When Grandpa Toan passed away, Grandma Lanh jumped onto the closed casket and asked to be cremated with him. Meanwhile, their children, my aunts and uncles, rolled their eyes and mocked her. “So dramatic,” they said, suspecting that she had force-fed him hot porridge and burnt his organs, that she had tied his wrists to the bedposts and cut off his circulation. But he wasn’t easy to care for from what I remember. Toward the end he had a habit of striking her every day at lunchtime, and one afternoon he hit her temple so hard, he knocked her out for a few seconds. I had to shake her awake by the shoulders and soothe her head with a cold, wet cloth.

On the car ride to the funeral home, Grandma Lanh is oddly quiet. Right hand on the roof handle, she sits up against the car door, as if ready to jump out. “I forgot the whip,” she suddenly says.

“You do not need the whip,” I say. “Not today.”

“Three times. I need to whip the coffin three times. If I punish her first, Buddha will have mercy on her soul. Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents, you know.”

“The girls won’t understand that,” I say.

“Do you?”

I swing a U-turn at the next light and when we arrive at Grandma Lanh’s building, I wait in the car.

The first time I met Jesus he was walking down Moonwalk Village Lane with a big wooden crucifix on his back. Behind him, a man in a leather skirt and a Roman brush hat whipped him every few steps. I was only four at the time and had no conception of reenactments, which were common in the Philippines during Easter weekends. I remember crying a lot that night. The next day, my father’s father, Grandpa Noel, took me to my first mass.