Chapter 5 #7
We might have spoken more, but I had only hazy memories of the rest of that night.
What I remembered: the post at the bottom of the stairs, the fraying edge of our rug.
Jack-Jack gnawing passionately at a chew toy.
And Gonggong, silent and solid, holding me and Flora against him until the police lights flashed outside our front door, and a tumble of voices spilled through the hallway, and Jasmine was delivered safely home.
MY MOTHER DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHY I WANTED TO KEEP TALKING about Cambodia.
“This again,” she said whenever I asked. “What else is there to know?”
What else? She’d hardly given me a story. How, precisely, had this all gone down? Had Gonggong ever confirmed that his parents were dead? Had anyone in the family survived?
“Well of course, his sister—”
“His sister?”
“Yes, California Grandma.”
“Oh!” There was a woman in Los Angeles that we had only ever known as California Grandma, though her actual relationship to our family had never been clear to me.
We understood that she was an older female relative of some kind, and that my mother had lived with her from high school onward.
We had met her on many occasions: I associated her with childhood road trips to LA, with dingy Vietnamese grocery stores and grainy taro milk tea and simmering pots of bone broth.
California Grandma was just a fact of life—another thread I’d never bothered to pick up.
“So California Grandma was your aunt?”
“Yes, Gonggong’s sister. So your great-aunt. She sent him a letter when she got to a refugee camp in Thailand and told him that their parents had died, and her twin sons had died, and her husband had died. She was the only one who made it out.”
“What happened to her sons?”
“I don’t know.” My mother paused. “Maybe they got sick. I hope—well, I just don’t know.”
I had a better idea now of how all this had gone down.
I had read some academic articles. I had learned that the Khmer Rouge rounded up everyone living in cities and called them the New People—the people who weren’t pure peasants, who needed to be culled for the revolution.
I had discovered a dozen ways my great-grandparents and my uncles could have died.
Maybe they refused to leave their home; maybe they were shot on the doorstep.
Maybe they got ill. Maybe they drowned in rice paddies, too weak to keep moving.
Maybe they were clubbed to death for asking for food, or walking too slow, or making the wrong expression.
And I saw that my question was indeed pointless, because the question wasn’t how they had died; it was how anyone could have survived that death march to begin with.
“Wait.” The thought had just occurred to me.
The Cambodian genocide began in the mid-seventies.
This was recent history. This wasn’t distant the way World War II felt distant.
This was only one generation away—this was living memory.
The Beatles had broken up before the Khmer Rouge started the massacres.
“You would have been born by then. You would have met them, right?”
“I didn’t meet them,” said my mother. “I was too young. My sisters met them. Your eryi remembers our grandma very well. She remembered that she wore such nice dresses. She was—how do you say it? A dainty woman. She was small and elegant and pretty. We had a photograph of her, and Eryi liked to show it to me all the time. This made me so jealous—that she had met Grandma, and I hadn’t. ”
“Do you still have that photograph?”
“Oh, no—I’m sure it’s lost now.” A pause. “I remember how she was standing, though. Turned to the side, one hand on her hip. We used to imitate her pose all the time.”
“Did you ever ask what happened to them? Your grandparents?”
“Of course,” said my mother. “All the time. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t meet them. No one would explain. When I was little, I used to sit outside and watch the planes flying across the sky, and I would think to myself, maybe that’s Grandma and Grandpa coming to visit.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Wow.”
“Yes, but of course, they were never coming. So that was a silly thing to think.”
“Wait, then, California Grandma. So she . . . so she made it to the US? Alone?”
“Yes. Oh—I forgot to tell you. Well, so you know how I went to California to finish high school?”
“Yes?” I had never asked about the circumstances of this either. I had just assumed my mother wanted to study abroad.
“Well, so, after my aunt had been living on her own for a few years, my father told her that he had three daughters, meaning he had extras, and she could have one. She lost her boys, remember.”
“So they sent you? As a replacement?”
“Yes.”
We were both silent for a while.
“Jesus,” I said. “Mom. I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you sorry? I was excited. I was so happy when Gonggong told me. I couldn’t wait to get out of China.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell us about this?”
“You never asked.”
“I was supposed to ask about why you were sent to replace your aunt’s dead sons?”
“Well, yes. I would have told you if you had asked. But you never asked.”
She said this in a matter-of-fact tone. I knew she wasn’t saying it to hurt me, but still it stung.
I had been planning to ask. I had promised to undertake this project ever since I began to learn Chinese.
I would interview my grandparents, and I would understand where I came from, and I would have a full historical record of everything they had gone through.
But California Grandma had passed away years ago.
Gonggong was dead. Popo could barely speak; Popo didn’t even know who I was.
All my connections to that generation were severed, and all I had now were stories from my mother, and she seemed disinclined to confirm more than the vaguest details.
“Lily, is everything okay?”
“Yeah.” I sniffled. “I just—I just really want to know more. I feel like there’s all this history that we’ve lost.”
“Then you can read a history book, can’t you?
Don’t be sad.” She must have heard me crying over the line.
“Things just happen this way, right? I left the island. Your dad left the village. Your gonggong left Cambodia. This is just what people do; they live their lives, and when circumstances change, they go off to find somewhere better, all right? What’s there to be sad about? ”
“Mom, am I bothering you?”
“No.” A pause. “Why?”
“I’m just really trying to find out what happened to our family, but it seems like you don’t want to answer anything. Like all these questions are just annoying to you.”
A longer pause. Then: “I’m sorry. It’s not annoying. I just—it’s not a happy thing to talk about, you understand?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had always imagined my parents would be pleased at my attempts to reconnect—that they had been waiting all these years for any one of their children to take an interest in our culture and our past. I thought that my studying Chinese was closing the circle. I thought I’d be rewarded for caring.
“I just feel like it’s important. Knowing what they’ve been through.”
“You never wanted to know before.”
“I was being stupid before.” I was crying again. I tried to quash it down, since I knew this would only irritate her further, but I just couldn’t stop. “But I really want to know now, Mom, I want to know where I came from.”
“But you see . . .” My mother began a word, and then broke it off, then made a sound that wasn’t a word at all. “But you didn’t come from that. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
IN THE SIXTH GRADE, MY FRIEND ERIN PRITZKER INVITED ME TO her grandfather’s eightieth birthday party at the Fairmont hotel downtown.
It would be a huge event, she told me; over a hundred relatives were flying in.
I had never been to a party at a hotel ballroom.
My mother made me wear my piano recital dress with silver-buckled black leather shoes, and I whined about this until Erin’s mom came to pick me up and I saw Erin was dressed the same way.
We were assigned to seats for dinner: Erin found her table number on a big board listing everyone’s names, and when we got there we found little name cards in front of every folded napkin: Erin Pritzker, Erin Pritzker Guest. There was a big buffet table, with large silver trays of foods that seemed in no way culturally linked, such as macaroni and cheese, samosas, and chicken piccata.
I kept seeing girls, young women, and older women who looked exactly how I imagined Erin might in five, ten, fifteen years.
The same brown-blond hair, the same green eyes, the same pert nose.
I was astonished when Erin told me she didn’t know their names.
She would say things like I think that’s Audrey?
I think those are the cousins from Maryland?
And not everyone knew who Erin was either.
Several times people asked who I was, and when I said I was here with Erin, they looked confused, until someone told them, Jenna’s girl, the Pritzkers, and then they would say to Erin, Oh yes, how are you, how is your mother?
Imagine having so much family that you didn’t know who they were!
I had only two cousins, and they both lived in Guangzhou.
I told this to Erin, who asked, why didn’t they have more kids?
I had just learned about the one-child policy in school, and I was confident this had something to do with it.
I explained: When the Communists took over, China didn’t have enough food to go around, so they put a limit on how many children people could have, and no one wanted girls, so people were aborting or abandoning baby girls until they gave birth to boys.
“Wow,” said Erin. “So your parents would have left you in a field.” I said that I thought my parents were more progressive than that, but yes—perhaps so.