Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes

by Chantha Nguon

but he was a son,

not a daughter—almost a different species.

But I have a clear memory of watching him with fascination as he peeled an apple. He did it the French way, peeling toward your body, whereas we Khmers peel away.

Many Cambodians believe that serving your parents is a divine act—“better than building a temple,” as one saying goes.

Prahok is both a poor man’s food and a guilty pleasure of kings.

But it seemed to me that a discrepancy existed between the ideal and its implementation. The equation seemed weighted toward vigorous

work and light on the what-you-need side.

Hunger helps you eat even food that has gone bad. —Vietnamese proverb

Free will is a muscle. It requires exercise.

In that time and place, a young girl had no right to demand explanations. So I learned to be a detective, to discern truth from partial information.

article in the youth newspaper: “A Writer + A Reporter + A Teacher = A Poor Person,”

She had taken care of my father, as a good wife was expected to. But she could also raise her voice when she disagreed with him, a rare act of defiance for a woman of that era.

I believed, and I did not believe. I worried, and I did not worry. I teetered between denial and dread, like a buffalo swept by rapids toward the roar of falling water.

We have a saying in Khmer: “If a father dies, the children eat rice with fish. If a mother dies, the children sleep on a leaf.” It means that when you lose your mother, you lose everything. She is the roof over your head and the rice in your bowl. She is your strength.

I resisted their interrogations by answering in proverbs and slogans.

Recipe: How to Change Cloth into Diamond Ingredients: 1 pampered little girl 2 communist revolutions 2 civil wars 1 genocide Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy French-Catholic-school education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 wholesale extermination. Separate her from home, country, and a reliable source of food. Slowly subtract small luxuries, life savings, and family members, until all are gone.

Shave down childhood dreams for approximately two decades, until only subsistence remains.

Be thrifty with your rice and look after yourself . . . Even if you have so little, you must work hard and try to find more; you cannot just do nothing. —Chbab Proh, the “Rules for Men” From Battambang, we headed

There’s a Khmer proverb about belief and fate: “Kru teay mday tha.” It means, “What your teacher (kru) and your mother (mday) foretell about you will probably come true.”

Does that saying mean that your teacher and your mother know you best, and can guess where your

character will lead you? Or does it mean that because you trust them, you’ll tend to ...

focused my mind: I must work hard to get out of here and be sure I never return.

It was a small way for me to show the girls I cared for them, in that tragic place with so little to hope for.

Run away from a tiger and face a crocodile. —Thai proverb

That irony makes me laugh. Don’t people say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Could be. Or it may be that what tries to kill you does harm that can never be fully repaired. Perhaps they are the same thing: the strength and the damage.

So I wonder, without answer, which one is a greater strength: feeling too much, or allowing yourself no feeling at all?

A lost mother’s lessons can nourish a daughter for a lifetime.

A wound can become a source of power. Pain into strength.

Big chickens and small chickens are alike: They all eat grain. —Khmer proverb

Mental illness was rampant in the camps, and with it came anger, resentment, and sometimes, violence.

Unrelenting trauma. Overcrowding. Boredom. Helpless dependency. It’s a recipe for anxiety, depression, and far worse ailments of the mind.

I was happy to think that maybe the ghost of my maternal grandmother lived in me, guiding my hands in their healing work.

Charity gets tiring. It was inevitable that the doors would close eventually.

To give our days meaning and stay sane, we invested in our lives as best we could—in our case, with nursing work and English classes; with friendships and laughter; with dreams and books and songs.

When you must flee and can carry only one thing, what will it be? What single seed from your old life will be the most useful in helping you sow a new one?

But one man’s noxious weed is another man’s stir-fry—or a refugee’s survival strategy.

The tiger depends on the forest. The forest depends on the tiger. —Khmer proverb

When you have nothing, weakness can destroy you.

No one would carry me out of the jungle. I would have to carry myself.

And with each moment I spent in the presence of their suffering, I felt my own wounds healing.

Survival mentality cannot see further than today’s meal.

Why plant a tree, if you will be punished for

harvesting the fruit—or if you will never live to see it reach maturity?

I call this Instant Noodles Mentality: a zero-sum game of plunder and temporary betterment, every person for himself.

Selfishness was an infection that resisted treatment.

Hồ Chí Minh once said that it takes ten years to grow a tree and a hundred years to grow a person.

But the past never goes away. The fear and pain are still there, buried in our brains like mines. It is better to defuse them than to leave them entombed, quietly waiting for a single misstep.

You don’t have to cut a tree down to get at the fruit. —Khmer proverb

They were expected to live by the old Chbab Srey code and depend on men to survive. That strategy often failed.

Neary Rotanak—“Women Are Diamonds”—focused on women’s literacy.