of the road, reaching higher, swirling around our tires, sweeping us away. The sea was like that, deceptive. It could hide its anger until it was too late. I didn’t know yet about the fields.
I turned away from the window and stared at the back of my mother’s head, observing the way her short black hair curled away from her sweaty brown neck. I couldn’t see her face in the rear-view mirror, couldn’t tell if she looked sad or determined or excited still, if she was squinting behind her dime-store sunglasses, suspiciously surveying this flat empty land, or if she had a faraway look in her eyes, as she imagined our miraculous future in Business Paradise, the Family Reunited, our Saviors stalwart and kind.
Her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, her knuckles glowing yellow through her skin. She held the steering wheel as though she thought it might try to jerk free of her hands and take us in another direction.
“Tell us about Auntie again, Ma,” I asked from the back seat. “Tell us how rich she was.”
“My sister, ha!” Ma laughed, a sound like a bark escaping from her throat. “She lived her life as though she were living in a book.” Ma shook her head. “She always had to have the best.”
Then she told us all the arrogant, impractical, glamorous things her oldest sister had done: the marriage party that had lasted three days, the three-story house with servants on every floor, the shiny black car and the man who wore white gloves just to drive it, the French accent Auntie had adopted even though she couldn’t speak a word, the high heels, the makeup, the perfume imported from Paris.
“I said to her, ‘Why do you need to smell like that? As soon as you walk on the sidewalk, you’ll smell like everyone else, like food, like sweat, like this city. Why waste your money? Who’ll notice the difference?’ And my sister said to me, ‘I’ll know the difference, that’s who! I’ll know.’ ” Ma clicked her tongue against her teeth. “My sister was crazy.”
For Chinese New Year, Uncle paid a man to come to the house and light strings of red firecrackers outside the door while another man played on a horn and a third man beat two cymbals together to drive away evil spirits. Uncle didn’t believe in evil spirits—he was an educated man—but he’d wanted his children to see the traditional Chinese celebration.
In those days, before the Khmer Rouge won the civil war, all the different ethnic groups—the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Cham Muslims, Cambodians from north and south, the French, anyone—could intermingle in the cities. Many intermarried. Only when the Communists took over did this kind of mixing become taboo, and a mixed background became an almost certain death sentence. We had to lie then. Pretend we weren’t mixed people, weren’t what the Communists called “new people” because they considered us alien to traditional culture, even though Chinese had been in Cambodia for more than five hundred years, and Cambodian culture had always been mixed.
Ma had married a non-Chinese. Maybe that’s what saved us. Maybe nothing but dumb luck saved us.
Before Ma was married, she used to go to her eldest sister’s house for the New Year to receive her red envelope, and she’d seen the firecracker man and the musicians at work. She’d pressed her ears closed with her fingers, but still the sound like thunder exploding from a tin drum found its way into her skull. Afterwards the red paper wrappers lay on the sidewalk in pointed mounds, tall as her waist. Three old women with bamboo brooms had had to sweep the street for half a day to clear the red away.
Ma said her sister had spoiled all her children. They behaved like members of the royal family. If they ran about the house and broke something or did something wrong at school or caused any kind of problem at all, the servants were punished instead of them. Once, when Ma had let Sourdi go over to their house to play, the daughter had pulled Sourdi’s hair and made her cry, but it was the maid whom Auntie criticized. “You can’t even watch two little girls?” she’d said, and the maid had bowed her head and apologized.
“My sister,” Ma sighed, “she really knew how to live.”
“We’re all going to stay, aren’t we, Ma? All of us?” Sourdi asked.
“That’s what the letter said. All of us.”
Sourdi leaned her head on her arm, letting the wind whip her hair about her head like the tail of a kite in a storm. She didn’t hum anymore.
“Do you remember Uncle and Auntie, Nea?” Ma asked.
“Me? No.”
“Not one bit? You don’t remember anything I told you?”
“Why would I remember them? Sourdi was the one who played over in their house, you said.” I must have let my voice slip a bit. Sounded irritable instead of respectful. It was hot in the car; the road was so long; I hadn’t meant to, but I couldn’t help myself. Anyway, Ma looked annoyed then. I’d spoiled her happy mood.
Now she fell into a long silence that she refused to break, and I took to staring out the window again at the endless jade fields and the steely blue sky and the waves of shimmering heat rising above the asphalt.
CHAPTER 4
The Ghost in the Window
We took the first exit for the town where Auntie and Uncle were supposed to be living, but it took us three passes through this village before we could find any Chinese restaurant.
The business district was not quite four blocks long, marked by a J.C. Penney at one end and a hardware store at the other. In the middle, there were the Blue Bunny ice cream parlor, a five and dime, a funeral home, a sandwich shop, a fabric store, a photography studio, and seven bars. The post office was on one side of Main Street and the police station on the other. There were also two grocery stores, a Piggly Wiggly and a Tom & Bud’s, at opposite ends of town. A couple service stations were sprinkled conveniently in between. Next to the J.C. Penney was a vacant building that, we learned later, had once been a very successful John Deere outlet, but since the farm economy had taken a turn for the worse, it had closed shop and its wares consolidated into the main showroom in Yankton, a larger town of ten thousand about thirty miles northeast across the South Dakota border. A branch of the Missouri river ran along the eastern edge of town, which was consequently known as a flood plain. On the drier, western border were the local grain elevator and a few stores that sold farm implements, Purina feeds, and veterinary supplies.
We found the restaurant finally on the far northwest corner of town, practically on the border of the town limits, just off the last exit on the state highway, near a Super 8 and a laundromat. Someone had painted the squat building a bright red; it stood out like a firecracker against the deep green of the cornfields. A lighted sign proclaimed “The Silver Palace.” It was the tallest pole in the parking lot and would become, we soon discovered, a magnet for lightning strikes. There was also a bright yellow plastic banner across the front of the building. It caught the wind and flapped ferociously, although in rare moments when the wind subsided we could just make out the words “Grand Opening.”
As we stood in the parking lot after our long ride in our cramped car, our boxes pressing against our knees, I stared at the Palace and tried to imagine that it looked like the Family Business that would save us all, that would send me to college and rescue Ma from night shifts gutting chickens, the kind of Chinese restaurant that needed guards to protect all the money hidden inside.
I couldn’t tell how Ma felt, whether she was still excited or if her silence meant that she was worried, or even panicked, by the emptiness of the sky above us and the flat
