World and Town (14 page)

“Oh, Josh,” she says. “You’re not so bad.”

“As best you remember, you mean.”

She tries to think what to say—still improvising with Josh, after all these years. Still feeling her way. “I do understand that coming home involves travel.”

“Getting on an airplane, you mean.”

Is that what she means?

“I’ll come soon,” he continues. “I know it’s been over a year—”

“You’re welcome anytime, Josh.” Hattie doesn’t mean to cut him off, but maybe she has? And is that
stonewalling?
“Anyway, good luck with your dinner.”

“It’s time for me to get married, you mean.”

“I mean, don’t drool and enjoy your food. If you like her.”

“I like her.”

Ah.

“Then, go. Live,” she says.

“Don’t waste time, you mean.”

She sighs. “I mean, live.” She stands back up and opens a window; outside, a half a dozen butterflies have crammed themselves into a nook between some rocks. “I mean, try and listen to your mother.”

“You mean, the unlived life is not worth living.”

She laughs. “Exactly! You remember! What Lee used to say.”

“I thought it was what you used to say.”

“No, no.” Misattribution—the most common error of the memory. “It was Lee. Lee used to say that.”

“Lee was great.”

“She was. Lee was great.”

She reaches down to pet Cato and Reveille at the same time, one with each hand.

H
attie does not visit the Chhungs for a week. Thinking to invite Sophy to the farmers’ market again, though, Hattie finally tromps down their way, through the ferns. Which are, of course, pushing up everywhere now; the hillside’s a veritable sea of curls, some of which will produce a trillion spores in their lifetime. As Hattie used to tell her kids in school, ferns are prolific. She’ll have to take the same route repeatedly if she wants to have a path—encourage Sophy to take it, too.

That is, if there’s going to be visiting.

The daughter you always wanted
.

Why would they have moved to Riverlake if they were thriving?

Well, either way she’s going to pick some fiddleheads to steam up. In the meanwhile, there’s her tribute of cookies to present, and her compliments to pay on the pit. She produces, too, a new kind of insect repellent—a local product with a pen-and-ink mosquito on its label. Chhung nods in thanks, smiling and smoking.

“You speak Chi-nee,” he says abruptly.

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

“Grew up in Chi-nah.”

“Yes. I grew up in China.”

“Speak Chi-nee like English. Good.”

She laughs. “Once upon a time I spoke better Chinese than English. But yes. Now I speak both equally poorly.” She waves at Gift and Sophy.

“My grandparents Chi-nee. Come from Chi-nah. My father speak—Teochew dialect. But me, no …” He waves his free hand in front of his face.

Hattie stops; but of course. The oval face, the pale skin. How could she not have seen this? “Your grandparents were from China?”

“From Chi-nah.” He holds up four fingers, all with Band-Aids; one has enough curve to qualify as a bandy leg if it were a leg. “All from Chi-nah.”

“All four of your grandparents were from China. That makes you Chinese Cambodian, right? Overseas Chinese?”

He nods, smiling.

“Like me, sort of.” She almost never thinks of herself as “overseas Chinese”—who knows what she is, or
what she’s made of
, either—but never mind. It’s a helpful enough category right now. “You don’t speak Chinese, though?” She tries to ask in such a way so as not to make him feel bad.

“In city, children go to Chi-nee school. But where I grow up, no Chi-nee school.”

“It’s hard to hang on to a language you don’t use.”

He nods again, his cigarette ash growing into a fine little log; his hand is surprisingly steady. “ ‘Human strr-en cannot chain destiny,’ ” he says, enunciating carefully.

“Human strength cannot change destiny?”

He nods a third time. “Fate sent you for teach Sophy.”

“Chinese? To teach her Chinese?”

“Chi-nee.” A glowing hunk of ash falls from his cigarette onto a pile of leaves, but he does not seem unduly concerned.

“Is Mandarin okay?” Hattie keeps an eye on the leaves.

“Okay.”

“I’d love to. But would she like to learn?”

He waves his hand. “Sophy smart. Learn fast. You teach her no problem.”

Not exactly what she asked, but all right. He offers to pay her; Hattie insists it would be her pleasure. And in truth, she’s been thinking of adding some calligraphy to her bamboo anyway—afraid as she is that she’s losing her Chinese. Her characters, especially, in which was found
gúo cuì
, her father used to say—the essence of China. Though what does that matter here?

Who knows? Pretty soon she and Sophy have a routine. First they go to the farmers’ market. Then they have their Chinese lesson. Then they play with Annie and have cookies. Sugar cookies, snowdrops, snickerdoodles—always something different, which Sophy likes even though Hattie is using whole-wheat flour now, trying to stay in step with their health-crazy time. Over the cookies, Hattie tells Sophy all kinds of things: How Annie is doing with her house-training. How little color dogs see. How Hattie once had a half-wolf dog, and how he really did wolf down his food. And how she got here, starting with how she came from China—Hattie tells Sophy that, too. How it was like being carried out to sea by a riptide. How she’s been swimming for shore for fifty years.

She does not explain how she found an island in Joe and Lee.

Sophy nods thoughtfully in any case, and tells Hattie stuff in return, pulling at her hair. Her hair is straight like Chhung’s, but she likes to pull it even straighter, then twirl it around her finger, then straighten it out all over again as she describes how her dad flips out sometimes, and how her mom misses Cambodia.

“My mom’s family had a mango farm when she was growing up,” she says. “They were, like, the mango family—people would come buy whole trees from them, because mango trees are easy to take care of and don’t take a lot of water. And they sold mangos at a stand outside their house, too, and my mom and her sister were in charge of the selling. So, like, one of them could lie in the hammock under the house but not both of them, or if both of them did, one of them was supposed to at least stay awake. So they had all these tricks to keep awake but fell asleep all the time anyway.”

“What do you mean, under the house?” asks Hattie, sipping coffee.

“I guess the whole house was, like, raised up on stilts. Because they had all this rain there, like in the monsoon season. So the fields were fields sometimes, but other times they were lakes. Like you couldn’t ever just say something was land, it was only, like, land sometimes. That’s why the house was on stilts. So it was always a place you could sleep, no matter what. But anyway, it got destroyed.”

“It wasn’t permanent, either.”

“No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t
permanent.
” Sophy leaves off playing with her hair in favor of playing with Annie. “I guess the whole village got, like, destroyed in the end, my mom says because of their karma.”

Annie pulls so hard on her chew toy, Sophy lets go.

“One thing I never understood,” she says, tugging again, “is who Pol Pot was anyway. Like everyone’s always saying during Pol Pot time whatever, and there’s that movie.”

“The
Killing Fields
, you mean.”

Sophy nods. “But was Pol Pot like a regular person, or was he, like, a
k’maoch?
”

“Is a
k’maoch
a ghost?”

Sophy nods again.

Hattie explains as Sophy frowns, nods, wonders, then frowns some more. Her head is down, her brow flattened by the light of the open window. She plays with her hair, slips a sneaker half off, claps it against the callused heel of her foot.

“Whoa,” she says at the end. Trying to take it in, but seeming to realize she can’t, really. “Nobody ever told me that. I mean, I guess I sort of knew. But it’s, like, so hard to believe.”

“It is. It is hard to believe, you’re right. It’s so hard that some people have spent their whole lives trying to understand it. What humans are, and how it could happen.”

Sophy picks up the chew toy, throwing it for Annie to fetch. Then she waggles her head thoughtfully and goes on. “My mom’s family were farmers, but they were rich,” she says. “I mean, not as rich as my uncle, who she was married to before she hooked up with my dad, but they had, like, a tile roof on their hut and …”

Hattie stops her. “Your mom was married to your uncle?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of wack, but they were married until he died and then my dad’s first wife died, too. Then my mom and dad sort of got stuck together.”

“I see.”

“It was, like, fate. Like I guess in the beginning they were just happy to find someone they knew in the refugee camp. And then they found Sarun, too, and had to take care of him, because of, like, the Thai soldiers and the mines.” Sophy tries to make Annie walk on her hind legs.

“I see.”

“And because, like, nobody else could, because everyone else was dead. Like one of my mom’s brothers had a gold chain, and another had a gold ring, which was why they both died. Like they got killed right in front of my mom by some kid who’d always been jealous of them, and who took the chain and the ring, I guess he was Khmer Rouge. And then he got killed by somebody else jealous of him.”

“That’s terrible.”

“And other people died other ways. Like, some starved. I don’t know. They died a lot of ways. And on top of everything, my mom says if her family still had their house and their land, it would be worth, like, a million cows now. But anyway, they don’t.”

“Who does?” Hattie reseats her glasses on her head, one pair toward the back, one toward the front.

“I don’t know. My dad thinks his family’s house is probably worth a lot now, too, because everyone in Cambodia is, like, buying everything. But there’s no way of even proving that it used to be his house because the Khmer Rouge took it over and everyone who knows whose it was before is dead now. And all the papers were destroyed, and anyway, my mom is sort of backward so it doesn’t matter.” Sophy dangles the chew toy so that Annie has to jump up for it.

“What do you mean, backward?”

Sophy shrugs, and though that makes her T-shirt bunch in her armpits and fold up above the shelf of her breasts, she does not tug at her shirt hem to pull it down, the way she usually does. “I mean, like, even if my mom got her family’s house back, she’d probably give all the money to the temple. Or else to, like, her brother. Because she thought her whole family was dead but then found out this one brother was still alive, and that his job was clearing mines. I guess because they still have these mines all over Cambodia that explode if you step on them. So now my mom wants to buy him a car so he can have his own driving business and not do that work anymore. Because I guess he already lost one hand and only has one left, and anyway he’s the only brother left of all her brothers and sisters so she doesn’t want him, like, blown up. But my dad says we have to think of our family here, too. Because we’ve been here my whole life and still don’t have anything because my dad can’t work and if my mom isn’t giving money to her brother, she’s giving it to the temple. Which my dad doesn’t believe will make a difference to our dead relatives or our next life or anything. He says it’s just throwing money away.”

“But she thinks it will?”

Sophy nods, though Annie is attacking her hand.

“And is she still doing that?” asks Hattie. “Giving away money?”

“I guess, because he’s always asking her how much
lui
she made cleaning and she’s always hiding it.” Sophy eases Annie off her lap.

“Lui is money?”

Sophy nods again.

“Don’t you need the money to live on?”

“Sarun has money.”

“Sarun?”

Annie puts her front paws up on Sophy’s knees. “He’s not supposed to be in business anymore, but he has money anyway.”

“In business? What do you mean? What kind of business?”

Sophy shrugs and looks off.

“And who’s he in business with?”

“I don’t know. With his old gang.” Sophy wipes some crud from the inside corners of Annie’s eyes.

Hattie thinks. “Is that where the TV came from?”

Sophy cleans her fingernail on a napkin. “Me and Sarun are, like, she makes the money, she can give it away if she wants. But you can’t say that to my dad because he would be, like, so ashamed that she makes money and he doesn’t. Because he was too tired to work when we came here, and now he’s the age to retire already, so all he can do is tell everyone his wisdom. Like how we should be saving for a car or a house. Or, like, college. My dad is crazy about college. Like all day long it’s college, college, college. Like it’s his mantra.”

Hattie nods encouragingly. “That’s great.”

Sophy flaps Annie’s ears up and down.

“I don’t know. My mom says college doesn’t make people happy. Like she thinks it’s more important to be good than smart, and anyway, that it’s no use to push children. She says our fate is our fate—like college is our fate or it’s not. I don’t know. My dad says it’s because of her background that she thinks that, I guess it goes with carrying stuff on her head the way she used to. And, like, how even though she’s been here forever she still eats with her hands if she’s in a hurry, my dad has to tell her she should eat with a spoon and fork every time. Or else with a fork and knife like an American, or chopsticks, like a Chinese. Anything. Unless it’s, like, a sandwich. And otherwise off a plate, or from a bowl, you know how the Chinese hold the bowl right up to their mouths? Do you do that?”

“Sometimes.” Hattie nods.

“And do you, like, make noise?” Annie nips Sophy’s finger.

“Slurp? Probably.” Hattie smiles.

Sophy makes a face and bops Annie gently on the nose. “He does that, too, the Chinese way. But I guess my mom forgets because she grew up eating from a bowl in the middle of the table, everyone just helping themselves. Or off banana leaves. And my dad says that isn’t even the worst thing about farmers. He says the worst thing about them is the way they never think about the future. They’re, like, the opposite of the Chinese. Like even his brother who died was the opposite of the Chinese, and he was Chinese.