text: Who killed my mother? She lays a few steps behind us, her body wet and cold like a fish, bobbing slightly in the underground creek. Her hair floats around her like a mass of black seaweed. I don’t know, I say. The others look at me when the camera feed shows that none of them did it, and I’m the only one who isn’t wearing my camera/flashlight in the excavation cave site. I forgot to take it with me, I stammer in broken Vietnamese, crying. They turn to each other, whispering. My uncle nods, and my cousin holds back to help me up some uneven rocks as we make our way back out of the caves. I stumble and grab onto his hand for support. “You look easy to *bat nat*, easy to take advantage of,” my friend’s friend said when we went around last year in clubs in Pho Tay in Sai Gon where all the foreigners go. He checked out black guys while I nodded along to the booming EDM music, drunk on half a mug of beer. We climb into the black van, and I look out the window as they drive away. I can’t believe I forgot it, I say, crying. I say the word for “dropping” the camera, but get the vowel and tone wrong, instead saying the word that means “messed up”. They correct my tone to the correct Vietnamese word, sympathetically. I’m the naive one, the *Viet Kieu* who can’t quite get her tones right. The one who was born in America. She must have done it herself, they whispered. She was depressed after all. Yes. She was always depressed, and she always blamed me. I let a few more tears fall. Be strong, my aunt says. Don’t be sad like your mother. God loves you. She says it slowly, so I understand. I nod, my head still turned towards the window. I think of a time in 4th grade, when I was at my desk. The Chinese guy I joked around with called me stupid, so I hit him with my notebook. “She hit me!” he yelled. “Claire wouldn’t do that,” Ms. Walker says, “Did you, Claire?” No, I murmur, my eyes lowered. I am the shy one, the Asian kid who’s Chinese? Korean? Japanese? No. Then what are you? Vietnamese, I say. Never heard of it, the kid says, wrinkling his freckled nose. No one hearing is good. No one hears that I understand everything they’re saying. In English, when they giggled that I eat something for lunch that smells like rotting fish. Or right now, in Vietnamese, when they say I’m *ngay tho*. Naive, my aunt says to my uncle, how will she survive? No one here heard that I got straight A’s in Vietnamese school in that foreign land, 7 years in a row, and can read and write all six tones with a 99% accuracy rate, although my accent is real. No one heard me kill my mother. I smile.