This Way, Uncle, into the Palace

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My nephew Xuan, now forty and too old for such talk, used an American expression I had never heard before, and after his wife explained it to me in laborious detail I briefly fell deaf. This was at our annual family picnic in Fresno, under a shade tree. When my hearing disappeared I pretended nothing had happened: for months now, whenever I am spoken to insensibly, in a rush of American street slang or media references, I have experienced total silence lasting up to a minute.

I have not yet told Xuan of my affliction. He sometimes seems to me no longer Vietnamese. His American wife, Janet, and their two mixed-blood sons, and even Janet's parents, whose house we are driving to after the picnic, have transformed him. His family extends me courtesy but nothing more, and I sense that Xuan, too, no longer holds me dear to his heart. I am the last of my own family's Saigon generation, a dried-out stalk, and one day soon, I know, my nephew will place my portrait on the small altar in his garage and light funeral incense. Until then I have no desire to suffer empty and dismal lamentations from Xuan or his family. Time no longer welcomes my presence. I accept that, even as I accept the betrayal of my adopted language, one I have loved and cultivated for decades. It has now begun to turn its back to me, leaving me bereft, as if standing outside a door, until the door opens again of its own accord. There is nothing that can be done.

We had been at the park eating picnic food for perhaps half an hour. Xuan's sons, Peter and Jackson, played nearby in the meadow, throwing a football back and forth. Last week, Xuan told me, a despondent man had been shot dead by the police in their neighborhood. They live in a respectable area, one with many professionals, so of course I was curious. "Suicide by cop," Xuan then said, stuffing potato salad into his mouth. He wore a backward baseball cap in imitation of his sons, and he spoke the words so fluently—he still has an accent—that I asked him how he came to know such an arcane expression. Then Janet leaned across the picnic table and informed me it was a common phrase. She explained its meaning to me. She must have been worried I'd start to ask for word derivations and such because she then leaned back and tried to expand the conversation. Imagine, she said to us both: imagine making a poor policeman carry around that guilt. What an act of spite, she said. Imagine pulling a stranger into your own darkness. It was like killing two people, yourself and the cop.

That is when my hearing briefly vanished. I nodded politely, and I passed Xuan a hot dog bun when I saw where his eyes were looking. Janet turned toward Peter and Jackson and yelled something, telling them, I think, to hurry up and eat. Soon, before traffic picked up, we would all drive to Janet's parents' house to exclaim over their newly installed hot tub. Peter shouted something back to his mother, but Xuan and Janet simply ignored him. If I had been the parent of either of those two boys, my response would have been much stronger. They had been speaking nonsense all morning, and they both laughed in my face when rude noises came from a mustard container I had squeezed.

I found myself wishing my deafness would continue all day, sparing me from the conversation that would ensue at Janet's parents' house. The last time we had all spent the evening together—it was Christmas dinner, with turkey and pineapple ham—I felt only insult. Xuan, of course, had fitted in quite nicely, raising his glass several times to toast ridiculous things—badminton, the...