Chapter 1

The Dirty Yellow South

My first love, Vu, once told me, “We don’t get to choose the war, only the wounds we carry from it.” Vu and I fell in love when we were barely adults, coming of age in a country that expected Vietnamese refugees to be grateful, to keep our heads down, and to survive without making a sound. But we were rowdy, unruly, and reckless. Houston heat bore us down, the air was thick with cigarette smoke, and our mothers’ commanding voices trailed behind us as we both ran wild because it was the only kind of freedom we knew. When we bled or made others bleed, it conferred honor because it was some kind of twisted proof we had control over our own lives. Then Vu got locked up and became a ghost in the system. Almost two decades later, we reunited through the mail. His ID was a six-digit number on a prison roster, his perfect penmanship was on college-ruled paper, and his sweet, raspy voice came through a staticky phone. I had dreams of pressing my palm to the plexiglass, seeing his full lips smirking flirtatiously and his milky smooth skin glowing, imagining I could still touch the boy I once loved before the prison system swallowed him whole.

We met on a warm September night in 1992, the kind of night that carried the quiet buzz of summer slipping away. Looking back, I see it for what it was—a lesson in how love can burn fast and fleeting yet carve itself so deep it never really leaves. It happened at Fu Kim, a dim sum joint by day and an after-hours karaoke bar by night. Inside, the air was filled with cigarette smoke and street war stories. The Park Place Boyz, a Houston Vietnamese gang straight from the cracked asphalt of the inner city, greeted me with slow, deliberate nods. Not out of politeness, but respect, a currency I carried by blood. My dad’s youngest brother was their leader. Across the room, the Southwest crew spread out like a kingdom of mythical creatures. Another nod, another unspoken gesture of recognition. I dated one of their guys who had once run underground gambling dens for the Flying Dragons, a notorious Chinese gang from New York City.

I was small, barely above five feet tall, but power isn’t always in size. It’s in the way you hold yourself, in the names stitched to your history, in the way no one asks twice when you walk through the door.

My sister’s boyfriend, Doughboy, greeted us at the door and led us through the haze to our crew—the North Chink Posse (NCP). We were three tables deep, each table littered with emerald Heineken bottles sweating on to the plastic tabletops, ashtrays spilling over like offerings to the ancestors. Doughboy introduced us to a few new faces, and that’s when I saw him. Vu. I felt it the moment his eyes found mine. It was a slow pull, like a song I already knew. His coy smile, so at odds with his bad-boy swagger, held my gaze. Thick, dark hair framed his face. His bangs fell over his eyes just enough to make you want to brush them back. His skin was smooth and pale in the low light, like something untouched. His eyes were bright, full of mischief, and his broad shoulders filled out his white V-neck T-shirt in all the right ways. But it was his lips I couldn’t stop looking at. They were full, almost too pretty, made even more dangerous by the lit Marlboro Red dangling lazily from them. The orange ember glowed with a slow burn, and my insides did the same.

I smirked, and he caught it. His boys noticed, too, their laughter curling through the smoke, nudging at the space between us. The one next to him, Rooster, grinned, then stood, flashing a quick hand signal for me to take his seat. I slid in, close enough to catch the scent of cologne clinging to his shirt. We made small talk, learning bits and pieces about each other. His family was from the neighborhood of Granada on the north side of Houston, while I lived in South Belt on the opposite end of the city. He dropped out of high school, and I was a freshman in college. I was into sports; he was into sports betting. On paper, we had little in common, but none of that seemed to matter. By the end of the night, we had traded two serenades and a slow dance, our bodies folding into the music, swaying under the amber haze of the last-call song. The kind of song that lingers in the bones, that makes you forget what came before and what waits after. When the lights came up, reality flickered back in, but it was too late. I was already his, caught in the quiet gravity of something I didn’t have a name for yet.