“Don’t talk nonsense. Give me some paper.” Ma sat down at the kitchen table as Sourdi carefully tore a sheet of paper from her notebook (Language Arts).
Her tongue pressed against her teeth, Ma broke the lead on her first pencil from pushing too hard. She switched to a Bic pen, but each time she placed it against the paper, the sheet ripped, again and again, line after line. Ma’s hands shook as she tore a new sheet from Sourdi’s notebook. She smoothed it against the table top, licking her lips, as she held the pen over the page. While we stood in a ring around her, holding our breath, she put the pen to the paper very lightly and wrote:
“Dearest Older Sister, dear Older Brother . . . ” she wrote politely, repeating the words as she traced their outlines in her most beautiful cursive.
She didn’t tell them that Pa was dead, or about all the jobs she’d had, about the shooting we’d witnessed or how all her money had been stolen. She wrote only happy news. Grateful words. Loving phrases.
Ma finished her letter, said a prayer to the Buddha, then sealed it.
“I can mail it for you, Ma,” Sourdi said, frowning still.
“I’ll mail it tomorrow before I go to work,” Ma said, her tone so casual, it made my stomach hurt with fear. She talked of the letter as though it were a bill. As though it were nothing special. But I could see in her face that she was as anxious and scared as Sourdi.
I bit all my fingernails off until even my thumbs were bleeding.
That night, I lay beside Sourdi on our mattress and whispered so we wouldn’t wake Ma.
“Do you remember them? Uncle and Auntie?”
“You don’t remember them at all?” Sourdi squinted at me in the dark.
“How could I remember them? I was too young.”
Sourdi licked her lips. “I remember them all right.”
She said Uncle had been a prosperous man, an engineer who had worked for the government. He and Auntie had lived in a large house with three stories and many servants in central Phnom Penh, the capital city. He’d had a car and a driver and his children had rooms filled with toys. Auntie had worn nothing but silk dresses and high heels, just like the foreign ladies whose husbands were diplomats or businessmen or else drug lords in the city.
“What were our cousins like? How old are they now? Will we meet them?” I asked, but Sourdi remembered other things.
She said Uncle’s boss was implicated in a plot to overthrow the president, Lon Nol, who was very paranoid. Lon Nol was suspicious of everyone in his own government. He understood how subordinates could turn on you. He himself had come to power after he’d staged a plot to overthrow the last chief of state, Prince Sihanouk. Now Lon Nol had Uncle’s boss arrested. Soldiers escorted him from his office, guns to his back. No one expected to see him alive again.
Sourdi said a neighbor had come riding back home on his Vespa just to tell Ma and Auntie what had happened. They all had assumed Uncle would be arrested, too, maybe not immediately, but sooner rather than later. Ma and Auntie went to the temple to pray. They didn’t trust anyone, not even the servants, so Sourdi had babysat all the children.
But fortunately, Uncle hadn’t gone to the office that day. Maybe he’d been feeling under the weather. Maybe it had been Auntie who was not feeling well. She was often sick, Sourdi said, mysterious ailments that kept her bedridden for weeks on end. Anyway, something had delayed Uncle so that he was not at the office to see the soldiers drag his boss away, upending file cabinets and desks, destroying typewriters and terrifying the secretaries, because the soldiers had no real idea how to investigate a crime—they only knew how to terrify the accused. Uncle heard about it later from a friend who had heard from someone who was there but who had been too lowly to be arrested at the time. When Ma and Auntie returned from the temple, Uncle was already with Sourdi, saying goodbye to the children. He said he had to leave that night before the soldiers came for him, too.
“Where did he go? To America?”
Sourdi shook her head. “I always thought he went to Thailand. Or maybe Singapore. He had cousins there. I overheard Ma and Auntie talking once. But he was already gone when the Khmer Rouge came. Ma said he’d always been a lucky man. Some people have luck, some people don’t.”
I nodded then as though I understood. I had more questions, but Sourdi wanted to sleep and turned away from me. Lying in the dark, listening to the jangling fan, the humming fridge, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine my grand, rich, wonderful uncle. He was tall, I decided. And handsome, like a Hong Kong movie star. When he arrived in East Dallas for us, I figured he’d come with a suitcase full of silk dresses just our sizes, and new Barbies, because I had wanted a new Barbie ever since Sam set my last one on fire, and I would recognize him immediately. “Uncle, you’ve come back!” I’d cry out, placing my palms together before my face in a gesture called the sompeah, like the old people did in the Buddhist temple we visited once when Ma didn’t have to work one weekend.
In the weeks that passed after we had received the letter, I waited eagerly for Uncle to arrive at our apartment in a gleaming black Mercedes, his gloved chauffeur at the wheel, just as Sourdi had described. But a full month passed and our savior uncle was still just a name on an envelope, a filmy sheet of spidery handwriting, hardly more real than a memory or a dream.
And then, the next part of our miracle.
Another envelope arrived. The same spidery handwriting looping across the paper. Ma’s hands shook so much that she handed the envelope to Sourdi, who opened it carefully, with the edge of a knife inserted just beneath the fold. She sliced the paper delicately as tissue. Then my sister placed the letter on the table before Ma, who held her fluttering hands pressed tightly together in her lap.
“We received your letter,” Ma read aloud. “We received your letter,” she repeated. She put her hands across her eyes as though there were nothing more to read. “We received your letter.”
Ma spoke so quickly as she read aloud in Khmer, I could barely follow. Sourdi had to translate. (I didn’t want to admit, I was forgetting words, or maybe Ma was speaking words I’d never learned.) In addition to Uncle, Ma’s oldest sister—her only living sister, our only living Auntie—was in Nebraska now, she and her husband. They’d just opened a Chinese restaurant that spring. They were well.
Ma laughed then, laughed until she cried and then started laughing all over again.
“A Chinese restaurant is like a bank,” Ma said, waving the letter in the air like a winning lottery ticket. “My father used to say that. ‘If you work in a restaurant, you’re just a teller, but if you own the restaurant, you own the bank.”
“Did your father own a restaurant?” I asked.
“Of course not! My father was a teacher. You don’t remember your own grandfather.” Ma shook her head, but with the miracle letter in her hand, it was hard for her to remain angry, even at me. “My father’s father owned a restaurant,” Ma said, and then she laughed some more.
“Back home,” Ma said, meaning in Phnom Penh, before the war, “all the families who owned the big Chinese restaurants were wealthy. They could afford to send their children to school in France. The men had enough money to keep several wives, and even the first wives had lovers. It’s true. I saw them with my own eyes.”
“You saw their lovers?” I asked, wide-eyed.
“No. I saw their restaurants. And they were always busy, night and day. They made so much money, there were guards at every door.” Ma sighed, thinking about the past. And I sighed, too, pretending to remember.
“Do they want to see us?” asked Sourdi, eyes wide.
“Of course they do! We’re family.”
“All of us? Or just, you know, some of us?”