by May-lee Chai
“You could go to jail!” I shouted over my shoulder. “See how you like that!”
Paul hurriedly unlocked the doors of his Mazda, and Sitan pushed me in the front seat, then he scrambled over me, his knees in my face, and landed with a thump in the back seat. Paul hit the gas, and the tires squealed against the asphalt as we tore off down the street toward the highway.
“What’s the matter with you?” Paul muttered.
“What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with your asshole friend? It’s totally illegal to threaten to hit people.”
Sitan peered out the back window as though he expected cars to come chasing after us.
“So you worked in that club?” I asked, calming down a little. I fastened my seatbelt. “You a bouncer or a bartender?”
“Neither. He was my supplier.”
I sat back with a hollow feeling in my gut.
Sitan whistled from the back seat. “Don’t go messing with those people.”
“I’m clean now. I’m not going back to that life.”
“Then why did you go back to that club if you knew your ‘dealer’ was there?” My heart was pounding in my ears.
“I needed to talk to someone.”
“That woman?” Then I corrected myself. “I mean, that guy?”
“No, someone else. Her friend.”
I knew I should tell Uncle about all this, the drug dealing, the search for a missing woman in his old dealer’s club, but part of me worried that Uncle wouldn’t want to hear what I would have to say. And bad news could have a way of boomeranging on the messenger. There was a lot of bad news Ma hadn’t wanted to hear over the years when I was growing up. Part of me felt weary. Was it still worth fighting the way I had as a child?
Sitan was laughing from the back seat.
“This isn’t funny!” I said.
“Shut up! Both of you!” Paul slammed his fist against the dashboard. Then he picked up the speed, tailgating again.
Great, I thought. We were going to get in an accident for sure.
Paul turned on the radio, and we listened to bad, loud pop all the way back to our exit to Santa Bonita.
CHAPTER 14
The Lost Boys
When we got back to the apartment, Uncle was nowhere to be found. There was a note in his spidery cursive anchored to the kitchen table with a grapefruit: “Glad you have a fun time together! This is special Ruby Red. Try it for breakfast.”
It seemed early for him to have gone back to the donut shop, but Sitan didn’t seem worried. “He stays with friends sometimes,” Sitan said. “Back when I needed a place to stay, he used to let me stay here, and he stayed somewhere else.”
“What do you mean? What friends? Where?” I asked.
But Sitan shrugged. “Don’t worry. It’s just the way he is sometimes.”
“Have you noticed all the Sudafed he’s taking?” I asked, since Sitan seemed to want to be the expert on Uncle. “And the Nicorette? When did he start smoking?”
Sitan shook his head.
“I think there’s something wrong. He didn’t used to be this way.”
“Nothing used to be this way,” Paul interjected. He was pacing around the apartment, taking long strides from the kitchenette to the front door, from the bookshelf to the opposite wall, as though he were measuring. “The old world ended. Back to Year Zero. Don’t you remember?”
I ignored him. “Sitan, Uncle seems to like you very much. He obviously trusts you. You must have known him for a while. Do you think he’s behaving rationally?”
Sitan picked up the grapefruit and tossed it from hand to hand. “You sound like an old woman.”
“You sound like a jerk.”
Paul stepped between us. “Hey, how about a smoke?” He held up a joint.
“If Uncle comes back, he’ll smell it.”
He and Sitan smirked, but then decided to go smoke on the fire escape. They slipped out the front door while I rummaged in the refrigerator for something to make for dinner. I turned on the TV, but Uncle didn’t get cable and there wasn’t much on—a sitcom, a medical drama, an animated Christmas special with singing animals, and an episode of Cops. I turned off the TV and ate my leftovers in silence, watching the occasional headlights pull into the parking lot, the shadows of a mulberry tree dance across the far wall, the flicker of shadow and light against the drapes. Life in California wasn’t glamorous the way I’d imagined. I could believe it would be a lot like life at home if I stayed—working around the clock in the family business, trying to find time to study if I went to school here—only it would be lonelier. I’d moved so many times, how could I have forgotten this empty feeling of being far from any friends? I realized I hadn’t thought out this trip very well at all.
Around midnight, Paul and Sitan returned, smelling of smoke and the pizza they’d ordered and shared.
Sitan grabbed my pillows off the sofa, stretched out on the floor, and fell asleep almost immediately, but Paul continued to pace.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I wish Mai were still alive,” he said. “I always thought she must have died in Cambodia.”
I didn’t tell him that part of her did, and that the woman who’d made it to America was nothing like the mother he remembered. I said simply, “She missed you.”
“Did she say what she thought happened to me? Did she say where she thought the soldiers took me?” His voice was angry.
“Nobody knew where you went. She could only hope you were still alive.”
“Ha,” he said, and the anger in his voice made me realize he might blame our mother for not taking care of him, for not having protected him. It wasn’t rational, but the way he held his face, his features squeezed together now, made me think of a child trying not to cry, not a twenty-five-year-old man thinking about the past.
Then Paul began to tell me his own story, how he and his best friend survived under the Khmer Rouge. We all had such stories, each one different and the same. “If not for him, I would be dead. He was like my brother. We were the only family we had.” He spoke in his beautiful Khmer, the grammar perfect, like our mother’s, like our father’s. I couldn’t follow everything he said at first, I wasn’t used to the vocabulary, but then as I listened, I found I understood more and more, the language sliding into a corner in my brain that I hadn’t known existed.
When he was eleven, the soldiers took my brother from the rest of the family and sent him to a camp for young men. Some of the boys were trained as soldiers, the so-called Old People, the ones who’d grown up in the countryside their whole lives and were considered the most “pure.” They were uninfluenced by the city’s foreign elements, uneducated, and unable to contradict the Khmer Rouge’s new version of Cambodian history. As one of the former City Boys, my brother was one of the New People. He was among those forced to work the hardest, digging drainage ditches for a road the soldiers wanted to build.
Later, the City Boys were sent into the mountains to help build a road. He had to hack through the jungle, clearing brush and vines and earth away in metal buckets on a pole slung over his shoulders. Many of the City Boys grew sick in the jungle, coughing in the cold night air, shivering from fevers, doubling over from the crippling diarrhea. Then, one by one, they died. Sometimes they were criticized for small errors—falling, tripping, dropping a bucket. Often they were beaten by the soldiers for no reason at all. One day several of the Country Boys accused a City Boy of something. It wasn’t clear what he’d done wrong. They said he’d complained about the hard work. They said he was only pretending to be injured. But who would dare to complain? Who would dare to malinger? The City Boy and his entire group of friends were led away into the jungle, and my brother never saw them again. He knew from his previous work camp that boys who were led off were generally killed, their bodies left to rot in the sun and feed the large black birds that circled in the sky, thick as the smoke of a funeral pyre.
At night my brother huddled together with his bes
t friend, Arun. They didn’t dare talk about the past anymore, their lives as classmates in Phnom Penh. They’d long ago decided on their story. They were war orphans, American bombs had fallen on their villages, their relatives had taken them to the capital’s shanty towns to escape, and they’d lived as beggars. They could describe the slums from their experience crocodile hunting. If anyone asked about their accents, they’d shrug. They’d had to learn to speak like City Boys or they couldn’t beg for work, for food, for money.
In the first camp, they were lucky. Some of the Country Boys liked to hear them talk about life in the city. What did the buildings look like? What kind of food did the city people eat? Did you ever see the King’s palace? Did you see the dancing girls? Were they pretty? How pretty? Some of the Country Boys sat rapt and wide-eyed, listening to the tales of a life they’d only dreamed about before the Khmer Rouge took over. But Paul and Arun had to be careful so that the chhlops didn’t hear them. Those children trained as spies would have turned them all in to the older men, who’d have killed them for talking about the pre-revolutionary past.
Arun was a good storyteller. He could remember the plot of every movie he’d ever seen. The other boys particularly liked the story of the snake spirit who pretended to be a beautiful woman so that she could marry an unsuspecting farmer. One night the husband followed his wife to a forest lake where she liked to bathe in privacy. He watched from behind a large boulder as she took off her clothes and stepped into the clear water, the moonlight shining like silver against her skin. Mesmerized by her beauty, he had climbed onto the rock so that he could watch her swim, when, in the bright silver light of the moon, he saw her reflection on the surface of the water, shiny as a mirror. He saw the face of a medusa, her hair coiling with snakes. He ran home terrified, unsure what the vision had meant. Nine months later when their first child was born, the little girl emerged with tiny snakes for hair. Horrified, he accused his wife of being a demon, and she slithered away to a cave, never to be seen again.
He remembered the plots of Hong Kong movies with flying Chinese swordsmen spinning through the air as they fought with villains, rescuing entire villages from masked bandits, demons who shot fire out of their hands, and wicked officials who stole from the poor. He could recount the complicated plots of Indian movies with bandits, star-crossed lovers, motorcycles, car chases, dance interludes, and beautiful, red-lipped women who sang in the sweet, high voices of little girls.
Sometimes the village boys would trade a little of their rice rations to hear another movie recounted from beginning to end.
But in the next camp, the work was harder, death felt closer, and the rice was less than a tight fistful for the entire work crew of boys. They filled their stomachs with the dirty water that was served instead of soup. They kept stones in their mouths all day, sucking on them, rolling them against their dry tongues, trying to keep the dreadful feeling of hunger at bay. To show weakness was to ask for death. Dying might not have been so bad, but the soldiers had taken to cutting out the organs of the men and boys they killed, boiling them as soup, drinking the gall of human bladders, sharing the livers of the dying as meat.
At night, he and Arun had smelled the scent of burning flesh on the wind.
“If they come for us,” Arun had whispered in the night, while they lay on the hard ground, the sounds of the jungle’s beasts carried on the wind, the sound of the others boys’ breathing filling the night around them, “if they try to take us away, I’ll kill you first.”
My brother had been grateful. “If they come for us, we’ll run fast, so they’ll have to shoot us,” he said.
The thought of dying together quickly was a consolation. It was enough to sustain my brother. It helped him to endure, to keep living, knowing that he had such a loyal friend in the whole dark world. Better than a brother.
Their chance for escape came when the Vietnamese army invaded in December of 1979. They woke one morning to the sound of men shouting and an engine turning over, roaring to life. The soldiers were fleeing the camp. They’d received word from Angkar, and they were firing up the trucks and heading inland, trying to escape before the Vietnamese arrived.
All the boys ran along the road, unsure of what was happening and where they should go.
When the army actually arrived, they killed everyone in their path. Arun and my brother hid under the bodies they found alongside the road until the soldiers passed. Then they fled into the jungle at night, eating leaves to survive.
Entire villages were evacuating from the border. Sometimes they ran into groups of Khmer Rouge, but the soldiers were afraid to waste their bullets. The soldiers stole the lizard my brother was saving to eat later, the dead bat he’d found, the leaves Arun had picked. Finally they took the sandals off their feet, and then the soldiers went on. Sometimes Arun and my brother ran into families or just bands of lost children, wide-eyed and terrified, trying to find their way back to their parents’ villages. If the children carried food, Arun and my brother asked for some. Once they simply took it from the children and ran.
Everyone was so hungry. It didn’t seem like stealing. It didn’t seem like a bad thing to do. It was food. But then, afterward, their stomachs hurt, they had cramping diarrhea. It seemed a funny time for Heaven to be showing any opinion about the business of man, but they didn’t steal from children again after that.
Together they returned to the jungle, hiding during the day, and walking only at night, when it would be harder for people to see them. My brother no longer trusted people, no matter if they were soldiers or villagers; humans were dangerous, he decided. He’d take his chances with the animals and the minefields. They followed along the edges of a Khmer Rouge-built road, stepping on bodies when they saw them because they knew then that the mines would have already gone off. They hid in the brush, they hid under the bodies, they hid whenever they thought they heard people. Eventually they came upon a large group of men who were wearing civilian clothes but who still moved like soldiers, walking toward the Thai border. My brother didn’t trust them, but he followed them at a distance, tracking them like animals. In this manner he was able to make it to a refugee camp in Thailand with Arun.
We’re safe, my brother thought. We’ve made it.
But in the camp, he quickly learned they’d landed in a new kind of trouble. They were two boys without family, without protectors. The Red Cross doctors were able to save Arun from the infections that ravaged his body, but they could not heal the wounds he’d already suffered, the ones that no one could see. For several months Arun lost his sight, although the doctors said there was nothing wrong with his eyes. He felt mysterious pains and heard the voices of the dead in the wind. When his sight returned, the doctors accused him of having lied. Other survivors thought he was possessed by demons.
The camp directors tried to find a family that would take them in, but nobody wanted a sick boy. It was bad enough to have to take in a stranger’s son, and they had enough burdens with their own children. If they took in a teenager, they wanted one who could work for them.
My brother sized up the families very quickly. Ones with many small children were the most vulnerable. He learned to ingratiate himself with the mothers, he learned to make himself useful. He protected them from the gangs of thieves that roved through the camp, from the crazies who had lost their minds in the war and now fought against phantoms with improvised weapons, from the bullies with small privileges doling out soup in the kitchens or helping the doctors in the makeshift hospitals. But still no family would take them in.
Then finally he figured out how to bargain with the fathers. My father was a rich man, he said. He’ll give you a big reward if you help me. My father was a member of Sihanouk’s government, he had many foreign ties, he left the country before the Khmer Rouge took over and doesn’t know what happened to me. When I find him again, he’ll reward anyone who’s helped me.
To prove he wasn’t lying, he told them stories about his life in the capital as
a boy. He described the meals he ate, the servants he ordered about, the movies he’d seen, the toys he’d played with.
At last a family was willing to take them in.
After they were sponsored to come to America, my brother had to change his name, of course, so that all the papers matched. He and Arun became this family’s paper sons, and my brother’s real identity was lost. It was just another story he remembered, and no longer a person that Uncle could track through the Red Cross.
After he arrived in America, the family moved in with cousins in L.A., but they grew angry when my brother couldn’t find his rich father. They made him work instead of going to school. Then he joined a gang to make some money, promised Arun he’d be back, but then he got caught and spent some time in juvenile detention, where he got his GED. When he got out again, he went to look for Arun. The family told him Arun had moved away.
My brother tried living on his own, here and there, trying to find work. But it wasn’t easy. He had a record, he didn’t have an education, he had gang tats. These were hard years. He started selling drugs again, then he saw the article in the paper. My brother glanced at the picture, then he stared. He almost couldn’t believe it, just when he’d completely given up, there was his long-lost father, smiling in black and white from the front page.
His rich father, alive and well in America, in a town just down the 10.
It was a dream come true. Better than winning the lottery. It was like the happy ending of the sentimental movies Arun used to watch in Phnom Penh.
That very day, he packed up his belongings in his car and drove on the 10, leaving the city behind, and traveled all the way to Santa Bonita, a podunk little town he’d never heard of in the Inland Empire, to find the father he’d last seen when we was nine years old.
There was something missing from Paul’s story. I couldn’t put my finger on it, I couldn’t say what exactly was wrong. But he was lying about something, hiding something important and big, so glaring I could feel it like a bruise pulsing just beneath my skin. But all I said was, “That’s some story.”