at first from afar, in large swooping arcs, then suddenly one of them yelled, “Japs!” and they started throwing rocks.
I bent over the twins, trying to protect them, while I shouted, “Help! Help!” as if someone could hear me. But the cook had the radio on, and there weren’t any customers pulling up, so of course no one came to our rescue. I felt a sharp stone strike my head, and for a second, I couldn’t see a thing for the pain, as though a knife had been inserted into my temple. I was so surprised, I couldn’t remember how to breathe.
And then I was angry.
The boys had stopped circling to watch me as I held my head with my hand. They were standing over their bicycles, doubled over laughing.
“Get behind the dumpster,” I hissed to the girls and Sam, and then quickly I gathered up as many of the boys’ stones as I could find on the asphalt.
“Hey, pendejos!” I shouted. While the boys pointed and laughed at me in an exaggerated fashion that made them seem simple, I grabbed another rock and another. I saw clearly that the boys were at a disadvantage. They couldn’t ride their bikes if they had to stop and pick up more ammunition, and they had run out. “Hey, your mother suck the dick!” I shouted in English. This elicited a satisfying gasp. Then I took aim and smashed one of the boys in the face—a scrawny kid with orange hair and skin pale as a toadstool. He clutched his nose with both hands, blood gushing through his fingers. Then he jumped back on his bike and rode away.
The remaining two boys called after their friend, but he didn’t turn back. The boys hopped off their bikes and set them up like a shield while they scoured the parking lot for ammo. They shouted, “You eat dogs!” and “Go back to Japan!” but their momentum was clearly lost. I lobbed their rocks back at them, and then trash from the dumpster: chicken carcasses, fruit cocktail cans, beer bottles that shattered on the metal spokes of their wheels.
Even Sam and the girls joined in, hurling whatever they could find at the boys.
This time the cook could hear our racket. He came running out the back door with his bloody apron on, and the boys looked shocked, then jumped back on their bikes and took off, pedaling as fast as their legs could manage across the parking lot and down the street.
All in all, I considered the fight a success. I’d been hit a couple times, to be sure, and I could tell that I’d have a shiner for a couple weeks to prove it, but the boys had fled, not us.
Auntie, however, was horrified. She’d watched the whole ugly spectacle unfold from the windows of the dining room: the circling hooligans, my cowering siblings, and me throwing rocks in public, in the parking lot, for everyone in the world to see.
“Just like a street boy!” Auntie said, her voice rising and crashing in indignant waves. “Just like a hooligan! Nea acts like a girl who has had no mother! No mother at all!”
Sourdi was applying ice to my eye in the kitchen, and we both heard Auntie as she lectured Ma in the back of the dining room.
It was then that Auntie launched into a long speech detailing all my shortcomings: I was loud, demanding, bold; I had no grace; I clomped when I walked; I slouched when I stood; I mumbled when I spoke except when I cursed. I even fought with boys in public. I would be the ruin of my family. I was every wrong thing that America could do to a Cambodian girl.
I was hoping that Ma would defend me, that she would point out that I was brave and kind, that I got good grades in school, what a wonderful daughter, but Ma said nothing. Peeking through the kitchen door, I saw that Ma’s cheeks were flushed pink, her head bowed in apology. In shame.
I wanted to cry then, I wanted to shout, I wanted to break everything I could get my hands on, but I didn’t. Instead I stole one of the little knives from the cutting block in the kitchen and took it with me to the bathroom. I locked myself in the stall then and drew the blade lightly over the skin of my arm, just deep enough to draw a line of blood. Three times. After the wound began to throb, I didn’t feel like crying anymore.
That evening, I found myself alone with Ma, just the two of us to close the Palace.
I was setting the chairs atop the tables as Ma mopped the floor. We had the radio on, Tanya Tucker was singing about love gone wrong. The only stations we could get here played country music. I watched my mother out of the corner of my eye. She was more than twelve years younger than Auntie, but squinting, I could see a resemblance, in the way their nostrils flared, the width of their foreheads, the spacing of their eyes, and I could almost imagine Ma as an old woman, too, with snaky white hair, her body fragile and weak, with a heart that stopped beating in the middle of the day. She’d be sorry that she had been mean to me, when she was old and needed my help. But it would be too late. When I grew up, I was going to go far away, and I’d never come home again.
Ma stopped mopping to smoke. She took her lighter from her apron pocket and flicked it open with one smooth snap of her fingers, the blue flame jumping to life. Then she bent close to the fire, as though she meant to kiss it, her cigarette dangling from her lips. She opened one eye and stared at me.
“What’s wrong?”
I shrugged and pretended to go back to work, vigorously wiping the counter with a dishrag.
Ma closed her eye and took another drag off her cigarette. Blue smoke emerged from her nostrils. “What’s wrong?” she asked again.
“Auntie hates me.”
Ma opened both eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re her favorite.”
“That’s not true!” I cried out. “She absolutely hates me!” I couldn’t believe that Ma would lie to me like this, as though I were still a baby who would believe whatever she said like my brother or the twins, as I though I didn’t know anything. “I heard her talking to you today,” I said. “I know.”
Ma shook her head tiredly. She leaned her mop against the table and held her elbow in her right hand, her cigarette in her left. “You don’t know anything.” Ma brought her cigarette to her lips but then didn’t inhale. “It’s hard for my sister. She’s not like me. She lost everything in the war, her beauty, her children, her mind, everything.”
Ma stretched her arm between the chairs and placed her cigarette carefully on the edge of a fire-red ashtray. She picked up her mop. “Auntie likes you very much. That’s why she wants to teach you things.” Ma’s voice was firm, her tone final. It was the voice she used to end an argument. It was the voice that meant there was nothing to discuss.
“You wouldn’t let Auntie say those bad things about me if Pa were alive. He wouldn’t let her say those things. He loved me. He wasn’t like you.”
Ma pressed her lips together very tightly. Her eyes narrowed. I thought she might grow angry all at once, grab up her mop and strike something with it. I thought she might knock the chairs to the floor, she might shout or stamp her feet. She might turn her back to me and leave me in the dining room, refusing to say another word. But instead Ma exhaled slowly, blowing her breath through her teeth. “You remind my sister of the daughter she used to have. My sister likes you all right. It’s me she doesn’t approve of.”
Ma walked over to the window, dragging the mop with one hand, leaving a glistening trail behind her on the floor like a snail. She stared into the parking lot as though she could see something in the dark that deserved her full attention.
“You look like him. Your father, I mean,” Ma said, without looking at me. “You
