"Seventy years," my father said after dinner while I was online looking up places to eat for our upcoming family trip to Vietnam in less than two weeks.

I turned around and he was holding the wooden box that was in one of the drawers of the lacquered wooden chest of drawers, the top of which displayed photos of my ancestors. The box was open and I could see, wrapped in plastic, the tiny newborn clothes of someone long gone. It was my father's older brother's clothes.

My father was born in 1945. My father's older brother was born in 1941. My father's family was small by Vietnamese standards. My mother's family was a booming 9 siblings large. My father would have been the fourth child, with an eldest brother and an older sister. In 1941, World War II was in full effect. My grandmother gave birth to a son. Less than a year later, he passed away.

Four years later, my father was born.

I remember my grandmother pulling out the infant clothes every year on the anniversary of his passing. The Vietnamese have a custom of honoring loved ones on the day of their passing every year, a nice act of remembrance that I would like to pass on if I ever have kids. Sometimes, I like to think of the century my grandmother lived in- from an era before flight, when automobiles were just entering mass production, to the great depression in America and countless wars. But in Vietnam, it was a different story. The country had been embroiled in fighting for decades. And while she lost a son in the first year of his life, she "lost" her youngest son- my father- on a boat to America on the last night of a civil war that tore apart the country.

Over a decade and a half later, her family that she began would finally be reunited again. And through the meager possessions she brought with her from Vietnam, she kept her son's newborn clothes. Over the decades, past the hardships of poverty, past all the fighting, past a journey across the ocean to America, and finally to the homes of her children in Texas, I like that a mother never forgets the ones that are gone. The clothes still look new, seventy years later, sitting in that wooden box. My grandmother passed away several years ago. Out of my uncle, my aunt, and my father, my father now holds onto the last tangible memory of the brother he never knew.

One day, one of us three brothers will carry on this piece of a branch on the family tree that was unfortunately cut short.