Lucky Child (38 page)

“Thank you, officer.” The guide shifted the car into gear and the car jerked forward. “Stay still and as you are,” the guide warned them. “The customs officer may still be looking at us.”

Kim maintained his position and exhaled and inhaled deeply. The air flowed richly into his veins and lungs, making his head light.

“You’ve made it. I know it’s been a long journey for you all. Welcome to France.”

Kim fought to control his shakes as his body finally released the stress, worry, and anxiety of the past six months.

When Kim finishes his story, I am filled with guilt for not knowing it already. As if sensing my shame, Kim says playfully, “I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve shared the complete story with anyone!” He begins to laugh.

“Yes, especially when it sounds better than an action movie.” I giggle and look at him gratefully.

For the rest of the afternoon, Kim, Hung, Aunt Heng, Uncle Lim, and I spend our hours walking, laughing, and talking more about Cambodia,
Chou, Khouy, and the family. Every few blocks Uncle Heng stops us to take pictures of the city and our reunion. While he takes his time directing and positioning us through his viewfinder, I stare at Kim. His face is fuller, his eyes are softer, and small lines traverse his forehead like a map of his life, deepening around his mouth. As the sunlight softly illuminates his face, I see that Kim is no long Ma’s little monkey but a full-grown man.

In that moment of stillness while waiting for the shutter to click, I realize that my motto of living life to the fullest, of not missing a single moment, and making every minute count had been all about me and had involved only me. As I look up at Kim, I finally understand that the unconditional joy and happiness I’ve been seeking to drown out the pain and sadness is an illusion. For no matter how seemingly great my life is in America or France, it will not be fulfilling if I live it alone. I know now that Kim wants the same thing out of his life that Meng, Khouy, and Chou do. Yet somehow they’ve all seen the truth behind my motto sooner than I—that living life to the fullest involves living it with your family.

26 khouy’s town

1993

Chou gazes at the new picture Kim has just sent from France. In it, Kim and Loung stand on a beach with blue-gray water lapping behind them. Kim wears a big smile, a brown T-shirt, and blue jeans and looks straight into the camera. Next to him, in her blue shirt and black pants, Loung poses sideways like a model. Chou stares at her full face and long, beautiful hair and swells up with pride. In his letter, Kim tells her about their trip to Monaco and how well Loung is doing in school. Chou’s smile fades a little when she again finds no letter from Loung herself in Kim’s package of medicines and clothes. Carefully, Chou puts the new picture on top of the others and folds the cloth corners over them. She then places them gently in her crate of sarongs and shirts.

“Ready to go?” Pheng asks, and takes the crate from her.

“Yes.” She slides off the bed and drops her feet to the ground. When she stands, her five-month-pregnant stomach pushes out against her shirt.

“The children are already in the truck,” Pheng tells her.

Chou follows Pheng outside to where their old rusted truck sits in the front yard. In the dust-covered truck bed, boxes and crates of their pots, pans, silverware, hammers, hoes, mosquito nets, and clothes are stacked tightly together. In the small spaces left empty, their neighbors busily nudge in bags of rice and dried corn.

“Chou, Pheng, go in health,” a man blesses them, as more friends and villagers gather around the truck.

“Thank you all for your help with packing and moving,” Chou says. In the past week, their neighbors have already helped send Uncle Leang and his family off to a bigger village, and now they are there to see the last Ungs off.

“I pray for your good business, and to keep your children safe and happy,” another neighbor tells them, as others loudly repeat their best wishes and prayers.

“Thank you, thank you.” Chou touches the women’s hands while Pheng and the men finish tying ropes across the truck bed.

“While we’re gone, our good friend here,” Pheng puts his hand on their next-door neighbor’s shoulder, “will watch our land for us. So you all better be careful what you do to our land or there’ll be trouble!” Pheng half jokes. “We hope not to come back, but if we do, we’ll still have a place to live.”

“Pheng, Chou, you’ll always have your land in the village!” one of the villagers yells back as Pheng and Chou climb into the front seat where their three children are waiting.

“Ma-ma.” Two-year-old Chang reaches for her. Chou takes Chang out of her big sister’s arms.

“Let’s go to our big new house!” Pheng announces and the kids cheer him on. As Pheng smoothly shifts the gears, Chou smiles proudly at her self-taught-driver husband. With a push of his right foot, Pheng commands the car forward, its wheels digging up dirt and grass as the villagers wave their good-byes.

Chou stands Chang up as her other kids clamor around her to look out the opened window. As the truck takes them away from Krang Truop, Chou stares back at her hut. She sees her adolescence spent collecting water, chopping wood, preparing meals, and braving Khmer Rouge attacks. By the time the truck reaches the bend in the road, Chou smiles at the memories of her life, their survival, and the births of her children.

Since the first Khmer Rouge raid of their village, Chou had wanted to leave. Uncle Leang, who originally moved the family far away from the growing Bat Deng, had hoped the trees, forests, and their farming skills would keep them safe if the Khmer Rouge were to come back to power. In his mind, the Khmer Rouge killed the city people but let his family live
because they were good farmers. But as the years passed, it seemed less likely that the Khmer Rouge would rule Cambodia again. And while the bigger towns thrived in relative safety, it was the rural villages that continued to suffer from the random raids.

After the first attack, the Khmer Rouge soldiers came back almost every week to steal from them. For Chou, these weekly raids left her anxious, paranoid, fretful, and unable to sleep. After a few months, the Khmer Rouge moved to terrorize another village but, for Chou, the fear they once again instilled in her had stayed. And even when the dogs were quiet through the night, Chou slept badly and dreamed of the soldiers kidnapping her husband and children. When she awoke, she kept her children close to her. Pheng agreed it was time for them to move, but they had no money or land to move to.

Then Meng visited and changed their lives. With the money he gave them, Pheng was able to buy an old truck. For many months, Pheng left the house before sunrise and drove from village to village. Along the way, he stopped whenever he saw people and told them about his taxi service. Since he was the only person with a truck in the surrounding villages, word spread and his business thrived. So every day, he climbed into the front seat alone and by the time he arrived at his destination, his midsize truck was packed body to body with people. After he dropped off his first load of passengers, a second group loaded their rice, chicken, vegetables, corn, and other goods on the truck and headed back to their village, perched on top of their supplies. When they’d saved enough money, Pheng and Uncle Leang pooled their funds to buy a bigger truck. Through the day and into the late night, Pheng drove back and forth until his eyes were too tired to focus and his body too stiff to sit up. Soon, they had extra money to buy an old motorbike.

“Morm is very excited for us to move near her,” Pheng says, breaking Chou’s train of thought. “Now she’ll have everyone nearby—Second Uncle, Second Aunt, and Amah.” With the money Aunt Heng and Eldest Brother sent to Amah, she was able to buy her own piece of land and a little house for her, First Aunt, and her daughter to live in.

“At Amah’s age, she needs her peace and quiet away from all the great-grandchildren.”

“She won’t get much ofthat. How can she, since her place is just one house over from Khouy’s?” Pheng chuckles. Chou laughs thinking about Khouy’s five rambunctious kids.

From the connections he had made with the villagers and farmers from his taxi business, Pheng learned about their farms and what they grew. Then before the harvest season began, when the villagers were too busy with their farms to travel, Chou and Pheng drove from village to village checking out farms of watermelons, pumpkins, and potatoes. If the produce looked good, they negotiated a deal on the spot to buy the entire crop. When the produce was ready, Pheng and Chou hired a few people to help them pick the ripe fruit. While Chou oversaw the workers and picked fruit herself, Pheng sold their products to vendors and delivered them to the markets.

In their partnership, Pheng makes the deals, but it is Chou who holds the money and pays all the workers and vendors. As their business grows, Chou also walks tall and proud because she discovers that even without schooling, she understands numbers and can quickly work them out in her head. In her hands money grows, and after a season people have come to respect her not as Pheng’s wife, but as an excellent accountant.

As Pheng steers their truck around large holes and mounds of dirt in the road, Chou watches the rice fields and green ponds. The sun beats hot rays onto the roof of their truck and warms the children into drowsiness. Soon Hok is asleep against Chou, and Chang breathes softly in her arms. Pheng lowers Eng onto a bag of towels in the middle seat and lifts the child’s legs onto his lap. As Chou’s arms grow tired and the children’s hot bodies make her shirt stick to her sweaty back, she dreams about their new home.

When they arrive at their new wooden house, Aunt Keang, Khouy, and his family are standing in front of it to greet them.

“Second Brother, Sister-in-Law, Aunt Keang,” Chou says.

“Chou.” Morm takes her hand. “Your house is beautiful!”

“Sister-in-Law, come, let’s look at it together.” Chou passes Chang to her husband and walks through the double door into a big room. In the corner, a big dark wood plank bed hovers high off the dirt floor, leaving plenty of room for the children to run around. Next, Chou
checks out the smooth wood that makes up the wall of her and Pheng’s private room. She enters the room to sit on her bed, and then gets up to push open the two windows. When she leaves, she closes her door and giggles.

“Chou, you have another big room up there!” Morm gushes.

Chou quickly climbs the stairs to her open attic. As she stands, she reaches up and touches its walls. “I can put a lot of things up here,” she hollers to Morm.

When she comes back down, Chou passes another door and walks into her kitchen, which is covered only by a tin rolling roof. A round fold-up table stands next to another small plank bed. When she walks into the hut’s backyard, Chou squeals at the sight of a well pump sticking out of the ground. While the men unload the truck, the women fill the hut with smells of cooked rice, roasted garlic, and fried fish. Then the adults sit down on white plastic chairs for dinner while the children eat next to them on the plank bed. After he eats, Chou’s son Hourt wanders over to crawl on Khouy’s lap. Hourt stares at the many strange black markings and dots on Khouy’s arm and tries to rub them off. Khouy also has them all over his back and chest.

“Silly boy,” Khouy laughs. “They’re tattoos. They don’t come off.”

“Why?”

“The ink was put in there by very sharp needles.”

The boy grimaces. “What for?”

“To protect me from the Khmer Rouge’s bullets,” Khouy says.

“Do you still go fight the Khmer Rouge?” Chou’s daughter Eng asks, squirming at the memories of the Khmer Rouge raids.

“Not anymore. In my village I am now the deputy army chief. I have one hundred and twenty men to watch over.” Khouy puffs on his cigarette. “But in my years as a foot soldier, I fought many times with Khmer Rouge.”

“Tell us about how you fought the Khmer Rouge, Papa!” Khouy’s son urges him.

It pains Chou to hear about Khouy’s travel to fight the Khmer Rouge soldiers. When he first joined the army, she knew Khouy told his family little of his battlefield experience because he did not want them to worry.
But worry they did. Each time he left, Chou feared he might die in the jungle, alone, and without his family to ease him in his journey from this world into the next. It caused her much anguish to think how Pa, Ma, Keav, and Geak had died alone, their bodies lost so that she could not give them a proper burial. She prays this will not happen to Khouy. And though Chou left Krang Truop to escape the Khmer Rouge, she also came to Bat Deng to be with her brother. With Meng, Loung, and Kim gone, she cannot bear the thought of losing Khouy, too. Even though she is a woman, wife, and mother of three, the small girl in her still wonders what would happen to her if Khouy died.

“Do you really want to hear?” Khouy asks.

“Yes, tell us, tell us,” the children plead.

As he speaks, Khouy’s voice carries him back into his past. “From 1987 to 1989, when the fighting was at its fiercest, I was often away. One time, I was given barely any notice at all before I was asked to leave.”

The army chief ranked higher than Khouy, though their friendship kept them at the same level outside the battlefields. But neither friendship nor Morm’s pregnancy prevented the chief from sending Khouy into battles to stop the Khmer Rouge incursions into the surrounding villages.

At twenty-eight, he was already a veteran fighter. He knew he could refuse, but he also knew he would go. As much as he hated leaving, he recognized that someone had to fight to rid the country of Khmer Rouge. And as much as he feared being killed or maimed, as a young father he feared the Khmer Rouge returning to power even more.

The next morning, he packed his hammock, water canteen, small tin pot, spoon, ration of rice and dried fish, and an extra uniform in his green military backpack. Then he strapped his pistol to his belt holster. Before he left, he put a smile on his hard face while he hugged his children and said good-bye to his wife.

Five days later, Khouy found himself crawling in the mud of a rice paddy as Khmer Rouge soldiers’ bullets whizzed over his head. He stopped and flattened his cheek into the twigs and dirt. Somewhere ahead of him, a loud explosion tore through the earth and shook the leaves in the trees.