After so many years of war, Cheung did not trust any soldiers, whether they were Khmer Rouge or the government. She saw only that the soldiers wore dark uniforms. As the soldiers moved closer, she finally pulled out her feet and ran through the water.
“Stop!” the soldiers yelled. Cheung kept running and dove into the knee-deep brook as bullets whizzed by her. Cheung held her breath and tried to swim, but the water was too shallow. Despite the warmth of the water, her skin went cold. When her lungs were about to burst, she raised her head out of the water and froze as another bullet flew by the top of her scalp.
“Please don’t kill me,” Cheung begged, her voice hoarse. Twelve soldiers surrounded her, their guns pointed at her chest.
“Put your hands behind your head!”
“Please don’t kill me.” Tears slid out of her eyes and nose now.
“You are Khmer Rouge!”
“Please, good lords, I am not with Pol Pot. I am just a village peasant.” The soldiers would not listen and ordered her on her knees. They grabbed her arms and tied them behind her back and jerked her off the ground.
“Please, good lords,” Cheung pleaded.
“Stop talking!” A soldier pushed at her back with the barrel of his gun. “Walk!” Still sobbing, Cheung obeyed in silence as they led her away from the village. In her mind, she saw them shoot her dead and dump her body in a rice field. With each step, her hands became more swollen and her feet heavier. Under her breath, Cheung thanked the gods for stopping the bullet from hitting her and prayed to them to help her get home. Suddenly, the group saw an old man approaching them on the road.
“Please help me!” Cheung yelled when she recognized the villager. “They think I am Khmer Rouge. Please tell them I am not!”
“Good lords,” the man pleaded with the soldiers. “Cheung is not a Khmer Rouge. She is from my village.”
“No!” the head soldier exclaimed. “We were chasing after a group of Khmer Rouge who raided a village this afternoon. They ran in her direction. We told her group to stop but her friends ran away. If they are not Khmer Rouge, why did they run?”
“Good soldiers, I can swear that this girl is no Khmer Rouge. Her name is Cheung and she is the daughter of old man Leang and his wife, Keang. I know them well. They are good farmers and kind people. She is their daughter. I beg you to let her go. I beg you to return her to her family.” The man raised his hands to his chest in respect. The head soldier hesitated and stared at the man and then back to Cheung.
“Will you swear? And if she is a Khmer Rouge and you are hiding her, we will come find you and make trouble.”
“Yes, I swear.”
Listening to all this, Cheung’s heart beat so rapidly she thought it would explode out of her ribs. When the soldiers untied her hands and told her she could go, she ran away so fast she never even thanked the kind man for his help.
When Cheung finishes her story, the women are all in tears. The men return later to find them laughing and smiling, with their arms still encircling Cheung. Chou smiles with relief when she sees Kim’s silhouette walking through the doorway.
5 “hungry, hungry hippos”
September 1980
On the TV screen, the girls sit in a circle around a table and laugh out loud. The laughs leave their mouths like light air bubbles, and their gleaming white teeth shine like pearls. In the background, a joyous chorus repeatedly sings the words “Hungry, hungry hippos.” On the table, four fat plastic hippos crouch on a red plate, their funny eyes staring dumbly at one another. Each hippo wears either a pink, yellow, green, or orange skin and waits patiently for the girls to feed them the white marble balls. As the music rises and the singers urgently repeat “Hungry, hungry hippos,” the girls release the balls and all mayhem ensues as each girl furiously pounds on the hippo’s tail to open its big mouth and make it swallow marbles.
“The hippos are too tame!” I think smugly, imagining the hippos growing larger, their bodies ripping out of the colorful plastic casings to reveal shiny leathery black skin. Their eyes are bulging and bloodshot, and their teeth are sharp and jagged like fangs. The hippos’ thick legs trample the red plate beneath them and chomp at everything in their path. Their noses flare, and they charge at the girls.
When the commercial is over, I remain transfixed on my couch. The “Hungry, Hungry Hippos” song is still swirling in my head, bouncing in my skull like a Ping-Pong ball, picking up momentum wherever it hits.
“Hungry, hungry hippos,” echoes my mind.
“Growl, growl,” my stomach sings back.
“Hungry, hungry Luanne,” I whisper to myself, using the name so many of the sponsors seem to think is mine.
The name comes out of my mouth tasting like a spoonful of vinegar, and my mouth purses in response. I stick out my tongue and blow air out of my cheeks, spitting Luanne out with it. Then I jump off the couch, both my legs landing on the floor in hard thuds.
“Stop jumping and making noises,” Eang calls out from the kitchen. “You know the dentist’s office is still open below us. We don’t want them to complain.”
Quietly, I tiptoe to the kitchen, careful not to bump into anything or knock something down. Downstairs, the dentist and hygienists in their white coats and masks work on a patient’s mouth, and the hum of their voices and their drills floats into our apartment. Above them in our new home, we live quietly and softly, our conversations kept low and our bodies scurrying from room to room with the softness of a cat.
At five-thirty P.M. the dentist’s office closes, and when the last white coat exits the building, our home comes alive. Upstairs, I go from a fuzzy feline to a clunky elephant, thumping my feet into the kitchen. Eang’s mood lightens as Meng plays with the radio. When he finds his favorite station, he turns the radio’s volume to high, and together we snap our fingers to the sound of the classic oldies. Tapping my feet to the Beatles and Santana, I throw a spoonful of chopped garlic into a hot frying pan. The garlic pops as the oil hisses and splatters, spreading its aroma into all our rooms. Eang squats on the floor, raises a cleaver, and brings it crashing down on the dead white chicken. The bird splits in half with no droplets of blood, its bones cracking under the cleaver’s sharp blade. Eang lifts the cleaver again and quarters the chicken, then chops the quarters into even smaller pieces. Then she dumps the meat into the frying pan and hands me the cutting board to wash. From the sink, I watch Eang add a spoonful of salt, a pinch of MSG, a few shakes of fish sauce, and globs of oyster sauce. Then she browns the chicken until it is golden and crispy. While she works on a vegetable dish, my mouth waters as my hands scrub clean the pots and pans.
Once we are seated, Eang serves us each a steaming plate of white rice. The rice tastes soft and sweet and its grains stick together like ants’ eggs, the way rice should. A few weeks ago, one of our sponsors brought us a box of Uncle Ben’s rice and raved to Meng that it was the best rice she had ever tasted. She explained that all we had to do was add boiling hot water to it, wait ten minutes, and the rice would be ready to eat. As Meng translated, I could not believe her words. Meng, Eang, and I have eaten rice three times a day all of our lives, and between us have cooked more pots of rice than we can count. We know how to cook rice and we know that rice takes anywhere between twenty and thirty minutes to cook.
We know how to make rice firm, soft, or sticky. We know how to turn it into soup, gruel, congee, and even sweet fermented desserts or cakes, but in none of these recipes does it require only ten minutes of cooking! As expert rice eaters, we thought this America invention for quick rice had to be too good to be true. And it was. Uncle Ben’s rice tasted like cardboard paper, all starchy and fluffy. I glance at our counter and smile at the box still sitting there.
Though I itch to shove a yummy morsel into my mouth, I restrain myself and sit quietly. In our Chinese-Khmer tradition, no one is allowed to touch his or her food until the male head of the household takes his first bite. Sometimes this could take a while if the head of the household
was chatty. After Meng takes his first bite, I reach in and serve myself a heaping spoonful of chicken.
Meng’s words break our slurping and crunching. “Tomorrow we’ll go shop for food.” I stare at him, my eyebrows knit together, and the food suddenly tastes stale in my mouth as I remember how much I hate going to the grocery store.
When I crawl into bed that night, I rub my round belly with happiness. Like the Buddha, my stomach sticks out under my shirt like a hard ball, but instead of being filled with air, it is filled with chicken and rice. Outside, the cemetery is still there; no one has come to answer my prayers and bulldoze it down. When I wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I make sure to walk quietly and sideways in the dark, so as not to peek out the window. I don’t know what I expect to see, but my fear is that there will be a ghost pressed against the pane, its long tongue licking the glass as it tries to get in. Though I no longer mark my ankles with Xs, I still sleep with my back to the window.
As I drift off to sleep, the clock ticks away the hours on the wall. Suddenly, I am awakened by the sound of rumblings and growls. The noise grows like a ferocious animal caught in a cage, waiting to be let loose. My hands clench the sheets and, wide-eyed, I attempt to calm the thumping of my heart in my ears. Outside, the wind pushes the clouds in front of the moon, causing my room to go black. Shivering, I pull the sheet over my head and pray I have not attracted the attention of the ghosts. But at the moment, all is quiet and my heart slides back down my throat and into its cage.
Then, abruptly, another growl bursts forth and I quickly jerk the sheet down to my chin to scan the room before realizing that the noise is coming from my stomach. I spread my palms on my belly as if to soothe the hunger beast and return it to sleep. But it’s awake. Below my rib cage, my organs follow the beast’s command to move and slide, causing me great pain. Though I don’t want to remember, my stomach reminds me of what I learned from the Khmer Rouge. Hunger means only one thing: death.
As my hunger grows, the dark shadows in my room expand with it and spread to my ceiling to hover above my bed. I flash to a picture of a Khmer Rouge work camp. In a thatched-roof bungalow, my fourteen-year-old sister Keav lies dying on a straw mat, her body a skeleton of its prior self. But I am far from Cambodia now and don’t often imagine Keav’s death as I once did—full of flies and foul vomit and stench. In America, as my life grows stronger, I am able to rewrite Keav’s story so that she dies in her sleep and without pain. But sometimes, I still find myself traveling to her work camp, where again I hear her shallow breaths wheezing in and out from her purple lips. When my mind is flooded with the sounds of her fight, I am filled with hurt and a rage so strong that all I can think of are revenge and hate.
I grope under my pillow and pull out a bunched-up napkin. Carefully, I unfold it to reveal two broken sugar cookies. My greedy fingers grab a big piece of a cookie and shove it into my mouth, crumbs spilling on my shirt and into the bed. The sugar and butter dissolve on my tongue and numb my hurt as my teeth grind down the baked flour to lull the rage. Faster, I devour the rest of the cookies and send my hunger back to sleep.
In the morning, Eang, Meng, and I trudge a mile to the A&P supermarket. As Meng and Eang talk to each other, I fall farther and farther behind. Because we do not have a car and Meng wants to save the three dollars for the three of us to take the bus to the market and back, we make the walk every week to buy our food. When I complain about all the walking, Meng answers me with a Cambodian rhyming phrase about savings.
“Remember, dthoh, dthoh, pbing moi pong [Translation: drip, drip, full container],” he tells me, a reference to how villagers in Cambodia collect palm juice to make sugar. They do this by climbing very tall, swaying palm trees, chiseling a hole, and hanging a bamboo or metal container to catch the juice. All night the juice drips, filling the container by morning. Meng says they use the same process here in Vermont with maple syrup.
Meng teaches with Cambodian sayings, and Eang uses Chinese ones to raise me to be a proper girl. Whenever she asks a question and I answer her with the unladylike “huh,” she glares down at me and replies, “Huh, mung ka, cachung sai leap pa.” Which literally means, “Huh, mosquito bites, your butt grows a bump.” So between Meng’s drip and Eang’s bump, I learn to be frugal and to protect my butt from bug bites. Still, this does not mean that I have to follow their path gladly or without fuss, so I dawdle behind and make them wait for me to catch up.
As we approach the store, the automatic doors slide open. Inside, Meng grabs a cart while I follow Eang as she goes about picking up our food for the week. I reach for a bunch of giant bananas in the produce section. Picking up a ripe yellow bunch, I wonder if the Americans are big because they eat giant fruits. In Cambodia our bananas are the size of a large thumb, and our apples are not much bigger than a child’s fist. In our village, you’re happy if you find a watermelon with the roundness and the size of a human head. But most of the time you have to settle for one so small you can eat it all in ten bites. I reach for an orange, lift it to my nose, and take a whiff. Like all the other fruits in our cart, the orange smells faintly of citric and some kind of cleaning agent.
As I walk the quiet aisles, I miss the noise and smell of our Cambodian markets. In my mind’s eye, I am back in a Cambodian market where a pile of fish flaps on the dirt floor next to a mound of beef intestines, tripe, and chicken feet. A seller squats next to her goods, her mouth talking incessantly, praising the quality of her products or sharing a yummy recipe on how to cook them. When a deal has been struck, she wraps the goods in a lotus or banana leaf and gives it to her customer. Then, with a wave of her hand, a black cloud of flies levitates and scatters, waiting for her hand to settle down before their eventual return. The smell of her fish, tripe, and chicken feet hovers in the humid air and floats fifty feet away to the people sitting on stools eating their fried chive cakes, pork dumplings, and shrimp patties. Boiling pots of noodle soups, yellow curry, pork-blood rice congee, and pans of hot oil filled with crunchy spring rolls sit on a makeshift oven. Crackling and browning in another oven are skewers of frog kabobs roasted to a crispy brown. The aroma of the soups and frogs hops over to another customer as she feels the firmness of a pink dragon fruit. From there, she inspects the wiry red ramutans, jackfruit, and durian before she pops a purple grape into her mouth. Drawn by songs of the dessert sellers, she finishes her shopping and sits down for a cool glass of mango fruit shake. As she sips her drink, the pungent smells of dried fish, squid, soups, frogs, fruits, meat, and fish seep into her clothes, skin, and hair.
Back in the A&P, I return the almost-fragrance-free orange to its stack and walk by the heap of grapes without popping one in my mouth. At the checkout line, Meng and Eang are busy loading food onto the moving belt to the soft background music of classic love songs. When they finish, Meng pulls a few sheets of money out of his pocket that look different from the U.S. bills. All of a sudden, the cold air freezes and the humming machines are quiet with shame.
“Food stamps?” the checkout clerk inquires.
“Yes,” Meng replies.
Meng tells me that food stamps are money the American government gives to poor people to help them buy the food they need. He also tells me that by accepting this food help, we also have to accept the embarrassment, loss of face, and shame that come with the stamps. Each time we go shopping as a family, the shame stamps are imprinted on our faces like a mark that won’t easily come off, no matter how often we wash.
When Meng hands the food stamps to the clerk, I turn my face away and stare at the pineapple in front of me. I imagine its hundreds of eyes shooting out beams of light like the disco balls I saw on the TV show Solid Gold. As I fall deeper into my daydream, Meng’s voice orders me back to the present.
“Pay attention. See how he stares at us because of the food stamps,” Meng tells me in Khmer. “Be embarrassed and ashamed by this, and don’t forget it.”
I turn my gaze from the pineapple to look at the
clerk and notice that his once cheerful face is now an unmoving plastic mask and his mouth is a straight line. He keeps his eyes focused on the red numbers of his machine as he takes the food stamps from Meng’s hand. Afterward, he hands Meng and Eang our groceries with a thank-you that sounds to me more like “I am angry you foreigners come here and eat free while I have to work for my food.”
6 amah’s reunion
September 1980
Despite her attack and miraculous escape, Cheung continues to search for food in the forest and rivers. Every day, the rest of the family works hard to grow rice and vegetables, but it takes many months before they can be harvested. Cheung’s skills at catching fish are needed to supplement the family’s food supply. So every day she trudges off with her friends carrying a wicker basket and an ax in her hands. If Cheung is afraid, she does not tell Chou. As their cook, Chou constantly worries about their food supply and prays that everyone has a successful day. Even in periods when the family has enough rice and supplies stored up to feed them for a few months, Chou still has nightmares that it will all disappear overnight and they will go hungry again.
On nights when Chou wakes up crying, Kim tries to alleviate her fears with reports of the government soldiers’ crushing victories over Khmer Rouge troops in battles. Kim speaks of these rumored victories so often that sometimes Chou thinks Kim is trying to convince himself that the Khmer Rouge’s threats to their lives are over. But they both know that this is not true.
For Chou, this constant anxiety has turned her into a light sleeper. During the nights while Khouy, Kim, and the family are able to escape the war, Chou jerks awake at the slightest sound. And on nights when the September monsoon electrifies and thunders across the sky and drenches the grounds with rain, Chou wakes up in the morning nervous and easily startled by loud voices and noise. Normally it is only she and the women who are in a state of near panic after a thunderous and stormy night, but today she senses that the men are also uneasy. As she sets down their plates for dinner, Chou listens carefully.