Summary
Chapter 6
Hai closes the restaurant alone one night. Half-asleep, he sees someone walk past the drive-thru window. A man walks in and Hai gives him food free of charge. The man turns out to be a detective investigating the seven-year-old murder case of a girl named Rachel Miotti. Though the detective (who introduces himself as Lippman) is retired, this particular unsolved case haunted him. Hai agrees to put up a poster on the cork board requesting information about the car belonging to the murderer. Later that night, Hai wakes to the sound of fireworks. This triggers one of Grazina's flashbacks to the war. Calling himself Sergeant Pepper, Hai speaks to Grazina with the identity of a U.S. Army official. Grazina responds with a vital awareness that was lacking before.
Chapter 7
Hai continues engaging in Grazina's war fantasies. He pretends to shoot her in various rooms in her house, and she kills him in turn. These shooting drills help calm her down when she is in the throes of an episode. At HomeMarket, Wayne, Maureen, and Hai examine one of Russia's tattoos, trying to decide how inappropriate the depiction of Bugs Bunny is. BJ shows the team her birthmark that she claims is the shape of a musical note. Everyone disagrees.
Hai and Maureen drive to conduct what they call the Peace Treaty, which is a food exchange with a nearby Panetta, another fast-casual franchise. Maureen offers Hai a sip from her flask of alcohol, which he declines. She proceeds to tell him about her conviction that the earth is hollow and that existence is a simulation. Furthermore, human society is controlled by reptilians who live underground. Hai does not agree with conspiracy theories, but he does see certain similarities in terms of wealth disparities. When Hai asks her about her Star Wars watch, Maureen tells him it belonged to her son, Paul, who died of leukemia. At Panetta, Maureen asks for pain au chocolat and runs into an acquaintance named Nacho. Back at HomeMarket, everyone expresses disappointment at the array of salads that Panetta traded. Hai and Maureen bond over their losses as they split a chocolate croissant.
Chapter 8
Hai helps Grazina set up her old electric scooter, and she spends several hours riding around. He also decides to make Fluffernutter sandwiches for his coworkers. Meanwhile, an angry patron yells at a woman named Cookie who often comes inside to use the restroom and ask for water. Once the man leaves, the crew goes to the back to eat the sandwiches. However, when Amanda opens the door to the bathroom, she finds that Cookie has overdosed. Chaos ensues as Hai and Wayne struggle to carry Cookie to the front so that the emergency responders can attend to her. Wayne accidentally knocks over a bucket of cheese sauce. Firefighters finally arrive and revive Cookie with Narcan.
Sony informs Hai that he saw Hai's mom at CVS, but did not speak to her. Later, Grazina pulls out a Nutella cake that she made for Hai's twentieth birthday.
Chapter 9
The restaurant is slammed the day before Thanksgiving. As the team rushes to heat and serve the food, Maureen reveals to Hai that BJ's secret corn bread ingredient is vanilla cake mix. They push and make it through the shift without taking breaks. An elderly man thanks them for staying open during the holidays. Everyone swells with a sense of pride. The next day, Grazina burns her hair while attempting to curl it. She invites Sony over for Thanksgiving dinner. Grazina enjoys Sony's history lectures. After the meal, Hai and Grazina notice that Sony has the blues. He tells them that his mom will remain incarcerated for reasons he cannot understand. Hai expresses frustration that Sony did not tell him sooner, but Sony points out that Hai never helped him in the past. After this uncomfortable moment, they settle in to watch Gettysburg. Sony is clearly upset about his family's situation.
Chapter 10
This chapter opens with a flashback to when Hai, his ma, Aunt Kim, Sony, and Bà ngoại drove to Florida to inspect a possible nail salon that Kim is considering purchasing. Sony begs them to take a detour in Virginia, and they stop at the Stonewall Jackson Historical House and Museum. During the tour, Hai's grandmother stops to relieve herself in an antique pot. They come across Confederate-themed souvenirs and books in the gift shop before going to McDonald's to eat. Hai wakes up from his dream.
Analysis
Despite lacking professional training in how to properly care for Grazina, Hai relies on his instincts and past experiences helping his traumatized relatives. While Grazina is from Lithuania and Hai's family is from Vietnam, they share certain parallels as refugees who fled war-torn countries. In an effort to stabilize Grazina, Hai decides to approach her from her own frame of mind rather than attempt to force her to return to reality. An article titled "Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services" published in the NIH National Library of Medicine discusses how even licensed treatment providers may "feel unprepared to address trauma-related issues." The article goes on to say that the first key step is "meeting client needs in a safe, collaborative, and compassionate manner." Hai endeavors to do just this, though he does so without medical training. Just as he did once or twice with his grandmother during one of her schizophrenic breaks, Hai reaches Grazina by going to her past.
Hai is unequipped to fully handle the full extent of Grazina’s medical and psychological needs. This can be seen when he relapses after caring for her the night that fireworks agitate her. Memory, he realizes, is a form of suicide because of how it robs one of the present moment (Chapter 6). This thought sickens him and causes him to take painkillers in an effort to subdue his torment. Witnessing other people's trauma can sometimes induce what is called vicarious or secondary trauma. This occurs when "individuals who have not directly experienced trauma absorb the emotional distress of those who have" (Caffrey). While Vuong's depiction of Hai's relapse suggests a secondary trauma response, the author does not attempt to make a value judgment about Hai and Grazina's relationship. Instead, the novel explores dissolving boundaries between different people and chronologies. Connection, according to Vuong, is both messy and essential. Hai continues caring for Grazina and himself as best he can.
Vuong uses the word "theater" to describe the performance that Hai and Grazina make of Grazina's memories (Chapter 7). This echoes the way that a "theater" can also refer to a site of war. In the same chapter, Hai declares that "this is war," referring to the games that he and Grazina play but also perhaps to the overall nature of existence. A theater of war represents the geographic region where combat, logistics, and strategy take place. The term in this context is attributed to the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz in his 1832 book On War. Some argue that the word acts as a metaphor in which war becomes a performance with the world as spectators. Even if a "theater of war" is a purely technical military term, Vuong plays with these multiple meanings.
The theme of chosen family appears repeatedly throughout these chapters as Hai spends time with his coworkers and with Grazina. The monotony of shift work is at times interrupted by strange, overwhelming, or painful incidents, such as racist commentary or coming across a woman who overdosed in the bathroom. The team bonds to make the time pass more easily. Back at Grazina's house, Hai cares for her through the ebbs and flows of her dementia. His caregiving ranges from ensuring that she takes her medication to giving her an emergency haircut after she burns her hair with a curling iron. Vuong has shared in interviews that he writes from personal experiences. He includes a dedication to the real-life Grazina, who Vuong lived with and cared for. Like Hai, Vuong also worked at various fast-food and fast-casual chain restaurants over the years. According to Vuong, "no ideology is strong enough to withstand kinetic kinship," which is the dynamic, action-oriented form of connection that builds bonds through shared movement, labor, or activity.
Sony's fixation on the Civil War is a coping mechanism for trauma and abandonment as well as a sign of his neurodivergence. Sony's own father was a Vietnam veteran. Sony is under the false impression that his father was a war hero, but the reality was that he worked in a laundry room. Sony relies on Civil War history to make sense of his father's disappearance. In Chapter 9, Sony states that "everything bad happens to the South," applying this underdog mentality to his own family's history. His obsession with the Civil War emphasizes the way that wars live on in the present. The legacies of several wars impact various characters in the novel.
