I turned off the television. We waited while Sourdi grabbed the letter off the refrigerator and held it out to Ma.
“This came for you.”
Ma reached for the fragile, airmail envelope with the spidery handwriting on it. Then she withdrew her hand quickly as though the letter were a snake that could bite. She sat down heavily in her chair, staring. Sourdi put the letter on the table before her.
“What is it, Ma?” Sourdi looked frightened, her dark eyes narrowing. Because she was afraid, the rest of us felt afraid, too.
Now we clustered around the table, pressing close to Ma.
She told us to back off, to give her room to breathe. We were suffocating her, we were like animals, she said. Like animals in a cage, pushing against each other out of fear until the animal in the very center would have the life squeezed out of it.
We backed away. Ma took a deep breath and ripped open the fragile airmail envelope.
“Golldang! Golldang!” Ma said in English. Then she began to cry. She held the letter in one hand and covered her face with the other as her shoulders shook.
“What happened?” Sourdi tried to read the letter even as Ma flapped it through the air. She grabbed hold of an edge and bobbed up and down, trying to keep the page smooth as Ma continued to wave her hand. Sourdi could recognize a few words in Khmer, but not enough to read the letter. “Tell us, Ma!” she begged.
But for several minutes, forever, all Ma could say was “Golldang!” in English, over and over, like the chorus of a song.
“Golldang” was our all-purpose exclamation word. We had heard it so often that we learned to use it the way other people might say “Oh!” It could mean anything. The letter might say we had won a million dollars, or it might be telling us that we’d failed in the U.S. and were being sent back to the refugee camp in Thailand or even back to Cambodia. Who could tell?
Finally, Sourdi began to cry in frustration, biting her trembling lips, sniffing her runny nose, as fat tears rolled down her cheeks. Then Navy and Maly and Sam cried, to see Sourdi crying. I wanted to slap all of them. I stamped my foot on the linoleum. “I’m going to call the police!” I shouted in English.
Then Ma uncovered her face and looked at me quizzically. She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Don’t shout,” she said. “Did I teach my girls to shout like this?”
I hung my head.
Ma wiped her nose on a paper napkin, then sighed. She spread the letter out on the tabletop, smoothing it flat with the palm of her hand. Then Ma told us that everything was going to be all right. We were saved, she said. It was a miracle. She smiled.
It had been a long time since I’d seen Ma smile like this, with her whole face, even her eyes.
Seeing her smile made my entire body feel light.
The letter was from a man named Chhouen Suoheang. My Uncle. The man married to my mother’s oldest sister. The letter meant that we had family, alive and living in the United States, in a place called Nebraska, in fact. We looked it up on the map in my social studies book, and yes, it was there, a real state, part of the United States. A miracle.
“Oh, this letter is so old. They’ll think we’re dead. They’ll think we’re lost forever.”
“Maybe it’s a lie,” Sourdi suggested, chewing on her nails. “Maybe they’re imposters.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. Give me some paper.” Ma sat down at the kitchen table as Sourdi carefully tore a sheet of paper from her notebook (Language Arts).
Her tongue pressed against her teeth, Ma broke the lead on her first pencil from pushing too hard. She switched to a Bic pen, but each time she placed it against the paper, the sheet ripped, again and again, line after line. Ma’s hands shook as she tore a new sheet from Sourdi’s notebook. She smoothed it against the table top, licking her lips, as she held the pen over the page. While we stood in a ring around her, holding our breath, she put the pen to the paper very lightly and wrote:
“Dearest Older Sister, dear Older Brother . . . ” she wrote politely, repeating the words as she traced their outlines in her most beautiful cursive.
She didn’t tell them that Pa was dead, or about all the jobs she’d had, about the shooting we’d witnessed or how all her money had been stolen. She wrote only happy news. Grateful words. Loving phrases.
Ma finished her letter, said a prayer to the Buddha, then sealed it.
“I can mail it for you, Ma,” Sourdi said, frowning still.
“I’ll mail it tomorrow before I go to work,” Ma said, her tone so casual, it made my stomach hurt with fear. She talked of the letter as though it were a bill. As though it were nothing special. But I could see in her face that she was as anxious and scared as Sourdi.
I bit all my fingernails off until even my thumbs were bleeding.
That night, I lay beside Sourdi on our mattress and whispered so we wouldn’t wake Ma.
“Do you remember them? Uncle and Auntie?”
“You don’t remember them at all?” Sourdi squinted at me in the dark.
“How could I remember them? I was too young.”
Sourdi licked her lips. “I remember them all right.”
She said Uncle had been a prosperous man, an engineer who had worked for the government. He and Auntie had lived in a large house with three stories and many servants in central Phnom Penh, the capital city. He’d had a car and a driver and his children had rooms filled with toys. Auntie had worn nothing but silk dresses and high heels, just like the foreign ladies whose husbands were diplomats or businessmen or else drug lords in the city.
“What were our cousins like? How old are they now? Will we meet them?” I asked, but Sourdi remembered other things.
She said Uncle’s boss was implicated in a plot to overthrow the president, Lon Nol, who was very paranoid. Lon Nol was suspicious of everyone in his own government. He understood how subordinates could turn on you. He himself had come to power after he’d staged a plot to overthrow the last chief of state, Prince Sihanouk. Now Lon Nol had Uncle’s boss arrested. Soldiers escorted him from his office, guns to his back. No one expected to see him alive again.
Sourdi said a neighbor had come riding back home on his Vespa just to tell Ma and Auntie what had happened. They all had assumed Uncle would be arrested, too, maybe not immediately, but sooner rather than later. Ma and Auntie went to the temple to pray. They didn’t trust anyone, not even the servants, so Sourdi had babysat all the children.
But fortunately, Uncle hadn’t gone to the office that day. Maybe he’d been feeling under the weather. Maybe it had been Auntie who was not feeling well. She was often sick, Sourdi said, mysterious ailments that kept her bedridden for weeks on end. Anyway, something had delayed Uncle so that he was not at the office to see the soldiers drag his boss away, upending file cabinets and desks, destroying typewriters and terrifying the secretaries, because the soldiers had no real idea how to investigate a crime—they only knew how to terrify the accused. Uncle heard about it later from a friend who had heard from someone who was there but who had been too lowly to be
