I met Hanh Nguyen at the pool in Sunset Park. She was swimming. I was swimming. We swam into each other, my hand mid-stroke skimming her face. I apologized and fixed her goggles. She laughed. “I’m Hannah,” she said.

A week later, I saw her on a blanket in Greenwood. She was wearing tight tan slacks and a black tank top. She had tattoos of widely varying size, quality, and style. One, on her shoulder, was of a dragon chasing its tail. She chewed on a Uni-Ball pen and read a book—her eyes tight with effort.

“Excuse me,” I said. “But I think we’ve met. Hannah?”

“Mike,” she said, pointing. “You were swimming butterfly in five feet of water. You almost knocked me unconscious.”

I nodded. “What are you reading?”

She held up the book. It was called Spirits, Haunting, and Change. On the cover there was a young woman sleeping happily while several wizened ghosts smiled and hovered. 

“Are you a spiritual person?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am.” 

We started seeing each other. Drinks. Dinner. Drunken texts. I met her dog, her roommate, and her roommate’s dog. We were dating. I showed a picture of her to my friend Dan. He asked if I was into Asian girls. I said yes.

One night, Hannah and I went to a batting cage in Coney Island. She watched me hit baseballs for an hour. I even hit an 80-mph pitch. Then, when I got out of the cage, she started to cry. 

“Sometimes I don’t think you see me at all,” she said.

I looked at her in disbelief. “Do you not like the baseball?” I asked.

“If you knew me, you’d already know the answer to that,” she said. We were fighting, I realized.

That night I slept on the couch with her dog. Her roommate’s dog had to sleep on the floor. He cried all night. I cried too.

In the morning, I made her a big stack of pancakes—blueberry, chocolate chip, banana—and brought it to her in bed. She smiled guiltily. The fight was over. We had sex. Then, we ate pancakes.

The fight wasn’t over. Two weeks later, on my birthday, we had a private audience to a live taping of a comedy podcast. You had to be in the top tier of Patreon to go to the live taping. It was very elite. You could take pictures. There was a cheese board. It was called the Platinum Tier. It cost $99 a month.

I was sitting there, having a good time, eating camembert, laughing my ass off. It was one of the top two, three nights of my life. I’m having a unique once-in-a-lifetime experience with my girlfriend. And then, suddenly, I’m not. She’s gone.

I text her. “What the fuck?” She doesn’t text back. I finish the taping. I don’t laugh once. I call her.

“Hannah, are you okay? It’s been three hours. No text, nothing. You just ran off. It’s my birthday. What’s going on with you? Why are you doing this to me?” I spoke quickly. I was confused, emotional.

“It’s Hanh. My name is Hanh. Not Hannah,” she said, coldly.

“Well sure, that’s on your passport, but it’s always been Hannah. I call you Hannah. Your friends call you Hannah. Your parents call you Hannah.”

“My name is Hanh Nguyen. I’m Vietnamese. I hate baseball. I hate pancakes. I hate comedy. I don’t belong here. I wasn’t meant to live like this. I wasn’t meant to be in this country. I wasn’t meant to be with you.”

“Hannah, what are you talking about. Your dad’s from Illinois. He’s an estate lawyer. Your mom’s from Texas. She’s an accountant. Where is this coming from?”

“Mike, I’m adopted. Those aren’t my parents.”

“Hannah, that’s not true,” I began. “Your dad’s a good man and your mom worked hard to make a home for you and—” She wasn’t listening. The line was dead. I wasn’t talking to anyone.

Five minutes later, she texted me. “I’m going home. To my real home. Don’t look for me.”

That night I went out drinking with Dan at Shenanigans. He was drinking gin. I was drinking whiskey. We were both also drinking beer.

“What’s she gonna do, man?” asked Dan, drunkenly. “Go back to some rice paddy?”

“Hannah’s got an MLIS,” I said. “She’s not going to a rice paddy. She’s just gonna go meet her parents. And then she’ll come back. And then everything will be normal.”

“Maybe her parents are on a rice paddy.”

“Are there even still rice paddies?” I asked. “Is that still a thing?”

“7 million hectares, man,” said Dan. “Did she say if her parents were from the Mekong Delta?”

“She’s never talked about them. Not once.”

“There’s a lot of rice paddies on the Mekong Delta,” said Dan.

The next day, Hannah’s father texted me. 

“Have you seen Hannah lately?” he asked. 

“Did she go to Vietnam?” he asked.

“Did something happen?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

A week later, Hannah’s father, Tom Nguyen, and I were on a plane to Ho Chi Minh City. He told me Hannah’s birth parents were from outside the city. He told me they were from the same town where his father was born—back when it was called Saigon. He told me he’d never been. I asked if it was on the Mekong Delta. He told me no.

Ho Chi Minh City was made up of a thousand narrow streets, made narrower by awnings, and made dangerous by mopeds. Tom and I took a cab to a Four Seasons. He turned the television on and fell asleep. I went out to the hotel bar and charged four Mai Tais to the room. I asked the bartender if Vietnam had any special cocktails. He put a lychee in my Mai Tai. Vietnamese special cocktail, he said.

Tom got a guide to take us to the village. The guide was thin and jittery and very proud of his English. He insisted that we stop to see the Cu Chi tunnels on our way to the village. Everyone loves to visit the Cu Chi tunnels, he said.

The Cu Chi tunnels were a guerrilla warfare theme park. Fat, sweating American tourists crawled after their nimble Vietnamese guides through subterranean tunnels and practiced popping up among the leaves. At the end of the tour, there was a machine gun range with cardboard targets in camo fatigues. It was a beautiful, exciting gun. Tourists happily mowed down mock American troops. 

We ate burgers and fries at the park restaurant with the guide.

“I’m fast in the tunnels,” he said. “My father was a great hero in the war.”

“My father was a butler for an American Colonel,” said Tom. “He left Saigon in a helicopter.”

The guide frowned. I tried to break the tension. “Have you seen a landmine?”

He shook his head. “We removed all the landmines. There was a big campaign in the 1990s. Before I was born.”

“Bullshit,” said Tom. “You couldn’t remove all the landmines if you had a hundred years. You should be careful when we go to the village, Mike. You step off the trail and—boom. Claymore.”

“There’s no boom,” said the guide reassuringly.

We rode for hours through swamps on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. Everywhere farmers and water buffalo worked the rice paddies. The guide asked if we wanted some beer for the drive. We said yes.

The village was small—a few straw houses on stilts, a well, a dirt path, some chickens, a paint bucket full of cigarette butts and rain.

An old man in a faded mesh baseball cap came over. Tom showed the old man a picture of Hannah on his phone. The old man shook his finger at the phone and began to speak very fast. From a hut, an old woman emerged. She spoke quickly too. The guide nodded and turned to us.

“She left already. They say she went to Ha Long Bay. They say she only visited for one hour.” 

“Is that on the Mekong Delta?” I asked.

“This is the Mekong Delta,” said the guide. “She left.”

“This is the Mekong Delta?” I asked.

 “Why did you think there were all these rice paddies?” he asked.

I looked at Tom. He looked down.

Ha Long Bay wasn’t on the Mekong Delta. It was a 600-mile limestone inlet in the north of the country. Formed by half a billion years of compacting karst, it was a UNESCO world heritage site and a global cruise destination. Our guide made some calls. We got back in the car and went to the airport.

On the flight to Hanoi, I watched Step Brothers.

“Is that good?” asked Tom.

“It’s very good,” I said.

He watched the movie too. He laughed intermittently but his face was pained and cringing, several times he covered his eyes.

At the end, he turned to me and asked, “Do you think I was a bad father?”

“No,” I said. “Did you like the Catalina Wine Mixer?”

“Yes,” he said.

Hanoi was more industrial than Ho Chi Minh City. Bigger, wider streets, more cars, tall buildings, vulgar visible wealth. We didn’t stay long.

A minivan took us to the bay with a family of American tourists. They all wore athletic shorts and running shoes. None of them appeared to have ever exercised. The son, a pudgy prepubescent boy, had a box of Oreos on his lap. He distributed cookies among the family. When they were gone, he began to complain about the lack of milk. Could a water buffalo be milked? I wondered.

At the port, Tom used three twenty-dollar bills to bribe a ticket agent. Hannah had gone to Bo Hon Island to see the limestone caverns. She had left an hour ago. We were in luck. She must have spent a day in Hanoi, seeing sights. The ticket agent said we could meet her on the island if we took the next boat. He said there’d be a late booking fee. It was $80.

Ha Long Bay was beautiful. The waters were as clear as cut diamonds and as blue as blue Gatorade. Fish jumped to dance for the tourists. The sun smiled on the face of the sea. A guide walked up and down the boat offering Voss water and fresh fruit.

The boat was anchored a hundred feet from the island. They began launching tourists in kayaks. Tom and I dropped into the sea.

“I think we should split up,” he said. “We’ll find her twice as fast.”

“What should I do when I find her?”

“If you find her bring her to the big main beach,” he said, pointing.

I went left into one cave. He went right, into another.

Streaks of sunlight illuminated the dark waters. A string of lanterns hung down from the stalactites. It was cold and humid. Narrow unlit passages led deeper into the island. Ahead was light.

I paddled out into a great lake. The sun was overhead. There was jungle on all sides. The water was completely still. Other tourists spun in lazy circles. Some sat on beaches. Guides circled, offering fresh fruit and Voss water. I saw Hannah eating lychee in the sand. I paddled over.

It took her a second to notice me. I suppose she’d never expected that I would come. I suppose she never realized I cared. It wasn’t a welcome realization. Her brow furrowed and her mouth turned down with displeasure.

“I told you not to come,” she shouted from the shore. “Mike, what the fuck?”

I pulled my boat onto the shore next to two others.

“You can’t just run away from your life,” I said.

“Mike, it’s over,” she said. “This is my life. You? You aren’t.”

“Alright,” I said. “Your dad’s here too.”

“Tom’s here?” she said. “You brought him into this? Mike, we dated for two months. You can’t go on international trips with my adoptive father.”

“You want us to take separate flights home?” I asked, joking weakly.

A voice interrupted from further down the beach: “Hanh, I’m back! I got you more lychee.” The voice belonged to a man. A handsome, shirtless Vietnamese man. He had six-pack abs and clear skin. His English was perfect.

Hannah looked at me furiously, clenching a fist. I waved to the man and pointed to the woods.

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” I said and walked blindly into the jungle.

It was cool, shady, and green. There were small, foreign-seeming animals slinking through the leaves. An insect settled on my arm and bit me. Then another. Then they attacked from all sides. I felt a strange allergy coming on. I stumbled, losing direction, pushing desperately for the edge of the woods. Something clicked. I stopped. Adrenaline hit. I looked down and saw the claymore. FRONT TOWARD ENEMY, I read.