Little Dog decides to write a letter to his illiterate mother after reading Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary.

Rose abuses Little Dog throughout his childhood, and he finally tells her to stop hitting him when he is 13.

Lan flees her abusive marriage and pushes through a military checkpoint in Vietnam while carrying infant Rose.

Little Dog visits white grandfather Paul in Virginia and learns Paul met Lan in a brothel while stationed there.

Rose drives Little Dog and Lan through the night to confront her sister Mai's abusive husband, arriving at the wrong house.

Little Dog takes a summer job harvesting tobacco at Mr. Buford's farm outside Hartford.

Little Dog meets Trevor, the grandson of farm owner Mr. Buford, while working the tobacco fields.

Little Dog and Trevor share a cocaine-laced joint in the farm barn and have their first intimate moment together.

Trevor wrecks his father's truck in a cornfield while driving high on cocaine and fentanyl, and Little Dog crawls out beside him.

Little Dog tells his mother Rose he does not like girls at a Dunkin Donuts; Rose does not disown him.

Little Dog discovers Trevor has died in a car crash by reading a Facebook post during a college literature class.

Little Dog travels back to Hartford for Trevor's wake and recalls their last meeting, where he noticed needle marks on Trevor's arms.

Lan is diagnosed with stage four bone cancer and dies on a mattress on the floor surrounded by her family.

Little Dog holds his laptop up to Lan's grave in Go Cong so Paul can apologize to her in broken Vietnamese.

Little Dog asks his exhausted mother to tell the story of the Monkey King, and Rose laughs for no reason.

Little Dog begins writing a letter to his illiterate mother, Rose, as a way to process their complicated and often violent relationship. He recounts his Vietnamese grandmother Lan's harrowing escape through wartime Vietnam and his complicated bond with Paul, the American GI who fathered Lan's children. As a teenager, Little Dog takes a tobacco farm job where he meets and falls in love with Trevor, a troubled white youth whose drug addiction would define and eventually end their relationship. After leaving Hartford for college, Little Dog learns of Trevor's death by overdose and returns to grieve while carrying the weight of that loss. Lan then dies of bone cancer, and Little Dog travels to Vietnam to inter her ashes, facilitating a final reconciliation between Lan and Paul at her graveside. The journey ends with Little Dog finding peace in his mother's laughter and his own sense of belonging to something larger than himself.

Little Dog's life story from his mother's abuse to love, loss, and eventual peace.

A young Little Dog dresses in his mother's clothes and is mocked by a neighbor boy for doing so.

Fourth of July fireworks trigger Lan's PTSD, and she clutches Little Dog and whispers warnings about mortar shells until she falls asleep.

A boy with a yellow bowl cut harasses Little Dog on the school bus, and Little Dog cries quietly to himself.

Rose struggles to communicate with a butcher because a napalm raid destroyed her school and limited her Vietnamese to second-grade level.

Little Dog hears sounds in Paul's garage at night and finds Paul weeping alone over a Vietnamese folk song played at dinner.

A neighbor mistakes Little Dog for Paul's hired dog walker; Paul firmly corrects her and introduces Little Dog as his grandson.

A woman with a prosthetic leg visits Rose's nail salon and asks Rose to massage her phantom limb, paying a hundred dollars.

Rose reveals she had an older son who was forcibly aborted during a famine, a trauma she has carried ever since.

A neighborhood boy knocks Little Dog off his pink bicycle; Rose later repairs the scraped paint with pink nail polish.

Trevor's drunk father rants about his Vietnam veteran brother James, who bragged about burning and killing Vietnamese civilians.

Trevor and Little Dog ride bikes through Hartford neighborhoods until they stop exhausted on a hill overlooking the city lights.

Little Dog reflects on seven dead friends and traces Trevor's addiction back to an OxyContin prescription given after a broken ankle.

Little Dog sits with Trevor in a playground as Trevor injects drugs and asks whether Little Dog will always be gay.

Rose turns out all the lights in a Saigon hotel room and asks Little Dog where she is.

Rose shows Little Dog a colony of ants in Paul's garden; they go inside together to set the table for dinner.

From childhood encounters with racism and poverty to intimate moments of connection, these events capture the texture of Little Dog's upbringing in Hartford. Lan's PTSD is made vivid through a fireworks episode, while Rose's educational deprivation — caused by a napalm raid — becomes clear through a heartbreaking scene at a butcher's counter. Paul's buried grief for Lan is revealed in a midnight weeping scene in his garage, and small acts of tenderness across households reinforce the family's complicated bonds. Trevor and Little Dog's relationship is deepened through shared rides across Hartford and shadowed by the drug epidemic that takes Trevor and six of Little Dog's other friends. The novel ends in Vietnam and Virginia, where Rose's fragility surfaces once more in a darkened hotel room, and a colony of ants in Paul's garden leads quietly to a family dinner.

The secondary moments that shaped Little Dog's world and identity.

Rose tells Little Dog she is not a monster but a mother; Little Dog privately thinks being a monster is not so terrible.

Little Dog is born in Vietnam with a name meaning Patriotic Leader of the Nation; grandmother Lan renames him Little Dog.

Little Dog takes on the role of family interpreter out of shame at his mother's inability to communicate in English.

Rose tells Little Dog that Paul is not her biological father and that her real father was an unknown American soldier.

Little Dog first finds himself beautiful while standing at a mirror and studying his own body after bathing at the farm.

Trevor refuses to let Little Dog be sexually submissive to him, saying he cannot because he does not want to feel like a girl.

Little Dog's father waves a twenty-dollar bill at police after beating Rose bloody; he is arrested and Rose is taken by ambulance.

Lan tells Little Dog that Rose loves him but is sick in the brains, openly acknowledging both their mental illnesses.

After the truck wreck, Little Dog searches for Trevor and finds him shivering alone in a park; they fall asleep together.

Little Dog comes home after learning of Trevor's death, lies next to sleeping Rose, and says 'I hate him' in English.

Lan compares her dying pain to the burning of huts in her village, linking her present suffering directly to the war.

During their first fully sexual encounter at the river, Trevor kneels in the mud to prove his feelings have not changed.

Little Dog steps outside his Saigon hotel and discovers a lavish funeral featuring drag performers hired to bring beauty to grief.

Little Dog walks through the tobacco fields at dawn searching for a crying cow and finds only an empty clearing.

Little Dog runs through the tobacco fields at dawn thinking of monarch butterflies, feeling for the first time truly part of his family.

This pool traces the key moments of self-discovery and revelation that reshape Little Dog's understanding of himself and his family. Beginning with Little Dog's private recognition that his mother is both monster and mother, the events move through his renaming by Lan, his role as family interpreter, and his discovery of Paul's complicated claim on the family. Trevor's relationship with Little Dog is charted through breakthrough and rupture — the moment Little Dog first finds himself beautiful, Trevor's refusal to be vulnerable, and their tender reconciliation at the river. The pool then follows Little Dog through grief, from returning home devastated after Trevor's death to witnessing Lan's dying words that link her suffering directly to the war. It closes with Little Dog's transformative run through the tobacco fields at dawn, where the buffalo metaphor of familial doom gives way to monarch butterflies and a hard-won sense of homecoming.

The pivotal revelations and emotional turning points that define Little Dog's journey.