Across the Mekong River (18 page)

Nancy went to
the sink and rinsed her glass. She peered out the window at the rain. “It’s really coming down. I can take you home, Laura, when you are ready.”

“That’s okay. I’ll take the bus.
My mother’s expecting me soon.”

“I don’t want you standing in this rain.”

“You could drop me at the library.”

Mary looked p
uzzled. “I thought you had to go home.”

“I do, but I need a book for my history report,” I said quickly.

Nancy walked over and patted my arm. “Whatever you want.”

Rain pounded on the roof, echoing my lies.

It was Father’s birthday.
I stood at the sink washing the left over breakfast dishes, slowly wiping a soapy rag over bowls, plates, and spoons. The sounds of idle chatter filled our kitchen as we crowded together in the tiny space, barely able to move. Mother chopped and sliced peppers, lemon grass, cilantro, and mustard greens with practiced and precise strokes. Water boiled in a pot as Auntie Khou cut pork into cubes and her daughter-in-law, Ia, prepared rice in the electric steamer. We would celebrate with a family dinner.

I glanced at Father relaxing in the living room, watching television on the sofa he had purchased the week befor
e at the used furniture store. A musty smell came from the scratchy plaid fabric covering the sagging cushions. I thought of the sectional couch in Mary’s family room upholstered in plush velour the color of the sky at dusk. I loved to run my fingers over the soft, pliant nap and watch the blue turn from light to dark and back. Everything about our living room was different, from the mattresses stacked in the far corner to the wood altar mounted on the wall with its bowl of incense where we left offerings and prayed to our ancestors. The floor of our apartment shook when we walked across the room, and the paper-thin walls carried voices from next door. Strips of ancient yellow paint lay exposed underneath a coat of muddy beige.

The conversation in the kitchen turned to the cotton material Auntie Yer had bought on a disc
ount table at the fabric store. I half listened as I thought about the homework I still needed to complete. I would ask Father to help me with my French.

My uncles came in, freshly showered after work, and joined my father in the li
ving room with bottles of beer. Mother turned to me. “Nou, get the children.” We would eat in shifts, the men first and then the children and women.

As I turned to leave, Ia took a deep breath and sank onto one of the p
lastic chairs around our table. “I can’t stand any longer,” she sighed, wiping sweat from her forehead and stretching out her legs. Her enormous belly, her third pregnancy, engulfed her tiny frame. Her ankles were swollen double, and her sweet face lined with dark circles under her eyes, making her appear much older than her eighteen years. We all worried. She had lost her last baby at five months.

I stopped to fill a glass with co
ld water and handed it to her. She had only been sixteen when she married Gia and first became pregnant, not unusual in the refugee camp in Thailand or in Laos. But here, now, I could not imagine myself married and pregnant within a year. I wondered if she was content, if she did not see more in her future beyond family and household tasks.

From the balcony that ran the length of the second floor I leaned on the metal rail
ing and gazed down the street. The late afternoon sun cast shadows off the electrical towers onto our parking lot. My cousins Blia and Mee came out of the Fast Stop half a block away, strolling down the street as they gnawed on long ropes of red licorice. Auntie Yer always gave Blia money for treats, and she grew heavier every year. In contrast, Mee looked like a tiny sparrow with skinny legs, a narrow face, and intense dark eyes that darted nervously around, taking everything in.

A
n old Cadillac with a dark blue hood and rusty burgundy body waited at the curb to pull out of the gas station onto the street. The engine rattled and strained to stay alive, as black smoke puffed out the tailpipe. The car started up and a series of explosions burst through the air. The terror was instant and visceral. Flashes of dark, tangled jungles filled my mind with the echoes of machine guns and bullets, popping and whizzing past my ears. I found myself crouching down on the porch, my arms over my head, my heart pounding. After a few moments I stood, shaking, and felt my way down the stairs.

“Man, did you hear that?” Mee said, as they raced up.

I tried to reconcile the logical cause of the noise with my violent reaction. “It was that car.” I pointed in the direction of the Cadillac, now speeding round the corner at the end of the street.

“I thought the Fast Stop was being held up again,” Blia said, lifting her hair off the back of her neck,
her moon-shaped face relaxing. “Where’re you going?”

“To get the kids for dinner.”

Blia made a face. “I forgot, we have to come to your place tonight. It’s so boring. Same old talk and nothing to do.”

I shrugged. She was right, but my father deserved a celebration for his birthday.

Blia turned to Mee. “We can sneak out after dinner and go down to my place to listen to some music.” As usual, the invitation didn’t include me.

I walked around to the small yard, separated from the freeway by a high cement block wall where the incessant whine of wheels on
asphalt poured over the top. I smiled at the site of my sisters and brothers playing with their cousins, a noisy, unruly brood. The older boys were kicking a soccer ball across the sparse patch of lawn. The girls were jumping rope, chanting rhymes in sync with the twirling rope, giggling when they missed the beat and tripped. The younger children had turned on the hose to mold mud into small patties. I found my brother Nao at the center of this group, his chubby little fingers covered in muck. I envied them such simple pleasures.

“Come to dinner,” I called o
ut, squatting down next to Nao. He pointed with great delight to his efforts. “Good work, Nao,” I said. He beamed as I lifted him, his weight pulling at my shoulders.

It took two more reminders before ev
eryone clambered up the stairs. I followed with Noa, laughing as he patted his nose with his muddy fingers.

The men finished their dinner and contin
ued drinking as the women ate. The apartment filled with boisterous exchanges of jokes and laughter and birthday wishes for father. The younger children played and pushed and shoved until they were sent out back again. The women retreated to the kitchen to wash dishes and gossip. When my cousins abandoned me to listen to music at Blia’s, I pulled out my homework.

Father and the other men talked about crop prices and markets,
nothing to catch my attention. But I looked up from my math book when Chia said he had had a call from a clan leader. They wanted more contributions to send additional arms and supplies to the faltering resistance in Laos. The fighters’ numbers had been reduced to almost nothing, and they remained trapped deep in the forests. Father sighed and said nothing would change, that it would be better to get them out of the country and stop their slow starvation and slaughter by government troops. Everyone grew quiet. Only Uncle Boua still spoke occasionally of returning to Laos. For the others that dream had faded long ago. Uncle Soua cleared his throat and reminded everyone that we had many blessings in our new life. We could not abandon those left behind no matter how hopeless the cause. Uncle Shone agreed and offered to take care of the matter.

The evening ended after ten o’clock with sleeping children hauled to their beds and tipsy men weaving down the hall and sta
irs to their apartments. I asked Father if he was too tired to help me with my French translation.

He
shook his head, “I am fine.”

We sat at the dining room table and I opened the book. Father smelled of beer and cigarette smoke as he leaned over and
studied the pages. His face was relaxed, his eyes drooped. I wondered if he was too drunk to decipher the words. Once his lids closed, and I thought he was asleep, but then he sat up and smiled.

“I was thinking of how difficult learning French seemed when I
started at school in Vientiane. I was not such a hard worker like you. I have almost forgotten those days.” He slowly nodded his head as if lost in another place. “Everything seemed possible then.” He looked at me. “You are doing well, Nou.”

It was the first direct complement my father had ever given me, and I blushed with plea
sure, staring down at the paper. When we finished, I placed my homework carefully in my notebook. “Happy birthday,” I said, embarrassed at the inadequacy of my words to express my love and gratitude for all that he did every day in good times and bad.

He stood up unsteadily. His voice grew thick. “Laos is only a memory. You are our future,
Nou.” He walked behind me, running his hand gently down my hair, the only way he knew to tell me that he loved me.

Once again,
I felt ashamed of my lies. Would he be as proud of me if he knew I used a different name at school and pretended to be someone else other than his daughter?

PAO

We looked like a line of ants, marching to the truck at the end of the field with our bulging bags, depositing our loads and trotting back to start again. Almost the entire family angled down the rows, furiously picking red tomatoes and shiny green and yellow peppers from vines that spilled and strained over the supports. Ears of corn with yellow silk peeked out from the top of pale green husks. A distributor had ordered twenty-five boxes of each to be delivered to the warehouse at the end of the day. The younger children packed and stacked the boxes while the rest of us gathered the vegetables. Any extra would be sold from the back of our truck the next day at the farmer’s market downtown.

I could not help but admire the bounty of our
crops, the delicious bouquet of lush ripe tomatoes and pungent leaves, the snap of crisp stems between my fingers. We had been up at five and in the fields as a spray of pink and gold light painted the horizon. Now the July sun beat down, searing the edges of leaves yellow and sucking water from the damp soil, turning it into clots under my shoes. It was only ten in the morning and already close to 90 degrees. No cooling breezes drifted up the delta sloughs. My shirt clung to my back drenched with sweat. Dried out grasses, dandelions, thistle, and mustard sagged in the untended field beyond ours, and in the fenced pasture next to this a dozen cows huddled in the shade of two oak trees, twitching their tails, sending swarms of flies into the air. A brown hawk, dappled with white spots and a black tail, circled lazily overhead. A chorus of songbirds, fluttering between shady branches, stirred the leaves of the cottonwoods to the south. I could hear only a faint hum of the freeway a mile away.

That first season we learned the ways of farming the rich soil of the Sacramento valley, so different from
our steep mountainsides in Laos. We had struggled to survive there as our crops leached nutrients from the land and monsoon rains eroded the thin layer of dirt. Every five or seven years we were forced to move our village to till fresh fields. But here we did not have these problems and could replant year after year. Other Hmong at the Community Center shared their experience and told us about advisors at the Farm Bureau and university agricultural services. Many resources were available to help us find success. We soon discovered where to rent machines that turned the earth into neat even rows in a fraction of the time it took us to do it by hand. We got recommendations on plant varieties that thrived in the valley soil and climate and learned how to irrigate and fertilize. Not everyone in the family embraced these new ways. We still did many tasks by hand, pulling weeds, picking off insects and leaves mottled with mold or disease. Yet, we were all happy to be working the land again.

Shortly after we arrived in Sacramento I had been lucky to find a position translating at the Hmong Community Center that paid more tha
n I had earned in Minneapolis. Chor, Gia, and I worked full time to keep the family fed as we waited to harvest our crops. After work and weekends I joined the others in the fields until the light began to fade. Our labor had begun to pay off. We would plant a second round of crops in the fall for winter harvest.

Yer headed down the row next to me with her empty bag, h
umming to herself and smiling. A new contentment had settled over her since we had arrived in Sacramento. She talked of nothing but working in the fields and the progress of the plants she tended, as if they too were her children. At times her mind drifted, distracted by something unseen, but she remained with us. And I was grateful.

A sassy blue jay with shimmering, long tail feathers swooped down, squawking at us as if we were intruding in his home
. Yer looked up, mumbling something in response.

I spied Nou gathering peppers on the other side of the field, her shoulders stooped, her
face hidden under a straw hat. All morning she had kept apart, her discontent hovering about her like the swarms of fruit flies rising up from overripe tomatoes. It still startled me when I turned to her expecting an awkward, quiet child with gangly legs, one who delighted in telling me about the latest book she had read, the paper she had written for school, or a funny thing her little sister had said. I remembered the daughter who had wanted nothing more than to spend a Saturday afternoon at the public library with her father and had patiently corrected his English, always careful not to offend. Instead, now I found Nou transformed into a beautiful young woman on the brink of her own life. It seemed to happen overnight.

She had adapted well to the new school and remained dedicated to her studies,
spending hours at the library. I was proud of her diligence and good grades. Yet since the move to California, she had grown guarded and aloof, no longer sharing her thoughts. She still turned to me for help with school work and in this purpose we shared a bond. But there were other changes I did not care for, as if she were imitating the other teenagers here. She monopolized the bathroom each morning, fussing with her hair and clothes. Once, Yer caught her putting on makeup after I had forbidden it. She asked me several times for money to buy new clothes, her disappointment and even resentment apparent when I explained our limited income could not be stretched any further. I worried she would forget to honor our culture and past. Sometimes she replied sharply to her mother’s requests for help around the house and protested about working in the fields every weekend and during the long summer days. These things would never have happened in Laos.

When she acted badl
y, I tried to temper my anger. She shouldered many responsibilities on top of school from an early age. She had never failed me when Yer abandoned us to her darkness, taking over without a word. Everything was a balancing act in America, a struggle of hard work and changing expectations. We were all drawn to the constant promise of more. I told myself this teenage behavior would pass without harm. I focused on the hope for my children to complete their education, not be denied this chance as I had been. Even though the girls would marry and leave us, their education would lead to a better life. Nou was bright, a special girl. She set an example for the others. But as the weeks and months passed, my worries over Nou worked at the back of my mind with an unease I could not shake, like a shadow growing longer in the late afternoon. Sometimes an image of her tumbling into the waters of the Mekong River, all those years ago, sprang up without warning. Once again I felt her slipping from my grasp.

A week later I returned from visiting with Uncle Boua in the early evening and found Yer at the dining room table sewing a story-cloth of village life in Laos to sell at a store that marketed Hmong crafts. The apartment was unusually quiet and calm. Our young ones were engrossed in some television show.

“Where are the girls?” I asked.

“Moua and Houa are in the bedroom drawing, and Nou has gone to her friend’s house.”

I sat down opposite Yer and lit a cigarette, glad for moment of peace with my wife.

Yer looked up, her brows knitting together. “Nou is with these friends too much. Four nights this past week. They are pulling her away from her family.”

“Sometimes I feel th
is too, but she is a good girl. She does well in school.”

Yer shook her head.
“The girls she meets, they cannot be good. You have heard the way she talks to me. This is not the Hmong way.”

Yer echoed my own concerns. Young girls in Laos remained obedient
and respectful of their elders. They did not talk back. I let out a long sigh. “I will speak to her. But it is hard for all of us. Things are different here.”

Y
er’s eyes narrowed. I had touched a raw spot. She had never wanted things to be different, to adapt to an American life, to learn English. Many of the older Hmong refugees I met through the community center shared this attitude. To accept the present, to change their ways, meant relinquishing all hope of returning to Laos. No matter how far they traveled, despite the terrible memories, all they desired was that simple existence they had once known. I understood that, but we could not live in the past forever. I suspected that Yer’s refusal to give up her dream of Laos was tied to the loss of our boys. I thought she believed they were waiting for her there, alive and happy. I could never be sure what confused thoughts wandered through her mind in the lost hours of her sickness. Many times I had asked Uncle Boua to use his shaman powers to help balance her souls again. But his efforts brought only temporary relief. Always I remained careful in how I spoke to her and the subjects I brought up, not wanting to risk setting her off again.

Yer’s voice softened.
“It is time to think about a husband for Nou.”

My breath caught in my throat at the suggestion. “She is too young.”

Yer gave me a sly smile. “Only a year younger than when I married you.”

“That was
Laos. Here she must have an education first. Maybe in a few years, when she is finished with high school.”

“Your heart is too soft when
it comes to Nou,” she scoffed. “If we do not marry her soon, it will be too late. Boys do not want a girl who is too smart. And she is getting too many big ideas of her own.”

“
It will be fine.” I took a long draw on my cigarette and flicked the ashes into a bowl. But in my heart, I worried she would go astray.

“You are busy with wo
rk and the farm accounts. You must take time to ask more questions. Find out where she is going, what she is doing. She does not listen to me anymore.” Yer put down her sewing and leaned close. “Maybe she doesn’t always tell the truth.”

I frowned and stubbed out my cigarett
e. Surely Nou would not lie, but a seed of doubt had already taken root in my mind. I must remind Nou of the importance of family and traditions. She would listen to her father and understand. She was my pride, my dear child. I could not let her fall away from us.