It’s the same in almost any place they call a capitalist paradise. On my first visits, I’d arrive, rolling a suitcase into the lobby, admiring the white linens, the carefully arranged fruit, the clean glassware of an executive lounge in an international hotel. I loved the unlimited portions of food (so tiny!), the fresh sunlight, the disposable slippers, the expansive views of the city and the land the city hadn’t yet eaten up. When I finally moved with my daughter, Sang, from Lynchburg, Virginia, to Thanh Vi Free Economic Zone in Vietnam for a promotion to project director at Facility 129, a manufacturer for MP Communications, I was happy. The large projects I’d worked on concluded with the careful assembly of millions of phones at the facility, and now that I was there to witness that final stage, I saw that my decisions had direct and measurable effects. I put Sang into an international school, and I was making more money than I’d ever imagined possible. In the weeks before the move, I was enrolled in etiquette courses, running home afterward to tell Sang to start with the spoon farthest from her plate, that the napkin in her lap belonged on her left thigh because she was left-handed. She’d look at the place settings I’d arranged on our dining table and say, You’re lame. But I could feel her eyes following my hands, and I knew she was attempting to commit to memory the rules I showed her. I’ve finally impressed her, I thought. This thought made me feel like I was floating or even flying, and it was in this triumphant golden haze, only a few months after I started working in Thanh Vi, that those infamous deaths began to occur. 

The first incident was the purported suicide of Stanley Lam (forty-one), a production supervisor at Facility 129. I remember hearing about Stanley on the news before we discussed him at work. According to the Thanh Vi Daily, a janitor discovered Stanley Lam’s body hanging from the ceiling in a bathroom stall. His wife had attempted to report him missing the night before, when he didn’t return after his shift from ten in the morning to ten at night, when he would normally read to their newborn son until he fell asleep next to the crib. The police had turned her away, however, believing that Stanley Lam was simply out drinking after a hard day of work, like a normal husband. Weeping in front of the news cameras, his wife said he wasn’t that kind of man. There was no suicide note. 

The next day, the media retracted their story about Stanley Lam, saying there was no body after all and no one knew where that rumor had originated. The janitor turned out never to have existed. The news was now certain of his last known whereabouts, airing CCTV footage of Stanley buying beer at a convenience store on the night he was supposed to have died. His wife was interviewed again, and this time she asked for privacy, saying she feared for herself and their child. When asked what she was afraid of, she said, cryptically, Retribution. 

Soon there were real deaths, but even when those began to occur, I felt like it would all blow over, that Sang and I would quickly return to our ever-improving lives. I would take her to nice restaurants in shimmering hotels, I thought. I would give her nice things to make up for the fact that her mother had passed away. 

In the years before Linh died of lung cancer, I worked at the factory in Lynchburg. Her death was slow, but in the brief periods when she felt healthier, she would drive with Sang in tow to Washington, D.C., a three-to-four-hour ordeal she undertook to buy Asian groceries and rent VHS tapes of the latest Hong Kong films for herself and new installments of Paris by Night for me. She never stuck to a single genre: Fight Back to School, Young and Dangerous, The Bride with White Hair. It was always an overnight trip. She stayed with a college friend in Falls Church, awake into the morning watching movies and dramas. At home, too, she seemed to do nothing else, glued to the TV, crying or laughing. I asked once, Why do you need to cry for something that never happened in real life? She said, Everyone needs to cry and laugh. Otherwise, they aren’t alive.