Summary

In Chapter 6, named after “Madame Bovary,” Phuc, Lou, and their older cousin Thuan went to 7-Eleven to look at comics. Lou played a game while Thuan and Phuc wandered away to look at the swimsuit catalogs. Later, Thuan invited Phuc to his apartment to show him his Playboy and Penthouse magazines. Phuc began to feel too old for his comics and crave more sexual material. His friend Max let him borrow an erotic book called The Happy Hooker that he found in his house. Phuc was excited to read it. In the middle of the book, the author wrote about the hooker having sex with an Oriental man and claimed that they have smaller penises. Phuc felt humiliated that this was a common stereotype about Asian men and that his friends would read about it in the book. In 1985, Phuc’s older cousin...