Tiger Girl (2 page)

Then, abruptly, the rain ended. The wind hushed while the clouds seethed like molten lead, and for a moment I held
my breath, searching the sky for signs of the copper-colored bruises that signaled a tornado was imminent, but the storm was moving on.

Ma and I sat silently side by side, watching the water in the ditches lap angrily at the edges of the highway.

Finally, a few rays of sunlight pierced the cloud cover and a truck zoomed down the road, splashing muddy water across our windshield.

Ma pulled back onto the interstate.

“I hope you'll study harder in school this year. I'm depending on you. You're the only one to go to college. You'll have to support the others when I'm gone.”

It was like a miracle, I thought. As if Ma had a groove in her brain where she could set the needle so that she'd never skip a track. And I realized she'd probably been an excellent student indeed, far better than I, a kind of genius even. I must truly have been a great disappointment, the way my concentration could be broken by something as ephemeral as the weather.

And, like that, the moment was gone.

I knew I couldn't confront my mother then and ask her to tell me the truth, to explain to me why she hadn't told me before. Questioning my mother felt like questioning her love. I hadn't the nerve.

When I was eighteen, just before I left for college, my older sister, Sourdi, told me the truth. She explained to me that I'd been adopted, a wartime arrangement that was never meant to have been permanent. In 1975, as the Khmer Rouge were poised to take over Cambodia, my birth mother fell ill after her latest child, a son, was born. My father had fled the country, afraid for his life. He'd been associated with a faction in the government that was no longer in power. As the American war in Vietnam spread to Cambodia and Laos, as American
bombs laid waste to the countryside and refugees flooded into the cities, the American-backed government of Lon Nol grew increasingly unpopular, and its ministers increasingly paranoid. They sensed potential threats from everywhere—from the Chinese merchants, whom they accused of being a fifth column for China; from those loyal to Prince Sihanouk, whom they suspected of plotting against them; from their own soldiers, whom they increasingly refused to arm.

Then, one day, soldiers came to the house, threatening to shoot my father, and my mother thought to shout, “Go ahead! Kill him! He's caused me nothing but trouble!” She complained that as a husband he was worthless. They used to be rich but now they were poor. What kind of life was this? She shouted loudly so everyone could hear, the soldiers, the servants, the neighbors. She wanted them to hear how much she hated her husband so they would think he was weak, not powerful, not someone who could overthrow a government. The soldiers left that day without shooting my father, but he knew he had to leave. Who knew when they'd come back? Who knew when they'd change their minds? My mother agreed, and my father fled in the night, promising to send for her and the children when he was safe and established in another country. He did not know, could not know, that the Khmer Rouge would take over the capital before he could send for my mother. No one believed Pol Pot could win. No one knew what he was planning.

Before the fall of Phnom Penh, my mother made a decision. She gave me, a precocious, talkative, energetic toddler, to her younger sister to take care of. She knew I enjoyed staying at my aunt's house, playing with my older cousin Sourdi. My aunt was energetic, her husband kind; they had gotten used to taking care of me while my mother had been recovering from the various illnesses that afflicted her.

Then, in the chaos of the Khmer Rouge takeover, I was evacuated with my aunt's family to the countryside. My mother and her sister were separated. They did not know how to find each other. My aunt raised me as her own, taught me to call her Ma the same as her children. She changed my name, calling me by my nickname, Neary, “gentle girl,” and not Channary, “moon-faced girl,” a fancy name for a different era. The Khmer Rouge were killing city people, the educated, the business classes, the Chinese, the Muslims, and then anyone they grew suspicious of—the pale-skinned, the myopic, the clever, the poor, the dark-skinned, the far-sighted. Eventually, I escaped with my aunt's family to a refugee camp in Thailand, never suspecting that the woman I called Ma was not really my mother, or that the siblings I grew up with were really my cousins.

I would not see my real mother and father again until I was eleven and living in Texas, where my family had been sponsored by a Baptist church to come to America. The rest of our extended family—grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins—had all died as far as we knew.

One day we received a letter through the Red Cross: a man named Chhouen Suoheng was writing to Ma, saying he and his wife had been looking for her for years. Ma was overjoyed to discover that her older sister was alive and in America, but Sourdi was worried. I didn't know then that she knew these were my real parents and that she was afraid they were going to take me away.

After he found us, this man whom I called Uncle, just as Sourdi did, invited us to move in with him and his wife, to help them run “the family business,” as he called it, a Chinese restaurant they'd purchased in a small town in Nebraska.

Our reunion was fraught with troubles. No one told me the truth. I called my birth mother Auntie, my father Uncle. Auntie was ill, suffering from PTSD and depression. She'd
been wounded in the war, her face scarred beyond recognition. Once she'd been a beautiful woman; now her face was split in two by a long purple scar, dark on one side, shiny and light with scar tissue on the other. She was addicted to painkillers. She took too many antidepressants. Her moods varied with the drugs.

Worse, she didn't like the Americanized child I'd become. She found me rude and loud, nothing like the refined daughter she remembered. She blamed her sister for having raised me wrong. I had no idea why this woman stared at me so intently and criticized my every move. I had difficulty understanding her Khmer; she had difficulty understanding my English. She grew increasingly paranoid, certain Ma was having an affair with her husband, convinced they were planning to abandon her. She became obsessed with finding her oldest son, hoping he'd survived the Khmer Rouge. She set fire to the restaurant, lashing out at the people around her. Fortunately, the damage to the Palace was repairable. However, the damage to our family was not.

My father in desperation sold his stake in the restaurant and moved with her to Southern California, where they opened a donut shop and devoted themselves to tracking down their eldest son. But the trail ran cold, and my birth mother grew more depressed. She ended up overdosing when I was in high school. Suicide or accident, we'll never know. Despondent, wracked by guilt, honoring his wife's last wishes perhaps, my father broke all ties with our side of the family. We assumed he was still looking for his son.

I would never have known the true story behind the people I called Auntie and Uncle if Sourdi hadn't told me just before I left for college. She seemed to think it was a gift to tell me the truth.

Maybe I should have left well enough alone, but the truth had a way of sitting under my skin, like grit in an oyster. I wanted to rub it into a pearl, I wanted to expel this scratchy thing that kept me from feeling wholly myself.

I wanted to know why my father had rejected me. For that's how I saw Uncle's behavior. Because he had not claimed me as his own and asked for my return, I assumed he had not wanted me.

Ma liked to tell me stories. When I was little, she complained that I was a naughty and difficult girl, noisy and precocious, the kind who refused to fall asleep. She would tell me stories late at night, trying to put me to sleep, trying to keep me from waking the other kids. With each story, I grew more alert. I tugged on her sleeve as she started to doze. I pinched the inside of her arm. “Tell me another story,” I whispered. “Tell me more.”

She told me stories about her own life—the big house she'd lived in as a child; her grandfather's Chinese restaurant, three stories high; her father, the teacher, who loved her so much that he killed every bug in the house before she went to bed just because they frightened her. When talking about the past made her too sad, she told me made-up stories. The dancing girl who fell in love with a man and lost her immortality, the monk who tried to ride a crocodile and drowned, the monkey who fell in love with a princess and was cast out of Heaven. In Ma's telling, her life mixed with ancient tales, and she became a heroine battling demons, a princess choosing among suitors, a goddess living among mortals.

The story of the Apsaras who fell to Earth was my favorite.

Once there was a dancing girl who defied Heaven's will and chose to live on Earth. She wasn't like her sisters. When she was born, rising fully formed from the Sea of Milk at the beginning of the universe, foam and salt still clinging to her
ankles and her skin glistening wet, she did not cast her glance to the side, modest as a mouse. Instead she danced smiling, eyes shining; she wanted to see everything at once, taste everything. She couldn't keep her mouth shut; she couldn't keep her eyes open wide enough. Life in the Heavenly Palace, surrounded by the gods, bored her. She stared at the blue-green pearl in the sky and plotted her escape.

One night when the moon hid her face behind a cloud, the dancing girl stepped off the edge of Heaven and fell to Earth like a meteorite.

To earn her living, she danced barefoot on the sandstone floors of a temple, incense in her skirts, her earrings jangling like small bells. She danced as her sisters had taught her, as they had always danced in their palace at home in Heaven. No one had seen such grace before, her hands stroking the air like smoke, her hips swaying like a breeze. Soon men came from the four corners of the city, from all the provinces, from the twelve cardinal directions of the world, just to watch her dance.

She fell in love with a minor court official. She saw how he treated the servants, never losing his temper. She saw how he treated the elder courtiers, never losing his patience. He was shy, casting his glance downward, staring at the earth when she smiled at him. Later, when she danced for him, he blushed, but this time he did not look away. He looked into her face and said he loved her, would love her forever. Of course that was impossible, she knew, because she would live forever and the man would not. The dancing girl agreed to marry him without telling him her secret.

While her husband went to work in the king's court, the dancing girl passed her days in their modest home on the road to the temple. The monks came by every morning to beg for food, offering to earn merit for her family.

She smiled and gave them rice.

When her husband returned from court, she danced just for him in the light of the candles that flickered throughout their home.

They were very happy together, the man and the dancing girl.

But while she stayed young, the man grew older. His belly grew round, his skin became rough under her fingers, his black hair turned gray and then white, exposing the lumpy shape of his skull. She put her hands against his cool, dry skin, the mosquito nets drawn tight against the bedroll to protect his soft flesh. His breathing was labored now, so slow. One night she laid her hands against his forehead and knew his soul was ready to leave his body.

Before the man could take his last breath, though, she impulsively snatched his soul in the palm of her right hand. She was not supposed to intervene. The cycles of birth and rebirth were ordained by
dhamma
. But she flew away, high above the banyan trees. The roots dangling from the branches clawed the air, reaching for her skirts as she rode atop the wind as though it were a wave of water and flew safely through the night, home to the Palace.

Her sisters wept to see her; laughter was not strong enough to express their happiness. They gathered around her, pressing their palms together before their faces. They had thought she was gone forever.

But when the Lord Buddha discovered that she had brought a human soul to the Palace before its time, he was very disturbed, and called her before his lotus throne. She walked carefully in small steps, carrying her husband's soul tucked in her hand. The vermilion streamers before the altar flicked at her calves like the tongues of a dozen snakes.

She knelt to the floor and placed her forehead on the smooth stones. “Forgive me,” she said. “But I love him. I cannot bear to be separated.” And she cried with tears of pearls.

Her sisters wept again, now with fear and sorrow.

Then the Lord looked at her with compassion. Raising his right hand, he said, “Let it be so,” and suddenly the dancing girl felt as though she were falling through the floor. The light of day went out like a candle flame snuffed between two fingers. Stars streaked by like strings of firecrackers popping as she fell backward into night.

When she awoke, she lay on a reed mat on a rough wooden floor, next to an old man who snored beneath his mosquito net. The wind blew through the open windows, carrying the sound of a river.

The dancing girl sat up slowly. She felt dizzy, a new sensation. She tried to climb to her feet, but found that her knees creaked, and her ankles were stiff. She rose only with difficulty. Pain was new for her. She tried to understand these feelings.

She walked around the tiny room, saw the small low table, the rough benches, the open windows. She saw that she was in a house on stilts at the edge of a brown river. Silver fish leapt against the current. Two oxen and a pig sniffed through the dirt below the floor in the blue light of the moon. The dancing girl felt a terrible pain in her stomach, as though a great hole were opening up from within. She knelt to the floor, clutching at her intestines. She cried out.

The old man woke with a start. “What happened?”