When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [135]
I look forward to our new life, yet I’m nervous, scared. Everything seems hopeful, yet abstract. The unknown scares me. It doesn’t help thinking of American or Cambodian girls my age who have parents. In America I won’t have Mak or Pa. I feel uncertain, unstable because my life has been so different. I wish I could plan it, laying it out like a calendar.
It’s only six more days until we leave for America. I make a mental list of friends to whom I want to bid good-bye. For the past few days, I’ve been thinking about this sweet old woman, a patient who has problems with her eyesight and legs. She can’t see or walk well. When I translate for her, she calls me “daughter” in a gentle tone of voice. I address her as Om, great-aunt, since she is, perhaps, older than Mak. When she saw Mary Bliss, she complained of a numb sensation in her legs. Since I haven’t seen her for a few weeks and she has missed her follow-up appointment, I have to visit her.
It’s about seven o’clock in the evening. I arrive at her apartment and peek inside. There she is sitting. Her legs folded on a mat, her face dark but pale. She looks up. She says, “Oh, there you are. Good. You’ve come. Come on in. You can sit anywhere you’d like. Sit down, sit down. I’ll get some cakes.” She gets up with difficulty, her legs seem heavy.
On the wall of her apartment is a poster of Buddha sitting on the lotus blossom beneath a tree in a beautiful, colorful forest. In front of him are angels in golden clothes, their legs folded, the palms of their hands pressed together reverently. Below the poster is a can of burned incense and four candles that have melted down to half their original length.
Om staggers toward me. Her mouth widens to form a weak smile. She hands me a bag of steamed cakes, made of sweetened sticky flour and beans wrapped in banana leaf, which she sells in the makeshift market in the camp.
At Phase I, when I last saw her, she had urged me to look for her in the market or to go to her home so she could give me cakes. She kept thanking me and God after I translated for her and filled her prescription, then brought it to her and helped her out the door. Today I’ve brought her a package of medicine which she would have gotten if she had gone to her follow-up appointment.
“Here, daughter,” Om says. “Take these cakes to your family. Thank you so much for bringing me medicine. Om is sad because Om can’t walk well. My husband is old. He’s always at the temple. We don’t have children, so nobody gets the medicine for Om. Om doesn’t know who to ask. It’s difficult.”
Understanding her circumstances, I tell her that I’ve been thinking about her, wondering if she’s all right. Om presses her palms together, raises them to her forehead, then faces the poster of Buddha and says, “Sa thook, sa thook. May God in heaven take care of you. Daughter, you’re so thoughtful, thinking of Om.”
After visiting with her for an hour, I’m tired. She seems very lonely, and shares with me her problems in Cambodia and in the refugee camps both here and in Thailand. When I begin to get up and say good night, she says, “Why hurry, daughter? Stay a little bit longer. Here, have some more cakes. Stay until my husband comes, then he can do fortune-telling for you, find out about your life in America. You don’t have any kids to worry about, visit with Om a little longer.”
When her husband comes, she gets up with difficulty, introducing me to him. I’ve been waiting for him to do fortune-telling, she tells him. When he has his back to her, she places fifteen pesos in the chalicelike container.
Her husband hands her an oaken stack of bound sheets, which she then hands to me. I look at it, then I remember. It’s called a kompee, a Buddhist sacred treatise that I saw at a temple in Phnom Penh. Om hands me a stick of incense. She tells me to wish in my mind, then raise the kompee to my forehead and insert