From who? he said. Boyfriend in America? Despite the dark of his skin, I could see the veins wrapped around his limbs, bulging like the rough bark of the wood he was chopping; dirt lined his sweaty arms, crosshatched in threads beneath his throat, embedded into the callused knuckles of his hands. Dark and dirty as though just come from the soil.
Family in America, I corrected him. I held out five kip, my way of being polite, certain he would not accept, otherwise I would not have risked giving away fifteen percent of my money. Hnuhlee was standing in the doorway of our hut, where I had told her to wait.
Mr. Cha invited me into the courtyard and offered me a stump by the door. When he returned with his cassette player-recorder, he asked if I had used one before. I nodded. Don’t press the red button or you’ll record over your cassette. But let me—he snatched the cassette from my hand. The sharp snapping sounds froze my heart, flooding me with anger and fear. Had he ruined my cassette? Was he trying to silence the voices of my family? I may have even yelped like a dog. Women, he said, shaking his head. Using his little-finger nail, he had broken off the corner tabs. That snapping noise, it was like he broke a little part of me, he a stranger I had trusted enough to ask something of. He started again his wood chopping, and I looked over my cassette, then yelled for Hnuhlee to come over, and we listened to past voices and words, fixing them to memory.
* * *
—
A long feather-filled coat was one of the first things my family sent me. They say, Here in America we need this coat to give us warmth. It can be squeezed into the size of a melon, but when you let go, again it puffs big. When first I put it on, it reminded me of the last time my family held me in their arms. The coat is in my closet now. Hnuhlee asks why, always, do I put it on when it never gets cold here. But my daughter does not know when I feel my family’s embrace I see their faces—my brothers’ and sisters’; Mother’s and Father’s, too; always, the face of my husband. And when I do his face is blurred by my tears, and I feel his body, remember the tone of his words, and I know I have returned to familiar arms, familiar sounds.
When my family sends me packages from across the ocean, also they include a cassette to tell about life on that other side. Usually, Mother would begin by telling me the month, day, and year—eighth month, eleventh day, 1984—then she would tell me how everybody is doing. Father never speaks on these cassettes, and only when I spend the money to phone my parents, if lucky and he picks up, do I hear his voice, which, quick, tells me to call back or fades as it yells searching for Mother. For me to stay behind, I know it must mean for him he failed, and failure is best left unheard. The next speakers would be my three sisters, starting with the oldest and ending with the youngest. They would tell me what is happening with their own families and about my parents, which I take to be more true than what Mother had told me, but on this tape from 1984, everyone agrees America has been good to them, so far. Then, in whatever order the cassette was passed on to them, my sisters-in-law would come on; my three brothers, speaking after their wives, would try to change my mind on America. It is my daughter I need to think about! They yell their words like Father used to do. I yell only to teach was his explanation. If I am not yelling, I don’t love you. From them, nothing was said about the reason I stayed behind.
On the other side of the cassette were the voices of my in-laws. Sometimes, in a word used by my father-in-law, the way he spoke it, I would hear my husband, and my heart would quicken to tear up my eyes, and I would grow afraid with envy that, already, he was there, in a better place, that he had not waited for me. When this happens, always I find myself on the verge of cursing him, to knock him down, yank him back to this lower place where, for him, I waited with life to see his face again.
Every woman who speaks on the cassette weeps because, whenever they speak to me, they are reminded of the time in the Thai refugee camp, and my return to our old life in Laos. They remember how the general told us the Americans were pulling out after coming, staging a war, then losing it, and how he warned everyone to leave before the communists, in their turn, came. The country was never taken nicely, always violently, with guns at your head and bombs from the sky, with voices commanding Stopstopstop, don’t run! Only after you were shot dead, or were looking at your legs ten feet from your body, or worse, were ravaged and the bleeding after the pullout was never complete, to save you by taking you from this life. Always it left enough so you would live, the memory a gun to your head, its presence always a heat behind you, a voice saying, Go on, hurry! Go on and be quiet! My family, when they record their words, is reminded of this land that no longer has a place for them to live, not in flesh or name, not even in spirit, reminded only of the reddened soil. But always, they wish me well despite their yells, and each tells me how much money, if any, they had sent. Maybe they believe the person who sent the most loves me the most, but I know they are telling me only so I will remember who to repay when I see them again.
Last on the cassette would be Grandma Joua. Often, her words are funny, full of truths and hidden feelings about everyone, which make me wonder if, before sending, anyone listened to the cassette. Or, if so great was everyone’s respect for her, they allowed her words to remain as spoken, afraid to curse themselves or her by erasing any part of her. When Grandma Joua started speaking, Mr. Cha wiped his brow with a forearm covered in wood chips and dust, and turned his ears toward the cassette player. Grandma Joua sounds like she is in front of me and speaking only to me, so Mr. Cha, stopping to listen, made me feel I was giving up a secret. Grandma Joua says she is healthy but lonely in this tape from 1984.
All of them there and they allow her to get lonely? Mr. Cha said.
Everyone’s lonely for the old country, I said. How we used to be, where the ones you miss could be run to.
Grandma Joua ends her message with a plea for me to come to America because she believes, soon, she might die. You are the only one I helped into this world that’s still there, she says. Everyone else is a phone call away, but you, I have to record this old, sad voice and wait for a reply. It’s like drawing upon a secret well of memory that I happen upon only by chance, never having learned the way to get there. I go as an orphan child, naive and ignorant, no one to lead me, but hopeful the spirits will look after me. I know why you’ve stayed behind, but if my words could pull you here, carry you across oceans, let them.
After the cassette ended, I asked Mr. Cha if he knew Grandma Joua.
Everyone knows Grandma Joua, he said.
Do I know Grandma Joua? Hnuhlee said, leaning back and forth in between my legs, playing with the cassette case. Mr. Cha smiled as I shushed my daughter, whispering in her ear it was not yet her turn to speak. The smell of her hair reminded me we both needed to wash.
This is my luck to be a war widow with a daughter, I said.
I have worse luck, said Mr. Cha. I am a man with two sons. He would have to find the money for his sons to marry, because sons were expected to take care of their parents in old age. That was their hold on a parent—best you try to give your sons everything and then hope. Hope they do not kick you out of their house. Hope they let you eat the moistest parts of meals. Hope they marry a kind wife. Hope they will clean you when no longer you can. There, hope is, always in a time to come, a rainbow you can see with your eyes, yet never, in your time, find realized, reacting to your every move, eluding your advances, only to vanish in sight, phantom in its makeup. Because one second into the future—right now—a bomb could fall on us and we would be dead. Our houses smashed and burning. And that would be reality and no longer hope. Hope is not Mr. Cha’s wife dying eight years earlier from what the Laotian doctor said was poison in the blood. Before her death, Mr. Cha said, the family lived okay, had a little meat to go with their vegetables at mealtimes. But now, they ate only rice mixed with cornmeal. Sometimes with fish paste or sugar.
It was true, Mr. Cha’s duties to his sons,
but I checked my feeling sorry for him. I had not much for myself and my daughter to be able to give away anything, even pity. I was born with my bad luck, I said. I told him when I was born that dark early morning in the fifth month of 1962 I was not breathing. Grandma Joua was the village medicine woman and had delivered many babies before. I came out blue, she said, the color of death. She kept it a secret from my mother, who, after she expelled me from her body, had rested her head on the rag pillow. All blue babies that had fallen into Grandma Joua’s catch already were dead, but she could feel my heart. She wiped my face with the hem of her sarong, then covered my mouth and nose with her own mouth, and sucked strong and deep. After three or four mouthfuls, she breathed into my body, unfolded my life, and finally, I cried. I did not tell Mr. Cha the part where, now as a mother and knowing how it looks when a baby is born, I once asked Grandma Joua if she was disgusted with me. She said she had no time to think. It was something any mother would do for her child. This is something a man does not need to know. Because my mother almost gave birth to death, Grandma Joua has kept watch over me, even though she is not my grandmother by blood. She said she needs to know when, again, she will need to breathe life into me.
See, I wanted to add, almost I was not born alive. I do not know now whether I was seeking pity or sympathy then from Mr. Cha, or if war has a way of muddling them and they become one metal, a feeling forged in war fires, hard to separate; only, I know nothing did I want to feel for him. Again, I offered Mr. Cha the five kip, but he shook his head. What do you do if you don’t need my money? I said.
He told me he cleared the forest and burned the stumps out of the ground. Soon, they would start planting more rubber trees, and after that, he guessed, many of the workers would be let go. When we are done, he said, the forest will look different. The trees will be in a straight line, with paths between to drive a truck through. Him already worrying about being let go, I did not ask him if he might help me get a job with the farm. Instead, we talked about his sons, who were thirteen and twelve. They were at the age when they could help bring in money, and by saving a little, when they were about twenty, they might have enough for a wife. But to pull them out of school was hard for Mr. Cha to do. I thought to tell him, if he pulled the boys, he could save the school fees to pay for their wives, but, in time, decisions like these make out themselves.
You are a woman, he said. You have better luck than me already. A man is good for four things in this world. Hunting, lifting heavy things, fathering babies, and fighting wars, I was good at all of those. But now, I do only heavy lifting. What is a man in this broken country?
Why didn’t you go to America? I said. Why stay here?
I tell you a story, he said, and, like Father when he began his stories that way, I was afraid he would speak to me in man language so I would not catch the meaning. One time while hunting, I walked into a tiger. I was watching my steps when, suddenly, everything went quiet. I looked up. Its face was there, among the shadows of the jungle—shadow and sunlight, that’s the face color of a tiger. You know what I did? I flipped my hair like this—he flipped his long hair over to cover his face—to look like a spirit. And the tiger disappeared. Didn’t even hear it run away. His eyes were slits of smiles, as though he found his own words hard to believe, squinting to see now, as he was reliving it, if there might be anything else true he might have forgot, all these years and miles walked from that life memory.
Did tiger disappear or you disappear? I said, wondering what to make of his story.
Perhaps the man did, he said, laughing.
The man that was you? Or perhaps the tiger never was there? Because everyone, when they talk of being brave, talks always of meeting a tiger.
Tiger is always there, he said. The sky was falling away orange by this time, and the fading light dusted the trees a rusty color and our houses a cheap gold. Mr. Cha leaned against the peach tree, which made a second back for a tired body. I hear in America, you get meat to eat, and everybody says you don’t have to work, and the government won’t let you starve. You put your feet up like a king. But if everyone is a king, there is no king. Isn’t that same as the communists? If so, why were we fighting them? Why go to America when I can put my feet up where my father and grandfather are buried?
Here, you’ll starve.
Here, at least, I’ll need to work not to starve. That’s something, no? To know this life is separated from death by a day’s labor. That gets you up in the morning. My father used to say, Labor is ambition at work. The ambition of a biting sickle is to have firewood, to build a house, to clear a forest for farming. If not for work, aren’t we all just kings?
That is why you stayed? Because you don’t want to put your feet up?
My toes will be up eventually, he said, sure of himself. He straightened his body from the tree, the sickle hanging from a hand. His front side, which faced the setting sun, caught a fiery glow. But his back side, I could see, was growing a long tail of shadow, as though something was draining out of him and pooling away, distance distorting the shape of what once could have been the hard edges of a man.
How will you do that? I said, wondering what he planned to do to become comfortable as a king and still keep the choice of work, wondering if he would let me join him.
* * *
—
Days later, Hnuhlee at her four-room school, I walked into Vientiane. I asked merchants and storekeepers if they had any cleaning work, went to the wealthier neighborhoods to see if someone needed a housekeeper, but most wanted only single live-in help. I was willing to cook and sell food by the side of the road, stick my hands in wood ash and pig fat to make soap, dig through the trash for metal to sell. Sometimes, I waited by the Buddhist temples and saved the food the monks shared. A grandfather with a toy car for a left foot told me he knew people who recovered bombshells for the metal. Did I want to do that? You look light on your feet, he said. You just bop-bop, his hand fluttering like a broken wing, over the fields and not end up like me. A bull giving you full warning, he wheeled his left foot forward and backward in place, humming hrmmm-hrmmm from that part in his chest where war life needs a taint of humor, and following the sound—a cry, a complaint, a protest—is a laugh, and you can go on. But I was afraid to start digging up the relics of war when so many remained unburied, else they might explode in my face. Who would take care of my Hnuhlee then? One good thing to come out of my search for work was two stray dogs, Bone and Skin, following me home, by the ropes I tied around their necks and would not let go.
Bone and Skin should be glad I saved them, too. Once, on a trip back from Muong Long, Vietnam, to visit family, Father and I stopped at a creek for a drink. On the opposite bank were an old Vietnamese man and maybe fourteen or fifteen dogs tied to trees around his hut. All were yelping and barking, their tails like a water buffalo’s swatting flies. So loud, the cries, that after ten seconds, I wished for them to be silent. The old man untied a red dog, maybe thirty pounds, and stuffed it into a sack. The dog struggled against the sides like a baby pushing against the mother’s belly. The old man carried over a block of metal—what I now know to be a half of a motorcycle engine. Quick my hands moved to cover my ears, maddened by the noise, still the dogs shaking their rumps, swooshing their tails. With a grunt, the man heaved the engine, now tied to the mouth of the sack, into the creek. The splash stopped my breath, and I thought I had gone deaf but realized, as I brought my hands away from my ears, the dogs were silent. Maybe it was only ten minutes, but, for me, a lifetime of wanting to hear a dog bark passed before the old man retrieved the sack. Only then did the remaining dogs start to whimper, circling at the ends of their ropes, curling into themselves, and hiding their faces. Father did not yell at me when I asked why the old man did that. Quietly, he said, For dinner.
I first ran into my friend Houa on one of these trips looking for work, surprised she had not gone to America. It’s my husband�
�s decision, she said. Stubborn like a mountain. Afraid Americans would chop him up, steal his insides, and eat him.
This, the same man that makes war, I said. She laughed like she could not believe it either. I told her where I was staying and my bad luck in finding work. War leaves no work for the living to do, I complained.
Sooner or later, she said, we all become orchid farmers.
Is there money in that? This was the first time I heard of growing and selling orchids.
Of course, she said. Next time you look for work, go deeper in the city. That’s where they mostly are. Watch for the small signs that say, WHITE ORCHID FOR ACHE, RED SILK ORCHID, LOCUST-MANTIS ORCHID. A grin appeared on her face.
How do you start?
Maiker, she said, laughing. Don’t get too heartened. I’m speaking like a man to you—I know you could never do it. I felt naive next to my friend, who, from somewhere, seemed to have picked up the man tongue. Had she put a dare to me? She reminded me that I was my parents’ laziest daughter and had escaped working out in the fields; that no food was ever gotten on my back. Which was true. While everyone was out farming, I did housework, and looked after the children, and massaged the pains of the broken elders in the village. So, yes, I did not know how good I would do to get my hands dirty. I had no knowledge of growing anything. Mother had said once, trying to teach me, there are some plants that do not even produce seeds. A drip of water, after hitting the leaf of such a plant and landing in the soil, could grow into that plant. Just that one miracle drop of water! Or some seeds refused to grow unless they were planted right next to the mother plant; only the soil of the mother plant was good enough for the seeds. That is how stubborn and sensitive some seeds are!
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 37