The Gangster We Are All Looking For

When I grow up I am going to be the gangster we are all looking for.

In Vietnamese, the word for water and the word for a nation, a country and a homeland are one and the same: nu’o'c.

I don't know how time moves or which of our sorrows or our desires it is able to wash away.

If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, your mother,father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend is dead from a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy misson, air attack, Tet offensive, My Lai massacre, failed escape, I would not scream but make of my body a net, a tarp, stretched taut across the sky, the sea, over every village and hamlet, prepared to catch everything from the sky, shade everything on the ground, rain water and receive yyou, war, with arms outstretched

In the fall of the year I turned sixteen, I jumped out of my bedroom window and ran away. The night’s black roads wound like long stretches of river. … The streets ribboned out in all directions. I lifted first one foot and then the other, ready to run down all of them

There is not a trace of blood anywhere except here, in my throat, where I am telling you all this.