Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen | Longreads | November 7, 2025 | (3,588 words)
Tom was a white and marigold calico cat who excelled at being beautiful but failed at being healthy. Of his many challenges, Tom had a permanent clog in one nostril, which made his meals terrifying to witness. I was relieved to see him alive afterward. I dreaded looking after Tom, though he was the first cat with whom I had a kinship.
We bonded one August in New York City. I had planned a trip from California to see my sister. Everything changed with a miscommunication: My stay overlapped with a last-minute jaunt to Tokyo, where she was chasing a new romantic partner. This meant that I would be in New York City to visit my sister’s cat.
We’ve had the privilege of publishing Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen in the past. Be sure to check out her first Longreads piece, “The Shapes of Silence.”
In trips past, I had established an adversarial relationship with New York; I had visited when it was cold and when I was lonely. This New York trip was supposed to have a different tenor. It was summer. I was traveling with a girlfriend that adored me. With her, I was on a mission to rectify my relationship with the city, especially since I had learned to like myself and the external world a little more.
Prior to the trip, my sister sent an email with several bullet points entitled, “When To Know Tom is Sick.” It began innocuously:
The list escalated in minor intensity:
The email concluded:
She signed, “Love you and THANK YOU. Sent from my Windows Phone.“
When I arrived in Harlem, I felt anguished responsibility and resentment toward the cat. He could die, I perseverated. I had imagined Manhattan from the vantage point of a twenty-something with her lover, but was now relegated to “indoor New York lesbian with dying cat.” I searched his litter for pee and poop, as though playing a weird Where’s Waldo? Tom needed anti-anxiety medication with his wet food, and I was careful with the timing and dosage. I bypassed New York City nightlife to keep the cat alive.
Despite my worries as a feline caretaker, Tom displayed what I have since learned are normal cat behaviors. He stared out the living room window overlooking the Harlem River with longing and disdain. He walked across my keyboard with apathetic audacity. One moment he would lay like a cherub, the next he would reach for a feather toy attached to a string. He protracted and retracted his claws with a bored cadence, as if to say, I’m a cat and this shit is just what I do.
I oscillated between wondering whether Tom was fighting to live or actively trying to die. I learned to adore the way he sidled against me and to hate his momentary affection, just as he learned to detach from me in weariness and depend on me in hunger. Days with him were a quick education in a cat’s existence.
I did not realize then that cat duality was normal.
I did not realize then that cat duality was normal.
A friend once described her cat Winston, who wandered away for months. She had discovered that Winston would visit four other families miles away. He often appeared on Nextdoor, his picture attached to the question: “Is this your cat?” He was everyone’s and no one’s.
When I heard this story, I understood. Winston had lived the life Tom could not: a single existence of different lives.
I was well versed in personal animal tragedy. My father, Thom, is an animal enthusiast with attachment issues. He feels guilty for bypassing the last puppy in a litter and is annoyed by said puppy for occupying his space.
My youth sometimes felt like “farm or famine.” We gathered chickens and rabbits as quickly as we freed them at our local temple, hoping that the vegetarian monks would keep them alive. Our dogs mysteriously disappeared, often when my sister and I were away for the weekend. Our hamsters escaped from their cages, vanishing into the unreachable crevices of our house. My world expanded and contracted with my father’s fickle interest.
My father modeled binary relationships using pets and people. I easily adopted this stingy affection. Duality was an adolescent tool to deflect from being queer; I could offer just enough to draw others in, but retreat the moment they sensed something different about me. My parents experienced my deluge-and-detach strategy. I portrayed an academically inclined daughter in exchange for dating women hundreds of miles away in California. Fully out and in adulthood, I still hold the dogs and people of my life close and recoil when threatened.
Tom was my sister’s second overweight, highly dependent male cat. He arrived with a sputtering digestive system at her Harlem apartment as a foster. Like my sister, I was drawn to Tom. Like my father, my affection slowly eroded seeing him lounging on the couch each morning and knowing he would be on the kitchen counter every afternoon and evening as I ran from the 135th Street subway station, worried that the goddamn cat had died.
If cats have nine lives, my father has had at least five that I know of. In his first, he had a mother, a father, and smoked boxes of cigarettes purchased on borrowed money he never returned. Everyone called him Hoang, his family name. That life ended in childhood with the Vietnam War, his dreams of becoming a lawyer erased by the obligation to enlist and fight for Saigon.
After passing an intelligence exam in his early 20s, he began his next life as a cargo pilot for the Southern Vietnamese Army. As Saigon collapsed in 1975, he escaped on one of the last planes before the airport was destroyed. From that life on, my father was never late again.
He was everyone’s and no one’s.
When Saigon fell, he was forced to flee. America reordered his names on papers. No longer Hoang, Thom led lives across the Bible Belt, first on a farm that sponsored Vietnamese refugees, then as a grocery store cashier in New Orleans, and finally as a house painter, parking attendant, and machinist in Houston.
I was a part of his next life. Then, he had the body of a tired man with the calloused hands of a machinist, who was once an aspiring lawyer. Emulating him, I embodied the role of a worthy daughter who relentlessly performed being an asset, not a burden. Meanwhile, I lived a different life in my imagination.
I always assumed that my father had a constant, cat-like annoyance at my existence, which forced him to dutifully pass time until his next life. Together, we lived at a close distance.
My father was Thom, the young dad, who watched me line up with my classmates in grade school. He was there out of pride, but also because he was often unemployed and needed something to do. He was Thom, the middle-aged man, who picked me up from an academic tournament at midnight, proud that I had won but fatigued from a job where overtime was standard. He was Thom, the rotund figure, who rewarded my report cards with Jack in the Box because he believed in positive reinforcement and because he loved American fast food, which gave him high cholesterol and adult-onset diabetes.
As his life became as American as it was Vietnamese, my father became “Tom.” His name, Thom, is pronounced with a silent h and a diphthong that stretches the o with a humming lightness akin to its Vietnamese definition: fragrant scent. Without Vietnamese people around, my father eliminates the intonation and simply calls himself “Tom.” My lackluster Vietnamese meant that he permanently became “Tom” to me.
I gathered bits of the lives he had left behind, which included joy riding on his Honda motorbike and a girlfriend who, like me, was a tiger on the Chinese zodiac—passionate and stubborn. I imagine a parallel universe where Hoang had not escaped and became a lawyer. I am a character in a world where none of that has come true.
In his current life, my father exists animal-less and alone on the southwest side of Houston. Forced into early retirement after a decade of unemployment, he passes time with a light routine: a trip to the library, grocery shopping, and napping. Gone is my mother, who grew tired of key-lock entrances to their separate rooms. His two closest family members—my sister and I—are his most infrequent and frequent guests. I’m busy, he would often respond in some variation to our dinner requests. I settle for occasional phone calls where we talk, but say very little.
Together, we lived at a close distance.
Without work or family, I wonder what his life means now. My father once told me that he wanted to live as long as he could to accumulate enough karma to reincarnate into something better. From his perspective, this life was punishment for misdeeds in a previous one. By extension, I felt like I was part of the punishment.
“What do you want to be in your next life?” I once asked.
“An American dog,” he replied. Though this was his version of a joke, it was also his general way of being—biding time in his current life while awaiting a better one.
My father met Tom, the cat, when my sister and I graduated with our master’s degrees. Just as he had with childhood pets, my father expressed initial excitement about our graduations, but had to be cajoled into visiting. He preferred being at home to visiting New York City and having to spend consecutive days with us.
To some extent, I understood. We both disdained the city’s pretension. He loathed people who thought they were better than him because he never had the opportunity to become the best version of himself. I despised people whose primary personality was a superiority complex about working at Deutsche Bank. Our versions of New York City obscured our real reasons for not wanting to visit. My father and I distanced ourselves from our surroundings. While he preferred rarely leaving home, I moved away from the people I thought I could hurt the most. Like my father, I always wanted to be somewhere else.
We filled the distance we created between ourselves and others with guilt. By living several states away from my father, my absence became my shame. I worried that he would die alone, without me. Similarly, my father left text messages and brief voicemails with the same rhetorical themes: Are you still alive? Where are you? Are you okay? In our brief exchanges, we rarely spoke about our lives, but seemed concerned about our potential deaths.
My father acquiesced to visiting New York City with the same guilty dynamic that defined our relationship. He bought a tie and a suitcase after I reminded him that he missed my sister’s college graduation for no particular reason.
“It hurt her,” I said to him.
“No it didn’t,” he snapped back defensively.
He looked upset taking it in. I was pushing my father to show up to compensate for the times he could not. Amid the brinkmanship, I had conveniently failed to remind him that, fixated on my grades and college escapism, I didn’t attend my sister’s graduation either.
“Why did you name the cat after me?” my father asked, upon meeting Tom for the first time. He looked incredulously at the cat, who stared back at him, bored, but mildly curious.
Tom spent graduation week slowly circling my father, alert to another male in his precious New York City territory. My father cautiously maneuvered the space, suspect of the size and the missing microwave. I often found him perched uneasily on the couch, as though the furniture would give out from his unfamiliar weight.
By the end of the week, I managed to take a single photo of the two Toms—the cat sitting upright on the couch, the father attempting to put his arm around the cat’s slim shoulder. Adjacent to one another, but at a conspicuous distance, they both smile into the camera.
As I cat-sat for Tom, I observed that he lived a regimented life within my sister’s 500-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment. I aligned my schedule to his. I watched Tom gorge on his breakfast of cat-Zoloft covered in wet food. I panicked at the sounds he made, air wheezing into his functioning nostril and struggling to escape his food-occupied mouth.
Afterward, I watched Tom waltz around his limited world. He sauntered from the arm of the couch to the empty feeder, then to the bathtub. I never knew if and when he would fall apart. He would play with an odd mix of delight and weariness. Sometimes he toyed with feathers or stuffed animals. Occasionally he attacked the shower curtain.
My girlfriend and I scampered out of the apartment in the early afternoons to enjoy summer in New York. No matter where I happened to be—on the Highline, waiting for fries at Shake Shack, or walking across the Brooklyn Bridge—I wondered whether Tom was dead or alive. One evening, as I watched a sunset production of Cymbeline at Shakespeare in the Park, all I could think about was how long it would take to get to my sister’s apartment immediately after the last act.
Tom had patterns that evoked my father. Like the cat, my father led a regimented life defined by meals, anchored by the house he loathed to travel from. Each of my are you alive? visits had the same routine. He offered me bottled water from cases stored in a corner. He proposed cutting the less-than-ripe pineapple on the kitchen counter, adjacent to a loaf of white bread. We sat on his floral-patterned couch and watched whatever was on one of the five television stations he had.
Once, I noticed a painting of a boy in a conical Vietnamese hat reading a book by an ox—two figures, alone yet together.
_“_I like it,” I said.
“I like it too. The painting is me,” he replied. I did not know whether he was the boy or the ox. The next time I visited, the painting had disappeared.
Despite how onerous the visits can be, I go at least twice a year, even if my father never asks me to. I am driven by imagining him dead on the floral-patterned couch, not to be found for days, his body’s stench finally alerting his neighbors. His death doesn’t scare me; that death would release my father from the life he had not planned for. I fear that my absence makes me somehow responsible.
His death doesn’t scare me; that death would release my father from the life he had not planned for.
Most of all, I worry about losing the opportunity to learn about all the lives he had lived before me. Although living at a distance affords me the ability to live fully, it comes at the expense of not truly knowing my father’s story. I am always relieved when my father picks up the phone or opens the door to tell me something new.
Your grandfather and grandmother were good people.
After I escaped, they blew up the airport. We landed in Thailand.
I was sponsored by a farm—Baptists. I didn’t like it.
I had a lot of girlfriends, one was a Tiger sign just like you.
My real name is Hoang. That’s my family name.
Midway through cat-sitting Tom, I hosted a friend at my sister’s apartment. I was thrilled to talk about topics other than cats and their narrowing urethras. At first, Tom began to withdraw physically from us. Then he writhed and screeched in anguish. My dread became real. Following my sister’s bullet-point instructions, we began the journey to the vet.
We put Tom in a box. He was surprisingly agile despite only one good nostril and a thrice-blocked urethra, trying to tip the box and force his way out. I jostled him back in. My brain was perplexed by the problem at hand—a bulbous, liquid-filled cat that could explode. After some fussing, he was ready for transport. I called a taxi.
New York City’s summer heat swelled as my girlfriend, our guest, and I reached the Manhattan Vet Group on the Upper East Side. We were a frenetic group carrying a cat in a box with a condition we didn’t quite understand. Upon arrival, I attempted to explain everything to the receptionist.
We were waved into an office where we placed Tom on what resembled a sterile kitchen island. Out of the box, Tom looked away, perhaps acknowledging his fate. He had been in this office twice, leaving each time with a new life and an unblocked, narrower urethra. Although he evaded death, his body and world became smaller each time.
A man in steel-blue scrubs entered the room. I heard myself say some combination of My sister, blocked, scarred, can’t pee, screaming, told me to come here. The man understood my hysteria, grabbed a fistful of Tom’s fur and lifted him as if he were pulling a sheet from a typewriter—tightening the skin around his body to reveal a hard, round globe of a stomach.
“He’s blocked and full of urine,” he said to us as Tom hissed in what I interpreted as cat indignation. The man repeated the same diagnosis to the veterinarian who entered the room. She examined the cat.
“We could unblock him, but his urethra would simply get smaller because of the scar tissue. He’d block again and more frequently,” the vet said. Her quick speaking pace matched her stressed, static-frazzled hair. “It’s the cheaper option,” she said.
“The long-term option is to widen his urethra to what could appear as more female presenting,” she said. “That’s a little more expensive.”
“How much?” I asked.
“$5,000,” she said.
I contemplated the options. I looked at my girlfriend, whose plans for a lower Manhattan excursion had been disrupted by the strange decision that ensnared us. I had imagined a different trip where Tom and my sister could share space with my girlfriend and I, where we could roam the city without a schedule or concern. Instead, I called my sister. Miraculously, she answered despite it being past midnight in Tokyo. Over speaker phone, the vet repeated the options to my sister: unblock and repeat, widening the urethra, no we don’t put animals to sleep.
The scene felt like practice for future conversations we would have about our parents. I heard my sister’s resigned, warbled sigh. Later, I learned that she was drained from the disappointing trip.
“I can’t afford to unblock this cat anymore,” she said, “We need to put him to sleep.”
The veterinarian refused on ethical grounds, but gave us the card to the Animal Medical Center on East 62nd Street. I reached for Tom. I grabbed the box. I hung up the phone.
Tom was just a cat. He wasn’t even my cat. Tom’s limited affection, provided on his terms, frustrated me. He added to my aversion for New York City. Despite all this, I sobbed en route to the Animal Medical Center. I was distraught because Tom was in pain, and that I helped determine that he would no longer live, despite the fact that he was, at the point of decision, still alive. Most of all, I was distressed that the circumstances—this trip, my role in Tom’s life, this choice over dying—did not have to be this way.
At the Animal Medical Center, we met the young veterinary intern who would put Tom to sleep. I looked into a crate where Tom was trapped, his tufts of fur trying to break through the grate’s rigid squares. Tom faced away even after I called his name. I couldn’t stand to watch him die, so I left him, alone, with a caring stranger named Elizabeth. She cradled Tom in her arms as I walked away. Tom knew I had given up, and in part, he had too. With that choice, I was there, but not.
I took the long walk to the billing counter. It was the first time I had dealt directly with the logistics of death instead of grieving in my head. I had always been haunted by images of my father’s body slowly disintegrating, whether the thoughts came before I went to bed, as I was driving to work, or when he failed to pick up the phone. In New York, I was momentarily freed from fearing the death of Tom the father because of my concern for Tom the cat. Tom’s death felt like the future.
At billing, a young woman gave stock condolences for my loss and prepared the paperwork to complete the transaction.
“What’s your name?” Jennifer Nguyen.
“What was the name of your pet?” Tom.
“Would you like to cremate Tom in an incinerator with other animals or would you like him to be cremated on his own? It’s a $50 price difference.” I’ll take the cheaper option.
I ran my credit card for the $200 dollar bill and the machine printed a long document requiring my signature. It was a certificate of death for Tom Nguyen.
Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen is a creative nonfiction writer and proud native Houstonian currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in Emerge (where she also served as editor), The Offing, Foglifter, the Ponder Review, and New Rivers Press as the winner of the American Fiction Award. Her writing has been supported by the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Vermont Studio Center, among others. She writes humorist pieces in “Thursday Letters with Jen” via Substack. She is working on her first book, “A Writer from Houston.”
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copyeditor: Brendan Fitzgerald