by Loung Ung
When we get to the party, most of the cool kids are already there smoking cigarettes and downing beers. They hang together in their corner, occupying the space as if they own even the air around it. Circling on the outer ring of the genetically blessed are the leeches who’ll do anything to be part of the elite crowd. Like the squirmy, wriggly bloodsuckers I’ve nicknamed them after, they’ve got two mouths: one to talk sweet, and one to bad-talk you to anyone who’ll listen, just to make themselves interesting. I’m very careful around the leeches and observe with fascination their need to hook and feed on their host.
I can’t believe I still care! I fume at myself. I know I don’t belong to any group, except maybe the misfits, but what the hell—I’m leaving all of this very soon! I’m an adult now! And grown-ups don’t waste time on such trivial matters as fitting in.
When I spot Beth talking to a few people we know, I make my way to her in my grown-up clothes. As I walk, my skirt rides up my thighs and I awkwardly attempt to pull it down. When I look down at myself in the dim room, it’s as if my body’s disappeared into my black outfit and only my legs catch the light.
“Hey, Loung. You’ve got meaty legs!” Though Tim yelled that to me our freshman year, I hear it still in my head when my insecurities are in full swing. I stare across the room and see Tim lounging in the middle of the cool corner.
For the next hour, I sit and talk to some guy who’s probably as bored as I am but I’ve got no one better to talk to, so we stay together. Whenever he pauses, I search the room for signs of Chris. Finding no trace of him, I ask Beth to leave the party. Since she’s not having fun either, we leave.
I arrive home at eleven-thirty P.M.; the house is dark and everyone’s asleep.
“So much for Meng’s crazy thought of my wild life,” I think as I shuffle into my room, kick off my heels, and fall into my bed. “Oh, but tomorrow is graduation day!” I say out loud with glee. “And in two months,” I whisper, “I’ll be gone and out of the house. Then I’ll get a life.”
I blame my lack of social life on Meng’s strict rules, the endless babysitting, and memories that won’t go away. Most of all, I blame Meng for these memories, for keeping me tied to Cambodia. I know that ghosts from the Khmer Rouge are there all the time, floating around in my living spaces, eating out of my plate during dinner and sitting at my desk as I study at night. I prefer to steer out of their way and make no contact with them. But I see them in Meng. And though he and I don’t talk about their presence, the look in his eyes and the frown on his face whenever Cambodia is mentioned make it impossible for me to escape them unless I escape him.
In two months, I’ll leave them both behind. Even though I’ll only move seven miles down the road, I look forward to college as a place where I’ll be able to live a guilt-free, indulgent life and not have to worry about how things are going in Cambodia. Away from Meng, I’ll be able to splurge on an expensive meal without thinking, “That twenty dollars is Khouy’s income for a month.” On campus, I’ll be able to walk around light-footed and fancy-free, just like the other Americans.
I roll over on my stomach and pick up a letter from the nightstand. All of a sudden, the party’s awkward moments disappear as I reread the words on the page.
“Dear Ms. Ung,” the letter begins. “We are pleased to inform you that you have been awarded the Turrell Scholarship Fund.” I hug the letter to my chest.
“Thank you, Mrs. Berringer, for my ticket out of here!” I send my gratitude into the night air.
I can’t believe that just six months ago, I sat in Mrs. Berringer’s office thinking I wouldn’t go to college. While I sat, Mrs. Berringer worked out the numbers of loans I could take out and what grants I might be able to get. When I saw the price tag, my hands had trembled with fear.
“My family just doesn’t have that kind of money,” I’d said somberly.
“You can take out loans. You’ll get grants.” She urged me not to give up. But the idea of signing for a loan that large when the combined income of all of the people in Chou’s village was still only a fraction of what I’d have to borrow—well, it tightened that noose around my neck to the point where I felt like I would lose consciousness.
“I can’t breathe, just looking at the numbers!” I’d told her.
“And here’s an application for a scholarship fund I think you should apply for.”
“Mrs. Berringer, my grades aren’t good enough. No one’s going to give me a scholarship!”
“Just do it. We’ll fill out the application together.”
Five months and one interview later, I got a letter back from the Turrell Scholarship Fund informing me that the fund would pay for my full four-year college tuition, room, board, books, and health insurance.
“I’m going to college and it ain’t costing me a dime!” I laugh and pound my legs into the mattress. “Wherever you are, thank you again, Mrs. Berringer.”
As I drift off to sleep, I dream I’m flying. My arms spread to the side like wings, and my hair flows with ribbons behind me. I fly like a dragon. I look up at the sky and yearn to zip right up to the heavens, but I don’t. I fear that if I go too high and others see me, they will catch me and cut me open to find out what is wrong with me and why I can fly. So I only hover over the trees.
A few hours later, I open my eyes to the familiar clanging of Eang’s pots as she makes our breakfast. Quickly I shower, wash my hair clean, blow it dry, and then dirty it again with hair spray. When I return to my room, I find Eang’s Cambodian-patterned sarong and shirt neatly laid out on my bed. I know Meng would like me to wear a piece of Cambodia under my graduation robe. But hanging on my door is my hot pink, less form-fitting, more comfortable, Western-style dress.
I reach under my bed and pull out a shoe box marked BOX OF VERY IMPORTANT THINGS. In it, I keep my artwork, poems on death and dying, letters, and the three hundred pages I wrote two years earlier about Cambodia, our family, and the Khmer Rouge. Over the months and years, as my body adjusted to its new form and survived the traumas of puberty, the war haunted me less, and the need to write about them disappeared.
As I stare at the pages, my eyes cloud over. After I’d written it and captured my demons down on paper, I shut them in this box and focused on my American life. And two years later, the war seems so long ago that sometimes I can hardly believe that it was me who lived through it.
If the war is a distant story, the girl who wrote these pages is a stranger to me now. As I flip through them, my hands tremble slightly, remembering the guilt and tortured emotions that brought about the story. I remember how when the girl started to write, she couldn’t stop. The story was like toxic poison that demanded to be purged out of her body, forcing her to write during breakfast, in class, and at night after everyone had gone to sleep. Sometimes she was so caught up in the battles, she forgot to come down for dinner until Eang hollered for her. For six months, the girl wrote until her fingers cramped and grew calluses, and her forearm ached at night. When she was done, there was a beginning, a middle, and an end, and she believed that her story was finished. She understood then that she didn’t want to die, but that she just didn’t know how to live with the ghosts. Now that she’d captured them, she thought perhaps she might live.
On my bed, I feel the paper and remember the girl. I know that she is Cambodian and she is me. But it’s too soon for us to fully join and become one. Still, today, I will walk with her when my name is called to receive my diploma. I rise up off the bed and wrap the beautiful silk sarong around my waist. I imagine that Keav and Geak are in the room, watching me. When I slip on the shirt, I dream that Ma is there helping me. I am the first girl Ung to graduate from high school. As I put on my blue graduation robe and hat, I picture Pa standing by the doorway, smiling.
22 a motherless mother
December 1990
“You have another daughter!” the midwife tells Chou. Chou tries to prop herself up to see her daughter but her arms give way and she falls back onto the
mat. In her fog of pain, she hears the midwife splashing water on the baby.
Closing her eyes, Chou lets her body sink into the soft mattress of many layers of towels and sarongs. Below her plank bed, a small fire burns to warm her, but the smoke flows up between the wooden slats and stings her eyes. From the altar, burning incense drops white ashes on Chou’s floor, waiting for her to sweep it away. Next to the incense bowls, melted candles flicker soft light, illuminating their sparse, one-room thatched hut.
“Here she is. She’s healthy and strong like her mother.” The midwife wraps the baby in a sarong and lays her on Chou’s chest.
“Chang.” Chou caresses Chang’s cheeks. “You caused me much pain.” Chou lifts Chang’s hand and presses it against her lips. Chang does not respond and ignores her mother with her closed eyes. For a moment, Chou’s thoughts shift to Ma, her eyes well up knowing that her children will never meet their grandmother.
“Chou, drink this. It’ll help heal.” The midwife brings the concoction of herbal tea to Chou’s lips. Balancing Chang on her chest, Chou raises herself up and sips the bitter liquid. With a grimace, Chou forces herself to empty the cup before handing it back to the midwife.
“You rest while I clean you up now,” the midwife says as she assists Chou back onto her pillows. As she closes her eyes, Chou is conscious that another person has come into the hut. Moments later, the sound of water being poured into a large plastic basin reminds her of a rushing brook near their hut. The midwife rinses out the cloth and spreads the warm wet rag on Chou’s belly. Working in a circular motion, she gently wipes down her groin, pelvis, thighs, and legs. After a few more rinses, the midwife cleans Chou’s feet and toes.
“You’re all clean,” the midwife says and covers her up with a blanket. Next she helps Chou slip on a brown long-sleeved shirt. “The baby is sleeping now but she’ll want to nurse soon. So you rest while you can. I will go tell your family the good news.” The midwife drops the mosquito net around her.
“Thank you,” Chou murmurs. The midwife exits the hut carrying a large silver bowl with the afterbirth and some dirty clothes. Chou raises her head and catches a glimpse of black sky and bright shining stars before the door swings shut and leaves her in the dark again. While Chang and she rest, Chou follows the slapping sound of the midwife’s flip-flop sandals as she crosses the patch of ground to Uncle Leang’s house. There, Chou pictures her four-year-old daughter, Eng, and two-year-old son, Hok, asleep with Aunt Keang in her mosquito net.
When she wakes up, Chou finds her husband asleep in a hammock. Next to her, he has left a gift wrapped like an egg roll in a piece of old cloth and tied with a few strands of brown straw. Smiling widely, Chou unfurls it to find the most beautiful pair of shoes she’s ever seen. Her eyes widen as she brings the shoes close to her nose and admires the tightly knit lines in the straps, and soles that are just her size. The white plastic shoes with their one-inch-thick heels and crisscrossed straps shine brightly in the shimmering twilight.
“Not flip-flops or sandals made out of leftover car tires, but real shoes!” she whispers. “And not a scratch on them.” In his hammock, Pheng abruptly turns to his side, scratches his head, and continues to sleep. Chou smiles warmly at him and carefully rewraps her shoes like a pair of precious gems.
For the next two months, Chou grows thin and lean while her fat transfers from her breasts to Chang’s chubby body. Chou knows that she is becoming an ugly woman because she is too thin. In Cambodia, fat people are considered to be rich and healthy, therefore it is a compliment to be told one is fat. And though she tries to keep her body plump and round, her worries eat at her flesh like a disease. In the cities, as in the villages, fear of Khmer Rouge attacks have resurfaced and spread through the country. Pheng tells her it’s because after ten years of occupation, the Vietnamese are pulling out of Cambodia and taking their troops, numbering over 180,000, with them. Without the Vietnamese soldiers and guns backing up the Cambodian government’s army, at night the Khmer Rouge are brazenly invading villages and towns more frequently to steal food, clothes, and animals and to kidnap men and boys in a struggle to keep their movement going. When Chou hears this, she is glad Kim is no longer with them in Cambodia, but is safe in France, living with Ma’s youngest sister, Aunt Heng. Still, she misses him and prays he’ll return one day to meet his nieces and nephew.
On the day Chou began her new life as a wife four years ago, she knew Kim took it as a sign that it was time to leave his old life behind. He’d been ready before that, but with Khouy in another town with his own family, Kim would never have left Chou. Just a month after she married, Kim left the village and rode all morning on a wagon to the old capital city of Ou-dong to live with a distant relative. Kim wrote to Chou that he was shocked to find hundreds of Vietnamese soldiers there, parading the city with their guns swinging from their shoulders. At first Kim was glad for their presence, but as weeks turned into months, the soldiers’ smiles changed into scowls as news of the Khmer Rouge resurgence reached the city. To counter the Khmer Rouge incursions, the Vietnamese-controlled Cambodian government forcefully conscripted young Khmer men and boys to build a five-mile-long bamboo wall along the Cambodian-Thai border. These men worked in horrible conditions and with little food, shelter, or medicine. Those who survived returned to tell stories of their friends dying from mine explosions, starvation, malaria, hard labor, and diseases. And for all those returnees, there were many who were never heard from again. For Chou, reading Kim’s letters was like reliving the Khmer Rouge war all over again. Yet in each letter, Kim told how he had managed to evade the forced labor.
Every month, Kim had visited the village under the guise that he wanted to see the family, but Chou knew he came to check on her. In their quiet times together, Kim described how he felt like a prisoner as he spent his days hiding out from the soldiers, attending high school, and clandestinely searching for ways to leave Cambodia. At night, his headache grew as the old familiar fear and paranoia of being caught, exposed, betrayed, and kidnapped resurfaced. In his sleep, the anger against the Khmer Rouge, Vietnamese, and Cambodian government soldiers intermingled, and his headache turned into searing pain that traveled from his temples to his eyes before flaring out of his nose in deep exhalations. Each day, he woke up more determined to leave Cambodia before it was too late.
Then, six months after he left the village, Kim had disappeared. A few days later, Khouy received word that he was in a refugee camp in Thailand. Four months after that, Khouy received a message telling him that Kim was in France. Chou had been so relieved to hear that he’d found his way to where he wanted to be. Chou is happy for him, and dreams of a day when all the siblings will reunite in Cambodia. Sometimes she still fantasizes of a life living with Meng and Loung in America, but she knows it is too late for her now. And with the birth of each child, she feels her roots growing deeper in Cambodia’s soil.
On this day, Chou straps Chang to her chest and tills her land and garden to grow food for her family. In the dirt and mud, her soles slap against her old, worn-out flip-flops. After two months, her new shoes are still wrapped up inside the hut because she can’t bear to get them dirty or scratched. On the ground beside her, Eng and Hok play by themselves, their grimy fingers constantly pulling out earthworms from the upturned soil of Chou’s shovel. While Chou keeps the house and minds the children, Pheng typically does all the heavy work of collecting water, chopping wood, and farming their rice fields.
By the time Pheng arrives home in the evening, Chou already has their dinner cooked and the children bathed and ready for bed. In the twilight, Pheng eats and plays with his children while Chou serves him, feeds the small children, and devours her food quickly. Then when the sky grows dark, Chou, Pheng, and their children snuggle close to one another to keep warm under their one old mosquito net as they drift to sleep. Above their porous hut, the moon lights up the land like a giant white Chinese lantern.
One night, the family’s peaceful sleep is interrupted b
y the distant barks of their neighbor’s dogs. As if picking up the distress signals, Uncle Leang’s two dogs wake the two houses with their desperate screeches and howls.
“Quick, Pheng—the Khmer Rouge!” Uncle Leang shouts as he pounds on their door. The force of his knocks shakes the whole compound. Pheng leaps out of bed to let him in.
“How far are they?” Pheng hastily slips on his sandals and grabs an ax.
“I don’t know. Maybe very close. We must go and hide now.” Uncle Leang grabs Pheng’s arm as he turns back to look at his young family.
“Chou, go to Aunt Keang’s house and stay there until I come back,” Pheng tells her. And then he and Uncle Leang disappear into the dark woods. The noise of their bodies brushing against shrubs and bushes follows them, but then all is quiet.
In their silence, Chou stands gasping, her heart pushing at her chest. As her eyes fog over, the ringing in her ears turns her mute and deaf.
“Ma,” Eng calls out, her voice dazed and confused. “Ma? Pa …”
Immediately, Chou snaps back to life. She cinches her sarong tight around her waist and jogs to the bed. Pulling the net open, she scoops up Eng and puts her down on the ground.
“Eng, wake up and make no noise,” Chou orders her urgently. Too frightened to answer, Eng rubs her eyes and nods at her mother. Chou then grabs sleeping Chang and Hok and cradles one in each arm. “Eng, walk to Amah’s house. Walk in front of Ma. Quickly.” Slowly, Eng walks with unsteady legs as she feels her way on the bumpy ground in the dark. A few meters away, tied to a tree, Uncle Leang’s dogs bark at them, their front legs leaping into the air.
“Quickly, Eng!” At the sound of her mother’s raised voice, Eng begins to cry and her legs stop moving. Chou runs to Eng and picks her up off the ground. With her back bent by the weight of three children, her barefoot wide feet spread out like webs, she marches to Aunt Keang’s house.