Viet Thanh Nguyen

Only one thing was missing from the hamlet and that was the people, the most important of which was my mother. She had died during my junior year in college, when she was just thirty-four. For the first and only time, my father wrote me a letter, brief and to the point: Your mother has passed away of tuberculosis, poor thing. She is buried in the cemetery under a real headstone. A real headstone! He had noted it to say in his own way that he had paid for it, since my mother did not have the savings to afford any such thing. I read his letter twice in numb disbelief before the pain struck, the hot lead of sorrow pouring into the mold of my body.