Chapter 5 #4
Eventually my sobs subsided, but then my sinuses clogged up, and there was always a brief panic when I couldn’t get air.
I was a disgusting crier. Something leaked from every orifice: tears, snot, phlegm.
I couldn’t breathe through my nose anymore; I had to suck in air through my mouth and then blow out into a tissue.
At first my sinuses were so clogged that the blowing only gave me a headache.
Sometimes my ears popped. But if I persisted in blowing, then snot would start coming out in huge, satisfying clots, and then my airways would open up.
After, a light and empty feeling. I sat still, just breathing. I felt hollowed out. Like a spoon had dug out everything wet and dirty inside me and now I was empty, dazed, clean.
This wasn’t a bad feeling. Perhaps this was one of the functions of crying: to purge the capacity for grief, even just for a little. It was the only time when I didn’t feel that weight on my chest. I didn’t feel good, but I didn’t feel anything. At least, for a few minutes after, I didn’t feel bad.
A FEW DAYS LATER, MY MOTHER SENT ME A VIDEO OF POPO.
She looked so pained to be in front of the camera.
Her face was strained in a rictus of discomfort.
I could never determine with old people whether they were in active pain, or if their faces were stretched that way even when they were at peace.
But it really didn’t seem like Popo was enjoying herself.
I hit play on the video. Popo sat, staring into space. Then my mother’s voice: “Popo! Popo. Say hi to Li-Li. Tell Li-Li you love her.”
“Li-Li, ah.” Popo’s expression did not change. If anything, the downward tug of her mouth grew more severe. She repeated, with no inflection, “Hello, Li-Li, I love you.”
This was something Popo would never say, because Popo didn’t speak like that.
Popo asked about how we were doing in school, she mentioned if we had gotten taller, and she reminded us to eat well and exercise.
That was how Popo expressed her love. She was talking like this only because my mother was coaching her from behind the camera to say the precise words my mother thought I wanted to hear.
Still I saved the video and played it over and over again until I fell asleep.
I MISSED ANNA.
I was still angry with her for all the same reasons, but I hadn’t known how I would crave her physical presence.
I wished she would fill up her corner of the apartment again, grease stains and all.
I missed falling asleep to the sound of her soft, even breathing.
I missed her little piglet snores. Her snores weren’t annoying so much as they were absurd—cute, tiny grunts that always began around two or three in the morning.
Sometimes they woke me up, but I wasn’t upset about it.
Anna was so self-conscious about her snoring, even when asleep.
If I cleared my throat, or even shifted in bed, the snoring always stopped.
But now the apartment was silent, and there was nothing so frightening as the nights when sleep wouldn’t come and the dark was as vast as my imagination—when I had to fill the void with everything I had ever done wrong.
I ASKED MY MOTHER IF WE COULD TALK ON THE PHONE ABOUT OUR family’s history. She asked me where I wanted to start.
“What are their names?” I asked.
I didn’t know the proper names of any of my extended family.
I had no reason to know them—we had never used them.
To me, my relatives were just Gonggong, Yeye, Nainai, Popo, Dayi, Eryi, and so on.
Most Chinese households were like this—you referred to people by their relation to you.
You didn’t even have to distinguish between this aunt or that aunt by name; you just called them First Aunt and Second Aunt, depending on seniority.
Dayi, Eryi. Then Dayizhang and Eryizhang for their husbands, and so on.
But this was so embarrassing. I couldn’t look anyone up in a registry. I couldn’t even find their obituaries.
My mother recited the names of everyone in her immediate family. I repeated each one as she said it, but they slid out of my mind as we went along. I asked her if she would text me a list so I could see which characters were involved, and she promised me she would.
I wanted to document everything about everyone.
What year were they born? Where did they go to school?
When did they start their first jobs? When did they move to Guangzhou?
I couldn’t believe I had never bothered to ask about these things before.
Did other people know these things about their grandparents?
Was I the only one who’d been living in a fog?
My mother said she didn’t know all the answers off the top of her head, but that she could send them to me later, if it mattered that much. “What else do you want to know?”
Everything. I didn’t have the barest contours of the story, let alone a line of questioning. “We could start at the beginning, I guess. So Gonggong—has his family always been in Guangzhou?”
“Actually, no,” said my mother. “He grew up in Cambodia.”
“Cambodia?”
“Right, yes.”
“So he’s actually Cambodian?”
“Yes—well, he’s also Chinese. His family were overseas merchants from China living in Cambodia. There were a lot of overseas Chinese at that time. They went everywhere—Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, all over Southeast Asia.”
“So how did he end up back in China?”
“His parents sent him. They wanted him to contribute to his country. They sent him back for school, and they expected him to work for the government when he grew older.”
“Did a lot of Chinese people do that?”
“The overseas Chinese, yes. They were living in Cambodia, but their allegiance was to China. So when it seemed like China might become a modern republic—after the Qing dynasty was overthrown—they sent their eldest son back to help build a new nation. There were a lot of dreams at that time, you understand. He was fourteen. They sent him to join the Nationalist youth corps, and then he was supposed to study law. It’s very sad. ”
I was still catching up to the thought of Gonggong at fourteen, crossing Southeast Asia so that he could help build a nation in a country he had never seen. At fourteen I was watching Riverdale and crying because my cute lab partner in AP Chemistry didn’t like me back. “What’s very sad?”
“Because that meant he had to be far from home, and then after the Communist takeover, he never saw them again.”
“Why not?”
“Because of Pol Pot,” said my mother, like I was being dense. “Do you know about the Khmer Rouge?”
I understood this reference. I had learned about the Cambodian genocide in high school. I knew the vaguest details about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and the peasant revolutionaries who took scythes to the countryside. What I didn’t understand was what this had to do with Gonggong.
“Wait.” I was still trying to follow the plot. “So you’re saying—Gonggong’s parents—they were targeted by the Khmer Rouge? They got genocided?”
“They were educated people, right? And the Khmer Rouge hated educated people.”
“Were they landlords?”
“Lily, they were Communists.” My mother snorted. “They weren’t landlords. They weren’t targeted on political grounds—there was no logic to it. The Khmer Rouge made everyone in their town leave their homes and go on a march—”
“A march to where?”
“Nowhere. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter—they were just marching, the marching was the whole point. And then your gonggong never heard from them again.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean he just couldn’t get any more information.”
“So they died?”
“I suppose so.”
“What do you mean, you suppose so?”
I couldn’t understand why she was being so vague about this. I felt I was asking rather basic questions, and that she was being recalcitrant to spite me, because who on earth merely supposed that their relatives might or might not have died?
“I don’t know,” said my mother. “They must have. Because your gonggong never heard from them again.”
“Did he ever go back to Cambodia?”
“No, he couldn’t. The borders were closed then, remember. It was very hard to get out.”
“Then how could he have made sure?”
“Lily.” My mother sounded exasperated. “How would he have made sure?”
“But how can we not know?”
I wanted confirmation. I wanted facts. I needed this story to make sense: the vagaries shaded in, the death dates certain, the bodies labeled and buried.
“Come on, Lily. It wasn’t like a dinner reservation, okay?
It wasn’t like everyone had a spot in line, and we had everyone’s phone numbers and dietary restrictions and credit card receipts and all that.
There was no documentation. It just happened, and we’ve never seen them since, so we know they’re dead. ”
“I never heard about this.” The words came out more accusatory than I meant, though I did feel someone here was at fault for something. “You never talked to us about this.”
“Well.” My mother hummed. I couldn’t read her tone. She seemed so distant—like we were strangers to each other—and I knew then that I had done something wrong, but I couldn’t understand what it was. “It’s not a very happy thing to talk about.”
THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT, I CURLED ON THE COUCH IN THE DARK and I posed my questions to the internet.
Why did the Khmer Rouge go after the Chinese?
Because the Chinese were alien migrants, city people, the wrong class, and they had stolen lands and riches from the native Khmer.
Was this true?
It was complicated. Then again, the Khmer Rouge went after the Chams, the Vietnamese, and the native Khmer as well. So it was difficult to argue that the Chinese had been ethnically singled out for destruction.
How many people died?