Also by Ocean Vuong: Night Sky with Exit Wounds. In this chapter the narrator expands the memoir with a series of fragmented vignettes that reveal ongoing physical abuse, moments of artistic escape, cultural dislocation, and the monarch‑butterfly migration as a metaphor for intergenerational trauma. The narrator recounts childhood memories in Hartford with his schizophrenic grandmother Lan, the protective nickname “Little Dog,” scenes of war‑time trauma, bullying on the school bus, his mother’s (Ma) attempts to teach him English and instill “American” habits, a spiral metaphor for memory, and his emerging role as family interpreter during domestic hardships. The chapter expands the backstory of Lan, revealing her escape from an arranged marriage, the naming of herself, and her life as a mother to a daughter named Hong; it depicts a wartime checkpoint scene where Lan and Hong confront armed soldiers, includes a brutal macaque‑brain ritual by the soldiers, and ties the events to 1968, the Year of the Monkey, deepening the memoir’s intergenerational trauma motif. The narrator discovers his grandfather Paul’s wartime past, his marriage to Lan, and learns that Paul is not his biological grandfather, a truth revealed by Ma; Paul’s cancer remission and his present life in Virginia are also detailed. Narrator is violently taken in a tan‑and‑rust Toyota by Ma and Lan, fearing a killer targeting Mai; they race to a house where a white man with a shotgun confronts them, learning that Mai has lived in Florida for five years; the car withdraws as a boy with a toy pistol mimics shooting. Ma waits at a kitchen table while her son lies wounded beneath pine trees; the son, addressed as Trev, shares a secret and declares he is no longer afraid of dying, and the chapter introduces a bullet metaphor for his lingering trauma.