ABSTRACT
When I first came to the United States from Vietnam in 1970, for several months I could not get a good sleep during the night. No matter how hard I tried to surrender to it, I repeatedly found myself lying still, eyes wide open in the dark, waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting, I thought, for dawn, so that I could finally fall asleep a few hours before starting my morning activities. During the daytime, sleep would often take me by surprise, and in between tasks I would catch myself napping, with remorse. But when night fell, and it was clearly time to rest and rightfully claim my due from the day of work, I again felt strangely uneasy. As the sounds of the world outside faded away, the night suddenly took on a threatening presence. Rather than finding peace and repose in the warmth of the bed, I was dreading what to me seemed like an endless moment of false cessation. So I waited, unable to figure out my uneasiness, until one night a distant shooting in the streets outside unexpectedly shed a light on the situation. I realized I was briefly home again.
