What’s in the Water

I don’t know what infected my own parents, whose immigrant families had once been described in the same terms as snakeheads, to compel them to live inside a gated enclosure. All I know is that I don’t go home all that often because, when I do, driving up the road past the old iron gates, I feel uneasy. I’m never sure whether I’m entering as a visitor or an inmate, or whether I ever earned my way out.