Tiger Girl (26 page)

“I don't think I can make a wish if it's not my birthday.”

“Of course you can,” Ma said.

So I closed my eyes and blew out the candles while everyone clapped, but when I opened my eyes, I realized I'd forgotten to make a wish. But that was okay, I didn't believe in wishes. Anyway, the candles sparked back to life right away, and Marie and Jennifer giggled hysterically, like the fifteen-year-olds they were. “They're trick candles!” they announced. “Got you!”

“It's okay,” I said. “I already got my wish.”

Ma turned the lights back on, and suddenly someone's hands covered my eyes. “Ha ha,” I said, playing along. “You got me.”

“I sure did!” said a familiar voice. And I realized it was my sister Sourdi. “Surprise!” she cried.

I pulled her hands away. “Sourdi! Sourdi! You're here!” I threw my arms around her shoulders. I hadn't expected to see her. Trips were so hard, what with all her kids. I hadn't seen her since I graduated from high school and visited her in Iowa. I held her tight. “You won't believe who I saw in California,” I whispered.

But before she could reply, I felt little hands, like so many eager monkeys, pulling at my jeans and my sweatshirt, enlacing my legs. “We're here, too!” Sourdi's kids, my nieces and nephew, screeched happily.

“You look good,” I told Sourdi, and I wasn't lying. She'd gotten her hair streaked in long blond tendrils, she was wearing a lot of makeup, but tastefully done, and she smelled like a perfume you couldn't buy in a drugstore. She looked like a grown-up, like a mother, like a woman who'd grown into herself, no longer like the girl who'd left home too soon.

“Ma called me last night. Asked if I could drive up with the kids to welcome you home. You're full of surprises, Nea.”

“I would have told you I was going,” I started, but then I stopped, because that was a lie, and I didn't want to lie again.

Sourdi squeezed my hand. “So Ma told me you went to find an
internship
?” She lifted an eyebrow, but she smiled too, and I knew she'd guessed my secret, and she'd already forgiven me. Sourdi had always been my best friend, my protector, and I was still her favorite. I could tell.

Ma brought out our special dessert plates and I helped cut up the cake—a special ice cream one from the Piggly Wiggly, mint chocolate chip; Ma had remembered my favorite.

“So how was California?” Sam asked. “You see any movie stars?”

“Even better,” I said. “You're not going to believe what happened.”

“It's no fun if you don't see movie stars,” he said, and grabbed his plate. “I'm taking this upstairs, Ma. Game's on.” And he rushed out.

The twins took their cake and started giggling with Marie's boyfriend, who thanked me politely when I handed him his slice. “Can we go finish watching the game, too, Ma?” the girls begged, and Ma let them go. Sourdi gathered up her children and followed the others. She paused at the door and winked at me, quickly, so only I would see.

I listened as their footsteps trooped up the back stairs like a parade of tiny royal elephants celebrating the new year.

Ma pulled up a stool next to me at the prep counter. “You can tell me. I want to hear all about your trip.”

“I will, Ma. But not tonight.”

“No, not tonight,” Ma agreed. She put her spoon into the mint ice cream and licked it delicately. “You came home just in time. We're going to have a storm. Weatherman says maybe six inches. Let's look.”

She took me by the elbow, and we walked to the back door and peeked outside. Sure enough, snow was swirling from the dark sky. We watched the flakes spiraling through the air, illuminated by the tall light in the parking lot, each flake floating gently like so many goose feathers.

“Like spring,” Ma said.

“What? It's freezing!”

“It looks like the flower petals in spring. The rains come and they fall from the trees. When I was girl, I used to like to dance in the first rain. My sister and I, we'd run out under the trees and let the petals fall into our hair.” Ma patted her head and stroked the air by her shoulders, imaging the long locks she used to possess. “We used to say they looked like pearls, like diamonds. We were very vain.” Her eyes grew bright and moist as she thought about the past.

“Come on, Ma,” I said. “Let's go! Quick, quick!”

I grabbed her by the hand and, giggling, we ran into the snow like schoolgirls ready to be bathed in flower petals.

The wind gusted and I held Ma's arm tight, so she wouldn't fall as we made our way across the icy parking lot into the pool of white light. The snow swirled around us, and we tilted our heads back to catch snowflakes on our tongues. We held out our palms, letting the crystals gather there like jewels we had skimmed from the sea of milk at the very beginning of time. We were like dancing girls witnessing the birth of the universe.

Side by side, we laughed in the falling snow.

I began this story to keep a promise I made to a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. When I was fifteen, I interviewed a Sino-Cambodian woman who had moved to the small town in South Dakota where I lived with my family. I wrote features for the local paper and often interviewed people with interesting stories and backgrounds. The woman wanted to tell me how her children had died as she tried to escape the Khmer Rouge. However, after I wrote up the article, my mother told me I should not submit it to the paper. “Don't draw attention to them,” she said. “They've already received threats.” Then my mother told me that the woman had confided in her that people had even threatened to “fire bomb” the Cambodian family's restaurant. It was the early 1980s, and anti-Asian sentiment was high in the Midwest because of constant Japan-bashing in the media. While Cambodian refugees could not be further removed from the Japanese auto executives being vilified in the press, the differences were not apparent to local bigots terrified of the “economic Pearl Harbor” that the media warned against. Thus, I did not submit my article to the paper, but instead resigned out of frustration. Shortly thereafter, the woman moved away with her husband and American-born children. They had sold their restaurant at a loss and decided to move back to Texas, where they felt safer. I lost touch with her after she left.

Eventually, I too left that small town, for college in Grinnell, Iowa, where I formed a mentoring group for the children of Southeast Asian refugees, including the many Cambodians who had relocated to the state in the 1980s. After I graduated,
I became a reporter for the Associated Press, where I made a point of covering the Southeast Asian community, first in Des Moines, Iowa, and later in Denver, Colorado. I hoped that as a member of the media I could make a difference in a way that I had been unable to do as a teenager.

Long after I left the AP, I still felt haunted by my inability to tell the story of that first Cambodian family that I had met. Finally, I wrote the novel
Dragon Chica
, creating a young Cambodian American narrator, Nea Chhim, who could tell the story of her family's struggles in America. While I did include the story of the first refugee I ever interviewed, revealing how her children died under the Khmer Rouge, I also expanded the narrative to include the stories that I had witnessed firsthand: the stories of the first generation of Cambodian refugees to come to America in the 1980s to make a new life in this country.

I was immensely gratified that readers responded so positively to the story of Nea and her family. When my publisher, Trish O'Hare at GemmaMedia, heard that students had asked if I would write a sequel, she immediately wanted to know if I would do so. Thus, I agreed to write this novel to explore the part of the family that I had not been able to include in the first book due to the constraints of time and space.

In continuing my research for this novel, I have benefitted from many sources, including many brave and accomplished Cambodian Americans willing to share their own stories with me, retired foreign service officers, scholars, volunteers who have worked with refugees in America, as well as the work of scholars and artists who have done much to document Cambodian history—not only the Khmer Rouge era (1975–78) but other periods of Cambodia's rich and complex culture. I found these books particularly helpful:
At the Edge of the Forest: Essays on Cambodia, History, and Narrative in Honor of
David Chandler
, edited by Anne Ruth Hansen and Judy Ledgerwood (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2008); Elizabeth Becker,
When the War Was Over: The Voices of Cambodia's Revolution and Its People
(NY: Simon and Schuster, 1986); David Chandler,
A History of Cambodia
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000) and
Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999);
Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors
, compiled by Dith Pran, edited by Kim DePaul (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Ben Kiernan,
The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Christopher Hitchens,
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
(NY: Verso, 2001); Peter Maguire,
Facing Death in Cambodia
(NY: Columbia University Press, 2005); Vibol Ouk and Charles Martin Simon,
Goodnight Cambodia: Forbidden History
(Soquel, CA: Dead Trees Are Alive Publications, 1998); Samantha Power,
A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide
(NY: Harper Perennial, 2003); Dith Pran,
Children of the Killing Field
; Sharon K. Ratliff,
Caring for Cambodian Americans: A Multidisciplinary Resource for the Helping Professions
(NY: Garland Publishing, 1997); Margaret Slocomb,
An Economic History of Cambodia in the Twentieth Century
(Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2010); William Shawcross,
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia
(NY: Simon and Schuster, 1979); William E. Willmott,
The Chinese in Cambodia
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Publications Centre, 1967) and
The Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Cambodia
(NY: Humanities Press, 1970).

I found the following sources useful for Cambodian proverbs:
http://cambodianculture.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/khmer-sayings/
;
Judith M. Jacob,
The Traditional Literature of Cambodia
(Oxford University Press, 1996), and
www.khmer-institute.org
.

I was also greatly helped by three films: Davy Chou's documentary on the movie industry in pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia,
Golden Slumbers
(
Le Sommeil d'or
), 2011; the haunting documentary by Thet Sambot and Rob Lemkin, directors,
Enemies of the People
, 2009; and the political documentary by Eugene Jarecki, director,
The Trials of Henry Kissinger
, 2002. I highly recommend memoirs by the following authors for firsthand accounts of life under Pol Pot: Chanrithy Him, Loung Ung, Thida Buth Mam (written with JoAn D. Criddle), Sichan Siv, and Paul Thai.

I would like to thank Yenly Thach, Laura Tevary Mam, Ratha Kim, and Jenny Chea-Vaing for sharing personal stories as well as for their own work promoting the beauty of Cambodian culture; Dr. Stanton Jue, who was stationed as a young U.S. foreign service officer in Phnom Penh in the 1950s, for sharing with me his memories of getting to know the Chinese business community and
congrégations
(as the French had called the native-place associations), and Florence Jue, who told me vivid stories about teaching English, watching the royal ballet at the palace, and living as a diplomat's wife in Phnom Penh; Dr. Franklin Huffman, who shared with me memories of traveling throughout Cambodia in the 1960s while researching various Cambodian dialects for his dissertation; members of the Southeast Asian Arts and Culture Coalition and the Indochinese Housing Development Center for their wonderful programs and events promoting Southeast Asian and Cambodian culture in San Francisco and the Bay Area; Sandra Sengdara Siharath, founder of SEACHAMPA. org; Dr. Halleh Seddighzadeh, volunteer with the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland; Dr.
Jessica Elkind, for allowing me to audit her graduate seminar in Southeast Asian history at San Francisco State University; Dr. Scott Lankford, whose brilliant students at Foothill College first inspired this book with their probing questions and request for a sequel, including Rebecca Hoffman, Elizabeth Jug, Colin Madondo, Shervin Nakhjavan, Vivian Reed, Emily Romanko, Ksenia S., and Aigerim Zholmurzayeva; City College of San Francisco librarian Maura Garcia; East-West reading series coordinator Suzanne Lo; bookstore manager Eden Lee; and Mary Marsh of the John Adams Library. I especially want to thank friends whose encouragement was essential to this project: Jeni Fong, Howard Wong, Lynne Ewart-Felts, Timothy Ota, Walter Mason, Lorraine Saulino-Klein, Edith Oxfeld, Sheryl Fairchild, Dr. Herena Kim, Babette André, Joe McGowan, Jr., and Nina Wolff, cover model Lotus Tai; Jeff, Virginia, Ariel, Everett, Adelaide, and Evelyn for all their love and support; my father, Winberg Chai, who wields a mean red pen and is always my first editor; Jennifer Sale for her sharp-eyed and judicious copyediting; my brilliant and hardworking agent, Penn Whaling; and my inspirational editor, Trish O'Hare.

Some of the characters and events in this novel first appeared in stories in somewhat different forms in the following publications, which I would like to acknowledge:
Many Mountains Moving, Seventeen, Zyzzyva, Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine
, and my collection of short stories,
Glamorous Asians
(University of Indianapolis Press, 2004).