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His face wears an expression full of those mixed-up emotions that only adults must feel, like plaintive, say, or wretched.
How funny, Sothy thinks, that decades after the camps, she lives here in Central California, as a business owner, with her American-born Cambodian daughters who have grown healthy and stubborn, and still, in this new life she has created, her hands have aged into her mother’s.
Throughout her sixteen years of life, her parents’ ability to intuit all aspects of being Khmer, or emphatically not being Khmer, has always amazed and frustrated Tevy. She’d do something as simple as drink a glass of ice water, and her father, from across the room, would bellow, “There were no ice cubes in the genocide!” Then he’d lament, “How did my kids become so not Khmer?” before bursting into rueful laughter.
“Do you remember what Dad said about marriage?” Tevy asks. “He said that, after the camps, people paired up based on their skills. Two people who knew how to cook wouldn’t marry, because that would be, like, a waste. If one person in the marriage cooked, then the other person should know how to sell food. He said marriage is like the show Survivor, where you make alliances in order to live longer. He thought Survivor was actually the most Khmer thing possible, and he would definitely win it, because the genocide was the best training he could’ve got.”
“Well, if Khmer people marry for skills, as Dad says, maybe it means it’s harder for Khmer people to know how to love. Maybe we’re just bad at it—loving, you know—and maybe that’s the man’s problem.”
A promise is a promise, yet, in the end, it is only that.
“Useless big words,” she scoffed. “That is all you learned going to college.” I laughed. It was hard to argue with her.
Throughout my childhood, she would balance the Shop’s books late into the night, her neck craning over greasy, smudgy invoices, with those steady hands running through her hair as if money might tumble from her scalp.
“It’s not awkward,” I said, remembering a time when I was younger, sitting in the same back seat of this same red minivan, and feeling awkward around Paul, his older sister driving fifty when the speed limit was twenty-five. He was only three years older than me, which felt like nothing now that we were both in our twenties; still, I felt giddy to be having sex with the cooler older guy from my youth, who listened to bands like the Mars Volta. If only my closeted, sex-deprived self from high school could see me now, I sometimes thought, before realizing, yet again, how dumb it was to think
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“Ba, you gotta stop using the genocide to win arguments,” I said,
I wonder if the older monks say their old names in their heads. Do they think of themselves as only monks? Maybe when I leave for the army that will happen to me. I’ll stop thinking of myself as one thing, and as part of another. I wonder if that will make me a better or worse person.
“Can you really be a drunk Cambo without blasting Mariah Carey?” one of them shouted.
“Give a bunch of Cambos money,” Bond answered, “and they’re still gonna believe a coup d’état’s coming for us.”
Maybe the younger you are, the more dying seems unexceptional. What’s the difference between birth and death, anyway? Aren’t they just the opening and closing of worlds?
I guess that’s another part of our generational difference: you believe we deserve answers, that there is always some truth to be uncovered.
Her blond hair appeared combative, as if forcing me to register its abundance.
how silly of me to see our pain as situated in time, confined to the past, contained within it.
