had to leave that night before the soldiers came for him, too.
“Where did he go? To America?”
Sourdi shook her head. “I always thought he went to Thailand. Or maybe Singapore. He had cousins there. I overheard Ma and Auntie talking once. But he was already gone when the Khmer Rouge came. Ma said he’d always been a lucky man. Some people have luck, some people don’t.”
I nodded then as though I understood. I had more questions, but Sourdi wanted to sleep and turned away from me. Lying in the dark, listening to the jangling fan, the humming fridge, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine my grand, rich, wonderful uncle. He was tall, I decided. And handsome, like a Hong Kong movie star. When he arrived in East Dallas for us, I figured he’d come with a suitcase full of silk dresses just our sizes, and new Barbies, because I had wanted a new Barbie ever since Sam set my last one on fire, and I would recognize him immediately. “Uncle, you’ve come back!” I’d cry out, placing my palms together before my face in a gesture called the sompeah, like the old people did in the Buddhist temple we visited once when Ma didn’t have to work one weekend.
In the weeks that passed after we had received the letter, I waited eagerly for Uncle to arrive at our apartment in a gleaming black Mercedes, his gloved chauffeur at the wheel, just as Sourdi had described. But a full month passed and our savior uncle was still just a name on an envelope, a filmy sheet of spidery handwriting, hardly more real than a memory or a dream.
And then, the next part of our miracle.
Another envelope arrived. The same spidery handwriting looping across the paper. Ma’s hands shook so much that she handed the envelope to Sourdi, who opened it carefully, with the edge of a knife inserted just beneath the fold. She sliced the paper delicately as tissue. Then my sister placed the letter on the table before Ma, who held her fluttering hands pressed tightly together in her lap.
“We received your letter,” Ma read aloud. “We received your letter,” she repeated. She put her hands across her eyes as though there were nothing more to read. “We received your letter.”
Ma spoke so quickly as she read aloud in Khmer, I could barely follow. Sourdi had to translate. (I didn’t want to admit, I was forgetting words, or maybe Ma was speaking words I’d never learned.) In addition to Uncle, Ma’s oldest sister—her only living sister, our only living Auntie—was in Nebraska now, she and her husband. They’d just opened a Chinese restaurant that spring. They were well.
Ma laughed then, laughed until she cried and then started laughing all over again.
“A Chinese restaurant is like a bank,” Ma said, waving the letter in the air like a winning lottery ticket. “My father used to say that. ‘If you work in a restaurant, you’re just a teller, but if you own the restaurant, you own the bank.”
“Did your father own a restaurant?” I asked.
“Of course not! My father was a teacher. You don’t remember your own grandfather.” Ma shook her head, but with the miracle letter in her hand, it was hard for her to remain angry, even at me. “My father’s father owned a restaurant,” Ma said, and then she laughed some more.
“Back home,” Ma said, meaning in Phnom Penh, before the war, “all the families who owned the big Chinese restaurants were wealthy. They could afford to send their children to school in France. The men had enough money to keep several wives, and even the first wives had lovers. It’s true. I saw them with my own eyes.”
“You saw their lovers?” I asked, wide-eyed.
“No. I saw their restaurants. And they were always busy, night and day. They made so much money, there were guards at every door.” Ma sighed, thinking about the past. And I sighed, too, pretending to remember.
“Do they want to see us?” asked Sourdi, eyes wide.
“Of course they do! We’re family.”
“All of us? Or just, you know, some of us?”
Ma scowled. “All of us. We’re all the same family. That’s all that matters. Family is family.”
Ma wrote another letter and another and another, and each time a reply came back, letter after letter after letter, miracle after miracle after miracle. There were a few phone calls, too, although they cost too much and weren’t as useful, because Ma had a tendency to cry at the sound of her oldest sister’s voice. She’d cry until she couldn’t speak, her voice turned hoarse, and once when I pressed my ear close to the receiver, I could hear a voice at the other end, crying hoarsely as well, without saying any words. Then after this kind of exchange for many weeks, the last and best part of our miracle occurred.
Uncle wrote, saying that he spoke for himself and his wife both, and they were asking us to come to join them in Nebraska, in business paradise, where there were no gangs and where hard work was rewarded. He said that family was family and should stick together. Would we come to help run the Family Business?
Ma didn’t hesitate before agreeing. She understood quite well that there was no point waiting around for our miracle to turn sour, to melt in a thunderstorm and break our hearts. It was time for us to move. She’d known. She’d dreamed everything.
And so we packed up our apartment, Ma said good-bye to her boss at the restaurant where she gutted fish and chickens, and we stuffed everything we owned into Hefty bags and plastic milk crates we found behind the 7-Eleven. We climbed into Ma’s dusty dented Ford that used to belong to One Arm and headed north to Nebraska.
We left quickly, not because we were naive or simple or foolhardy, any of these things people might want to accuse us of being, but rather because we understood about miracles all right, how their shelf life was as long as a butterfly’s summer.
CHAPTER 3
Last Chance, Nebraska
The highway stretched before us like the long, narrow blade of a knife. The sky touched the earth in every direction, empty even of clouds, as blank as a sheet of paper. The air was too hot for color. Sourdi hummed along with the radio for hours, and then after a while she stopped. I couldn’t remember when exactly; at some point, I realized she was silent, that was all.
For hours there were no towns, no buildings visible from the highway save the occasional abandoned barn, faded and derelict. Just the dark earth, the corn and wheat and soybeans just beginning to grow, a thick green carpet swaying in the wind. In the distance, hidden behind a knot of trees, I imagined there were farmhouses, people, dogs, but on the highway, this was only a guess.
Sourdi and Ma sat in the front seat, the television and the tape player balanced between them. My younger brother and sisters stretched out in the back, leaning against me, kicking, scratching, farting. They’d fussed nonstop for sixteen hours straight before they, too, at last had fallen into a deep slumber. Hefty bags of clothes lay on the floor. My feet rested on top of a crate of dishes, pushing my knees up uncomfortably into my chest. It hadn’t seemed as though we owned many things when they were spread about the apartment, but now with everything we owned packed into the car, it seemed we had too much.
Heat waves shimmered above the highway, forming imaginary lakes, pools of cool blue water that disappeared just as our tires would have splashed across the banks. If I squinted, the jade fields on either side of the highway appeared like water, spreading all around us, to the very edges of the flat earth, green as the ocean before a storm, simmering. Then it seemed
