Читать книгу Dragon Chica - Mai-lee Chai - Страница 9

A week or so after the storm, the next part of our miracle arrived with the junk mail—Lillian Vernon catalogs, coupon flyers for various grocery stores—and the bills, which Ma was ignoring since we’d be moving soon anyway. We almost threw it away, but when Sourdi was clearing the table for dinner, she discovered the letter. The envelope was battered, torn along one edge. The Red Cross had sent it first to our sponsors at the Baptist Church in our old town, and the Baptists had forwarded it to our former address in East Dallas before the post office had sent it along to our latest apartment.

At first I thought it might be from One Arm, although I couldn’t imagine why he was writing through the Red Cross. Maybe he’d been sent back to Cambodia, I thought. Maybe he was sending Ma back the money he’d stolen from her, but I was wrong.

“You should open it,” I suggested slyly to Sourdi, who was holding the envelope up to the light so that she could just see the outlines of the letter folded inside.

“It’s for Ma.”

“It might be important. We might have to call her at work.” (She’d found a temporary job in another restaurant while we waited to find out where she wanted us to move.)

“You open it.” Sourdi pushed it across the tabletop at me like a dare. I snatched the envelope up, and I was ready to rip it open, truly I was, but the paper seemed so fragile, the neat handwriting on the front so precise, like something ancient discovered in a tomb or a time capsule, something that might disintegrate if exposed to air. I examined the envelope instead. Whoever had written the address had also decorated the envelope with vines and curlicues, little dots, like leaves dancing across the pale blue paper.

“That’s Khmer. You don’t remember, do you?”

“What?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“It’s how we used to write.” Sourdi took the letter from me and put it on top of the refrigerator where the little kids couldn’t get at it.

I didn’t correct her. It was the way she used to write. Never me. I never learned.

When Ma came home that evening, she was surprised that we all looked up the moment she came in the door. I turned off the television. We waited while Sourdi grabbed the letter off the refrigerator and held it out to Ma.

“This came for you.”

Ma reached for the fragile, airmail envelope with the spidery handwriting on it. Then she withdrew her hand quickly as though the letter were a snake that could bite. She sat down heavily in her chair, staring. Sourdi put the letter on the table before her.

“What is it, Ma?” Sourdi looked frightened, her dark eyes narrowing. Because she was afraid, the rest of us felt afraid, too.

Now we clustered around the table, pressing close to Ma.

She told us to back off, to give her room to breathe. We were suffocating her, we were like animals, she said. Like animals in a cage, pushing against each other out of fear until the animal in the very center would have the life squeezed out of it.

We backed away. Ma took a deep breath and ripped open the fragile airmail envelope.

“Golldang! Golldang!” Ma said in English. Then she began to cry. She held the letter in one hand and covered her face with the other as her shoulders shook.

“What happened?” Sourdi tried to read the letter even as Ma flapped it through the air. She grabbed hold of an edge and bobbed up and down, trying to keep the page smooth as Ma continued to wave her hand. Sourdi could recognize a few words in Khmer, but not enough to read the letter. “Tell us, Ma!” she begged.

But for several minutes, forever, all Ma could say was “Golldang!” in English, over and over, like the chorus of a song.

“Golldang” was our all-purpose exclamation word. We had heard it so often that we learned to use it the way other people might say “Oh!” It could mean anything. The letter might say we had won a million dollars, or it might be telling us that we’d failed in the U.S. and were being sent back to the refugee camp in Thailand or even back to Cambodia. Who could tell?

Finally, Sourdi began to cry in frustration, biting her trembling lips, sniffing her runny nose, as fat tears rolled down her cheeks. Then Navy and Maly and Sam cried, to see Sourdi crying. I wanted to slap all of them. I stamped my foot on the linoleum. “I’m going to call the police!” I shouted in English.

Then Ma uncovered her face and looked at me quizzically. She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Don’t shout,” she said. “Did I teach my girls to shout like this?”

I hung my head.

Ma wiped her nose on a paper napkin, then sighed. She spread the letter out on the tabletop, smoothing it flat with the palm of her hand. Then Ma told us that everything was going to be all right. We were saved, she said. It was a miracle. She smiled.

It had been a long time since I’d seen Ma smile like this, with her whole face, even her eyes.

Seeing her smile made my entire body feel light.

The letter was from a man named Chhouen Suoheang. My Uncle. The man married to my mother’s oldest sister. The letter meant that we had family, alive and living in the United States, in a place called Nebraska, in fact. We looked it up on the map in my social studies book, and yes, it was there, a real state, part of the United States. A miracle.

“Oh, this letter is so old. They’ll think we’re dead. They’ll think we’re lost forever.”

“Maybe it’s a lie,” Sourdi suggested, chewing on her nails. “Maybe they’re imposters.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. Give me some paper.” Ma sat down at the kitchen table as Sourdi carefully tore a sheet of paper from her notebook (Language Arts).

Her tongue pressed against her teeth, Ma broke the lead on her first pencil from pushing too hard. She switched to a Bic pen, but each time she placed it against the paper, the sheet ripped, again and again, line after line. Ma’s hands shook as she tore a new sheet from Sourdi’s notebook. She smoothed it against the table top, licking her lips, as she held the pen over the page. While we stood in a ring around her, holding our breath, she put the pen to the paper very lightly and wrote:

“Dearest Older Sister, dear Older Brother . . . ” she wrote politely, repeating the words as she traced their outlines in her most beautiful cursive.

She didn’t tell them that Pa was dead, or about all the jobs she’d had, about the shooting we’d witnessed or how all her money had been stolen. She wrote only happy news. Grateful words. Loving phrases.

Ma finished her letter, said a prayer to the Buddha, then sealed it.

“I can mail it for you, Ma,” Sourdi said, frowning still.

“I’ll mail it tomorrow before I go to work,” Ma said, her tone so casual, it made my stomach hurt with fear. She talked of the letter as though it were a bill. As though it were nothing special. But I could see in her face that she was as anxious and scared as Sourdi.

I bit all my fingernails off until even my thumbs were bleeding.

That night, I lay beside Sourdi on our mattress and whispered so we wouldn’t wake Ma.

“Do you remember them? Uncle and Auntie?”

“You don’t remember them at all?” Sourdi squinted at me in the dark.

“How could I remember them? I was too young.”

Sourdi licked her lips. “I remember them all right.”

She said Uncle had been a prosperous man, an engineer who had worked for the government. He and Auntie had lived in a large house with three stories and many servants in central Phnom Penh, the capital city. He’d had a car and a driver and his children had rooms filled with toys. Auntie had worn nothing but silk dresses and high heels, just like the foreign ladies whose husbands were diplomats or businessmen or else drug lords in the city.

“What were our cousins like? How old are they now? Will we meet them?” I asked, but Sourdi remembered other things.

She said Uncle’s boss was implicated in a plot to overthrow the president, Lon Nol, who was very paranoid. Lon Nol was suspicious of everyone in his own government. He understood how subordinates could turn on you. He himself had come to power after he’d staged a plot to overthrow the last chief of state, Prince Sihanouk. Now Lon Nol had Uncle’s boss arrested. Soldiers escorted him from his office, guns to his back. No one expected to see him alive again.

Sourdi said a neighbor had come riding back home on his Vespa just to tell Ma and Auntie what had happened. They all had assumed Uncle would be arrested, too, maybe not immediately, but sooner rather than later. Ma and Auntie went to the temple to pray. They didn’t trust anyone, not even the servants, so Sourdi had babysat all the children.

But fortunately, Uncle hadn’t gone to the office that day. Maybe he’d been feeling under the weather. Maybe it had been Auntie who was not feeling well. She was often sick, Sourdi said, mysterious ailments that kept her bedridden for weeks on end. Anyway, something had delayed Uncle so that he was not at the office to see the soldiers drag his boss away, upending file cabinets and desks, destroying typewriters and terrifying the secretaries, because the soldiers had no real idea how to investigate a crime—they only knew how to terrify the accused. Uncle heard about it later from a friend who had heard from someone who was there but who had been too lowly to be arrested at the time. When Ma and Auntie returned from the temple, Uncle was already with Sourdi, saying goodbye to the children. He said he had to leave that night before the soldiers came for him, too.

“Where did he go? To America?”

Sourdi shook her head. “I always thought he went to Thailand. Or maybe Singapore. He had cousins there. I overheard Ma and Auntie talking once. But he was already gone when the Khmer Rouge came. Ma said he’d always been a lucky man. Some people have luck, some people don’t.”

I nodded then as though I understood. I had more questions, but Sourdi wanted to sleep and turned away from me. Lying in the dark, listening to the jangling fan, the humming fridge, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine my grand, rich, wonderful uncle. He was tall, I decided. And handsome, like a Hong Kong movie star. When he arrived in East Dallas for us, I figured he’d come with a suitcase full of silk dresses just our sizes, and new Barbies, because I had wanted a new Barbie ever since Sam set my last one on fire, and I would recognize him immediately. “Uncle, you’ve come back!” I’d cry out, placing my palms together before my face in a gesture called the sompeah, like the old people did in the Buddhist temple we visited once when Ma didn’t have to work one weekend.

In the weeks that passed after we had received the letter, I waited eagerly for Uncle to arrive at our apartment in a gleaming black Mercedes, his gloved chauffeur at the wheel, just as Sourdi had described. But a full month passed and our savior uncle was still just a name on an envelope, a filmy sheet of spidery handwriting, hardly more real than a memory or a dream.

And then, the next part of our miracle.

Another envelope arrived. The same spidery handwriting looping across the paper. Ma’s hands shook so much that she handed the envelope to Sourdi, who opened it carefully, with the edge of a knife inserted just beneath the fold. She sliced the paper delicately as tissue. Then my sister placed the letter on the table before Ma, who held her fluttering hands pressed tightly together in her lap.

“We received your letter,” Ma read aloud. “We received your letter,” she repeated. She put her hands across her eyes as though there were nothing more to read. “We received your letter.”

Ma spoke so quickly as she read aloud in Khmer, I could barely follow. Sourdi had to translate. (I didn’t want to admit, I was forgetting words, or maybe Ma was speaking words I’d never learned.) In addition to Uncle, Ma’s oldest sister—her only living sister, our only living Auntie—was in Nebraska now, she and her husband. They’d just opened a Chinese restaurant that spring. They were well.

Ma laughed then, laughed until she cried and then started laughing all over again.

“A Chinese restaurant is like a bank,” Ma said, waving the letter in the air like a winning lottery ticket. “My father used to say that. ‘If you work in a restaurant, you’re just a teller, but if you own the restaurant, you own the bank.”

“Did your father own a restaurant?” I asked.

“Of course not! My father was a teacher. You don’t remember your own grandfather.” Ma shook her head, but with the miracle letter in her hand, it was hard for her to remain angry, even at me. “My father’s father owned a restaurant,” Ma said, and then she laughed some more.

“Back home,” Ma said, meaning in Phnom Penh, before the war, “all the families who owned the big Chinese restaurants were wealthy. They could afford to send their children to school in France. The men had enough money to keep several wives, and even the first wives had lovers. It’s true. I saw them with my own eyes.”

“You saw their lovers?” I asked, wide-eyed.

“No. I saw their restaurants. And they were always busy, night and day. They made so much money, there were guards at every door.” Ma sighed, thinking about the past. And I sighed, too, pretending to remember.

“Do they want to see us?” asked Sourdi, eyes wide.

“Of course they do! We’re family.”

“All of us? Or just, you know, some of us?”

Ma scowled. “All of us. We’re all the same family. That’s all that matters. Family is family.”

Ma wrote another letter and another and another, and each time a reply came back, letter after letter after letter, miracle after miracle after miracle. There were a few phone calls, too, although they cost too much and weren’t as useful, because Ma had a tendency to cry at the sound of her oldest sister’s voice. She’d cry until she couldn’t speak, her voice turned hoarse, and once when I pressed my ear close to the receiver, I could hear a voice at the other end, crying hoarsely as well, without saying any words. Then after this kind of exchange for many weeks, the last and best part of our miracle occurred.

Uncle wrote, saying that he spoke for himself and his wife both, and they were asking us to come to join them in Nebraska, in business paradise, where there were no gangs and where hard work was rewarded. He said that family was family and should stick together. Would we come to help run the Family Business?

Ma didn’t hesitate before agreeing. She understood quite well that there was no point waiting around for our miracle to turn sour, to melt in a thunderstorm and break our hearts. It was time for us to move. She’d known. She’d dreamed everything.

And so we packed up our apartment, Ma said good-bye to her boss at the restaurant where she gutted fish and chickens, and we stuffed everything we owned into Hefty bags and plastic milk crates we found behind the 7-Eleven. We climbed into Ma’s dusty dented Ford that used to belong to One Arm and headed north to Nebraska.

We left quickly, not because we were naive or simple or foolhardy, any of these things people might want to accuse us of being, but rather because we understood about miracles all right, how their shelf life was as long as a butterfly’s summer.