LENA LINH LÊ

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       This is a necessary love letter to the three pillars that would make up the settings of my childhood, and the places where my grief can be stretched out fully. The front room, adorned by a painting that I believed was unique to our home, until I saw it again in a Vietnamese restaurant halfway across the country much later, is the room my mother prays in. Twenty minutes every morning and evening, reading under the whispers of her breath with the altar as her clock. The second room is easier to miss, as it’s a duplicate, a carbon copy, a nail salon run by a pair of Vietnamese immigrants with their child crammed in the corner being taught a piano lesson. The salon, tucked in the confines of a Walmart, hides a racial tension still unbeknownst to me. The third room are my two countries, both blatant mysteries in their generalized whole, but intimately familiar as they write the wrinkles of my palm.