the end of me

After my mother’s death, Lan thinks we should have another child. Má, whom Lan has come to think of as her mother, would want that. As for Ba Má, they long ago ceased calling Lan their daughter-in-law, telling Lan that they love her as a daughter.

Three hundred fifty days

after Má’s death,

Simone is born.

If Ellison was named

after one great writer,

Simone is named after

Simone de Beauvoir

and

Nina Simone

strong, heroic women who faced a violent world with

philosophy, politics, writing, music, and song.

I, who never wanted to be a father, am now a father twice. I, who always distrusted the feeling of being at home, now feel at home. With my children, with Lan, in our house.

This is, perhaps, the end of me as a writer.

Or this is the beginning of me as a different kind of writer.

Fatherhood, I think, has made me a better writer.

Opened me to the care of others, to the study

of my own emotions. Made me someone

who knows how to love and to give

of myself to Lan and the children.

Made me someone who

could write this book,

which I never

wanted to

write.

The house is full of books, a precondition of happiness. And justice. Ellison and Simone each have their own libraries, the very Extravagance and Necessity172 I wished I’d had in my childhood. In giving them books, I want them to be whatever they want to be. No need to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers. I want them to be happy!

i.e.,

that is,

not a writer.

Or at least not

a writer like me.

What if Ellison wants to be a professional video game player? Lan asks.

Dear reader—

I hesitated.

At nine, Ellison wrote these words when asked to describe himself at school: friend, brother, eldest child, Vietnamese boy, comic lover, artist, writer, gamer.

So perhaps he will be a professional video game player one day.

But he is also a writer and an artist because, when he was five, after having been exposed every day and night to the picture books and comic books I read him in the morning and evening, and after Lan and I took him with us to an artists’ colony and writers’ residency—

where one can experience what socialism probably

feels like, or should feel like, which is to say a

kinder version of capitalism, with a wealth of

resources and choices, minus the exploitation,

greed, and soul-crushing alienation, as well as a

kinder version of communism, with a commitment

to justice and collectivity, minus the paranoia,

secret police, and reeducation camps,

allowing one to be creative, playful, and free

—he wrote and drew a book of his own. I posted it on Facebook. An editor asked if this was for real, and if so, could she publish it?

I asked:

Can I make money off my son?

And so Chicken of the Sea was born. In the tradition of Lester the Cat, this gallinaceous adventure is also about animal alienation:

A flock of chickens,

bored with rural life,

abandon the farm.

And become

pirates!

I could never have imagined such a story, just as I could never now imagine Lester the Cat. I have lost that part of childhood, but from Ellison and now Simone, I have learned to ask the most important question of all when it comes to writing, and the imagination, and justice:

Why not?

Why not write this book in this way?

Why not tell these sad stories and

these sob stories? And then

why not crack a joke?

These children have given me a great gift, and I would have neither of them if it were not for Lan, who believed I could be a father. And so I feel at home, and yet I should not feel at home, when my home stands on the land of the Hahamog’na Tribe,173 when so many are without homes and when much of the world is unsettled, when the philosopher and critic and refugee Theodor Adorno wrote

it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.174

But as the scholar and critic and exile Edward Said, one of his inheritors, who always stood with Palestinian refugees in their perpetual homelessness, also wrote

what is true of all exile175 is not that

home and love of home are lost, but that

loss is inherent in the very existence of both.

And so just for now,

just for the time that I have

with these children and Lan—

I want to create a home with them,

and even if it is a home in which I can never

forget the losses of my past and the losses

of my present, it can be a home to which

one day they will want to return.

Or so I hope. And if it is not

such a home, then one day

may they write their own memoir.