Uncle wrote, saying that he spoke for himself and his wife both, and they were asking us to come to join them in Nebraska, in business paradise, where there were no gangs and where hard work was rewarded. He said that family was family and should stick together. Would we come to help run the Family Business?
Ma didn’t hesitate before agreeing. She understood quite well that there was no point waiting around for our miracle to turn sour, to melt in a thunderstorm and break our hearts. It was time for us to move. She’d known. She’d dreamed everything.
And so we packed up our apartment, Ma said good-bye to her boss at the restaurant where she gutted fish and chickens, and we stuffed everything we owned into Hefty bags and plastic milk crates we found behind the 7-Eleven. We climbed into Ma’s dusty dented Ford that used to belong to One Arm and headed north to Nebraska.
We left quickly, not because we were naive or simple or foolhardy, any of these things people might want to accuse us of being, but rather because we understood about miracles all right, how their shelf life was as long as a butterfly’s summer.
CHAPTER 3
Last Chance, Nebraska
The highway stretched before us like the long, narrow blade of a knife. The sky touched the earth in every direction, empty even of clouds, as blank as a sheet of paper. The air was too hot for color. Sourdi hummed along with the radio for hours, and then after a while she stopped. I couldn’t remember when exactly; at some point, I realized she was silent, that was all.
For hours there were no towns, no buildings visible from the highway save the occasional abandoned barn, faded and derelict. Just the dark earth, the corn and wheat and soybeans just beginning to grow, a thick green carpet swaying in the wind. In the distance, hidden behind a knot of trees, I imagined there were farmhouses, people, dogs, but on the highway, this was only a guess.
Sourdi and Ma sat in the front seat, the television and the tape player balanced between them. My younger brother and sisters stretched out in the back, leaning against me, kicking, scratching, farting. They’d fussed nonstop for sixteen hours straight before they, too, at last had fallen into a deep slumber. Hefty bags of clothes lay on the floor. My feet rested on top of a crate of dishes, pushing my knees up uncomfortably into my chest. It hadn’t seemed as though we owned many things when they were spread about the apartment, but now with everything we owned packed into the car, it seemed we had too much.
Heat waves shimmered above the highway, forming imaginary lakes, pools of cool blue water that disappeared just as our tires would have splashed across the banks. If I squinted, the jade fields on either side of the highway appeared like water, spreading all around us, to the very edges of the flat earth, green as the ocean before a storm, simmering. Then it seemed as though we were driving across a narrow bridge, trying to cross the entire ocean before the weather turned and the green waves began to lap at the sides of the road, reaching higher, swirling around our tires, sweeping us away. The sea was like that, deceptive. It could hide its anger until it was too late. I didn’t know yet about the fields.
I turned away from the window and stared at the back of my mother’s head, observing the way her short black hair curled away from her sweaty brown neck. I couldn’t see her face in the rear-view mirror, couldn’t tell if she looked sad or determined or excited still, if she was squinting behind her dime-store sunglasses, suspiciously surveying this flat empty land, or if she had a faraway look in her eyes, as she imagined our miraculous future in Business Paradise, the Family Reunited, our Saviors stalwart and kind.
Her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, her knuckles glowing yellow through her skin. She held the steering wheel as though she thought it might try to jerk free of her hands and take us in another direction.
“Tell us about Auntie again, Ma,” I asked from the back seat. “Tell us how rich she was.”
“My sister, ha!” Ma laughed, a sound like a bark escaping from her throat. “She lived her life as though she were living in a book.” Ma shook her head. “She always had to have the best.”
Then she told us all the arrogant, impractical, glamorous things her oldest sister had done: the marriage party that had lasted three days, the three-story house with servants on every floor, the shiny black car and the man who wore white gloves just to drive it, the French accent Auntie had adopted even though she couldn’t speak a word, the high heels, the makeup, the perfume imported from Paris.
“I said to her, ‘Why do you need to smell like that? As soon as you walk on the sidewalk, you’ll smell like everyone else, like food, like sweat, like this city. Why waste your money? Who’ll notice the difference?’ And my sister said to me, ‘I’ll know the difference, that’s who! I’ll know.’ ” Ma clicked her tongue against her teeth. “My sister was crazy.”
For Chinese New Year, Uncle paid a man to come to the house and light strings of red firecrackers outside the door while another man played on a horn and a third man beat two cymbals together to drive away evil spirits. Uncle didn’t believe in evil spirits—he was an educated man—but he’d wanted his children to see the traditional Chinese celebration.
In those days, before the Khmer Rouge won the civil war, all the different ethnic groups—the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cham Muslims, Cambodians from north and south, the French, anyone—could intermingle in the cities. Many intermarried. Only when the Communists took over did this kind of mixing become taboo, and a mixed background became an almost certain death sentence. We had to lie then. Pretend we weren’t mixed people, weren’t what the Communists called “new people” because they considered us alien to traditional culture, even though Chinese had been in Cambodia for more than five hundred years, and Cambodian culture had always been mixed.
Ma had married a non-Chinese. Maybe that’s what saved us. Maybe nothing but dumb luck saved us.
Before Ma was married, she used to go to her eldest sister’s house for the New Year to receive her red envelope, and she’d seen the firecracker man and the musicians at work. She’d pressed her ears closed with her fingers, but still the sound like thunder exploding from a tin drum found its way into her skull. Afterwards the red paper wrappers lay on the sidewalk in pointed mounds, tall as her waist. Three old women with bamboo brooms had had to sweep the street for half a day to clear the red away.
Ma said her sister had spoiled all her children. They behaved like members of the royal family. If they ran about the house and broke something or did something wrong at school or caused any kind of problem at all, the servants were punished instead of them. Once, when Ma had let Sourdi go over to their house to play, the daughter had pulled Sourdi’s hair and made her cry, but it was the maid whom Auntie criticized. “You can’t even watch two little girls?” she’d said, and the maid had bowed her head and apologized.
“My sister,” Ma sighed, “she really knew how to live.”
“We’re all going to stay, aren’t we, Ma? All of us?” Sourdi asked.
“That’s what the letter said. All of us.”
Sourdi leaned her head on her arm, letting the wind whip her hair about her head like the tail of a kite in a storm. She didn’t hum anymore.
“Do you remember Uncle and Auntie, Nea?” Ma asked.
“Me? No.”
“Not one bit? You don’t remember anything I told you?”
“Why