The chapter shifts back to August 2001, when eleven-year-old Hai rides through Virginia with Sony, their mother, Aunt Kim, and Bà ngoại on the way to Florida, where Kim wants to inspect a nail salon she might buy. Kim’s possible move makes the trip feel important, and Sony has insisted on a detour to a place he wants to see. In the car, Bà ngoại jokes, hands out cough drops, and turns the cramped ride into something playful, while Hai quietly pays attention to her in a way the others do not.

Sony leads the family to a tidy small-town property that turns out to be the Stonewall Jackson house museum. The family enters awkwardly, not fully understanding where they are, and Hai has to translate as they pay for the tour. Inside, a docent named Carol welcomes them, shows a film that presents Jackson as gentle and domestic, and then guides them through rooms filled with preserved objects and fake food displays. The museum’s polished version of history clashes with the family’s confusion and suspicion almost immediately.

As the tour continues, Carol explains Jackson’s home life and defends the museum’s language by calling enslaved people “servants” because that is what the Jackson family called them. The other white visitors accept this framing, but the scene exposes how the museum softens slavery and turns Confederate history into sentiment. Sony listens intently and tries to ask a military question, wanting to learn and perhaps connect Jackson’s image to his own idea of heroism, while Hai is bored, restless, and more interested in escaping to a motel room and television.

In the middle of the house tour, Bà ngoại urgently needs to urinate and, unable or unwilling to wait, uses an antique chamber pot while Hai and Sony stand guard. The moment becomes farcical when Carol unknowingly helps her put the pot back and only warns the family not to touch the exhibits. Afterward, the tour ends in a gift shop full of Confederate merchandise and children’s books, reinforcing the chapter’s satire of how history is packaged and sold. Outside, Ma and Kim dismiss Jackson’s grandeur, Kim insults Sony’s father, and their talk returns to the Florida nail salon and the possibility that Kim and Sony may move away.

The family finally sits in a McDonald’s parking lot eating fast food as evening approaches. Bà ngoại calls it Sony’s birthday, says the museum was full of demons, and the children peel off their visitor stickers together. Hai leans against Sony, absorbing the ordinary closeness of the moment. Then the chapter returns abruptly to the present: Hai wakes on Thanksgiving Day in East Gladness beside the sleeping Sony and Grazina, realizing that Bà ngoại and that summer day are gone, and he whispers, “Happy birthday, Sony.”