How would you know? I said.
Maiker, he said, looking down at his hands, again shaking his head. A dead wife is more demanding than a living one. He searched my face to see if I agreed with him. Now you can’t even raise your hand to them. It’s like, you raise it and it’s frozen there, never coming down, never satisfying you for just that moment when it strikes her face. Every time a man raises his hand to his wife now, he is reminded of his own weakness. Every time he has to bring that hand down, it’s with such shame to know he’s powerless. Sometimes, you have to pretend you were only scratching your head so the bitch doesn’t see you are incapable of it.
You want me to take back the fish? I reached for the bag I had placed on the small table in his house.
My sons wouldn’t want that, he said.
Right, I said. Your sons wouldn’t want that.
It was only morning, but he yawned, thinking about the long day ahead, groaned as he stretched like a man being pulled apart by horses, then scratched the top of his head before combing his hair with his fingers and tucking it behind his ears. I asked if I could use his cassette player-recorder, and he pointed to the pillar where it hung on a nail.
Does that work? he said at my back as I went to grab it. His question confused me. How much can you get from them?
I never ask for money, I said.
So that is how you do it. He nodded as though he had just come upon something that, all these years, had escaped him. Maybe it works because you are a woman—your sweet woman voice.
Mostly, the money, it is from my in-laws, I said. I think it is because of guilt.
A woman is a good cause for guilt, he said. Haven’t I said that?
I’m no one’s guilt, I said. Their missing son is their guilt.
I listened to the words on the cassette from two months earlier one final time. On the tape, Grandma Joua speaks of her son. He brought her so much shame in America, how he had run off with a girl. Mr. Cha shook his head when he heard this, saddened to learn America was teaching children to abandon their parents. What next, he wanted to know, parents will stop claiming their own children? Grandma Joua weeps, telling me this, and I could see the tears following the deep creases on her face. If tears could fill and smooth, all war women would have skin like a worn river stone; age and heartache would only affect them in spirit. Her husband, too, had left for war and never come back. Then, I did not know why, because of the tears maybe, Grandma Joua starts speaking fast, and it sounds like a different language altogether. This fast talk scared me.
What’s she saying? Mr. Cha said.
I rewound the cassette twice before I caught on, as if shame, if ever it must be spoken, should be spoken fast so you can get through the telling of it. She regrets her own failure, I said to Mr. Cha.
The son running off?
You don’t know? I said. Worse. Maybe.
I haven’t seen Grandma Joua in a long time, he said. Not since my wedding.
I told him Grandma Joua wonders, on the cassette, if her life would be different. Would her daughter, if she were alive, have loved her more? And remained by her side, unlike the son.
I didn’t know she had a daughter, Mr. Cha said.
I paused the tape and told him what Grandma Joua had told Mother and Father one day in Ban Vinai about the night in 1972 when she fled Long Chieng into the jungle with the Lee, Her, and Vang families. By then, she had lived there eight years after fleeing Fi Kha. Afraid Long Chieng soon would fall, it was safer, they decided, to wait out the war in the jungle or slowly try to cross into Thailand. When she walked away from the group to use the bathroom in the bush, she was captured and beaten. This, only the second night they were in the jungle. The dark was blinding, Grandma Joua said. She only remembers the stink of the man’s breath, like sour milk, before she passed out. She did not scream for the others because she feared drawing them into an ambush. After that, the families hid during the day and moved only at night. When Grandma Joua gave birth months later, still they were in the jungle. They had run back and forth in the dark, then decided to get into Thailand but had gotten lost, and then wandered the long way down the country. Because the baby girl cried a lot those first two months, Grandma Joua used opium to quiet her, but had to leave the baby in the jungle. She needed to save her son.
That’s the war, Mr. Cha said. We never knew the true faces hurting us. They hid in the dark, in the shadows. Sometimes they were the same faces you saw many times a day—you just didn’t know. But I’d kill that guy if I knew.
Maiker, Grandma Joua says on the cassette before it ended, I keep all your cassettes because I am the last one to get them and no one else wants them. I listen to them when I am lonely for the voices of the old country.
I knew I, too, should save their cassettes, but I could not spare the money for even one cassette, and each time I erased their words and covered them with my own, I knew I was replacing causes for happiness—their voices, their love, their tears—with my complaints of a tough life in Laos. If I cried during a recording, always I made sure to muffle the sound. On the cassette I sent in 1990, I told my family that a few of those who left for America are now returning for a visit. In all of the world, I heard the visitors saying, the orchids of Laos are the best. And all around Vientiane now, orchids of all colors and fragrances are sold. Orchids from Pha Thi. Centipede’s Back Orchid. Orchid of Village 52. Cut Vein Orchid. Many whites are also visiting Laos for the orchids, and they bring with them the green paper that can flip the communist mind. But Mr. Cha believed the communists are more accepting because the whites are not here to take over like before.
The orchid collectors are slowly starting to come out of Vientiane and into Phondachet, I said into the recorder. You see young whites as often as the old, and most do not look wealthy. The war widows, mothers, grandmothers, some wives, and even the young teenagers who are pushed by their parents to learn the business because it promised food—all who sell orchids now make more money than any man could make, despite some orchids’ fetching only two thousand kip, about three American dollars, because there are so many sellers. But many survive only on what the orchids provide.
I said the Hmong collectors come dressed in creased pants, shirts with ties, gold watches. If they come around to our houses, trying to see who might have orchids, Mrs. Kethavong and I would untie our dogs. Collectors are scared of Mrs. Kethavong’s four dogs because her husband uses them for pig hunting. Sometimes, the men would say okay, okay, they are hungry for fish to calm us down, and we would tie up the dogs and sell the men fish and charge them more. Always, they pay with cash that they take out of their back pocket, a fold in middle of the money so it looks more than it is. They smile when we look at the money, and ask where they might find the orchids no other collector has found yet. They would say, We take to show our wives back home. That is sometimes true because some collectors like to show off the orchids in front of their wives, to stab them with jealousy over getting to own such beautiful flowers, and oftentimes, they would breed them, the different orchids, but all are liars, I know.
I did not tell my family often Hnuhlee would ask why we could not go to America, since everyone who came back carried so much money. Nor did I mention the time she refused to go steam rice inside the house when I asked, forcing me to shove her and slam the door, latching it from the outside, while Bone and Skin ran to bark at three men approaching our house. After the men were gone, Hnuhlee said she only wanted to see their thick fold of American dollars—some girls at school had said always the collectors came with it. What is the wrong in that? Why can’t we go to America? She was twelve and had recently started carrying around the clothes of women. A lot is the wrong in that, I wanted her to know, but did not say.
When I finished recording my words, I called for Hnuhlee to come and say a few of her own. Always, she said the same things, the same words I taught her when she was
young and unsure of her own heart to know what to say: This is Hnuhlee, daughter of Yee and Maiker Pha. It has been a long time since I talked to you. I hope everyone is living well. We are okay, just the two of us, by ourselves, waiting for Pa, over here, after you left. Pa has not returned, but soon, we believe. I do not know what I will do when I see him. I do not know if he will remember me, or if I will know him. I am in year seven of school and would like to study English to be a translator, so when you visit I can talk to you in your language. I can read and write in English some, but I speak it slow. If we have just a bit more money, maybe I can make it to the next year. Maybe if I am lucky.
These, the only times my daughter said her father’s name.
* * *
—
On the cassette from 1993, voices tell me to keep Hnuhlee away from the orchid collectors. Grandma Joua says evil spirits mostly like to steal the souls of young girls, and starts listing fifteen to twenty girls that died young, as though, always, they have been on her mind all these years—Phoua, Panyia, Gaosheng, Maizong—then this: Evil is everywhere even here in America, a man has arrived not too long here, why couldn’t he have been buried in the old country because evil is at home in both countries, it can cross back and forth, it carries two faces, listen carefully, the truth is in and around their words, in that space their words carry many meanings, listen to what they don’t say, go on, listen to me, remember what— On this cassette, before Grandma Joua can reach the last of her words, a girl’s faint voice can be heard: Stop speaking like that, Grandma Joua. Tell me what it is. It is not good to frighten people. Just tell me. That young voice, still I hear it, those words seeking, as if, knowing, it alone could set right the world, there in America with both parents at the door.
That was the year Mr. Cha’s oldest son, Bee, twenty-one, which was old to be without a wife, went to the Harvest Festival and kept another man’s daughter too late. When Bee walked the girl home, the man asked him for his father’s name. To keep her so late, did Bee intend to marry his daughter? Bee said sure, he would like to marry her, but he had no money, and they only were talking. But really, you do not know with children—they have their ways, like adults have theirs. The man went to the clan elders of the village, who settled disputes, righted wrongs, and restored honor. They determined that $75, about 55,000 kip that year, was the fine to be paid for soiling the girl and bringing shame to her father’s name if Bee failed to marry her. For marriage, the father requested a bride price of $2,050. If Mr. Cha and Bee refused both choices, the father threatened to go to the Laotian authorities and say Bee had raped his daughter. The man could promise a little handout if they threw Bee in jail and knocked him around, as a lesson and to convince him to pay. Or if Mr. Cha was wealthy, he could pay off the authorities—and the clan elders—and have the problem gone, but that would cost more than the $75 fine because each authority and clan elder has more than two hands.
Mr. Cha asked what should he do, and I said did the children want to get married? The girl was a little shorter than I like, with dark skin. Her figure was delicate—narrow hips, thin legs, small breasts—I feared their children would go hungry. But she was a good speaker, respectful to the elders, and patient with everyone; in another world, she would make a good judge. I told him to pay the bride price. Why waste the money?
I’ll ask for two years to come up with the money, Mr. Cha said. With father and sons working and a daughter-in-law taking care of things at home, or even herself working, they might need four years to pay it off, I thought.
Come up with half, I said. That might buy you more time.
Mr. Cha thought this over, but of course, for him, already the decision was made—only he was shifting numbers to see what was possible and not possible, and even in his mind, as it was in mine, his math did not show the possibility of coming up with half. Still, to marry the girl was the money-saving and honorable thing to do.
In one year, they were able to pay $620. Mr. Cha was confident, since they had been good to his daughter, the man would see they were decent, hardworking people, not slave owners who only wanted a water buffalo and brood sow. But just as Mr. Cha was feeling hopeful, after the man assured him there was no hurry, that Mr. Cha’s name and promise were honorable, the son curse hit again. The younger son, Say, was caught being husband-and-wife with his sweetheart along the path that snaked into the jungle. At night, the girl had snuck out of the house under Say’s urgings. The only daughter of a family with four sons, she was more expensive than Bee’s wife. And unlike Bee, who met his wife at the festival and maybe a little too long into the night talked with her, openly Say and his sweetheart had courted for ten months. But rare are the marriages for love, even now. The father of Say’s girl did not bother with the clan elders before setting a bride price of $6,500—so high that even Hmong-American men would not pay—though some people in the village said the father, knowing Mr. Cha could not afford much, had a good heart to fine them only $20 to restore his name. Say loved this girl, argued that whatever and however long it took he would come up with the money. But Mr. Cha said they could not afford it just then, maybe if he had waited four or five years. But that is men: when they want something, immediately they must have. All orchid collectors are like that. Worse, also, because men think parental love is a competition. So what one son gets, the other, too, must get. Else that means the parents do not love them equal. This time, though, while Say was off trading labor, Mr. Cha walked over and paid the fine to the girl’s father.
One day not long after, the girl, Maida, came home and saw an orchid collector sitting with her parents inside their house. They told her the man was there to buy her orchids. He had heard she possessed the rare Eggplant Petal orchids, which resembled purple butterfly wings with a fiery floret between, but more valuable than the look was that her orchids could cure low energy and fatigue. She ran over to Mr. Cha’s house, but they refused to let her through the courtyard gate; they feared being fined again. And like an innocent prisoner looking for a way, she shook the gate until it almost broke, then, knowing a woman in a sarong should never climb a fence to be loved by just a man, she walked over to our house when she saw Hnuhlee out in our courtyard staring. Maida was fourteen and had a good figure. She was tall, with a solid, wide frame to have babies easily and endure the many labors of a countrywoman. She told Hnuhlee she did not raise her orchids to sell to a Hmong-American man. She wanted only Say to have them, the man she loved.
What do you think, Ma? Hnuhlee asked. Would you do that? Oy! She and Maida walked into the house where I was poaching fish. I wanted to pinch her lips, teach her about saying things and asking questions at the wrong time. Instead, I said, Absolutely not. Maida is strong to love like that.
Only you two see only two ways in the world.
How many ways are there? I said, because there are only two ways in the world. The right. And all the wrongs. Hnuhlee was fifteen, and already believed she knew enough to survive without me. Her family isn’t starving! I said. Is your family starving? I did not wait for Maida’s answer because I knew enough about them. Her parents just want new things! Maida should get to choose who she loves! Who she wants to be with!
Hnuhlee turned away from me and Maida, and started walking out of the house. Why are you yelling at me? she said.
Your father wouldn’t ask you to do that! Which, I was sure, was the truth. Sometimes it is okay to go hungry!
He can’t ask me if he’s not here, she mumbled, her back to me, but clear across the threshold, I heard her.
It’s okay to go hungry, Maida, I said.
Later, Maida refused to go home when I urged her. Afraid Mr. Cha again would be fined, I walked to her house and told her parents she was in my home. That was when I saw the ugly man, who was more than fifty. Short, with three gold teeth, a big mole on his bald head. Some faces—how do I explain this—bring to mind certain things. Seeing this man, I wondered what Gran
dma Joua might have done to her daughter. These things about the world made me wonder why Hnuhlee’s father, my husband, would keep away.
I fed Maida for two days before, by the hair, she was dragged home by her mother. Her parents had a new stove and bed. The man sat on a new armchair. Maida ran behind the curtain that made for her a private area in their small house and refused to speak to the man. So you have decided to watch your father and mother and brothers go hungry? her mother said. Remember, you’re not the only person in this house! Remember whose hands you ate from all these years! To let Maida decide, her parents took the man to visit some of his distant family in another part of Vientiane: they hoped it would not come to them tying her down; they hoped it would be done by her will.
If she stayed, Maida knew, the man would have her orchids by morning. She wrote a letter, grabbed a paring knife, and walked past her brothers, who were keeping watch. Go on then! said the oldest brother, who was twenty-three years, raising his hands and backing away. From this day forward, this is no longer your home, we are no longer bound by name. I curse your oil-blood will no longer light your way to our people. The youngest brother, seven years, who would recount this to me years later, ran up to her, wondered if he could come with her. When she shook her head, he said, Be a good person, Mai. Go on before Mother and Father get home. Maida bit her lips and nodded and walked out of the house into the time at dusk when the shapes of people, still, you could make out, even as their details faded—the sharpness of their nose and eyes, the locations of scars and moles, the curve of the mouth in feeling; they were not altogether disappearing, but night was only exposing their shapes as hollow spaces in the world where they—their dreams for the future, the history of their love, their desire for life—had once been.
She gave the letter to Hnuhlee to give to Say. When Maida turned to go, she saw Say’s figure standing in the doorway of his house. But it turned away because her parents had sent word to Mr. Cha that there was an owner of her orchids now. No one was to touch her. Maida yelled that he was a weak boy. Why wasn’t he fighting for her? Wasn’t he a man? But too young was she to know the war had taken our best men and left us only boys. And these poor farming boys, they could never hope to win fights against orchid collectors.
The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019) Page 39