Part 3 Summary
An older [Patricia "Tricia" Kelly] narrates the novel’s final movement, a single day that explodes her marriage, tests her conscience, and forces her into her first act of real agency. As [Charlene] turns a “charitable” errand into an arranged adoption and [Peter Kelly] quietly engineers their extraction from Saigon, Tricia confronts what it costs to be “helped”—and what it means to choose.
What Happens
Chapter 3: Part 3
Charlene arrives at Tricia’s villa and announces an “excursion.” Tricia—still unaware Peter has already decided they’re leaving Vietnam—goes along with Charlene and the maid, Minh-Linh. The taxi carries them into a part of Saigon Tricia has never seen: narrow lanes, heat, and crowded rooms where women and children sit in rows. Offered tea, Tricia cradles a toddler and feels the ache of delayed motherhood, imagining she will be a wonderful mother someday. She assumes this is another of Charlene’s charitable missions and even senses that Charlene is “absolving me of my wifely obeisance,” since Peter had forbidden her to leave the city.
A tall adolescent girl brings out a baby called Suzie, her face marked with a vivid port-wine stain. Tricia is instantly smitten by the child’s calm, sweet presence; she feels that “gentle, persistent stirring” of longing. Charlene says, “She’s yours,” and briskly waves aside Tricia’s protests about Peter, legality, and the possibility she’s pregnant. Charlene claims she has handled everything—including consulting [The Unnamed American Doctor] about treating the birthmark in the U.S. Reeling, Tricia accepts the baby. When their taxi abandons them, the blistering walk home feels to Tricia like “a long and difficult labor—an entirely physical birthing.” At Tricia’s gate, Charlene drops her final blow: Peter has already quit his job and booked their flights home—without telling Tricia. The revelation collapses Tricia’s sense of partnership and exposes the binding constraints of [The Role and Status of Women].
Back at the villa, Tricia readies herself to present Suzie to Peter—with joy and trembling—when the children from that crowded room appear at the gate, weeping for their sister. Led by the tall girl, they insist Suzie belongs to them. Minh-Linh erupts, calling them “bad kids” and insisting Suzie is unwanted and better off in America. Tricia sees the brutal contrast between Suzie—clean, well-fed, perfumed—and her siblings, painfully thin and ragged. The truth clarifies: Charlene has staged and fattened the baby like a gift. In a blaze of “hot” anger at manipulation and a “cold” fear of loss, Tricia makes her first autonomous moral choice. She opens the gate, returns the baby to the tall girl, and sends the children home with a basket of supplies, money, and the Saigon Barbie. Peter arrives as the taxi pulls away. Tricia deflects his questions and quietly confronts him with what she knows: they are leaving. Later, writing to [Rainey], she adds one final coda: [Lily (Ly)] chooses to remain at the leprosarium with her twin sister, rejecting American plans for her future. Tricia also confesses that the tidy story she once told about “deciding together” to leave Saigon was an invention—shame disguised as memory.
Character Development
Tricia’s day of crisis becomes a crucible. She rejects other people’s designs—Charlene’s staged rescue, Peter’s paternalistic secrecy—and acts according to a moral logic that refuses to purchase her salvation at another family’s expense.
- Patricia “Tricia” Kelly: Moves from passive compliance to decisive agency, returning Suzie despite her own longing and humiliation; acknowledges her unreliable earlier story.
- Charlene: Her “good works” reveal a manipulative, imperial mindset that scripts Vietnamese lives—and Tricia’s—into her redemptive narrative.
- Peter Kelly: Exposes his paternalism by making a life-altering decision alone; treats Tricia as dependent rather than partner.
- Minh-Linh: Fiercely complicit, driven by a harsh calculus that an “ugly child” will have a “good chance” in America—anger masking desperation and class fear.
Themes & Symbols
Charlene’s scheme tests the boundary between charity and harm, crystallizing Morality, Good Deeds, and Absolution into a single choice: Tricia refuses a gift built on family separation, seeking not the absolution Charlene offers but a painful integrity of her own. The section indicts [American Naivete and Imperialism], exposing the arrogance of diagnosing “problems” abroad and imposing unilateral “solutions.” It also compresses [Motherhood, Fertility, and Loss] into an afternoon—Tricia experiences the rapture of holding a daughter and the devastation of relinquishing her. Finally, by admitting she invented the story of mutually deciding to leave, Tricia foregrounds [Memory, Storytelling, and Perspective]: humiliation refashions memory into survivable narrative.
Two symbols sharpen the chapter’s moral line. The journey home with Suzie functions as a literalized labor, granting Tricia a felt claim to motherhood even as it is thrust upon her. The villa gate—iron, locked, separating American safety from Vietnamese reality—becomes the hinge of conscience; when Tricia unlatches it to let the grieving siblings in, she chooses witness over insulation.
Key Quotes
“She’s yours.”
Charlene’s three words collapse process, consent, and legality into a performance of power. The declarative gift exposes her white-savior script, in which Vietnamese kinship—and Tricia’s voice—exist only as props.
“a long and difficult labor—an entirely physical birthing.”
Tricia’s metaphor reframes the sweltering walk as childbirth, asserting an embodied bond with Suzie even as the baby is being assigned to her. It underscores the chapter’s tension between felt motherhood and forced adoption.
“I felt, perhaps, the first real sense of humiliation at my own childishness, the same humiliation, I suppose, that moved me to describe for you, to invent— I apologize—that earlier version of our deliberations, Peter and mine, our late-night plans to leave.”
This confession reveals Tricia as an unreliable narrator whose shame has authored a more palatable past. Memory here is not record but coping, and the novel invites the reader to reread her story through that lens.
“What does it matter now? Charlene tells me we’re going home.”
Soft, edged with irony, Tricia’s line is a quiet rupture. She names the collusion between Peter and Charlene and signals that their marriage—as hierarchy—has been seen through.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This chapter is the novel’s emotional and ethical climax. Tricia refuses a salvation premised on someone else’s loss, claims responsibility for her own choice, and exposes the costs of American intervention—intimate and political. Returning Suzie is both grief and self-determination, the act that earns the book’s title not as personal pardon but as a granting-back of what is owed to the Vietnamese family. It resets Tricia’s life, reframes her narrative as a crafted memory, and leaves the reader with the enduring question of what “good” costs when done in someone else’s name.