigon bar while stationed at Cam Ranh Bay; they married in 1968 at the city courthouse, a ceremony captured in a photo that hung in the narrator’s childhood home. Lan recounts fleeing an arranged marriage, working as a sex worker for American GIs, and becoming pregnant with the narrator’s mother Ma, though she later claims the child’s biological father was another American soldier. The narrator recalls singing ca trù folk songs for Paul, who recognizes the melody and admits hearing it in the dark, linking the songs to Lan’s wartime lullabies. Paul later shares details of his cancer diagnosis from Agent Orange exposure, his successful surgery, and his current habit of smoking joints while tending a basil garden with the narrator. Their conversation sidesteps the past, focusing instead on gardening, antibiotics, and cooking, until Paul’s lamp clicks off and he whispers “I’m glad you’re here, Little Dog.” The narrative then shifts to Hartford memories of the narrator questioning racial labels on TV, Lan’s remarks, and the family’s struggle with color and identity after immigrating to a Latinx neighborhood in 1990. Further digressions trace the lineage of Tiger Woods, connecting his mixed heritage to the Vietnam War’s legacy, and recount a church service where the narrator’s sister (referred to as “you”) sings “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and cries out in Vietnamese for her absent father. Interwoven are historical footnotes about US bombing in Vietnam and a final, poignant scene where the narrator asks Ma why knowledge fails to heal, reflecting on the layered uncertainties of identity, memory, and familial truth.