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her hands went from twisting dough to picking rice in order to serve the Communist ideals of a genocidal regime. 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.
most Khmer people always known, deep down, that they’re Khmer? Are there feelings Khmer people experience that others don’t?
Being Khmer, as far as Tevy can tell, can’t be reduced to the brown skin, black hair, and prominent cheekbones that she shares with her mother and sister.
Tevy has recognized nothing she has ever done as being notably Khmer. And now that she’s old enough to disavow her lying cheater of a father, Tevy feels completely detached from what she was apparently born as.
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.”
Tevy wonders if her mother has ever loved someone romantically, if her mother is even capable of reaching beyond the realm of survival, if her mother has ever been granted any freedom from worry, and if her mother’s present carries the ability to dilate, for even a brief moment, into its own plane of suspended existence, separate from past or future. Kayley, on the other hand, wonders if her mother misses her father, and, if not, whether this means that Kayley’s own feelings of gloom, of isolation, of longing, are less valid than she believes. She wonders if the violent chasm between her
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“What’s the difference between a Chinese family living in Cambodia and a Khmer family living in Cambodia?” Tevy asks. “Aren’t they both still Cambodian? If they both speak Khmer, if they both survived the same experiences, if they both do the same things, wouldn’t that make a Chinese family living in Cambodia somewhat Cambodian?”
This man, they realize, didn’t mean much at all to them, lent no greater significance to their pain. They can hardly believe they’ve wasted so much time wondering about him. Yes, they think, we know this man. We’ve carried him our whole lives.
semiracist teachers, who simultaneously thought we were enterprising hoodlums and math nerds that no speak Engrish right, on whether wearing tees big enough to cover our asses was as dope as we hoped.
generational ethics of badminton.
“Badminton is a balancing act. You need both strength and grace. You need to smash the birdie with just the flick of your wrist. None of that tennis nonsense of swinging with your whole stupid arm.
we didn’t agree. It was hard to do well in school, especially as a Cambo. And weren’t we supposed to aspire to the status of Justin’s family? Weren’t we supposed to attend college and become pharmacists? Wasn’t that what our parents had been working for? Why our ancestors had freaking died?
whenever we prioritized our homework over the
bigger and better shit, like college degrees and Costco bulk food, you’ll swear, on the graves of all those murdered Cambos, on every cupping bruise your mom self-inflicts to rid her flesh of trauma, we promise you’ll swear that the stench of raw fish, and raw everything else, never got the memo to quit and relax.
incomprehensible intertwined with what made me feel so comfortable. I’d lived with misunderstanding for so long, I’d stopped even viewing it as bad. It was just there, embedded in everything I loved.
The only time I took the idea of kids seriously was when I thought about everyone who had died, two million points of connection reincarnated into the abyss, how young Cambos like me should repopulate the world with more Cambos, especially those with fancy college degrees, whose kids could be legacy admits.
the future appeared so precarious, the way a tradition like this could depend on a flimsy plastic.
Cambos like us retained our Camboness mostly through our food. Egg rolls stirring up portals back to the homeland, but just in your mouth,
“Without gossip,” she said, “how do you know not to respect a man with a Rolex?”
his parents had conceived him to work on a conveyor belt of nonsensical family issues.
And people were engrossed, even the FAMOUS SINGER. Recovering drug addict or not, Marlon was the FUN COUSIN.
“It’s weird,” Marlon said. “I’ve been back at home, you know, and everything’s reversed from when we grew up. Dad makes tons of money now. Mom’s healthy and she’s hella extra about making sure I don’t relapse. She cooks, like, every day. She does my laundry, and I keep telling
They imagined a future severed from their past mistakes, the history they inherited, a world in which—with no questions asked, no hesitation felt—they completed the simple actions they thought, discussed, and dreamed.
a white predator of Asian women. “It needs to be said!” I shouted, as half of a gay kickball team
everything that was deemed by the social learning department, which was hilariously Caucasian, as “fundamental yet appropriate.”
When my former classmate began reciting the first sentence of The Human Condition, I muttered something about needing ketamine to disassociate from his very existence, then returned
he looked young the way older gay men do when they hit the gym twice a day, seven days a week, with monomaniacal drive.
I wanted my students to understand the doomed nature of Ahab’s hunt for Moby Dick, the profound calm of Ishmael’s aimless wandering, the difference between having “purpose,” like Ahab, and finding “meaning,” like Ishmael. I thought my students should learn the best ways to be lost.
had the perverse desire to test the limits of his optimism.
complete confidence that donning a growth mindset was undeniably a virtue. My sister could go on and on about her life plan—MBA from Wharton, Forbes 30 under 30, three
30 percent of Cambodian Americans, a statistic that she readily cited in all her job interviews, making sure to note that it was more than twice the national rate. As for the goals she projected for my future,
