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The chapter opens with the narrator describing Ma’s callused, scarred hands from decades in factories and nail salons, condemning the salon as a place that simultaneously raises immigrant children, cooks phở, and forces workers into hazardous, under‑paid labor. On a Sunday, a ten‑year‑old narrator opens the salon and assists a frail, seventy‑something woman with an amputated lower leg. He helps her into a pedicure chair while Ma performs a meticulous “pedicure” on the prosthetic limb, ultimately accepting a hundred‑dollar bill and departing. That night, Ma lies on the floor and asks the narrator to scrape her back with a Vicks‑coated quarter, a ritual that bruises her skin and brings her relief, echoing Barthes’s idea of writing on the body.
Later, the narrator recounts his first paid work at fourteen during the summer of 2003. He rides his bike to a tobacco farm outside Hartford, describing the sprawling fields, barns, and the bitter smell of tobacco. He meets Manny, the Spanish‑speaking crew leader who calls him “Chinito.” The farm’s owner, Mr Buford, a lanky seventy‑year‑old in a Red Sox cap with a gold tooth, greets him. Other workers include Nico, a Dominican migrant; Rick, a white twenty‑something on the sex‑offender list; and Rigo, who repeatedly says “Lo siento.” The narrator learns the harvest process—cutting with machetes, gathering in spears, and drying in barns—while communicating without language through gestures. He observes the constant apology (“sorry,” “Lo siento”) that workers repeat to each other and to Ma when she misses work due to Lan’s schizophrenic episodes.
At the end of the season, a new figure appears: Trevor, the grandson of Mr Buford, taller and helmeted, who introduces himself and triggers the narrator’s realization that his apology to Ma is now an extension of himself. He says “Sorry” to Ma, linking his identity as her son to the recurring motif of apology throughout the chapter.