Tiger Girl (24 page)

“I saw Auntie in America,” I said slowly, my heart pounding in my ears. The past as I remembered it was a minefield—growing up, when anyone would mention something about the past, I never knew if it would make the adults around me furious or sad, if they'd fall into a rage, fight with each other or me, or if they'd sink into despair, refusing to speak at all. Their moods were terrifying. I turned to Arun, tried to focus, think of something innocuous to say. I decided to start with the simplest facts. “For nine months or so, when I was eleven, we all lived together in one house in Nebraska. We'd been living in Texas, Ma and Sourdi and me and the little kids. The Baptists sponsored us. But then Uncle found us through the Red Cross, and he invited us to come live with them. Run ‘the family business' together. He'd borrowed a lot of money and bought a Chinese restaurant in this small town in Nebraska. The Silver Palace. He wanted us to come work there.”

Both Arun and Paul turned to me, their faces eager and open as children's.

I swallowed. Looking at them, I knew I couldn't tell them about the damaged woman I had met, scarred inside and out. I took a deep breath. “I remember Auntie would stand in the doorway, watching the wind blow in the fields. ‘The wind here is uncivilized,' she would say. She couldn't speak much English, but if the customers couldn't understand her, she'd speak to them in French and say the problem was that their French was terrible.”

Arun laughed. “Yes, yes! She was so elegant! That sounds just like her.”

“She used to watch the soap operas every afternoon. She repeated the lines after all the characters. She said it was for our benefit, so we'd lose our ‘Texas accents.' Once she caught me throwing rocks at some white boys who'd tried to attack me and the little kids in the parking lot. She was horrified. She said I was becoming an American.”

All my memories made Paul and Arun laugh. At the time, when I was eleven, none of this had seemed funny. I'd found Auntie to be a harsh and bitter person, but now, in the retelling, she seemed almost heroic, fighting against the daily humiliations she faced.

“She had a picture of the family in a silver frame. Black and white. A formal portrait taken in a photography studio in Phnom Penh. She'd carried it folded up in the hem of her clothes, hiding it from the soldiers so they wouldn't know how rich she'd once been. She looked like a movie star. Her face was round and white like the moon. She looked very proud. You were in the photo, too, Paul. You stood right by Uncle.”

Paul's eyes were wet. Arun put a hand on his shoulder.

“Do you have the photo?” Paul asked.

“No. Auntie kept it. I looked in Uncle's apartment, but I didn't see it there either.”

Paul nodded, disappointed.

That evening, after we left the hospital and said good-bye to Anita, Paul drove us to a video store and checked out some action movies to take our minds off our troubles. Going back to the apartment without Uncle, knowing he was lying in his thin cotton gown in his cold, white hospital room, made us feel too sad and lonely to face his empty apartment for the night. We got Jiffy Pop popcorn and stopped by a liquor store and bought a couple of six-packs of beer. Paul tipped the haggard-looking man in the Santa suit ringing a bell over a red kettle on the sidewalk underneath the Budweiser sign.

Driving up and down El Camino Boulevard, we compared the garish Christmas lights that blinked on the storefronts in the shapes of flying reindeer and sleighs and obese snowmen, their colors reflected in the puddles on the sidewalks and asphalt. The rain had finally stopped, but the wind buffeted the car, gusting so that the palm trees waved wildly, their dark leaves silhouetted against the sky, the bright moonlight falling to earth like snow.

Anita had said she'd call the Kasim sisters so they wouldn't come in to work. They could call the girls they were training. We'd decided not to open the donut shop tomorrow, not without Uncle. It seemed inappropriate. As though we were going on without him, when he was the only reason all of us were here in the first place.

That night after we'd watched all three movies, each noisier and more mindless than the last, Paul and Arun fell asleep on the floor in front of the TV, but I couldn't sleep. I paced quietly from one end of the small apartment to the other, imagining them living here with Uncle. If he could still accept them
when he wasn't medicated, he'd have two sons to help him and keep him company. Or maybe a son and a daughter, eventually. There was even less reason for me to stay. And I didn't feel as though I belonged.

I didn't remember Uncle as my father, the way Paul did. I didn't even remember the things Arun had shared. Arun loved those memories, but they were someone else's stories to me, nothing that I could cherish, not now, not after everything that had happened.

My family was in Nebraska, my mother the woman who had raised me as far back as I could remember, my siblings the sisters and brother I'd lived in the work camps with and crossed the minefields with and survived in the refugee camps alongside. The family I came to America with had supplanted any memory of the family I was born into. Instead my head was crowded with memories of the six of us—Ma and Sourdi, Sam and the twins and me—working and laughing and fighting together, day in, day out. I knew then that I should go home in time for the New Year. I'd make sure Uncle was okay, but I could see clearly now that what I had been seeking wasn't here in California.

What I needed wasn't the past. I didn't yearn for all the old stories anymore, not of my family and all we lost in the war, not even the ones Ma liked to tell of magical dancing girls and goddesses and all the tragic humans who tried to defy the gods and died. I didn't want to hear about the poor fools who tried to ride a crocodile and drowned, who bowed before tigers and were eaten, who ran away into a forest and turned into birds. I wanted a new story. The girl who tamed a tiger and learned how to roar. The daughter who rode a bus and reunited her grateful relatives. The student who went back to college and got her degree with honors.

From the window of Uncle's kitchen, I watched the sun rise, the edges of the sky turning pink like the inside of a shell.
The streetlights switched off, and the world was revealed, as though the night were a great tide ebbing, the inky water receding as the palm trees caught the light and glowed gold in the sun. The fronds swayed gently as sparrows darted across the sky, welcoming the morning. I slid open the window and dipped my hand into the sunlight, felt the warmth settle on my palm like a hummingbird. Leaning my elbows on the sill, I stuck my head out into the light and let the wind fill my mouth. “Roar,” I said. “ROAR!”

The tiger depends upon the forest; the forest depends upon the tiger
.

—traditional Cambodian proverb

After Uncle was released from the hospital, everyone divided the work at the donut shop. Sitan said he could help with the baking at night, and Anita decided to train some more girls to work the front counter. For the first time, Uncle's business was actually being run in a way that would make it profitable, instead of just serving as a penance for his guilt-wracked soul. Paul tried to talk Uncle into expanding, opening something upscale in a larger city, but before he would consider it, Uncle said there was something more urgent that he needed to do first. He wanted Paul and me to visit Auntie's grave.

She was buried in a mausoleum in a cemetery on the outskirts of town. “It's pretty. Your mother liked it,” Uncle told Paul in the car.

“Auntie picked out her cemetery?” I exclaimed.

“For both of us,” Uncle said. “She knew her health was poor.”

We drove through the tall black wrought-iron gates and circled past row after row of grave markers, the bright sunlight incongruously cheerful. The far side of the cemetery had fancy crosses and giant pavilions, but the area we drove toward was more modest, with flat markers, easy to mow over, and a copse of young cypress trees casting thin tendrils of shade over the graves. We parked on the side of the asphalt and walked across the browning winter lawn toward the stone mausoleum. I tried
to read the names on the graves as we passed. There was an Armacost, a Miller, a Garcia, a Lopez, then a Lee and some Chinese symbols, a Mozelewski, and a Mueller. A young girl's grave was marked with pinwheels and a teddy bear. A woman who'd died in her teens decades ago had fresh yellow roses.

Inside the mausoleum, Uncle led us down the center aisle, then turned left and stopped three spaces in. He pointed, and I saw Auntie's name in gold calligraphy: Sopheam Chhouen, written in American style, with her personal name first and Uncle's surname. Uncle's name was next to hers, the year of his death left blank. Khmer script ran beneath the English, looking elegant and final.

The black-and-white photograph of the family had been set into the marble tablet alongside her name in English and Khmer. I was shocked to see it again. I peered closer. The last time I'd seen it was in Auntie's room, and I had barely glanced at the little girl in the picture. Now I stared at myself. My expression was exactly like Auntie's, our lips set in identical half-curls, slightly mocking, a little haughty. When I was eleven, I hadn't recognized these people, my family, they'd seemed like alien creatures, but now I could clearly see that Uncle and Paul had the same cheekbones, the same long noses and straight lips. Their younger selves stared back at us calmly.

Paul stood before the photograph, tracing the outline of Auntie's face with his finger. Then he stepped back, bowed three times before the placard, and knelt on the cold floor.

Uncle put his hand on Paul's shoulder. “I have found our son,” Uncle addressed the tomb in Khmer. “I promised you I would find him and I have. Our eldest son, Ponleu. I hope that you can rest now. I will take care of your son until I am reunited with you. I am sorry that I failed you in life, but I have fulfilled your last wish. We will come to your grave every year. We will
bring you incense and sweet fruit, we will never forget you.” Then Uncle bowed three times before her grave as well.

I followed him, but I didn't know what to say aloud. I closed my eyes, and thought, “I'm sorry I disappointed you, Mother.” But that seemed false and hypocritical. To whom was I actually praying? And why say things I didn't mean? I touched the placard, ran my fingers along the gold lettering. Then I stepped back and whispered, “You were very brave. I'll always remember you.” And I bowed.

When I turned around again, I thought Uncle was crying. His eyes were shut tightly, but when he opened them again, I saw they were bright and shining. Uncle did not look sad so much as hopeful.

Before we left, Uncle pressed his hand to the picture embossed on the marble and stroked the photograph gently.

As we left the mausoleum, blinking in the sunlight, the world unnaturally bright and calm, Paul stepped away. His face was flushed, his emotions still turbulent. He said he had to make a call, he'd seen a pay phone by the front gate. I assumed he wanted to talk to Arun. Clearly he needed to share his thoughts with someone he knew and trusted. That wouldn't be Uncle or me. We might be family, but we were all essentially strangers.

Uncle and I walked back to the car alone and waited, leaning against the Toyota.

Uncle stared at me. “You look so much like her,” he said, but not as sadly as he had when I'd first arrived in California. He nodded. “It's good. She would have been so proud to see you like this. The first member of the family to go to college in America. A beautiful young woman.”

I didn't know what to say. “Thank you.”

Then Uncle paused. “There's something I should tell you.”

My heartbeat quickened. I'd been telling myself all this time that this was exactly what I'd wanted to hear, what I'd wanted him to acknowledge, but now, in this moment, I felt afraid. I didn't know why. My heart pounded in my chest, drummed in my ears. My body broke out in a cold sweat. I realized then that I was afraid he'd ask me to stay in California with him and Paul, and, truth be told, I didn't want to. I wanted to go back home to see my family, the family I knew and loved, the family who had raised me. And, quickly, I tried to brace myself, tried to think of a polite way to tell him no without hurting his heart.

“I already know,” I said quickly. “Sourdi told me. I know you are my father, I know Auntie is my mother. She told me before I went to college.”

“I wasn't sure until the hospital.” And I knew then that he'd heard me call myself Channary. Uncle swallowed. “Your mother was so happy to find you alive.” I must have looked surprised or skeptical, despite my efforts to keep my face blank, to show nothing. I was too nervous, I didn't trust my emotions. But now Uncle put his hand on my shoulder. “She could see you were smart. We could all see that. When we left for California, she wanted to take you with us, but I thought we should wait. Wait until you were older. She was ill, and you were so happy where you were. You were doing so well. How could we look after a child? We argued about this. Maybe I was wrong.”

“No, you were right.” I opened my mouth, but I didn't know if the words I was thinking actually came out. I didn't know if I could actually say what I was feeling.

Uncle rubbed his face with his hand, and I thought he would cry again, but he remained calm. “Your mother was very proud of you.”

“It's Ma she didn't like,” I said. Even I heard the words come flying out this time.

Uncle looked at me, startled.

“That's what Ma said.”

“Sometimes it's hard between sisters. Your mother was used to being the best, the most successful, the most beautiful. It was hard for her.”

I didn't tell him I knew about his feelings for Ma, that they had fallen in love, or thought they had, at least. They had broken Auntie's heart, what was left of it. It didn't matter anymore. Somehow facing him, hearing his confession, I no longer felt burdened by the old worries, the old rivalries and dramas in the family. I had feared this moment, confronting Uncle, and now here it was passing by, already becoming a story I might tell to someone else someday. Maybe Sourdi, maybe a friend, maybe my own daughter one day. The moment my father admitted I was his daughter. The moment I realized I didn't need anything more from him.