The Rent Collector

by Camron Wright

“Life will not always be so hard or cruel. Our difficulties are but a moment.”

Crafting a plan is easy. Taking action will always prove to be the more difficult path.

“Teaching someone to read, Sang Ly, is very mechanical. It is like picking trash—straightforward, simple rules—you just follow the motions instinctively as your brain directs.” “Okay, I understand that.” “But literature is unique. To understand literature, you read it with your head, but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together—and, quite frankly, they often don’t get along.”

“Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside—and even if you find them all, if you don’t enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment. There was a playwright named Heller, American, I believe, who summed it up this way. He said, ‘They knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.’ ”

“Fight ignorance with words. Fight evil with your knife.

“Because I distance myself from heaven and then complain that heaven is distant.

there are no words harsh enough, no paragraphs wide enough, no books deep enough to convey the weight of true human sorrow.

The Old Woman and the Elephant by Sopeap Sin The old woman was already weary when the Khmer Rouge soldiers marched her to the work camp at Khum Speu—tired bones, tired mind, tired heart. She didn’t expect to survive long, since others around her—younger, stronger, wiser—were killed or died almost every day. “The educated,” the new leaders of the regime announced, “are a stain on the true worker. Cities are evil. Education and learning is useless and selfish. Money and commerce are corrupt. The strength of a nation is in the working man—not the parasites who live off the laborer! Plant rice for the nation to prosper! Only those working in the fields will eat!” They told her over and over again that she was irrelevant, nothing better than a single grain of rice in a larger communal bowl. “Remove one grain of rice and the bowl is just as full,” they would drill into her. “To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.” It was a holocaust of life but also of common sense and reason. As a child, the old woman had suffered from nightmares—fiendish, gruesome dreams that had caused her to wake screaming, drenched in sweat and fear. However, no matter how awful they seemed at the time, she always took comfort in a truth her grandmother repeated, “Fear will flee. You will always wake up when morning comes.” In the camp, fear stayed. Everything was backwards there, topsy-turvy, upside down. Truth no longer applied, since the old woman’s worst nightmares now played out during t...