Lucky Child (19 page)

“Kgo, Kgo! Come look at this red bug!” she yells, and runs away. Slowly I go after her, my skates stomping heavily on the ground, and by the time I reach Maria, the world is no longer so dark and angry.

“Loung! Maria!
Nham-bay-e!”
“Eat rice,” Eang calls out of the window in Khmer. In Khmer, there are no separate words for separate mealtimes. All you need to do is to add the word
morning, day,
or
evening
next to the word
eat,
and you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner. But all Eang needs to yell is “
“Nham-bay-e”
and we come running.

“Wash your hands first,” Eang tells us as Maria and I head into the bathroom. When we return, our meal of stir-fried chicken with ginger and turnips boiled in pork broth is already on the table.

“The movie
The Killing Fields
is still playing at all the movie theaters,”
Meng comments between slurps of soup. “The theaters are now advertising that all Khmer people can go see the film for free!” Meng laughs.

“Why see it? It’s a movie about life under the Khmer Rouge. We lived it.” Eang’s face frowns as her words rush out. “I wouldn’t pay to see it. I wouldn’t see it if they paid me.”

“I wouldn’t see it either, no way, no how,” I pipe in, hoping our unanimous agreement on this will put an end to the conversation because it’s making the chicken in my mouth taste rancid.

“Well, we can go see
Ghostbusters
instead,” Meng says, and smiles. Because Eang doesn’t like to waste money on English-speaking movies she can’t understand, Meng and I often go together.

I love going to the movies because it reminds me of Pa. One of my fondest memories of Cambodia was of sitting on Pa’s lap in the dark theater. I would squirm and move around, one hand holding my soybean drink and the other a bag of fried crickets. The crickets were crunchier than popcorn and didn’t get stuck in your teeth. When I didn’t want to hold my own food anymore, I would tap Pa’s hands and, without saying a word, his palms would turn upward and I would put my food and drink in them. Back then we didn’t have cup holders in Cambodia. Pa’s lap was my chair, his arms my armrest, his palms my cup holders. Pa was everything to me.

In Vermont, going to the movies with Meng was fun when I was younger, and I would still get scared by movies like
Clash of the Titans
and
The Beast Master.
Back then I didn’t care that Meng stubbornly refused to speak to me in English in public, even when we saw people I knew. Now, I care. It’s bad enough that
I
know I’m different. I can’t do much about my skin color and the fact I wasn’t born in America, but at least I can try to pass with new clothes, fluent English, and the latest hairstyle. But Meng doesn’t seem to care that he isn’t like everyone else, and he proudly announces his foreignness everywhere he goes. At fourteen, I’ve decided that I don’t want to be seen with my embarrassing brother in public anymore. But I don’t know how to tell him that, so I pretend to always have too much homework to leave the house.

After dinner, we all move to the living room. Meng and Eang sit on the couch while Maria plays with a doll between them. I’m lying on my
side on the floor, when the trailer for
The Killing Fields
splashes across our TV screen. The commercial begins with a group of helicopters flying into view like a swarm of dragonflies, then cuts to scenes of bombs dropping onto Cambodia, and the Khmer Rouge soldiers storming into Phnom Penh. On the screen, as the soldiers raise their guns and fists to the sky in victory, Haing Ngor, the actor playing Dith Pran, stands alone in a flooded rice field. Dressed in a wet black tattered shirt and pants that cling to his thin frame, his face contorts as he realizes he has stepped into one of Cambodia’s many mass graves. As the camera pulls away, we see skulls, bones, and black shredded clothing floating in the murky, brown water.

From somewhere inside my brain, the smell of putrid flesh leaps off the television and fills my nostril. I blink but the smell remains and attacks my eyes, making them water. My scalp starts to sweat, while my heart squeezes into a tight fist. Lightly, I scratch my feet and crack my toes to distract myself from the smell.

“Americans will never know what it was truly like,” I think.

They won’t remember the smell, the sound, or the heat. For two hours, they’ll sit in the dark and watch but they’ll never know what it was like to be there for three years, eight months, and twenty-one days. What it was like thinking everyday that I was going to die and not knowing if the war would ever end. When the credits roll after two hours, the lights will come back on, and they’ll leave the war. But I can’t. Behind me, Eang and Meng sit still, each lost in thought. I shift my eyes to the corner of the living room without moving my head. I don’t want Meng and Eang to see how upset I am and worry that I still feel and remember. I have to be strong because if I let myself cry, I’m afraid I’ll never stop. So I force my body to be still while the actors dressed in black cry and scream. I tell myself that the actors are too fat to play starving Cambodians. Together, we wait silently for the movie trailer to end so that we can return to our show.

Before
The A-Team
comes on, Mr. and Mrs. Lee are on-screen to sell us something called Calgon. Though we’ve seen this commercial many times, Meng and Eang always watch it because the actors are Chinese. And they’re
really
Chinese, not some white people with their eyes taped and bad accents playing Chinese people, like in the old black-and-white movies.

In the commercial, when Mr. Lee tells a customer his laundry is so
clean because of an “ancient Chinese secret,” Eang and Meng laugh out loud. Then Mrs. Lee puts Mr. Lee down by calling him a big shot and confesses that his secret is Calgon.

“Calgon’s two water softeners soften water so detergents clean better. In the hardest water, Calgon helps detergents get laundry up to thirty percent cleaner,” she pitches perkily.

“Ancient Chinese secret! That’s funny!” I slap my knees a little too eagerly.

The
Killing Fields
moment has passed.

When
The A-Team
finally comes back to rescue our night, our moods have already been lifted by Calgon.

“Show’s over. Time to sleep.” Meng yawns and stretches his arms. Eang picks up Maria and carries her into the bedroom, with Meng following behind.

I take their place on the couch and sit alone to watch the news. I sink deeper into the cushions when a reporter shows footage of starving Ethiopian children. The long drought in Ethiopia is destroying the crops and forcing many families to go hungry. The camera then zeroes in on a skeletal woman with big, liquid eyes. A brown cloth covers her head and drapes past her shoulders to protect her from the scorching sun. Peeking out of her sleeves, her skin hangs like wrinkled, black, unpolished leather on her thin arms. The camera slowly pulls away from her unflinching stare to reveal a small starving child gasping against her chest. As the child lies in between this world and the next, the woman fans her hand in front of the child’s face to chase away the flies already feasting on her flesh.

I cannot watch anymore and turn off the TV. After I change into my sleep clothes, I crawl into my bed, lie on my chest, and half bury my face in my arms. Pushing against the mattress, my stomach is a hard ball and aches from too much food. When I close my eyes, I see the child from the news and watch as her skin turns pale, her black hair straightens, and her face turns Asian. Instantly, the mother also disappears and in her place, Ma now holds Geak. Ma gazes at Geak; her hand smooths her hair and caresses her face, but Geak’s body is limp and shows no signs of life.

“I’m going crazy,” I whisper and pull the covers over my head. Under the blankets, my breathing rings loudly in the confined space. I think I hear the Ethiopian child struggling to take in a lungful of air, a sound not
even picked up by the reporter’s microphone. I picture her fighting and fighting to get enough oxygen into her body, her dry mouth opening and closing, her chest heaving painfully.

I toss and turn, but my thoughts float to Keav and her last moments of life. And though I wasn’t physically there with her, my mind makes up images that my eyes did not see. Ma’s voice weeps as she tells us about her visit with a sick Keav. “Her last wish is to see her family and be near us even after she’s gone. She knows she will die but she will wait for Pa… . She will wait for him to bring her home.” But Pa didn’t get to bring her home and Keav died alone, scared and away from us all. On that day, Pa and the rest of us also died with her.

“Get out of my head!” I plead, but the ghosts, the killing fields, and the Ethiopian girl do not leave me. My lids twitch and flutter from too many images, and I know sleep will not come easily tonight. I give up and get out of bed. I walk into my closet and force myself to think about something else. My fingers run through my rack of old clothes from the Salvation Army. I fantasize of someday walking into a big expensive department store like JCPenney and buying clothes that don’t have armpit stains on them.

“Armpit stains,” I say in disgust, fingering the tassels on the red-and-white checkered cowgirl shirt hanging on the rack. I put a cowboy hat on my head and turn to the mirror. The girl looking back at me has long black wavy hair that hangs past her shoulders. As I lean closer into the mirror, she stares back at me with her almond-shaped eyes and a face so round that she looks fat. When I stand sideways, the girl looks skinny all over except for her big, protruding stomach. I spread my palms over my taut belly ball and frown at the mirror. Eang says it’s still bloated from years of malnutrition. Meng tells me not to worry and to think of it as my Buddha belly. Finally the darkness lifts and I crawl back into bed praying that the Lord Buddha will keep the war away and out of my head.

15 living their last wind

April 1985

April is the hottest month of the year, with temperatures that often climb above one hundred degrees. Today, the sun god shows no signs of mercy as it turns the ground below Chou’s feet into hard, dry clay and the once green fields into brown dead land. On her way to the village market, Chou adjusts the krama on her head and wipes her dripping forehead with her sleeves. When she arrives, she scans the area to see only a dozen or so vendors selling their goods in the open field.

Chou has come to buy palm fruits and baby crabs seasoned with spices and deep fried to a crimson red. The few dozens vendors call out to Chou and the handful of other early buyers.

“Buy from me, sister,” a boy calls, bringing over his basket of slippery black eels.

“You bought from him last week.” A small girl shows Chou her bucket of live fish, splashing in an inch of water. “Buy from me this week, sister.”

Chou is staring at the girl’s fish when, suddenly, the earth shakes with a loud explosion that chases the birds into the sky. Instantly Chou’s feet burn and her toes sting as if they’ve been pierced by dry, splintered wood. Next to her, the girl ducks, hugging her bucket to her chest. Around Chou, many villagers scream and run into their homes. For a moment, Chou closes her eyes tightly and crouches low to the ground. When she
opens them, she is crawling on her knees toward a nearby tree, hoping to find shelter.

“Another mine exploded!” a villager shouts.

“The man on the trail! He’s hurt!” a woman yells as she runs back to the market.

From her tree, Chou sees the man lying on the ground in a storm of red dust. With a dazed look, he props himself on his knees, tentatively stands on one leg, and lifts up his bike. Slowly, he pushes his bicycle forward and hops the rest of the way into the village market. A chill runs down Chou’s spine when the man passes, his face smeared with blood, his eyes big like crabs, and his dark shirt wet with brushes and twigs stuck all over it. As he passes Chou, his left leg pushes him on while his right leg drags in the dirt, dripping thick streams of blood as it goes. Chou suppresses a scream when she sees that his right leg is shredded and hanging by the skin to its stump, his foot only bits of charred skin and melting flesh. When he passes the crowd, his face is ashen but calm. Then abruptly, he falls to the ground; his body convulses for a few minutes and then is still.

“Does anyone know his family?” a man shouts, approaching.

“He’s from another village!” another person yells.

“Someone has to tell his family he’s dead,” the first man says quietly.

“He looks as if he didn’t know what had happened,” a girl whispers sympathetically.

“He was living his last wind,” an old woman tells her, referring to the moment when his life flashed before his eyes.

When blood returns to warm her face, Chou walks away from the crowd. In a daze, she continues her shopping for the family’s eggs, chicken, and potatoes with her eyes opened wide.

The hot season comes to a close as April reaches its end. The humidity rises, the fine dust in the road settles, and soon the rain will come to drench the red land and make everything green once again. But that time is still a few weeks away. It is early morning and Chou is again on her way to the village market. Chou raises her hands to the sky to air the wetness in her armpits. By the time she lowers her arms a few paces later, tiny droplets of sweat have already collected above her lips.

When Chou enters the market, a village girl sitting on a low stool in
the hot sun greets her. Chou stops to look at the eggs she is selling and by chance glances up to see a friend’s husband approaching the village on a trail Chou has traveled on many times. From a short distance away, Chou sees him pick up what looks to be a round green disk the size of a small cup. In the instant it takes for Chou to blink, the mine explodes and knocks the man to the ground. As if in slow motion, Chou feels the blast reverberate in her ribs and weaken her knees. Throughout the market, villagers gasp and stop in terror. In the distant fields, a cow moos and dogs bark in protest.