Lucky Child (28 page)

It is still dark. The stars sparkle brightly; the wind is quiet and cool. In their big round water jars, the smiling moon shivers when Chou dips her hands into the container. Under her feet, the grass and shrubs that lay
trampled from the previous day are healing slowly with the morning dew. But it is too early for Chou to really register anything. She does not know what time it is. She knows only that it is so early that even the cows, dogs, and roosters are asleep. When Chou finishes washing her face, she pours the rest of the water onto her palm and splashes her neck and arms. Suddenly a chill spreads all over her body and makes the hair on her arms stand. Her knees go weak from nerves as she gasps for breath and grips the water container for support.

After she is finished, she steadies herself and walks back into the hut. In her haze, she hears Aunt Keang and the older cousins rouse out of their sleep, their yawns and coughs echoing in the quiet air. Inside the web of nets, the young children, accustomed to loud noises, continue to sleep undisturbed.

“Chou,” a soft voice calls from outside the door. Chou crosses the room to answer the call as Aunt Keang sidles off her bed and heads outside to wash her face. When she opens the door, Chou finds her next-door neighbor, a friend, and two distant cousins standing there. Usually, wedding banquets are held in the evening, but because the roads are unsafe to travel after dark, Aunt Keang decided to have the reception in the afternoon. This timing will allow the out-of-town guests to join in the celebration and return to their village without the fear of stepping on land mines or being kidnapped by Khmer Rouge soldiers during the night. Because an early wedding means less time to prepare, Aunt Keang has invited many people in the community to come help with the preparations.

“Cousins, sisters, please come in.” Chou ushers them in.

“Chou, today is your wedding day!” her friend gushes. “Why are you up so early? You should sleep a little more. This is your only day to be a princess!”

“Sisters,” replies cousin Hong, “in the village, a poor woman like Chou can only be a peasant princess. That means we work even on our wedding days.”

“But a peasant princess is still a princess!” Aunt Keang walks in from the outhouse and greets the guests. “And thank you all for coming.” She takes each of their hands in hers and guides them into the kitchen. “You have good hearts and generous spirits to come help.”

“No need to thank us, Aunt Keang,” says her friend. “We are all family. Of course we will help.”

“Today is your wedding day,” one of the cousins announces again, and touches Chou’s arm. “We are so happy for you. Your aunt and uncle have picked a very nice man for you. May you be blessed with much happiness and many healthy children.” Instantly, Chou’s ears ring loudly as the words travel into her heart and speed it up.

In the dark, fear flickers across her face. After today, she will no longer be a girl but a woman and a wife. She is not sure she is ready to be either, but she accepts her fate in this world.

“When the sun comes out, the cook will come to make the dishes,” Aunt Keang tells them. “For now, let’s prepare the ingredients: cut the vegetables, wash the fruits, slice the meat, make the noodles, set the tables.”

As she leads them around to their workstations, Aunt Keang tells the women that when the sky is bright enough for the men to see, they will go to gather the wood, leaves, and ropes to make the tent. Then while the women help with the cooking and cleaning, the men will do the hard work of chopping the wood and collecting the water. When they are done with that, they will go around the village to borrow chairs and tables from friends and neighbors for the festivities.

“Aunt Keang, how many have been invited?”

Chou listens intently as Aunt Keang tells the women about the four hundred friends, family, and guests expected to attend her wedding. As the women gasp, Aunt Keang explains that because Ma and Pa were so well known and loved in the village, she wants to give Chou a big wedding to bring honor to them. While the women nod, Aunt Keang then goes on to list the eight dishes they will serve at the reception.

“Young chicken soup to bless the new couple with healthy children, sautéed mixed vegetables, steamed fish with bamboo shoots, fried rice, shrimp lo mein, roasted whole chicken, lotus seed sweets, and rice cakes.” Aunt Keang finishes and leads the women into the kitchen.

Leaning on the door frame, Chou is frozen by the thought of being a hostess to four hundred people. She is not accustomed to being at the center of attention. But her worries are cut short as more women arrive to help. Wasting no time, Aunt Keang quickly puts them to work while Chou washes dishes, knives, and cutting boards. Hong and a friend are
washing pink lotus blossoms for table flowers. As their fingers rub the dirt and mud from the leaves, they chat, laugh, and gossip. Near them, two more women sit on footstools with their cleavers busily chopping bunches of scallions and dicing garlic. Beside them, another woman splits wood to kindle the fire to boil the water. When the water is hot enough, Aunt Keang picks up a chicken from the pile of fifty and holds it upside down by its feet above the hot water. The limp bird has been sliced across the neck and drained of blood, as Aunt Keang dips it headfirst into the pot. After a few minutes, she pulls it out and repeats the process with another bird until there are none left. Chou takes the hot, wet chickens and delivers them to a group of women sitting in a circle. Between laughs and giggles, they pluck the feathers. Chou leaves them and goes to stir a big pot of white rice congee soup sitting on the fire. Then she reaches over for a metal spatula and flips over the chunks of dried salted fish sizzling in a frying pan. Once everything is cooked, she ladles the congee into bowls and carries the platter of soups, spoons, and fish to the women.

When the roosters crow at the brightening sky, the young children slowly wake to rub the sleepy seeds out of their eyes. By the time their mouths open with the day’s first cry, the women have already peeled the potatoes, sliced the tomatoes, cut the carrots to look like bats, shaped the watermelons into flowers, made fresh noodles, scaled fish, and chopped the chickens. As the young mouths quiver and cry for milk, the first waves of women recruits return to their huts to tend to their own children while their younger, childless sisters arrive to take their place.

Chou brings the men breakfast at the outside table, making sure to serve Uncle Leang first, followed by Kim and the others. Before she heads back inside, Chou turns and glances quickly at Kim. Ever since Aunt Keang announced Chou’s impending marriage, an awkward distance has come between Kim and her. Chou wonders if Kim is angry with her for accepting Aunt Keang’s choice so easily. Chou has never worked up the courage to ask him, she’s so afraid of his answer. While he eats, Chou’s eyes linger on his face, and she notices how much his features resemble Ma’s. And just like Ma, he has been brave enough to stand up to the family.

Inside the hut, Chou and the cousins sweep the floor, wipe the plank beds, decorate the room with wildflowers, arrange the chairs, and clean
out the incense bowl. On one altar, they replace the red ceramic bowl with a shiny gold brass bowl wrapped with dragon designs. Then they replace the old candles with new red ones. Next, they hang red paper Chinese wedding characters for health and prosperity on the walls and on top of all the doors.

The women steadily work to beautify the hut with their mixture of Chinese and Cambodian decorations. Soon they hear roars of motorcycles as Khouy and other male relatives arrive to help build the tent. When they have a big enough crew, the men drive away the cow wagons and their motorcycles. By the time the bright rays have dried up the morning’s dew the men return with their wooden poles, palm leaves, and bamboo rope to build the tent. In a flurry of action, the men heave the posts into position and erect the frame. Chou comes out to watch and smiles as Khouy takes charge, directing people while he stands on the sidelines to smoke. While the others sew the palm leaves for the roof, Kim climbs on top of the tent and ties the skeletal frame together. Below him, Uncle Leang saunters from one group to another and spews out instructions in between puffs of his cigarette and swigs of coconut milk. All around them, the cousins, neighbors, and friends hammer poles and posts to stabilize the tent. In the corner of the tent, Chou sees Pheng gather a spool of thick nylon rope hanging on his arm. She quickly hides in the shadows but realizes that no butterflies flutter in her stomach at the sight of her groom. She becomes nauseous when thoughts of the marriage bed enter her mind, and she feels at a complete loss. Neither Aunt Keang nor her married women friends have disclosed anything or given her any advice about what to do on her wedding night.

For a brief moment, she envies the women who choose their own husbands, but she chases such rebellious thoughts away. Besides, she knows she is young and uneducated; even if she
could
choose her own husband, she wouldn’t know what to look for in one. And so she will marry the man chosen for her and hope that one day she will love him. Her married friends assure her that love will blossom after the birth of their first child. She prays that they’re right, and wonders if she is Pheng’s choice or if his parents forced her upon him. She supposes it doesn’t matter.

“Ma, Pa,” she whispers, “today is my wedding day.” Chou’s voice is soft and firm as she tries to make herself sound like a woman. “Pa, thank
you for looking after me. Ma, you don’t have to worry about me anymore. I’m going to be all right.” She visualizes kneeling in front of them with Pheng to receive their blessings.

“Chou,” Hong says as she rests her hand on Chou’s shoulder, “it’s time for you to get ready. The guests will be arriving soon.”

Hong leads Chou into a makeshift room closed off by red cotton curtains. The girls stop their work and rush over to look at the dress laid out on the plank bed. Squeaking with excitement, a parade of hands guides her to a seat.

“Chou, I will turn you into a beautiful princess today,” the wedding dresser declares, her hands heavy with her scissors and fake golden jewelry.

“I am but a peasant princess,” Chou laughs and sits down. In her throne, Chou feels her tired body relax and wishes for a small nap. But the wedding dresser keeps her awake by pulling tiny hairs off her thick black brows and temples with tweezers. Chou’s forehead is still numb when the wedding dresser splatters a pinkish-white foundation on her face, turning her two shades lighter. The wedding dresser applies dark charcoal to her brows and eyelids, then spreads her tube of red lipstick on Chou’s cheeks and lips. When she finishes, Chou looks like a pink plastic China doll.

“Let’s give her princess hair,” the dresser says to the group. She then pulls, teases, and puffs Chou’s curly hair into a big nest on top of her head. With dexterous fingers, the wedding dresser folds and twists her hair into one big bun and secures it with thirty large black bobby pins that poke into Chou’s scalp. As the girls gasp, she places a fake diamond—studded golden tiara in front of the bun and again pokes Chou’s scalp with another twenty pins. When she’s done with the design, she cracks three eggs and separates the egg whites from the yolks. While one girl runs the yolks to the kitchen for the cook to whip into the yellow cake mix, the wedding dresser mixes the egg white with lime juice in a bowl. She uses this mixture to wet down Chou’s fly-away hair and to hold the hairstyle in place.

“You look beautiful!” the girls tell her.

Chou teeters on her feet as she stands up, but she is smiling radiantly, looking like the golden goddess Apsara. For a moment, Chou forgets about the war, her dirty hands, and that Meng and Loung are not there. In her rented form-fitting shiny gold dress and her sparkling fake diamond
earrings, she feels beautiful. When she whirls around, the thick gold bangles wrapped around her wrists and ankles dance with her.

“You look like a princess!” the girls exclaim in unison.

“I
am
a princess,” laughs a new playful Chou.

As the guests start arriving, Chou exits out of the parted red curtains and the room becomes still. The hut is filled with thirty or forty members of the immediate family, cousins, and close relatives all dressed in their finest, most colorful lace shirts and sarongs. Chou feels all their eyes on her, the men appraising her appearance, the women looking for details gone wrong. Chou lowers her head modestly.

“Chou’s beautiful,” Amah announces to everyone.

Chou looks up to see Kim and Khouy beaming brightly at her like proud peacocks. Chou feels her face turn red under her pink makeup when Hong leads her to the tent. Under the entrance of the thatched-roof tent, dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, and black tie with a big red cloth flower pinned to his breast pocket, Pheng waits for her. Shyly, Chou joins him, her head down and her hands at her sides. One by one, friends young and old arrive on foot, bicycles, wagons, or motorcycles and are greeted by the young bride and groom. Once the guests pass the wedding party, they go inside to sit on high-back plastic chairs at tables decorated with bright fuchsia cloth.

Through the many decades of war and peace, the Cambodian-Chinese culture has evolved in many ways, as people intermarry between the various cultures and races. For Chou’s big day, the family chose to modify and shorten the traditional three-day-long Cambodian ceremony to just one afternoon event. During the next few hours, Chou and Pheng go through their own special truncated Chinese-Cambodian marriage ceremony. To receive their blessings in a Chinese tea ceremony, the bride and groom kneel in front of a pair of elder family members seated in chairs to offer them tea. After a sip of tea, the elders give the couple a red envelope containing a few Cambodian riel, small gold jewelry, and blessings for happiness, prosperity, births of many sons, and good health. After the Chinese tea ceremony, the new couple move to a corner of the tent where a red blanket has been out spread out for the Cambodian string-tying ceremony. Aunt Keang directs Chou and Pheng to sit close together with their knees
facing the same direction. Two elder women lower them so that they can prop their elbows on a large red pillow. As they sit with their palms pressed next to each other in a prayer, the cousins invite guests to participate in the ceremony by tying a red string around both their wrists and blessing them with a lasting marriage.