There is a photograph Linh Tran keeps on her desk — not framed, just tucked under a corner of her monitor, creased from being folded and unfolded too many times. It's her mother, Lan, at a sewing machine in the living room of their Houston apartment, sometime around 1998. Linh would have been six. The photograph is overexposed, shot on disposable film by someone who didn't quite know how cameras worked. But you can see Lan's hands clearly: bent forward over the feed, guiding a hem with that specific kind of focus that looks indistinguishable from prayer.
"She had this rule," Tran says. "No one was allowed to talk to her when she was at the machine. Not because she was strict. Because she was being paid by the piece. Thirty-three cents per dozen. If you broke her concentration, you took food off the table."