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By Root 1351 0

have to share it with Mak’s mother and siblings. Signs of war have already begun to trickle into the city. One day I am playing marbles along a street with cousins and neighborhood children. We glance up to see a cluster of grown-ups. Our game is abandoned as we run to discover what has captured their attention, fighting our way to the front of the crowd. There on the street sit the decapitated heads of two men. The blood on their necks is encrusted with dirt and hay. Their faces are puffy and purple, their eyelids bruised. “Here, see, Khmer Rouge heads,” a man fiercely declares. “We captured them. Look at them.”

My first reaction is to reel backward, my spine slapping into the circle of adults standing around me. I am baffled. Rouge is “red.” Khmer means “Cambodian.” I do not understand what I am hearing. These lifeless faces before me could be those of anyone in the crowd. Quickly, other adults begin to herd us away from the gory spectacle, chastising those who rolled the heads before us like melons at a market. “Don’t you know better?” they bark at them.

Pa says that there has been more bombing along the Cambodian border, and more people are fleeing their homes to Takeo. In these strange times, after returning my brothers, sisters, and me to school for a year, my parents consider relocating. They decide to buy a house in Phnom Penh that had been owned by a Vietnamese family. Pa says many Vietnamese families have been involuntarily repatriated, and their homes in Phnom Penh are being sold in a hurry and at good prices.

For Pa these have been months of frustration entangled in brutal lessons. He has lost two sons, children not touched by bombs but who might have survived if there had been access to hospitals and advanced medical care. Pa has become silent, but out of his silence comes a burning desire. A desire to fight back, not with guns but with the mind—a desire to learn.

In ways I can never imagine, his desire will come to affect us all.

3

A Grain of Rice on a Dog’s Tail

Phnom Penh is a city designed for the senses. Everywhere there is activity, sound, and tantalizing smells. Here, people don’t seem to feel the shadow of war creeping up on them. Now it’s the summer of 1972. We delight in the sudden normalcy of human activities. People stroll through the city. Others crowd around the carts of food vendors, jostling for their right to fried noodles, sour yellow fingers of pickled green mangoes served on a stick with a touch of red chili and salt, or crispy, golden fried bananas, battered with flour and sesame seeds. My personal favorite is the pâté sandwich—thick baguette rolls stuffed with three kinds of sliced meat, wafers of cucumber, and green onion or cilantro.

Phnom Penh truly is a capital city. Everywhere we see markets, pharmacies, restaurants, schools—the normal bustle of urban living. Even though the bus has taken us only seventy miles north of Takeo, following winds up from the Gulf of Thailand, it is a different world.

Soon after our arrival, we welcome another person into our family. Mak gives birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she and Pa name Putheathavin, who has beautiful, long eyelashes, longer than those of anyone in our family, and velvety tan skin like Pa’s. We call him Vin, using the last sound of his first name. Similarly, my name is Chanrithy, and everyone calls me Thy or Athy. Ra is Chantara, and we call her Ra, but Pa and Mak call her Ara because they’re older and they can use A before her name. Ry is Channary, Than is Chanthan, and Avy is Putheatavy, but Chea is Chea because this is her special nickname, which means “heal,” but at school her friends call Chanchhaya. Now Pa and Mak have seven children, more than the neighboring families.

Our neighbors on the right are two Chinese families, quiet and polite people. On our left is a nice Cambodian family, pure and cultured Cambodians, Mak said, with dark skin and large eyes. Across from us lives another Cambodian family, an aunt with her family and a niece who is single and works as a policewoman. Her name is Veth and I am