by Loung Ung
“Ma, wait for me!” I beg, but no one hears me.
In my panic, I finally notice the heavy load in my arms. I bend my head down to see that I am holding a newborn baby. The baby is pale as a ghost and lies limp and unmoving in the crooks of my arms. I stare at her and a cold chill travels up my spine before spreading like an artic blast all over my body.
“No, no! Wake up, wake up!” I shake the baby but she doesn’t move. “Wake up, wake up!” Frantically, I squeeze the baby to my chest, hoping to give it life. But the baby lies dead in my arms.
part two divided we stand
12 totally awesome u.s.a.
March 1983
At six-thirty A.M. Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” wakes me up for school on my alarm clock. I slam my hand down on the snooze button and close my eyes for a few more seconds. Outside the wind howls and blows cold air in through the cracks in the windowpanes. When I open my eyes again, it’s seven A.M.
“Damn, I’m late!” I jump out of bed, throw on my big red sweater, and quickly slip on black tights, a skirt, and red leg warmers. In my closet, I quickly tease up my bangs and pull the rest of my big, permed hair into a banana clip.
“Damn, damn!” I swear, skipping and jumping while trying to cram my feet into a pair of Keds.
“Loung, stop swearing and jumping around,” Eang says as she sleepily passes my room to lie down on the couch.
“Sorry, sorry. I got up late.”
“Then hurry, but no swearing and jumping.” Eang pulls a blanket over her shoulders and closes her eyes.
I tiptoe down the stairs and out the door. In my hurried pace, my body heats up and keeps me warm against the cold wind. As my feet half-jog the mile to ADL Intermediate School, I think about Eang and her aversion to swearing. When we first came to America I used to be able to throw these four-letter words around and tell Eang they were not swear words, but she’s caught on now and is always on my case about it. “Swearing,” she says, “is not proper or ladylike.” Sometimes I want to scream at Eang and her many rules. After three years in America, she is still trying to raise me to be a proper Cambodian. And it seems that in addition to not swearing, a proper Cambodian girl doesn’t go out to movies with male friends, go the mall, listen to loud music, talk for more than five minutes on the phone, come home after dark, or go anywhere by herself. It seems to me, a proper Cambodian girl is just supposed to sit at home and be quiet. But I’m no proper Cambodian girl. And in English the bad words blow off of my lips without much shame or fear, yet I can’t even silently mouth these same swear words in Chinese or Khmer without feeling like a very bad girl.
As I get near school, I stop jogging to coast along a patch of ice on the sidewalk. On the smooth concrete, I glide as if on a pair of roller skates, when suddenly I slip.
“Shit!!” I holler loudly.
Above me a row of birds frantically flutters off the telephone line. My right ankle rolls off a fallen branch and is growing fat before my eyes.
“What the hell! I’m late enough already. Jesus Christ!” I mutter to myself while I rub my ankle. Ahead of me, a group of kids turns and stares at me quizzically. Afraid that I look like a retard, I glower at them and make my eyes super small, as if to dare them to say something.
“Hey, are you okay?” a brunette girl asks.
“Umm, yeah,” I answer meekly.
“You’re sure?” she persists.
“Yeah, just a twist.”
“All right, see you at school then,” she smiles and leaves with her friends.
“Bye.” My mouth feels sour at how quickly I assumed the group would make fun of me. But more often than not, that’s exactly what the other kids do.
At thirteen I am only a year older than most sixth-graders at ADL, but those 365 days color my face with embarrassment and shame when the question of age comes up. And inevitably, the discussion will end with some kid making fun of me for it.
“So did you stay behind?” someone will ask.
“No,” I’ll reply with a nonchalant shrug of my shoulders.
“Did you start school late?”
“Yeah, very late,” I’ll laugh, all the while fully aware of their looks of disbelief because in their world everybody starts school at the same age. And if someone starts late, it must mean they’re slow.
“I’m not stupid!” I want to scream at them, but instead I smile.
Sometimes I wish I had a T-shirt that reads “I don’t speak like you. I’m from another country. We don’t speak English there. So stop being rude!” But no such T-shirt exists. And I don’t want to explain how I started school as a ten-year-old in second grade because then I will have to tell them about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge.
I stand back up and tentatively walk on my tender ankle, but before I get to school I suddenly veer off the sidewalk to knock on Beth’s door. A car in the road kicks and jerks forward loudly. Involuntarily, I lower my shoulders and bend my knees as if to crouch. As the car passes, I reprimand myself for being a scaredy-cat.
“Beth,” I shout and rap louder.
“You’re late,” Beth says calmly when she opens her door.
“Sorry, I got up late, then twisted my ankle trying to rush here. It’s just one of those days.” Beth is quiet as she locks the door behind her.
Beth is my best friend in junior high. At five feet four inches, she is two inches taller than me. In contrast to my black hair and dark skin, Beth’s a blond-haired, blue-eyed, pretty all-American girl. She’s also one of the nicest and kindest girls in school and an extremely good teacher to me.
“If we hurry, we should be okay,” she says and glances at my face. “And urn … you should wipe off the ugly, sparkly blue eye shadow.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. You’re beautiful without it.”
Part of the reason I love Beth is because she compliments me all the time. And yet as many times as I’ve heard her say I’m pretty, I don’t see it in myself. How can I be when I’m so different from everyone else?
“Wipe it all off or leave a little on?” I persist.
“All off.”
“Really?”
“I don’t know why you don’t believe you’re pretty,” Beth sighs in exasperation.
I take Beth’s advice and clean up my lids. But she doesn’t understand. She wasn’t there last summer at the fairground when the boy turned his face away. I’d smiled at him as we both stood in line to buy cotton candy. Later, when he met up with his friends, they looked at me and laughed. Beth just can’t understand how that feels—she’s so perfectly normal that sometimes I wonder why she’s friends with me.
Though Beth and I spend a lot of time together, I never tell her anything about the Khmer Rouge or the war. Instead, when I’m at her house, my favorite thing to do is to hang out in her kitchen and watch her and her mom interact. Ma Poole—that’s what Mrs. Poole lets me call her—likes to hug and puts her arms around Beth a lot. And when I’m there, I get a lot of her hugs, too. So while I share with Beth what it’s like to be a stranger in a foreign land, with her mom and in her house, I get to have my American family.
“Hey, Beth, let’s buck it!” I holler and march ahead of her.
“What?” Beth asks, trying to stifle her giggle.
“Let’s buck it, let’s hurry.” I explain.
“Umm, babe. The expression is ‘book it.’” Beth cracks up, her face muscles jiggling like the cafeteria jello.
“But …” I stammer. “A buck is a male deer and deer move very fast. So we make like a deer and ‘buck it,’ right?”
“No, book it.” Beth is certain.
“What? How? Why ‘book it’?” Beth can’t answer me.
I don’t understand English expressions and idioms. When I hear these strange phrases, I try to analyze and find reasons for them. Buck it, book it; windshield factor, windchill factor; I pledge a legions, I pledge allegiance; ant, aunt; there, their, they’re; I wonder why the Americans make it so difficult for themselves,
not to mention for me!
When I’m not stumped by these weird sayings, I struggle with the sounds. Sometimes I listen with envy as Beth rolls out the words effortlessly, automatically, and with a perfect accent. Her lips move so fast when she speaks that they look like a sock puppet with somebody’s hand controlling her mouth. I, on the other hand, have to sit in speech therapy class day after day to practice saying the sounds “S,” “Th,” “Str,” “L,” “V,” and “O” with exercises that have me blowing air between my teeth, pressing my tongue against the roof of my mouth, and breathing through a straw. Afterward, my tongue usually feels swollen and too fat for my small mouth. Sometimes my tongue gets so tired, it becomes cranky and grouchy and sputters out sounds that taste like dirty water. But still I make myself practice and repeat the sounds until the phrase “Susan eats snakes” echoes even in my sleep.
Beth and I reach school just as the bell rings.
“One more day, then it’s the weekend!” Beth calls out as she walks off to her class.
“Totally awesome!” I yell back and enter my class.
Around the room, the popular students gather and socialize while the misfits sleep and pretend to look bored. In their corner, the Valley girls jingle their plastic bracelets and balloon out their cheeks like frogs before they pop their chewing gum. At my desk, I sit quietly and try to remember yesterday’s grammar lesson. Early on, I learned that to pass the tests, I just have to memorize the rules even if I don’t understand their usage. Then the day after the tests, the lessons can fly out of my ears like yellow busy bees. When the rules do stay in my head, they zip around and cross-pollinate with all the other lessons in my brain and get all mixed up anyway.
“All right, class, I trust you all did your homework.” The teacher sends everybody to their seats.
The assignment was to take your assigned big word and find other small words in it. One by one, each student walks up to the front and gives a report; I avoid the teacher’s eyes, hoping she won’t call on me.
“All right, Loung,” the teacher nods in my direction. “Your turn.”
“Okay.” I smile, my feet clunking heavily on the floor like they’re stuck in blocks of cement as I approach the board. As I stand in front of the class and write my big word on the blackboard, I am careful to slant the chalk so it doesn’t squeak. When I’m finished, I turn back to the class. My lips are dry and cracked.
“My word is Saturday,” I say in a small voice. My feet want to tap from nervousness but I stop them. “My word is Saturday,” I begin again in a deeper voice. “There’s the word ‘sat,’” I draw a line under sat. “There’s also the word ‘day’” I draw two lines under day for emphasis.
“And in the middle,” I continue, “is ‘turd.’”
Twenty heads toss back and erupt into laughter. I turn around, my fingers gripping the chalk tightly.
“What?” I ask, confused.
“Loung, do you know what that means?” asks a girl in the front.
“It means cool,” I answer. I have heard the cool kids call each other that.
“Well, no, it doesn’t,” another student answers, her voice cracking. Now even the teacher has her head bent to the desk, her right hand covering her mouth.
“But some kid called me a ‘turd’ the other day,” I protest. At this, the class roars and finally the teacher asks a girl to explain the word to me.
The girl takes a long time to explain what exactly a turd is. She first tells me something about a galloping horse that lifts its tail up.
“You mean it flicks at flies?”
“No. You know,” she persists, “when a horse lifts its tail and stuff comes out.”
“The horse pees?” I crinkle my brows.
“Closer.” She smiles. “All right.” She looks me in the eye. “Rabbit poo, bird droppings, and elephant manure.”
Finally, I get the picture.
“Oh shit!” I exclaim, but quickly cover my mouth with both hands.
When the bell rings again, I walk out of class wishing I were somebody else. As I find my way to the next class, I pretend I am a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl just like Beth. In my fantasies, I am named Jassy after a character I saw in an old black-and-white movie on TV. Right away I like the name because the girl in the movie rides horses and is a tomboy. But the first time I brought up the subject of a name change with Meng, he’d gazed at me as if I were crazy.
“But, Eldest Brother,” I protested, “many other refugee kids have taken American names.” Of the roughly two hundred Cambodians living in Vermont, many now call themselves by their new American names.
“It doesn’t matter what others do. You’re not changing your name,” Meng had said. He can be very final when he wants to be.
What Meng doesn’t know is that in school, my name has already been changed to its American variations of Loung.
“Hey Louie,” a girl name Missy says to me as she greets me. “Don’t you just love second-period gym class?”
“Barf me out!” I answer her and head into the locker room to change into my gym shorts and sweatshirt.
Outside, the sun is shining brightly in the sky and giving us an unusually warm day for the end of March. All the snow has melted, leaving the green grass below us cold and soggy. But still, I wish it were forty degrees warmer as I step onto the field, my sneakers soaking up the water like sponges.
“What a gorgeous day to play outside!” the girl next to me exclaims.
“Totally bitchin’,” I grumble under my breath, rubbing the bumps popping out of my skin.
“All right, girls.” The gym teacher blows into her whistle. “Gather around.” We all do as she says. “Missy, you play center forward. Loung, you’re left fullback. Colleen, you’re right wing.” While she split us up into two teams, I stare up at the sky and pray that the nice weather is here to stay. But in Vermont, we can still get snowed on in May.
“All right. Get into positions!” the teacher yells as I stroll to my spot. For the next twenty minutes, I stand around rubbing my thighs to keep them warm and run after the ball if it rolls by. Then suddenly, before I know what’s going on, the ball flies high into my space and without thinking I jump headfirst into it. It hits my head with a loud thud, creating a vibrating shock wave all over my scalp and then bouncing off to the ground where it is pounced on by other players. I lie on my back, my arms and legs spread out on the grass, and squeeze my eyes shut. For a second, I see black spots and my heart leaps with excitement. “You may have amnesia!” my mind whispers. With that, I envision myself waking up and not knowing who I am. I see myself returning to normal life with Meng, Eang, and Maria—but as a new person with no memories of Cambodia. But then swirling stars burst forth into my sight, and as the sun penetrates my closed lids, my face darkens with disappointment.
“Lou, are you hurt bad?” the gym teacher huffs at me.
“Have you ever heard of anybody hurting good?” I snap back in annoyance. The teacher scowls.
“What did you say?” she demands.
“I’m sorry. I mean I’m okay.” I chew on my lips to keep quiet.
The teacher smiles tightly and sends me to sit on the bench. While the game continues, I try to think of another way to erase my memory of Cambodia. In soap operas, it seems that every time a girl hits her head, drinks too much, gets in a car accident, or merely faints, she gets amnesia. As my butt freezes on the cold bench, I realize that amnesia is a lot harder to get in real life than on TV.
The next period takes me to Mrs. Kay’s English class. I listen to her gentle vioice reading the class announcements out loud and wonder what it would be like to have her read me bedtime stories at home. For the rest of the class, I sit with my face resting in my palm like a heavy coconut that’ll fall down if I don’t support it. When the bell rings to end our class, the students rush out the door like alligators being let out of their cages; I follow behind.
“Loung, can I talk to you for a minute?” Mrs. Kay calls me.
“Loung,” Mrs. Kay begins tentatively. “Loung, I’ve asked you to stay behind because I want to thank you.”
“Thank me?” I’m bewildered.
“Yes. You don’t know this but my son died this last summer. And I’ve had a very hard time with it and you’ve helped me a lot.” She smiles. “All through the year when I feel very sad, I just look at you. You’re always smiling and working hard. I say to myself, ‘This young girl has lost her family, her home, moved to a different country, and she still goes on smiling.’” I stare at Mrs. Kay not knowing what to say. I don’t know how she knows about me. I don’t talk about my past life to anyone. “You’ve helped me to go on …. And Loung, I think that your story is a very important story. If you ever want to write it down, I can help. If you want, you can even talk into a tape recorder and I can help you transcribe it.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Kay. I’ll think about it. And I’m sorry about your son.”
“Anything I can do to help, just ask.”
“Thanks, I will,” I tell Mrs. Kay, even though I have no intention of ever sharing my story with anyone.
After school, I walk Beth back to her house, then stop in for a cookie before going home.
“Loung, you’re late! It’s three-ten!” Eang yells when I open the door.
“Sorry,” I reply meekly knowing their shifts start at three-thirty P.M.
“All right, food is cooked. You need to finish the laundry. Mop the floor.” And like a tornado, Meng and Eang storm out of the house.
“Okay, okay,” I call out after them, and go over to hug Maria.
“Hi sweetie,” I say. She smiles but then turns back to the TV.
Maria is three years old and already can communicate in three different languages. Between the two of them, Meng and Eang speak Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Chiu Chow, Vietnamese, Khmer, and now English. They are pushing me to study French to add another language to our household. At home Meng mostly speaks to us only in Chinese, while Eang doles out her instructions in Khmer. Meng rarely bends his Chinese-only rule, even when I have Ahn McNulty over.