“Your grandparents were so lucky,” the bigger boy said to me at play time. “They didn’t have to live through the Depression like mine did.” He fiddled with the toy train.
I thought of my grandparents’ stories of civil war, of street vendoring for pennies a day. But my foreign-born shame followed my family’s bloodline to this nation, where I was born, so I kept quiet.
“I mean, I guess you Vietmanese had a war, too, but it wasn’t like the World War II.” I thought about the absurdity of boasting “My War Can Beat Up Your War.” I mentally counted another American who couldn’t pronounce Vietnamese.
“It was a pretty bad war,” I said.
