I have heard this story many times from her. After decades of marriage, you get to complain like that, I guess, even if the man’s been dead for over thirty years. She married him when she was fifteen; he, thirty-five. Right before his first wife died, she told him, “Wed that young Lanh from down the street. The girl can bear you many more children.” And so the day before she passed, Grandpa Toan walked ten houses down and said, “Here’s a gold nugget and a couple silver ones. They’re all I have.” He pointed to the one in white with hair to her waist. Two days later, the two bowed before portraits of ancestors and his dead wife, and a year later, they had Ty, then Men, and then five others. For seven years straight, this was their ritual.

“I actually look forward to the dialysis,” Grandma Lanh continues. “The nurses there are very nice, like Mexican driver. They give me a gold star sticker every time my blood sugar is good. ‘Good job, Mrs. Tran!’ they say. Do you know how many stars I have now?” Grandma Lanh tucks in her thumb and spreads out four fingers. “One more and I have a perfect score. Five stars. But not Viet Cong stars,” she says.

When the communists took Saigon in 1975, they raided all the surrounding small businesses. My grandparents’ convenience store was one of them, as was their cyclo business. After, Grandpa Toan swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.

“Luckily your Uncle Ty was there to take him to the hospital. He was a good son.” Grandma Lanh wipes her eyes with the cuff of her pajama sleeve. Once she told me her sleeves were way cleaner than tissue paper, which reminded her of the toilet. “Because your grandfather didn’t want to leave for America, because he couldn’t leave behind his home and the cyclo business, your Uncle Ty was sent to reeducation camp. I had to take the ferry across the Mekong every weekend to visit him.” She looks up at me to see if I am still listening. “Back then I could go anywhere I needed. Now, I have nothing. No money, no car, no kidneys.”