by Gail Sheehy
In the after swoon, he said he couldn’t stay over. My bed, the way it stuck out in the middle of the room—he knew would make it impossible for him to get a decent night’s sleep. I said I would have a hard time sleeping, too, with his coming and going whenever the mood struck him.
“I thought you were glad to see me,” he said.
“I was, I mean, oh, God, Clay”—spilling it now, not having meant to—“they’re going to keep me from getting her out.”
“Who?”
“The State Department, the immigration people, I don’t know who exactly. Our former ambassador to Cambodia told me the Reagan administration is going to punish me for my Washington Post op-ed about the refugees American bombs created and now want to forget. They won’t let me bring her out.”
“Bring who out?”
“You know. Srey Mom.”
“Agghh, God, Gail.” He was up and pulling on his pants with that air men get when something is revealed as out of their control. “You can’t expose a traumatized child from a primitive background to the lack of acceptance she’d find in New York.”
“Compared to a childhood spent in a refugee camp?”
“You have no idea what traumas she’s been through. Why would you take such a chance?”
“Because I want another chance to be the right kind of mother.”
I remember Clay stuttering with concern. “Gail, this, I mean, it’s noble, but it’s not a good idea.” He couldn’t find his sock. Our dog Ms. had a thing for smelly socks. I put on Clay’s shirt and walked barefoot out onto the terrace. The night had deepened into silky last-of-the-summer black with a veil of clouds, a night when love should not be uninterrupted.
“What’re you doing out there?”
“Planting tulip bulbs.” Oh, I was on a tear now.
“I just want to say good night.”
I looked up the terrace steps at him: maybe he was not, after all, the man of my life. “Who was it who got me started thinking about adopting a Cambodian orphan?”
“The reason that I—”
“Push-pull, push-pull, there’s a real fear for you in getting close, Clay.”
“You’re wrong about that. I can’t reason with you.” Suddenly he was talking about premenopausal panic.
“Of course. I’m just a woman!”
“It shows how desperate you are, to consider taking in a teenage child from another culture.”
“Desperate? Because I fell in love? With a child? She’s only twelve.”
“Everyone knows that women get irrational when they’re afraid of losing their looks.”
“I don’t need middle age to be irrational.”
“Not that you, I mean you’re prettier than ever—”
“It’s not about looks—it’s about the family you would never agree to have!”
“Don’t attack me!”
He ran for the door. We had exhausted our tolerance for open warfare. I had to rip off his shirt and hand it to him.
He said at the door: “It’s really very simple.”
“What?”
“The reason we haven’t gotten married. You know.”
“I don’t know.”
“I need you to pay more attention to me.”
It hit me. Hard. Thinking about Clay took up more of my time than sleep.
“So you want to be the child!”
These last accusations were too true to be forgiven. We had unmasked each other’s fears. Standing there in nothing but my panties, arms folded angrily over my chest, I finally replied. “Clay, you once told me that if I make a major decision on my own, I do it fine.”
He grunted assent.
“I’m going to make this decision on my own.” I saw his startled look. “I think we ought to take a vacation from each other,” I said.
“Fine. Good.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I.”
EXACTLY NINE MONTHS AFTER I had met Srey Mom in the camp, I walked across the street after a dinner at the typewriter and sat beside the rowing lake in Central Park. I gazed at the lovers enjoying their postprandial idylls and felt my aloneness. Back in the apartment, a quick check of messages on my answering machine turned up an unfamiliar voice.
What? Who? When? WHEN? I listened again. Yes, I must have heard the astonishing message correctly: Srey Mom arriving tomorrow night, September 30, Northwest Airlines, flight 8, JFK, 8:30 P.M.
Just like that, a new life began.
CHAPTER 28
Discovering Mohm
“EXPECT LICE.”
“Assume she’s been raped repeatedly.”
“They’re very manipulative, refugees are, maybe even violent.”
These were warnings from resettlement workers. I knew nothing. Who was this child who had lost her name, her family, her country?
Maura was thrilled, yet concerned for the child. Were we really doing her a favor with such a drastic dislocation? I wondered myself.
My mother was wonderful. She had demonstrated that the best way to defeat the numbing ambivalence of middle age is to surprise oneself. “Don’t let anyone talk you out of it,” she said over the phone from Florida. “Listen to your heart.” At forty, my mother seemed old. At fifty, divorced by my father for a much younger woman, my mother had bounced back, begun a new business, dropped three dress sizes, and within a few years had been courted by and married to the love of her life. More than once she had pulled me out of anomie by chirping, “If I could start a new life at fifty-three, why you, honey, with what you have to offer [etc., etc.]—and besides, you’re still young!”
I had a strong intuition that this child was meant to move on, that she had the will to endure another transmigration, that the adventure would be right for both of us. Margie de Monchy, the former director of the Children’s Center in Sakeo, called to reassure me. No matter how traumatic the transition, she said, resettlement was the only alternative left.
What were the essentials? Nightgown, toothbrush, a Khmer-English dictionary, a globe—and something to give her self-respect. I dashed to Asia House to buy a poster of Angkor Wat. She must know that we respected her culture. As the hours before her arrival raced by, my preparations grew more feverish. But underneath I was singing.
Peter Pond, the humanitarian hustler who had been helping me, arranged for General Chana, Thailand’s former ambassador to Cambodia, to ride with me to the airport and interpret. My sister, Trish, wanted to come. Fearing Clay might bring negative vibes, I did not invite him. Best to keep it simple. We set off for JFK in my green VW Beetle.
Halfway around the earth, a small orphaned survivor who had already run from the Vietnamese through forests, eating fruit dropped by monkeys that she knew was not poison, who had walked across the border of the damned, stepping over corpses into Thailand to reach a United Nations truck before she collapsed from malnutrition, this survivor had taken another risk. She had given away her sarongs, found homes for her bird and her cat, said good-bye to Darvy, her camp housemother, and stepped off the edge of a world she had been taught was flat, all for a crazy hope called “future.”
How did she get out? The pipeline to America was opened for only twenty-four hours. I learned that Margie de Monchy and other American volunteers with IRC had shrewdly seized the last day before the fiscal year ended—a day when the ceiling for refugees expired and before Congress could vote to close it again—and hustled Srey Mom and fourteen other unaccompanied minors onto a plane bound from Bangkok to the United States. Officials gave her no name, no address, no fix in the galaxy to set her internal compass for, nothing but a mimeographed map of America with a yellow highlighting over the magic words New York.
After waiting for nearly an hour, at 9:42 P.M. a slip of a girl with enormous eyes and a LOVE T-shirt emerged from the jetway. We held each other’s gaze as we moved through the crowds of passengers and family members. I embraced her. She was tiny but well formed. Her hungry eyes, looking up at me, were filled with light and hope, a chi
ld’s eyes in a face no longer a child’s.
I heard my sister, Trish, say, “She’s beautiful, Gail.”
General Chana had taught me a few phrases. “Chum riap sua.” Hello. I introduced my bong srei—sister. Was she cold? Yes. I had brought one of Maura’s sweaters for her. Then I tried the phrase that means, in Khmer, I love you. “Knhom sralanh nea.”
Her face whirled up at me, astonished. Such an intimacy from a near-total stranger must have seemed odd, but then she seemed to relax.
“I think you said the right thing,” whispered General Chana. He asked Srey Mom how she felt.
“Sok sabai,” she said, an expression that sounds exactly like what it means: “calm, content, well in spirit.” She slipped her arm around my waist and we began to walk briskly into the bedlam of Kennedy Airport. Her long legs fell into synchrony with mine. A good sign. We were in step from the start.
The drive into New York was nightmarish. Cars and cabs coming at us with blinding lights, sirens screaming, skyscrapers looming up taller than mountains and looking, from where she lay in my sister’s lap on the backseat, as if they would fall over on her from both sides. She was carsick.
At home, I showed her the terrace. She seemed to like seeing all the trees across the street. I picked a flower for her. She picked one for me, copying my movements precisely. I showed her the room that would be hers, all to herself. She looked dismayed. A room alone, a bed alone, so different from Sakeo where the children slept together on straw mats, all in a row.
She gravitated to the photograph of Maura. Bong srei, sister, I told her. She smiled. We turned on the light inside the new globe and I traced her flight path from Bangkok to Tokyo to Seattle and across the United States. A frown rippled across her forehead. Then, recognition. She ventured her first English words, “New . . . New Yawk!”
She wanted to know about the two little animals who kept sniffing at her sandals, my Lhasa apsos. We looked up the word dog in the dictionary. Chkai. My sister gave her a pretty nightgown. She pulled it over her fully clothed body. I motioned for her to take off her jeans. She dipped her head modestly. We had to leave the room.
Maura telephoned from college. “Snuggle with her.” One thing I knew for certain: demonstrations of physical affection were severely inhibited in her culture. The head, the part of the body closest to God, must not be touched. We took off the bedcovers together and I tucked her in. One of the dogs jumped up and worked his rump into the indent of her waist. Would she like the chkai to sleep with her? I indicated. Her expression read as if I’d suggested she sleep in a tree. Dogs in Cambodia were seldom domesticated. Fully aware that I was taking a chance but unable to hold back, I brushed her cheek with my lips.
“Good night, angel.”
I said good-bye to my sister and sat down with a glass of wine to look through the plastic bag that represented the sum total of Srey Mom’s worldly possessions. A tin spoon, the torn half of a file card stamped by the U.S. Immigration Service, three pictures—Margie, Darvy, and the Buddha—and a tiny red plastic pocketbook. Inside, worn and folded in a cloth, was the first letter I had sent to her. I wept. What if I had been away on a trip when the call came? Call it luck, I chose to think of it as destiny. Srey Mom was one of the first Cambodian refugees to be settled in New York State. Together with Catholic Guardian Society, we could establish a precedent and help to foster others.
ON HER FIRST DAY, I wanted to keep the frenzy of the city at bay. It was mild for the beginning of October and I took her rowing on Central Park Lake. It was the best activity I could think of to connect to her old life . . . nature, water, trees, peacefulness. Rowing did not require words. She quickly mastered the stroke and we pulled the oars in unison, just as we had fallen in step walking through the airport. As our boat glided under the wishing bridge, we lay back and gazed up at the trees bending to the water. Light filtered through the stone cutouts of the bridge and played over her face. She sighed aloud.
For a picnic, I bought her what I thought would be her first American treat. A hot dog. Chkai, I said. She accepted it, took a bite, then held the specimen away from her body the way a child does a dead snake. I went to find her an ice cream cone. When I came back, I found her burying the hot dog. She thought I wanted her to sleep with a dog and then eat a dog.
Early mornings she would climb into my bed and we would play word games. She had come without a word of English. Strict linguists stated there was a cutoff age at about twelve—her age—after which learners lose the ability to fully acquire a second language. But this child’s appetite for learning was insatiable. She began sticking labels all over the apartment, sounding out the English words—light, wall, floor, door—as she wrote their Khmer equivalent above. Language gives voice to one’s uniqueness. If I did nothing else, I had to give this child a voice. Every night, after I half closed her bedroom door, I would hear her reciting words she had memorized—bus, car, subway, street, apartment—words that reflected her fate in dropping out of the sky into the fast lane of a sophisticated Western metropolis.
When she called me “Mom,” and I called her the same thing, we fell to laughing. I got a towel and we had a tug of war, then a pillow fight—who was going to be the mom around here? I had an idea. I found a box of letters and moved them around, putting an “h” inside the “Mom.” Her name could be Mohm, pronounced like “Ohm.” She liked it.
Maura let Clay know that the child had arrived. He called, hurt that he had been left out of the welcome, and asked, “How is she?”
“She’s magic.”
“I’m terribly excited to meet her.” His tone was honest and sweet.
“I should have invited you to come to the airport. I didn’t want to take the chance of marring that precious moment. But I’d love for you to meet her now.”
Week three. We made the rounds of private schools. On the Upper East Side the reception was mostly chilly. One principal looked down his long Anglo-Saxon nose at the Asian child and shook his head. “We would, of course, have to suspend traditional educational goals in her case.” All the school could provide, he said, was a rich social setting in which she could learn what it is to be an American teenager.
After being rejected by many schools, we were fortunate to find Friends Seminary, a gentle Quaker school on a tree-lined street downtown. All at once Mohm flew from my side and down the hall after two girls with black hair and amber skin, shrieking, “Same me!”
They were indeed two Cambodians. Friends had learned that the new refugees were languishing in a public school and reached out to offer them a place in the seminary, part of the mission of the American Friends Service Committee. The headmistress told me that the school was committed to instilling the concept of service in young people. Mohm was warmly accepted.
SEARCHING FOR POCKETS OF CAMBODIAN CULTURE, I found the principal teacher of the royal Cambodian dancers of Prince Sihanouk’s palace, most of whom had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. Madame Kamel was alive and well in Brooklyn. She assessed Mohm, found that she was double-jointed and exceptionally graceful, and agreed to give her a tryout. On my return, I found Mohm squeezed into a string of children on a sofa, happily swaying together to Cambodian music. She looked totally grounded.
“Mohm can be a fine classical dancer,” said the teacher. “But we must ask, is she serious?” Mohm nodded enthusiastically. I was elated. But pulling her out of a familiar cultural setting and plunging her back into the aridity of a Manhattan apartment with just the two of us, I watched a visceral change take place. Like a delicate shrub pulled up before its frail roots can support transplanting, she shrank into herself.
Drifting out onto the terrace, Mohm began walking in circles. She leaned over the railing and stared down eight stories to the street, turning her face away, trying to hide the last futile contortions before it turned into scowls of fear, anguish, or was it fury? I could not look at the wild discord in her face. She could not succumb to tears. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders. Her body f
elt like broken bird bones.
She put one foot up on the railing. I shuddered. Here in her glass-enclosed high-rise, she must have felt a prisoner, separated from her culture, lost, with me as her jailer. It began to grow dark and cold. “Will you come inside, sweetheart?” I tried.
“No.”
The last sun drained from the clouds. I heard the doorbell. Mohm couldn’t be left alone. A voice was calling; I couldn’t make it out, then, amazed, I heard the name of Mohm’s camp director. “It’s Margie! Are you all right?” I had no idea Margie de Monchy was back in the States. “The door’s open.” Mohm’s trance was broken. Margie quickly sized up the situation and joined us to talk to Mohm. They stood side by side, silent, Mohm hanging over the railing. Seven o’clock came and went. Finally, Mohm began to speak. Margie later told me what she said.
On the long plane ride from Bangkok to New York, she had watched the sun set, then rise, then set again. She thought she had landed on another planet. I don’t like to live here, all big apartments, no children. I can’t speak. My family all gone, torn away. I’m already broken. I make a beginning of new life in the camps. Maybe I have to go the rest of my life without seeing anybody I love. I’m not even myself anymore. I don’t think I want to go on.
The doorbell rang. Another incredible coincidence. This time Mohm rushed inside to peek through the peephole, on guard. Seeing a man, she opened the door and instinctually butted her head into Clay’s belly. He laughed. I let her know that this man was my friend, come to welcome her. She bowed her head in respect.
Clay had brought a big picture book about ancient Cambodia. He read his inscription to her in his deep voice, so unlike high-pitched Asian voices. It seemed to intrigue her. “Welcome to your new home. Here are some beautiful scenes from your other country. Now you have two home countries, the U.S.A. and Cambodia. I hope you will love it here.”
Margie motioned for her to sit on the sofa between Clay and me and turn the pages. Seeing monuments of ancient Cambodia transported her to the deepest layers of memory and fantasy. She devoured the book page by page, narrating the zenith and decline of her culture. She pored over the visions of hell carved into the sandstone temples of Angkor Wat—people being yanked up by the hair, bludgeoned with shovels, led away in chains—images that could have been taken from news footage of Pol Pot’s reign of terror. She drew a finger across her throat, letting us know that she had seen people’s heads lopped off like fruit. “No go, slap . . .”