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If you have to talk to them, be extremely careful. Under no circumstances should you attempt to approach them without a clear indication that you accept you are an alien. You are not of their tribe. You are not sentient to their customs, traditions, gestures, or language. Don’t use terms like “treated,” “sweet,” “bling bling,” or “phat”. This behavior will risk instant exile. You are a stranger in a strange land. Don’t make eye contact, do not touch any of their possessions, don’t comment about their clothes, hair color, make up, the smell in their room, the lack of lighting or fresh air, or whether the tattoo of an eye covering most of your daughter’s lower back is, in fact, permanent.

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I grew up watching the news on television. Walter Cronkite explained that the footage from Vietnam told a story of chaos, cruelty, heroism, and loss. One of the English teachers from the school I would eventually attend held a weekly candlelight vigil in our town for her only child, a Yale student who was killed in Vietnam in 1967. When I asked my mother why she kept protesting the war that had stolen her son, my mother sighed and said, “What else can she do?”

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My parents’ marriage was hard to categorize. They were madly in love, but they also were awful to one another, including my father being violent when drunk and my mother finding ways to punish him through guilt and shame. Still, they were married at twenty, met on the steps of the Widener Library at Harvard, brilliant, beautiful, and well, who knows, they were my parents; their marriage was a mystery except for one thing: I never wanted that.

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