Chapters 4-7 Summary and Analysis

At the start of Chapter 4, "Clan-Rift," the author had been back in California's Bay Area from Mexico for four months, without a job or a place to live. He had moved in with his parents, which made sense to his Vietnamese-American friends but evoked pity from his other friends. Andrew told nobody about his plan to cycle through Vietnam, saying that his next ride would just be up the coast toward Seattle and maybe into Canada. His family thought he was recuperating from a breakup with a girl named Trieu, who cheated on him and left him, information that foreshadowed the later story of the romance of Andrew and Trieu. Andrew's mother kept saying he should wait for a good day on the Chinese calendar to begin his trip, which was symbolic of the cultural gulf between Andrew's Vietnamese...