I met someone the other day who reminded me of you. She works at the post office—the short, little woman who finds the packages people weren’t there to sign for. I was wearing the old khan ran you gave me, and when the woman saw it she reached out to grab it and nearly started weeping. She had come here from Vietnam as a refugee when she was only a little girl—her brothers and father had all died in the war, so she and her aunt raced out of Saigon in a rickety, cramped paddle boat that, eventually, lead them to the United States. Her mother, she said, stayed behind to look after the family who were too frail to leave, promising to meet them in America as soon as she could. Every few months she got postcards and letters from her mother saying it would only be a little bit longer before they were together again, only a little bit longer—until, suddenly, they stopped.