A French priest who employed the narrator’s mother as a maid when she was thirteen. He teaches her how to read Scripture and count in French, and he regales her with stories about life in France. He never acknowledges the narrator as his son, though he does notify him about his mother’s death. The narrator’s father dies in 1968, soon after the narrator returns to Vietnam from California. He is shot in the head while listening to his assassin’s confession at his church.