Across the Mekong River (26 page)

“I was afraid if you had too much time to think about it, you might say no. I didn’t want her to be disappointed.”

“I would never have said no.”

“She’s wanted to come for a long time.”

“Why didn’t she then?” I found myself feeling defensive.
What had kept her away?

Blia scrunched her mouth to one side for a moment. “She was afra
id to go against your father.” She put her hand on my arm. “How do you feel about it?”

I sighed
and gathered myself together. “Good.”

The trees along the familiar streets have grown taller, looking spindly now with their leaves lying in golden-red piles in the gutter. As I drive through the Shannons’ neighborhood, I notice some houses have been remodeled, others painted new colors. I went to visit Mary and her parents first this morning as she and Josh are home for the weekend. I needed their strength and encouragement to bolster me for the afternoon ahead. Mary and I retreated to her old bedroom while I changed into the traditional Hmong outfit that Mother and I worked on together. We laughed like the teenagers again, helping to ease my frayed nerves.

In September Mother invited me to the family New Year’s celebration. A
new year, a new start, she said. I have no idea what kind of reception I’ll receive. I expect my cousins and siblings to be friendly, or at least polite. Mother insists that Auntie Yer and Auntie Kia can’t wait to see me. But I have not heard any mention of Father or my uncles, whether they are ready to welcome me. At least Father agreed to allow me to join them. Mother and Blia seem so confident and optimistic about the reunion. I want to believe them.

I am gripping t
he wheel so hard my hands ache. I feel slightly claustrophobic wrapped in layer after layer of embroidered cloth, my sash and apron tightly wound around my middle. But my clothes are like protective armor, good luck charms. I cross the freeway and approach our street for the first time in over five years. On the rare occasions I visited Sacramento with Mary, I avoided coming anywhere near my family’s apartment.

I am fifteen minutes early, so I park on
the street in front of the vacant lot, out of sight behind the oleander bushes that now tower twenty feet in the air. My heart is pounding and I cannot seem to catch my breath. I put an icy hand on my forehead and close my eyes. Perhaps, this is a terrible mistake.

Since our reunion in early June, Mother ha
s come to visit me four times. One Saturday in July she arrived with Blia, May, and my three sisters. The girls were awkward around me at first, but their uncertainty eased as the day wore on. They stared wide-eyed as we walked around campus and wandered through shops on Telegraph Avenue. Over lunch they offered snippets of their life at school and with friends. Houa is planning on going to junior college.

Since then Mother has taken the Greyhound bus by herself and stayed ove
rnight one weekend each month. Cautiously, we are nourishing a relationship as two adults, two equals, in a manner I never imagined possible. We are becoming friends, companions, and sometimes mother and daughter. One Saturday, we played tourists in San Francisco, gliding over the hills in a cable car, browsing in China Town, and visiting the De Young Museum. On other days we tried a new Thai restaurant in Berkeley then my favorite Italian place in Oakland. A child like quality of awe and delight reshapes her face with each new discovery. All the while she chides me for spending too much money.

I love our quiet times shopping and
cooking at home. She insists I am too thin. I don’t know how to feed myself properly. What man would want a skinny girl like me? She cooks huge pots of chicken and vegetables infused with lemon grass and cilantro and steaming bowls of pork with mustard greens and peppers so hot they scorch my mouth. We eat in my dining room with cloth mats and napkins and candles. In the last light of evening, we sit on my back porch with cups of tea and chocolate chip cookies that I baked myself.

Sometimes it is enough to simply be together, sewing clothes for the New Year and listening to music.
Occasionally she shakes her head and grabs my fabric, correcting my stitches. But more often she forces herself to hold back and let it be. Either way, it makes me laugh. She gossips about the family and discusses problems with my sisters and brothers, even asking my advice on how to deal with Noa’s rebellious behavior. I have discovered my mother is funny and thoughtful. There is a depth to her I never recognized before.

There are subjects we
still do not broach. I have never mentioned Pete. We do not acknowledge the cause of our split, the court hearing, or the decisions we all made in the midst of the turmoil. We talk of the intervening years as if I have been out of reach, away on a long vacation in Berkeley. Mother never raises the topic of my father. I have no idea what she tells him of her visits.

Some things never change.
She questions me about my social life. Why am I am not dating a nice Hmong man? What is wrong with the men in the photo of the Hmong Student Union? I tell her they are either married or too young. I haven’t offered that I dated one of them for a few months, but he was too jealous and domineering. On her last visit, she mentioned a nice man who works with Father at the Hmong Center. I could meet him some time when I come to Sacramento. Isn’t it surprising that a handsome man, already twenty-seven years old, has never married, she says. Nothing I say dissuades her.

The more time we spend together, the deeper my desire to learn about
our former life in Laos, about the village I barely remember. Like the bombed-out houses with gaping holes in the roofs and walls that we left behind, important pieces of my past are missing, obscured by time. Mother is hesitant to reopen old wounds, but slowly she has unearthed memories and emotions that span from her early life to the days when she married Father and war and tragedy took over. She tells me of her childhood with a mother she never understood, a woman she felt never loved her. She recounts her first blissful years of marriage and the birth of my brothers. And then there were years of war and killing and brutality, never knowing when the enemy might appear or a bomb might drop. Guilt and remorse weigh on her for secrets she has never shared with anyone before. Her confessions break my heart. There was a day when Pathet Lao soldiers raped and beat the other women in the village, while she hid in corn crib, untouched.

“
What could I do? How could I have helped?” she asked me, tears streaming down her face.

Many times she said
, “I have forgotten these things. These are memories I try to bury, but it is important for you to know.”

And all I can answer is,
“I never knew, I didn’t understand.” The stories wrap our hearts together like the threads weaving in and out of cloth, binding patterns into a whole piece.

It is time.
I walk from the car down the street and into the parking lot. The apartment building appears unchanged except for a fresh coat of dark brown paint and white trim. There are new rose bushes along the right side. Three small children who I don’t recognize play in the side yard, staring at me with curious eyes. I climb the metal stairs listening to the happy murmur of voices coming from my parents’ apartment through an open window. I wonder if the entire family is gathered and if they will fall into silence when I enter. Who will speak to me? Who will ignore me? And Father. Please let him forgive me. Let us be family once more.

I hold my hand in the air
, ready to knock on the door.

The End

Author’s Note

While
Across the Mekong River
is a work of fiction, the circumstances of the story in Laos and Thailand are based on the 1960–1973 civil war in Laos, part of the wider second Indochina War, and the takeover of the government by the Communists in 1975. For those interested in learning more about the history of Laos, the Hmong/Laotian refugee experience or Hmong culture, I recommend the following resources:

Organizations

Legacies of War: http://
www.legaciesofwar.org

Hmong National Development: http://
www.hndinc.org

Hmong Archives: http://
www.hmongarchives.org

Hmong Studies Center: http://
www2.csp.edu/hmongcenter/

Hmong Cultural Center: http://
www.hmongcc.org

Books/Articles:

Branfman, Fred, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an air war. Vientiane, Laos: Cluster Munition Coalition, 2010 (second edition); originally published New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

Chan, Sucheng (edited by), Hmong means free: Life in Laos and America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.

Conboy, Kenneth, with James Morrison, Shadow War: The CIA’s Secret War in Laos, Boulder, Colorado: Paladin Press, 1995.

Donnelly, Nancy D., Changing lives of refugee Hmong women. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994.

Evans, Grant, A short history of Laos: The land in between. Crows Nest, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2002.

Faderman, Lillian, with Ghia Xiong, I Begin My Life All Over, Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.

Fadiman, Anne, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

Hamilton-Merritt, Jane, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Haney, Walt, “The Pentagon Papers and the United States involvement in Laos”. In Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, eds. Vol. 5. The Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition: Critical essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.

John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Hmong Art Tradition and Change. Sheboygan, Wisconsin: Sheboygan Arts Foundation, Inc. 1985.

Khamvongsa, Channapha and Elaine Russell, “Legacies of War: Cluster Bombs in Laos” Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2, June 2009, pp. 281-306.

Long, Lynellyn D., Ban Vinai, the Refugee Camp, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Mote, Sue Murphy, Hmong and American. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., 2004.

Moua, Mai Neng (edited by), Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Writing by Hmong Americans. St. Paul, Minnesota: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002.

Pholsena, Vatthana, “
Life under Bombing in Southeastern Laos (1964-1973) Through the Accounts of Survivors in Sepon
”, European Journal of East Asian Studies. Vol. 9, No.2, 2010,
pp. 267-290.

Russell, Elaine (forthc.), “Laos -- Living with Unexploded Ordnance: Past Memories and Present Realities”. In: Vatthana Pholsena & Oliver Tappe (eds.), Interactions with a Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

Quincy, Keith, Harvesting Pa Chay’s Wheat: The Hmong and America’s Secret War in Laos. Spokane, Washington: Eastern Washington University Press, 2000.

Stevenson, Charles, The end of nowhere: American policy toward Laos since 1954. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.

Stuart-Fox, Martin, A history of Laos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Vang, Chia Youyee, Hmong in Minnesota. St. Paul, Minnesota: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008.

Warner, Roger, Back Fire: The CIAs Secret War in Laos and Its Link to the War in Vietnam. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Yang, Dao, “Hmong at the Turning Point,” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations Dec 22, 1994,; Vol. v3, No. n4.Article Info
Hmong at the Turning Point.

Yang, Kao Kalia, The Latehomecomer : a Hmong Family Memoir. Minneapolis : Coffee House Press, 2008.

The Journal of American-East Asian Relations Dec 22, 1994,; Vol. v3, No. n4

Article Info
Hmong at the Turning Point.
The Journal of Asian Studies Feb 1, 1994,; Vol. v53, No. n1 Films

“Gran Torino” Warner Brothers,
directed by Clint Eastwood, 2008. Drama

“Bomb Harvest” Lemur Films, directed by Kim Mordaunt, 2008. Documentary. Distributor: TVF International, 375 City Road, London EC1V 1NB United Kingdom. Website:
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“The Betrayal (Nerakoon)” Pandinlao Films, directed by Ellen Kuras, 2008. Documentary. Distribution: Cinema Guild, Ryan Krivoshey, 115 West30th Street, Suite 800, New York, NY 10001.

Website:
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“The Most Secret Place on Earth” Gebrueder-Beetz-Filmprodukion, directed by Mark Eberle, 2007. Documentary. Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion Köln GmbH & Co. KG, Im Mediapark 6a,50670 Cologne, Germany. Website: http://www.gebrueder-beetz.de/engl/index.htm

“Bombies” Bullfrog Films, directed by Jack Silberman, 2002. Documentary. Distributor: Bullfrog Films, PO Box 149, Oley, PA 19547. Website:

http://
www.bullfrogfilms.com/contact.html

“The Split Horn,” Alchemy Films, produced by Taggart Siegel and Jim McSilver, 2001. Documentary. Distributor: Independent Television Service (ITVS) 651 Brannan Street, Suite 410, San Francisco, CA 94107. Website: http://www.itvs.org/films/split-horn