ALWAYS ALONG RUE LABEOTTADOK, during unguarded moments. This time on my way home from Mrs. Kethavong’s sister. It was almost dusk. But still enough light to see her face was not among the orchid sellers crowding the street, calling for customers—Sweetest smelling! Softest in all of Laos! For you, the flower Asian! Her face was not among the merchants by their doors. Inviting, the way they stand. But always their looks suspicious. Her face was not among the vegetable ladies, their voices like a twenty-year smoker’s from haggling. Her face was not among the peddlers of jade animal figurines and combs and full-belly Buddhas, always the whites buy and ask be wrapped in paper. Gossip pieces for their walls and tables at home, their vanities, about how they had visited Laos. Nor among the food-cart cooks, whose grills scented the air, filling and cramping the empty stomachs of the hungry. The cooks’ loud voices, too, clashing with the orchid sellers—food and flowers, flowers and food. On Labeottadok they are one, a singsong of distorted echoes, flower’s food, food’s flower. But right before the Royal Tea House, when Houa, my old friend, stepped out from the alleyway, empty-handed, instantly, I knew her.
“Why are you running—so quickly, Hnuhlee’s Mother?” she called to me. So I stopped, of course, for an old friend. Her long hair folded and softly held on her head with a bright purple scarf. “You work too hard,” she said, seeing the rice sack in my hand, after she had pushed her way through the crowd. In the sack were four fish wrapped in paper. One was a calf-sized frogfish, my favorite, and I was planning to steam it for dinner.
“Are you well, Shengcua’s Mother?” I said, ignoring her question, walking still. Lushest! Moistest! In all of Laos. The top two buttons of her yellow blouse were undone, showing her pale, bony chest. Her red sarong covered her feet, stuttering her steps.
“Doing like yesterday. Hoping to do the same tomorrow,” she said. Houa and I grew up in Fi Kha before the war. She had lived four huts over and is a sister by our Vue clan name. Forty-one years since our births, and here we were. On the same street. In the same town. Smiling at each other, each knowing the path of how the other got here, as if the other’s was our own. Orchids! For you the flower Asian! “What happened to your leg?” she said, looking me over. On my right thigh, above my knee, was a bandage. A mean catfish had snapped back and stung me that morning as I untangled it from a net. “It’s hard work and it’s dangerous?”
“Every job has dangers,” I said. “But I’m lucky to have this.” Come see Yellow Pearl Orchid! Slowly I walked so she could keep up, and searched the oncoming faces. “You must be doing a little better,” I said to my friend, speaking the way old Hmong women speak, which is to strike at the heart of the matter with the vaguest comment possible. The vagueness gives you space not to seem nosy, and space also for the other person to tell you what you truly want to know if she chooses.
“For a few months maybe,” she said.
“A few months’ calm of heart is worth it,” I said. The sweetest smelling.
“You believe so?” she said, the left dimple marking her beauty emptied and filled before a stranger could notice it.
“For the heart to be calm, however short, is worth it. Even for thirty minutes. For the belly to stay quiet.” Knowing I had a little more than my friend, I offered her my frogfish.
“Maiker,” she said, feeling young again and comfortable, “you keep it. We will be okay for a few months.”
“Oy, Houa. I caught with my own energy. I want you to have it.” Newly grown. You pick! “It’s a frogfish!” I said, as if that would settle everything. We had stepped out into the road and now were being pressed in by the flow of people around us, tourists, grocery shoppers, orchid collectors, laborers returning home.
“I don’t want your charity,” Houa said. “Don’t pity me.”
“It’s not. I don’t. I give it as a dear sister of a life we both knew from long ago.” Stopping, I turned to Houa, and a body bumped into me before continuing on.
“All right,” she said, accepting the fish I had taken out of my sack, “but only to help you sleep better.” We walked on. Purple Locust Orchid! Cheap! But as I stepped into the intersection to cross the street, she was no longer by my side. When I looked back at her, four-five paces behind, she said, “Ask it.” But who am I to ask? What do you say? Because I am a woman, I am fluent in vagueness but had no courage for bluntness. “You want to know how could I, right?”
“Anything for the heart to be calm,” I repeated, knowing our existence here was lived closer to death than to life.
“You speak like it’s opium. Something I need to do to survive the long day, to be able to face the world, to face you.”
“It’s not opium,” I said. “But one must live, must try to go on. Believe me, I know it’s not.” But already she was in the street, crossing over to the next square, into the next group of vendors along Rue Labeottadok, never listening to the words I was never saying. New orchid. “Houa,” I said, catching up to her, afraid to be alone with my own voice.
“All this time I’ve been wondering, Did she do it on her own? Did her father and I force her? Did she have a choice?” Blue-Winged Dragonfly.
“It’s done,” I said. “Think instead of the two months you have to live and use it to prepare for the next two months.”
“But—listen—it is not done. Never done unless you’re dead. After two months, it might need to happen again.” Pink-Tipped Orchids. Come see.
“Then you’ll make the decision then.”
“But it must be considered now,” she said, shaking the fish in her hand as though swatting a small grease fire. She stopped walking and faced me. Her face was calm with the trouble of thinking, but having strong currents underneath. Did my old friend think I was naive? “Tell me what you think of me?”
“It’s never easy,” I said, “this life.”
Trembling now, the fish in her hand. “You think she had no choice. Because if she had a choice, she wouldn’t have done it?” I had no answer for her, but knew and was afraid she would take my silence wrong. “But what does that say about me,” she said, “as a mother?” Because I did not know what to think of myself, I could not tell her what I truly thought of her as a mother. What would I think of myself if I were in her position? Of all things, this was the one difference in our paths. And now, it seemed, we were arguing about it. Besides, she had a husband, which left her decisions not so easily made. Pink-Tipped Orchids, fresh and sweet. A throng of people caught up to us, surrounded us. We quickened our walk, to let them separate themselves and hurry on, leave us behind. “However, if you think about it”—she stepped slowly and gingerly now, as though, with bare feet, walking on broken glass, Purple Petal Golden Heart—“she has many years ahead. And she could still get married.”
“You want to know who gets to make the sacrifice?” I said.
“I want to know who gets to decide,” she said. Come see best orchids in Laos!
“Maybe no one gets to decide,” I said. “Maybe it was already decided long ago for us.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Maybe it was us who decided long ago, and those decisions are just now starting to show. Or maybe it has nothing to do with decisions. And choosing. Maybe it’s just our luck. That we change. Forced to change. Everything changes.”
“You have some luck!” she said. “Only one child, two mouths to feed. If your neighbor didn’t pity you, how helpless you are without a husband, she never would let you fish with her.” Her tone made me wonder if she wished her husband dead. Would she prefer that type of luck? Blue Hooded Orchid. For sale. For sale, Blue Hooded Or—
“That’s true,” I said. “That’s my luck.” We came to the end of the paved section of Labeottadok. Ahead was all red dirt and tire ruts, then home.
“Some luck, you don’t get to change.” Her knowing tone was an elder’s, lecturing me before weighing me down with guilt.
“You’re right, Houa. Some luck you don’t get to change.” My friend stepped into the dirt road, then, realizing her sarong was brushing over it, hopped back onto the paved street. “What were you doing on Rue Lab?” I said. Houa lived north of the city. There, the buildings thinned out, and more land was available for farming, where the popularity of Laotian orchids was making some farmers wealthy.
“Talking to myself about what was done and what to do,” she said, then turned around, heading the way we had come, saying over her shoulder, “Meet you again,” and fell in with a crowd walking back toward the heart of Labeottadok, the marketplace, and the orchid sellers. I knew I would again find her along this road, and maybe, someday, I would stop speaking to her like a woman who has been given space to remain silent about her luck.
On the road coming to my house, Bone and Skin slid out through the gate hole to warn me with their teeth, slowly backing as I came forward. I encouraged their barking at strangers and willingness to bite, but this had not been their usual behavior with me, only after I returned from the last time I saw Mr. Cha alive, as though, overnight, they had aged and were going blind and I now was difficult to recognize by sight. But always, when they heard my voice—Bone and Skin, I would say, because one is white and the other yellow, go home—they would quiet down and lead me home. This day, though, after seeing my old friend Houa and trying to help quiet the voices in her head, to reassure her of our decisions in the past, walking home, I remembered the disagreement I was having with Hnuhlee when my dogs ran out to greet me with their teeth and severed my thought, made me gasp, forcing a curse on my tongue, and for a second, I forgot how to quiet them down, to remind them it was only me, still me coming forward.
We now live in a house with two floors and whitewashed walls. To look like Modern Woman, as she calls herself, Hnuhlee has cut her hair short. All the reading she has done has made her need eyeglasses. She is pregnant with her first child. And this is the seed of our disagreement: whether we prefer a baby boy or baby girl. Hnuhlee said it does not matter, but I think it does, even for a modern woman.
And you? I had asked her husband.
Hnuhlee was born in 1978 in the Ban Vinai refugee camp. We had fled our village in Laos the year before without my in-laws. They believed things would not be as everyone feared when the communists arrived. When Hnuhlee was one, my husband heard from a new arrival in camp that his parents had disappeared into the jungle and were trying to join us in Thailand. He told me this at night as we lay facing each other, Hnuhlee asleep between us. He said he was going after them.
What do we do if you don’t come back?
Why think that way?
What am I to think? I wanted to yell at my husband, but feared waking up our daughter. He turned onto his back. We had to leave fast, he had said after he returned from war the second time; he knew what the communists would do to us. Did he forget? This, the man, to become his wife, I had shouldered a ker for and fell in behind when he came through our village on his way back from war the first time. I wondered if still he was the sixteen-year-old who said to me as we came upon a stream during that march, I can be a horse, then laughed when I lost my footing on a slippery rock. Sitting in the water, I was angry at him for his man language—which I took to mean, then on, I will have to feed him, his horse’s appetite—and his laughter at his clumsy bride. I was almost fourteen, but in the years since, I have come to understand his words to mean sacrifice, for me to jump on his back and ride across.
The small wooden shed the refugee people gave us had only a door. Between the wall planks were gaps allowing you to see the stars and brighter night sky, but the weak skylights did little to the darkness inside. I turned my husband’s face and held it between my hands. His nose bridge was high and sharp: with enough light, I could pick out its outline in a sea of a million faces. I heard us all three breathing—Hnuhlee’s deep and evenly spaced, mine shallow and hurried, my husband’s broken now and again with sighs—and hoped in the morning the door would not open, that it would seal us in, and if we were to die in this wooden box, then it would be all right because we would die as a family, our breathing, finally, as one. He said, Follow your family to America. His words burned my insides like hot metal, and this time, letting go of his face, I turned on my back. I had married him and was part of his family. Saying that was like he wanted to divorce me. I breathed loud out of my nose because too much it was to use my mouth. He said, I’m their son. Do I leave them?
Each beat of my heart was a yes!-reply, a thump in my ear, but I let my silence speak, my breath scream. Hnuhlee started and stirred but did not cry; she knew to save her tears for later. Even in the dark, I could see what my husband was supposed to do: stay with his wife and daughter. But he was a man who walked the narrow path of a son—help your parents, protect your family, take a wife, have children, raise your grandchildren—and I knew my words would not enter his heart. Helping your parents was the first thing you learned to do and the first thing you got to let go. And long as they drew breath, their pull on him was strongest, and that night, briefly, I wished my in-laws dead.
The next night, I held tight my husband’s arm and pushed Hnuhlee at him to hold, but he refused to take her. He pulled away and disappeared through the camp fence. In the dark of our shed, I cried and held my daughter’s face next to mine, her cheek warm and soft, then my bitter tears, when they dried on her face, itched her, and she started to cry. Everything my mother had told me, it seemed, I was forgetting. She said to me once, Never cry on a baby’s face. If your tears get in a baby’s eyes, the baby will feel what you feel. So I put my daughter down on the bed and sat away from her, so I could cry by myself, and she by herself. I did not know how to stop for a long time. For a long time, I could not even hold my own daughter.
Seven months after my husband left, his parents arrived in the refugee camp. They were bones and walked slow. They explained to me this: They traveled with the last group of people from their village. My husband found them and led them through the jungle until the communists spotted them, and again, he had picked up a gun, making him a soldier. He drew the communists away from the group with two other men from the village.
You are so stupid! For many days, I said nothing else. Their assurances meant nothing to me, and I was a bad daughter-in-law to close my ears to their words, my heart to their suffering, too, and they had every right to beat me but could not find the strength to hurt. We all waited in silence. My husband was in the jungle, I believed, still fighting the war, and only waited for the perfect time to drop his gun and slip the communists and return. When my in-laws filed the paperwork to leave for America, I decided to stay. Don’t make the mistake we did and stay too long, they said. But again, worthless words to me. They offered to claim Hnuhlee as theirs and take her ahead with them. But I told them no. She is mine, and she will wait with me.
Despite arriving in the refugee camp before my in-laws, my parents left two years later, watching and waiting on me, the last of their children in the camp. Mother said childhood is the length of your parents’ lifetime; but I was only a daughter so did not believe her.
Grief has blinded you, Father said. Your in-laws, they have already left. They know your husband is dead.
They don’t love him, I said.
Love? He left his wife and child.
His reason for leaving, I wondered, was it not a good reason? Would you have asked your sons to do the same?
If I made that decision, to stay behind, I wouldn’t expect help. I wouldn’t trouble my children. I’ve lived a full life, but my children have not. A parent’s life is built on what you can give your children. You think about Hnuhlee. I was only twenty-one years old and knew there could be still many more years. We old people don’t say this because we are afraid to die alone, afraid no one will remember us, but duty has an end date. Your duty to me, whatever you think it might be, should not dictate your decision now that you have a daughter. From this day forward, do not think of me when you think of her. Always, Father’s words sounded like commands, and to disobey him was to disrespect him. Like my in-laws, my parents offered to take my daughter, but again, I refused. Only later, when Hnuhlee was twelve, would Father’s words enter my heart.
The morning they left for the airport in Bangkok, Father spoke to me as his daughter for the last time. You have such a hard heart. Good for a man, but you are my daughter, he said before turning away to board the bus. I did not know if he meant I was brave, which is one meaning, or stubborn and thick-skinned not to think of my daughter, which is another meaning. Even now, I think, he meant both. Even now, the last image I have of my husband is his back, and he is walking away from me. For a wife who knows her husband loves her still, that should never be her last image of him.
In 1984, alone in camp, I thought about America for a long time, then I borrowed a cassette player-recorder and, for my family, recorded a cassette. I told them I had decided to go back to Laos. I sent them my words but did not wait for their reply. I took six-year-old Hnuhlee and, in secret, muffling her protests with my hand, walked out of the refugee camp in Thailand and followed the Mekong till I came opposite the shore of Vientiane, and hired a boat to take us into the city. While we waited for the boat, she cried, said she wanted to stay behind. I told her to be quiet, otherwise the Thai border authorities will hear us, and who knows what they will do to a young mother and her daughter. Or the evil spirits will hear her cry, seek her out, and make her sick and die, so her soul could be theirs. Did she want to be away from her mother? I held her hand tighter than when I held my husband’s before he left. Don’t you want to see your father? I said. What father? she said. Her father had died a long time ago because that is what everyone told her. Those words hurt me as much as if she had said she hated me. Again, hurt me like my husband’s suggesting I return to my family. To keep from slapping her, making her cry louder, I had to be strong. But I wanted to go back and find my husband, and whatever I needed to do, my daughter was to go with me, even if it meant I must drag her until her knees showed bones.
I first saw Mr. Cha from behind. He had just turned out of his courtyard and was walking with his sons down the road. I had learned of an empty hut on the outskirts of Vientiane, in Phondachet village. I believed it was a woman I was looking at because of the long yellow hair reaching below the shoulders, a woman whose figure was hardened by work and square-shouldered like a man’s. The Laotian lady in the hut across the dirt road caught me staring and shouted, He is a single man, you know? Her dark legs, round and fat as gourds, stuck out from her shorts.
That is a man? I said, hot with embarrassment when she nodded. I suspected, then, there were empty huts elsewhere in the village, but was told to come here for a reason. No, I am too poor to keep a man, I said to the Laotian lady.
Make him support you, she said, raising her chin, twitching her brows, a smile on her face.
Support me living in this? I pointed to Mr. Cha’s hut, then to the hut across the dirt alleyway, which was to be my own. Our huts were made of wood—some planks, some posts. To hold up the thatched roofing, a middle beam, supported by a pillar, ran its width. This pillar, always in the center of the hut, seemed to cut right down the living space, and was either useful to hang stuff on or always in the way when you were in a hurry. Around each hut, people blocked off a small courtyard with wood poles, a private place to chop wood and husk rice and pluck chickens and gut a pig and plant a small herb or flower garden.
What is wrong with this? the lady said, sweeping her hand from one direction to the other. Not good enough for you? She rested her hands on her round hips. She was stout and strong, and my bony frame shivered from the fear of crossing her. Behind her were two girls and a boy.
No, I said. That is not it. There were a small, black fat-belly sow and six-seven piglets in a pen in the corner of her courtyard, and four hairy dogs tied to a sturdy post in the far back, all on their feet, looking at me, their back hair standing, trying to decide if I was friend or not. I said, For me, this is perfect.
Vientiane, being closer to ocean level, the dust and pollen floated even more, drifting from all the mountain trees and plants. But when the sun was near overhead, you could not make them out well, just a far-off haze, their presence only noticed when sneezing, because too much collected inside of your nose, or turning black in the folds of your body. Other refugees in the village had told me that with good luck I might talk to Mr. Cha about a job at the rubber-tree farm where he worked. Here, it is not polite to knock on the doors of people you do not know, so you try to catch them out in the open. I had heard music coming from his house. One day, while he was chopping kindling in his courtyard under the shade of a thin peach tree, I walked over.
How are you? I said from the dirt alleyway, a few feet from the gate door.
He leaned his long-handled sickle against the peach tree and tucked his yellow hair behind his ears. How are you? he said, walking toward me. I hear you have a cassette player—I held out my cassette—and was wondering if I can listen to this? Just arrived, I lied. It was the first tape my family had sent me, the only one I kept, the one with everyone’s voices.
From who? he said. Boyfriend in America? Despite the dark of his skin, I could see the veins wrapped around his limbs, bulging like the rough bark of the wood he was chopping; dirt lined his sweaty arms, crosshatched in threads beneath his throat, embedded into the callused knuckles of his hands. Dark and dirty as though just come from the soil.
Family in America, I corrected him. I held out five kip, my way of being polite, certain he would not accept, otherwise I would not have risked giving away fifteen percent of my money. Hnuhlee was standing in the doorway of our hut, where I had told her to wait.
Mr. Cha invited me into the courtyard and offered me a stump by the door. When he returned with his cassette player-recorder, he asked if I had used one before. I nodded. Don’t press the red button or you’ll record over your cassette. But let me—he snatched the cassette from my hand. The sharp snapping sounds froze my heart, flooding me with anger and fear. Had he ruined my cassette? Was he trying to silence the voices of my family? I may have even yelped like a dog. Women, he said, shaking his head. Using his little-finger nail, he had broken off the corner tabs. That snapping noise, it was like he broke a little part of me, he a stranger I had trusted enough to ask something of. He started again his wood chopping, and I looked over my cassette, then yelled for Hnuhlee to come over, and we listened to past voices and words, fixing them to memory.
A long feather-filled coat was one of the first things my family sent me. They say, Here in America we need this coat to give us warmth. It can be squeezed into the size of a melon, but when you let go, again it puffs big. When first I put it on, it reminded me of the last time my family held me in their arms. The coat is in my closet now. Hnuhlee asks why, always, do I put it on when it never gets cold here. But my daughter does not know when I feel my family’s embrace I see their faces—my brothers’ and sisters’; Mother’s and Father’s, too; always, the face of my husband. And when I do his face is blurred by my tears, and I feel his body, remember the tone of his words, and I know I have returned to familiar arms, familiar sounds.
When my family sends me packages from across the ocean, also they include a cassette to tell about life on that other side. Usually, Mother would begin by telling me the month, day, and year—eighth month, eleventh day, 1984—then she would tell me how everybody is doing. Father never speaks on these cassettes, and only when I spend the money to phone my parents, if lucky and he picks up, do I hear his voice, which, quick, tells me to call back or fades as it yells searching for Mother. For me to stay behind, I know it must mean for him he failed, and failure is best left unheard. The next speakers would be my three sisters, starting with the oldest and ending with the youngest. They would tell me what is happening with their own families and about my parents, which I take to be more true than what Mother had told me, but on this tape from 1984, everyone agrees America has been good to them, so far. Then, in whatever order the cassette was passed on to them, my sisters-in-law would come on; my three brothers, speaking after their wives, would try to change my mind on America. It is my daughter I need to think about! They yell their words like Father used to do. I yell only to teach was his explanation. If I am not yelling, I don’t love you. From them, nothing was said about the reason I stayed behind.
On the other side of the cassette were the voices of my in-laws. Sometimes, in a word used by my father-in-law, the way he spoke it, I would hear my husband, and my heart would quicken to tear up my eyes, and I would grow afraid with envy that, already, he was there, in a better place, that he had not waited for me. When this happens, always I find myself on the verge of cursing him, to knock him down, yank him back to this lower place where, for him, I waited with life to see his face again.
Every woman who speaks on the cassette weeps because, whenever they speak to me, they are reminded of the time in the Thai refugee camp, and my return to our old life in Laos. They remember how the general told us the Americans were pulling out after coming, staging a war, then losing it, and how he warned everyone to leave before the communists, in their turn, came. The country was never taken nicely, always violently, with guns at your head and bombs from the sky, with voices commanding Stopstopstop, don’t run! Only after you were shot dead, or were looking at your legs ten feet from your body, or worse, were ravaged and the bleeding after the pullout was never complete, to save you by taking you from this life. Always it left enough so you would live, the memory a gun to your head, its presence always a heat behind you, a voice saying, Go on, hurry! Go on and be quiet! My family, when they record their words, is reminded of this land that no longer has a place for them to live, not in flesh or name, not even in spirit, reminded only of the reddened soil. But always, they wish me well despite their yells, and each tells me how much money, if any, they had sent. Maybe they believe the person who sent the most loves me the most, but I know they are telling me only so I will remember who to repay when I see them again.
Last on the cassette would be Grandma Joua. Often, her words are funny, full of truths and hidden feelings about everyone, which make me wonder if, before sending, anyone listened to the cassette. Or, if so great was everyone’s respect for her, they allowed her words to remain as spoken, afraid to curse themselves or her by erasing any part of her. When Grandma Joua started speaking, Mr. Cha wiped his brow with a forearm covered in wood chips and dust, and turned his ears toward the cassette player. Grandma Joua sounds like she is in front of me and speaking only to me, so Mr. Cha, stopping to listen, made me feel I was giving up a secret. Grandma Joua says she is healthy but lonely in this tape from 1984.
All of them there and they allow her to get lonely? Mr. Cha said.
Everyone’s lonely for the old country, I said. How we used to be, where the ones you miss could be run to.
Grandma Joua ends her message with a plea for me to come to America because she believes, soon, she might die. You are the only one I helped into this world that’s still there, she says. Everyone else is a phone call away, but you, I have to record this old, sad voice and wait for a reply. It’s like drawing upon a secret well of memory that I happen upon only by chance, never having learned the way to get there. I go as an orphan child, naive and ignorant, no one to lead me, but hopeful the spirits will look after me. I know why you’ve stayed behind, but if my words could pull you here, carry you across oceans, let them.
After the cassette ended, I asked Mr. Cha if he knew Grandma Joua.
Everyone knows Grandma Joua, he said.
Do I know Grandma Joua? Hnuhlee said, leaning back and forth in between my legs, playing with the cassette case. Mr. Cha smiled as I shushed my daughter, whispering in her ear it was not yet her turn to speak. The smell of her hair reminded me we both needed to wash.
This is my luck to be a war widow with a daughter, I said.
I have worse luck, said Mr. Cha. I am a man with two sons. He would have to find the money for his sons to marry, because sons were expected to take care of their parents in old age. That was their hold on a parent—best you try to give your sons everything and then hope. Hope they do not kick you out of their house. Hope they let you eat the moistest parts of meals. Hope they marry a kind wife. Hope they will clean you when no longer you can. There, hope is, always in a time to come, a rainbow you can see with your eyes, yet never, in your time, find realized, reacting to your every move, eluding your advances, only to vanish in sight, phantom in its makeup. Because one second into the future—right now—a bomb could fall on us and we would be dead. Our houses smashed and burning. And that would be reality and no longer hope. Hope is not Mr. Cha’s wife dying eight years earlier from what the Laotian doctor said was poison in the blood. Before her death, Mr. Cha said, the family lived okay, had a little meat to go with their vegetables at mealtimes. But now, they ate only rice mixed with cornmeal. Sometimes with fish paste or sugar.
It was true, Mr. Cha’s duties to his sons, but I checked my feeling sorry for him. I had not much for myself and my daughter to be able to give away anything, even pity. I was born with my bad luck, I said. I told him when I was born that dark early morning in the fifth month of 1962 I was not breathing. Grandma Joua was the village medicine woman and had delivered many babies before. I came out blue, she said, the color of death. She kept it a secret from my mother, who, after she expelled me from her body, had rested her head on the rag pillow. All blue babies that had fallen into Grandma Joua’s catch already were dead, but she could feel my heart. She wiped my face with the hem of her sarong, then covered my mouth and nose with her own mouth, and sucked strong and deep. After three or four mouthfuls, she breathed into my body, unfolded my life, and finally, I cried. I did not tell Mr. Cha the part where, now as a mother and knowing how it looks when a baby is born, I once asked Grandma Joua if she was disgusted with me. She said she had no time to think. It was something any mother would do for her child. This is something a man does not need to know. Because my mother almost gave birth to death, Grandma Joua has kept watch over me, even though she is not my grandmother by blood. She said she needs to know when, again, she will need to breathe life into me.
See, I wanted to add, almost I was not born alive. I do not know now whether I was seeking pity or sympathy then from Mr. Cha, or if war has a way of muddling them and they become one metal, a feeling forged in war fires, hard to separate; only, I know nothing did I want to feel for him. Again, I offered Mr. Cha the five kip, but he shook his head. What do you do if you don’t need my money? I said.
He told me he cleared the forest and burned the stumps out of the ground. Soon, they would start planting more rubber trees, and after that, he guessed, many of the workers would be let go. When we are done, he said, the forest will look different. The trees will be in a straight line, with paths between to drive a truck through. Him already worrying about being let go, I did not ask him if he might help me get a job with the farm. Instead, we talked about his sons, who were thirteen and twelve. They were at the age when they could help bring in money, and by saving a little, when they were about twenty, they might have enough for a wife. But to pull them out of school was hard for Mr. Cha to do. I thought to tell him, if he pulled the boys, he could save the school fees to pay for their wives, but, in time, decisions like these make out themselves.
You are a woman, he said. You have better luck than me already. A man is good for four things in this world. Hunting, lifting heavy things, fathering babies, and fighting wars, I was good at all of those. But now, I do only heavy lifting. What is a man in this broken country?
Why didn’t you go to America? I said. Why stay here?
I tell you a story, he said, and, like Father when he began his stories that way, I was afraid he would speak to me in man language so I would not catch the meaning. One time while hunting, I walked into a tiger. I was watching my steps when, suddenly, everything went quiet. I looked up. Its face was there, among the shadows of the jungle—shadow and sunlight, that’s the face color of a tiger. You know what I did? I flipped my hair like this—he flipped his long hair over to cover his face—to look like a spirit. And the tiger disappeared. Didn’t even hear it run away. His eyes were slits of smiles, as though he found his own words hard to believe, squinting to see now, as he was reliving it, if there might be anything else true he might have forgot, all these years and miles walked from that life memory.
Did tiger disappear or you disappear? I said, wondering what to make of his story.
Perhaps the man did, he said, laughing.
The man that was you? Or perhaps the tiger never was there? Because everyone, when they talk of being brave, talks always of meeting a tiger.
Tiger is always there, he said. The sky was falling away orange by this time, and the fading light dusted the trees a rusty color and our houses a cheap gold. Mr. Cha leaned against the peach tree, which made a second back for a tired body. I hear in America, you get meat to eat, and everybody says you don’t have to work, and the government won’t let you starve. You put your feet up like a king. But if everyone is a king, there is no king. Isn’t that same as the communists? If so, why were we fighting them? Why go to America when I can put my feet up where my father and grandfather are buried?
Here, you’ll starve.
Here, at least, I’ll need to work not to starve. That’s something, no? To know this life is separated from death by a day’s labor. That gets you up in the morning. My father used to say, Labor is ambition at work. The ambition of a biting sickle is to have firewood, to build a house, to clear a forest for farming. If not for work, aren’t we all just kings?
That is why you stayed? Because you don’t want to put your feet up?
My toes will be up eventually, he said, sure of himself. He straightened his body from the tree, the sickle hanging from a hand. His front side, which faced the setting sun, caught a fiery glow. But his back side, I could see, was growing a long tail of shadow, as though something was draining out of him and pooling away, distance distorting the shape of what once could have been the hard edges of a man.
How will you do that? I said, wondering what he planned to do to become comfortable as a king and still keep the choice of work, wondering if he would let me join him.
Days later, Hnuhlee at her four-room school, I walked into Vientiane. I asked merchants and storekeepers if they had any cleaning work, went to the wealthier neighborhoods to see if someone needed a housekeeper, but most wanted only single live-in help. I was willing to cook and sell food by the side of the road, stick my hands in wood ash and pig fat to make soap, dig through the trash for metal to sell. Sometimes, I waited by the Buddhist temples and saved the food the monks shared. A grandfather with a toy car for a left foot told me he knew people who recovered bombshells for the metal. Did I want to do that? You look light on your feet, he said. You just bop-bop, his hand fluttering like a broken wing, over the fields and not end up like me. A bull giving you full warning, he wheeled his left foot forward and backward in place, humming hrmmm-hrmmm from that part in his chest where war life needs a taint of humor, and following the sound—a cry, a complaint, a protest—is a laugh, and you can go on. But I was afraid to start digging up the relics of war when so many remained unburied, else they might explode in my face. Who would take care of my Hnuhlee then? One good thing to come out of my search for work was two stray dogs, Bone and Skin, following me home, by the ropes I tied around their necks and would not let go.
Bone and Skin should be glad I saved them, too. Once, on a trip back from Muong Long, Vietnam, to visit family, Father and I stopped at a creek for a drink. On the opposite bank were an old Vietnamese man and maybe fourteen or fifteen dogs tied to trees around his hut. All were yelping and barking, their tails like a water buffalo’s swatting flies. So loud, the cries, that after ten seconds, I wished for them to be silent. The old man untied a red dog, maybe thirty pounds, and stuffed it into a sack. The dog struggled against the sides like a baby pushing against the mother’s belly. The old man carried over a block of metal—what I now know to be a half of a motorcycle engine. Quick my hands moved to cover my ears, maddened by the noise, still the dogs shaking their rumps, swooshing their tails. With a grunt, the man heaved the engine, now tied to the mouth of the sack, into the creek. The splash stopped my breath, and I thought I had gone deaf but realized, as I brought my hands away from my ears, the dogs were silent. Maybe it was only ten minutes, but, for me, a lifetime of wanting to hear a dog bark passed before the old man retrieved the sack. Only then did the remaining dogs start to whimper, circling at the ends of their ropes, curling into themselves, and hiding their faces. Father did not yell at me when I asked why the old man did that. Quietly, he said, For dinner.
I first ran into my friend Houa on one of these trips looking for work, surprised she had not gone to America. It’s my husband’s decision, she said. Stubborn like a mountain. Afraid Americans would chop him up, steal his insides, and eat him.
This, the same man that makes war, I said. She laughed like she could not believe it either. I told her where I was staying and my bad luck in finding work. War leaves no work for the living to do, I complained.
Sooner or later, she said, we all become orchid farmers.
Is there money in that? This was the first time I heard of growing and selling orchids.
Of course, she said. Next time you look for work, go deeper in the city. That’s where they mostly are. Watch for the small signs that say, WHITE ORCHID FOR ACHE, RED SILK ORCHID, LOCUST-MANTIS ORCHID. A grin appeared on her face.
How do you start?
Maiker, she said, laughing. Don’t get too heartened. I’m speaking like a man to you—I know you could never do it. I felt naive next to my friend, who, from somewhere, seemed to have picked up the man tongue. Had she put a dare to me? She reminded me that I was my parents’ laziest daughter and had escaped working out in the fields; that no food was ever gotten on my back. Which was true. While everyone was out farming, I did housework, and looked after the children, and massaged the pains of the broken elders in the village. So, yes, I did not know how good I would do to get my hands dirty. I had no knowledge of growing anything. Mother had said once, trying to teach me, there are some plants that do not even produce seeds. A drip of water, after hitting the leaf of such a plant and landing in the soil, could grow into that plant. Just that one miracle drop of water! Or some seeds refused to grow unless they were planted right next to the mother plant; only the soil of the mother plant was good enough for the seeds. That is how stubborn and sensitive some seeds are!
Do you know how to grow orchids? I said, hoping that orchids did not spring from miracle water, that even a woman like me could raise them.
Maiker has lost her mind, Houa said, giggling now, like we were ten and secretly had learned something of our parents. Why was she laughing at me? Embarrassed, I told her it was getting close to time for me to pick up Hnuhlee from school. You better hurry then. Before you regret staying here too long. She turned me by the shoulder in the direction of my daughter’s school and nudged me away. Go on, before she’s lost to you!
A month into the dry season, but the lingering humidity left water everywhere truck tires had carved into soft earth, where motorcycle tires were too thin for the weight they carried. To remain presentable while looking for work, always you must keep one eye on the ground, one eye on the road ahead, because, sometimes, the cleanest way forward means veering to the other side of the road; always your hands clutching and lifting your sarong to keep the hem from getting dirty, or enough to free your legs to jump over a muddy puddle. I was most jealous of the Laotian lady and her shorts on these days.
Three weeks into our lives in Phondachet, still without work, I picked up Hnuhlee and told her teacher I might have to pull her out of school. Hnuhlee looked at me, widened eyes and opened mouth, as though she was hollow—all hope cut down and burned, and her spirit abandoned her body, leaving only a skin shell. Those words in my voice and my daughter’s emptiness convinced me, as mother, I was failing.
Not even a month yet, her teacher said. How is she to learn? He pulled me away from Hnuhlee. She is a good student, he said quiet into my ear, still holding my arm. You must do whatever you can to keep her in school. Warm were his words. I told him I had asked around for work until my throat was so parched I almost fell to my knees to drink water from a roadside puddle like some animal. Then consider becoming an orchid seller, he said. To convince me, he nodded his approval, proud of his suggestion as teacher, as someone with knowledge. I will buy from you, he said.
But to hear a strange man say those words suddenly made them mean something different: man language was made of words a woman should not question or dispute, but needed only to follow, give in to, act upon. If I hesitated and waited, I knew, he would think I was considering it. I snatched Hnuhlee’s hand and hurried away. Most, though, I wanted to spit at his feet, call him dogface, tell him to die, but I did not want Hnuhlee to know something was wrong. To swallow down those words was hard—they hooked on my tongue, swelled heavy on my chest, smothering me.
Am I not coming back? Hnuhlee said.
New school, I said, keeping my words short to hide the shake in my voice. New teacher. Better school. Smarter teacher! You will be a better girl when you finish this school. School fee was paid to the end of the month, but I tried not to think of the lost days and wasted money. Else, I might turn beggar and allow her teacher to see me in my place.
I already have two friends, Hnuhlee said.
I handed her the red-bean bun the monks had given me. Eat this and be quiet.
Her teeth, she tore at the plastic wrapping of the bun while her little feet tried to keep up. You want me to save a little for Bone and Skin? she said. After the dogs followed me home, I had tied them to a post in our courtyard. At the same times each morning and night, I fed them what Hnuhlee and I could spare. I told her to go ahead and finish the bun, pulled on her arm, walking faster, not looking back. Never. After swallowing the last bite, she told me she needed water.
Swallow your spit. Unless you want to drink my piss.
I really need water, she said. You made me eat too fast. She started to hiccup, and I feared she would choke and die on me—and what type of mother would I be, then, if I let my daughter die in front of me?—so I hit her on the back three times. I dragged her toward the house, hopping over the muddy tire ruts, lifting her arm so she, too, would jump, as though mother bird teaching baby bird to fly, and Hnuhlee started to cry. The running only worsened her need for water, I knew, but, quick, we needed to get far away, get home. As last option, I decided to collect my spit in my mouth for her to drink. In that moment, though now it seems unclean, it felt natural that what came from my body would nourish hers, spit included, but the running allowed no spit to collect. Suddenly, Hnuhlee stopped and slipped out of my hand, gasping for breath like being pulled underwater, or squeezing her tiny body was a snake. I snatched her up in my arms to carry—but, oh, how she had grown in the few weeks we had been here—and I tumbled over. She staggered to her feet, looking at me like I was a man attempting to kidnap her to be my bride, and ran from me. To watch her escape, my seat on the ground, my sarong muddied—how fast she ran, I was hopeful.
When, finally, I caught up to her, we almost were home, but still she struggled to push down the food, and after hitting her three more times on the back, I looked up and saw the Laotian lady judging me from the open gate of her courtyard.
What she do that was so bad? she said.
She needs water, I said.
And you hit her?
I’m her mother, I said. I’m helping her.
By hitting her cause she thirsty? She called for her son to bring her a bowl of water.
As Hnuhlee tilted it to drink, the bowl caught a few of her tears. That sadness flushed into my belly and settled there, and I knew, then, orchids were raised on the backs and tears of women. I turned away from the Laotian lady and her fat body because I had no high seat in my life to argue from, and the thought of how she had put it shamed me. Even my body had failed to provide Hnuhlee the thing she needed.
Later in the evening, there were knocks on my courtyard gate. It was rude of the stranger, and at this time of night? Already, did a rumor get out that I was selling orchids? Bone and Skin disappointed me with their silence.
Husband said tomorrow you go fishing with me, the Laotian lady said, standing by my gate. Wake up early. There is plenty water on the river. She grinned, and again, I felt such shame, that grin a weight sinking me to live with the catfish and stingray. I nodded, though I was terrified of water. Because I am a woman, I never learned to swim; fishing was a man’s job. To escape the communists when we crossed the Mekong into Thailand, I had convinced my husband to hire a small boat for us. I knew many people who died in the river when they tried to swim it. But since I took my daughter back to Laos, I had no other choice.
To Hnuhlee early the next morning, I said, You must wait until I can afford a new school. Work on what you have learned so far. Don’t go outside. Do not open the door for anyone. This, you must do for me. Understand? I let my dear dogs loose in the courtyard, hoping on my return, still they would be there, waiting for me by the door to be fed.
On the new cassette, Mother says it is the tenth month, fourteenth day of 1985. She tells me they buy clothing in big black plastic bags from the thrift store for twenty-five cents each without knowing what is inside—they like the surprise and disappointment. For only twenty-five cents, they throw the disappointments away, or use them as rags and towels to wipe their feet with. Father is 182 pounds and one of my sisters has a new baby boy. Because of the baby, everyone says they have not much to send, but please do not think they do not love me with only ten dollars from each. Grandma Joua says her son is in his second year at the university, but she sends twenty dollars because she wants my Hnuhlee to stay in school. Again, they yell at me for leaving the refugee camp. Stupid, they say. I should have stayed, so at least, still I would be allowed to come. But America had probably made them forget how, in the refugee camp, you could not even make a life like a maggot in waste. There are other ways to cross the ocean, they say. Think about yourself. Where will you live when Hnuhlee marries? Who will take you in? Still you are young, you could try to have sons here. But I did not want a man to tell my Hnuhlee she was to get married, have children, and not go to school, always to wear a sarong that would keep her legs close and never allow her a full stride when she needs to run. She would be disappointed in me, more so because I had dragged her back to wait for her father. She was to wear shorts and pants, if she wanted, to match strides with men, that way she would not fall behind, she would not keep them waiting; and should she err in her journey, an unfettered sidestep could right her way, an about-face would not trip her up; she was not to be like me.
Mr. Cha lost his job with the tree farm while I had good work as a fisherwoman. The Laotian lady, who told me her name was Kethavong, and her husband owned two boats, long and only wide as a tree but with a five-HP motor attached to each. After seeing me hit my daughter that day, Mrs. Kethavong said she convinced her husband to let me help.
How did you convince your husband? I asked on the first day as we got into the boat.
We have two boats, she said. More boats, more fish, more money. Even my husband is smart enough to know that. Mrs. Kethavong and I worked one boat, her husband worked the other.
Thank you, I said. What to say to someone who might have saved your life? The first three months, I went out with an old inner tube tied to me. After making some money, I bought a small air vest. That vest protected me from causing a tidal wave of bad luck if I fell in the water. To think one wrong shift of your body is all it takes, it is a wonder how small things keep safe a life: Mrs. Kethavong’s offer for me to help fish; the air vest, which would save my life so I could make my daughter’s life, which, as it is doing now, is providing life for the child in her belly.
You work hard. That is all I ask, Mrs. Kethavong said. We trolled the wood boat out to the deeper, calmer breaks—this river is not the Mekong but a smaller river that brings water from a mountain lake to the Mekong, so when it is raining the water can be fast. Also, a wife has other ways of convincing her husband. Mrs. Kethavong stood up in the narrow boat, shifted her solid thighs from side to side like a dancer, upsetting the boat until I thought we were going to capsize and drown. She laughed loud at the fear on my face. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I am talking about, she said.
I am not pretending, I wanted to tell her. I could not remember many of the ways a wife can convince her husband.
Mrs. Kethavong and I dropped four nets and pulled them up every two hours. Usually, one net, we catch only seven or eight fish. Once, on our lucky day, forty-two fish. At two in the afternoon, if our catch was low, I hauled the fish in a cart to her sister’s booth in the marketplace while Mrs. Kethavong and her husband continued fishing in one boat until nightfall. If we catch many fish, two or sometimes all of us will take the fish to market. What fish remained after three days on ice would be brought home and smoke-dried. The Kethavongs would give me a little to keep, and we would take the rest back to the sister’s to sell.
One day, as we waited for the hour to come before we pulled in the nets, Mrs. Kethavong asked me why I have not remarried—I am still young, I have left a little beauty.
I said, I’m holding out for a rich Hmong-American. She laughed and shook her head, said that I was smart to do so, but she knew I was lying and only was giving me space. What can I do? I said. Already, I am married.
Yes, Mrs. Kethavong said. A lifetime ago.
No, this lifetime. But I knew what she meant—war makes a lifetime of a year. My marriage was a marriage of waiting. In 1985, my husband and I had been married for ten years, but we were together, I counted, only thirty-nine months. We made a life between the times he was away at war and when he found his way home, and always, he remembered to hide his gun in the jungle so no one would suspect he was a soldier. I was used to life without him, but always, I expected he would return and we would continue as husband and wife. I never told my husband I loved him, and he never told me. Wrong ears hung like leaves in the forest, and your words might give you away, so tenderly, my husband and I tried to treat each other, not be so rough when we talked. When we were together, we tried to be happy. That was enough. To Mrs. Kethavong, I said, What if I remarry, and he comes back? If I were a man, that would be okay, I could have more than one wife, but I was born a woman. And the thought of remarrying could never be on my mind.
I put Hnuhlee in the school of the three Kethavong children, deeper into Vientiane and more expensive, but there, they taught the students English.
Mr. Cha’s sons started trading labor for money with the farmers in the countryside, and sometimes, he joined them. They were fed a handful of rice at lunchtime. Mr. Cha refused to ask his sons for their earnings to help with expenses. If they have need for money, he explained, they have in mind already what they’re going to spend it on. Mr. Cha’s hair was long to his waist by this time. When there was not enough work for father and sons, Mr. Cha would let his sons work, and he would walk to Vientiane, as I had the year before, looking for work.
One day, Mr. Cha returned with his gold hair muddied, nose bloodied and crooked, and lip fat and swollen as a sow’s teat. This time I wasn’t quick enough, he said. I plowed over a grandmother pulling a cart of vegetables—wincing as he pressed his bottom lip with his thumb and finger—and stopped to help her. I never imagined I would become a thief. He rubbed the bruise reddening along his right temple to the corner of his mouth. I steal only food. Nothing else. He was staring off behind me, but I knew he could not see anything in the distance. I let the cook beat me up afterward.
While I gathered a bowl of water and towel, he came into my courtyard and, kicking out his legs, sat on a stool. The five black hens I had managed to buy flapped their wings, could not get away fast enough from him. Up, I said, tapping the bottom of his chin. He leaned back, tilted his head. Since my husband left to find his parents, this was the closest I had come to a man. Strong on his warm body was the smell of salt and wood. I wiped away the dirt on the side of his face and saw, clearer, the bruise. The pain was blackening like a disease in his skin. His eyes were light brown, the color of green tea. To look into them made me uncomfortable, but I wanted to look because they were so different, and knowing this—that I wanted to look—made me shy and want to smile.
Close your eyes, I told him.
What for? he said.
So I can see your face better.
What about me? Then I can’t see.
Close them, I said, impatient, a tone rarely used with my husband. There is nothing to see. I ran the towel across his eyes so he would close them.
What if I can’t see and my hand happens to do this— His hand reached out and grabbed my outer thigh, and my body flinched, a lasting reaction from the war to gunshots and explosions, to loud foreign voices telling you to stop, a body gathering itself one last time before being hurt.
Stop it, dogface! I ground the towel into his lip. His hands shot up to grab my wrist, still my hands. That happens when you don’t respect me. You get hurt. I pulled my arm away; faster were my heart and breathing. He opened his eyes to look at me, to see how my face was, to see if maybe I might be smiling, but I held still my face. The pain had put tears in his eyes, and I felt bad about what I had done, about how I was seeing this man cry. Close them, I said, and made my fingers into a fork to pretend to blind him until he lidded his eyes from my sight. With one hand, I cupped the side of his face gently. His skin was cooling from the water, and I was reminded of how I held my husband’s face that last night. With the other hand, I pressed the towel into Mr. Cha’s face firmly, so he would not notice how my other hand was holding him.
This is good pain, he said as I poured water down his hair, which I had untangled. Reminds me of the pain in the war when my feet were rotting with blisters, my shoulders ached from a pack full of rice, ammo, and water—all a man needs in life. You risk getting your foot stuck in a hole or rolling an ankle over a root. In war, to survive, you must be willing to do what the enemy is not. And sometimes that means going blindly into a thicket to sleep. And always you slept on the most uncomfortable ground because, there, the enemy rarely looks. War made for a tough life, but I felt like a man. This pain reminds me of that life.
I thought stealing didn’t make you feel like a man, I said, squeezing my hands down his hair, which was softer when dirty than mine was when clean, this long hair, he told me once, his mother said never to cut because it was the only golden thing she could give him.
But this pain does.
Those who think like you are few. I handed him a torn and fraying towel. This isn’t the cleanest. But you need to bathe before you can get a cleaner one.
I haven’t complained, he said. He dried off his hair, wrung out the towel, and hung it over the top rail of my fence.
Since you are a thief now, I said before he left, go steal me a rooster. Recently, I had started letting my hens out of the courtyard when I was home so they could be covered by a neighbor’s wandering rooster, but no luck yet. I will give you eggs to start a flock. Maybe it will help you steal less. Unless you like getting beat up and washed by a woman.
By 1990, about once a week, I would drop off a bag of four or five dried fish for Mr. Cha and his sons. He said to me one day, It’s a good thing my wife died when she did. War makes you glad your loved ones are dead.
Only a man would say such a thing, I said. Only thinking about himself. I reminded him of his sons, how they needed their mother, even though they were poor, as Hnuhlee needed her father.
All these women making money now, he said, shaking his head, breathing loud a sigh. What’s left to remind me that I’m a man? I can’t find work. I am nothing. My usefulness slowly erased. But these women—cash in their waistbands, stuffed into their bras—they have so many ideas about life. New ideas, too. Even bossing their husbands around.
How would you know? I said.
Maiker, he said, looking down at his hands, again shaking his head. A dead wife is more demanding than a living one. He searched my face to see if I agreed with him. Now you can’t even raise your hand to them. It’s like, you raise it and it’s frozen there, never coming down, never satisfying you for just that moment when it strikes her face. Every time a man raises his hand to his wife now, he is reminded of his own weakness. Every time he has to bring that hand down, it’s with such shame to know he’s powerless. Sometimes, you have to pretend you were only scratching your head so the bitch doesn’t see you are incapable of it.
You want me to take back the fish? I reached for the bag I had placed on the small table in his house.
My sons wouldn’t want that, he said.
Right, I said. Your sons wouldn’t want that.
It was only morning, but he yawned, thinking about the long day ahead, groaned as he stretched like a man being pulled apart by horses, then scratched the top of his head before combing his hair with his fingers and tucking it behind his ears. I asked if I could use his cassette player-recorder, and he pointed to the pillar where it hung on a nail.
Does that work? he said at my back as I went to grab it. His question confused me. How much can you get from them?
I never ask for money, I said.
So that is how you do it. He nodded as though he had just come upon something that, all these years, had escaped him. Maybe it works because you are a woman—your sweet woman voice.
Mostly, the money, it is from my in-laws, I said. I think it is because of guilt.
A woman is a good cause for guilt, he said. Haven’t I said that?
I’m no one’s guilt, I said. Their missing son is their guilt.
I listened to the words on the cassette from two months earlier one final time. On the tape, Grandma Joua speaks of her son. He brought her so much shame in America, how he had run off with a girl. Mr. Cha shook his head when he heard this, saddened to learn America was teaching children to abandon their parents. What next, he wanted to know, parents will stop claiming their own children? Grandma Joua weeps, telling me this, and I could see the tears following the deep creases on her face. If tears could fill and smooth, all war women would have skin like a worn river stone; age and heartache would only affect them in spirit. Her husband, too, had left for war and never come back. Then, I did not know why, because of the tears maybe, Grandma Joua starts speaking fast, and it sounds like a different language altogether. This fast talk scared me.
What’s she saying? Mr. Cha said.
I rewound the cassette twice before I caught on, as if shame, if ever it must be spoken, should be spoken fast so you can get through the telling of it. She regrets her own failure, I said to Mr. Cha.
The son running off?
You don’t know? I said. Worse. Maybe.
I haven’t seen Grandma Joua in a long time, he said. Not since my wedding.
I told him Grandma Joua wonders, on the cassette, if her life would be different. Would her daughter, if she were alive, have loved her more? And remained by her side, unlike the son.
I didn’t know she had a daughter, Mr. Cha said.
I paused the tape and told him what Grandma Joua had told Mother and Father one day in Ban Vinai about the night in 1972 when she fled Long Chieng into the jungle with the Lee, Her, and Vang families. By then, she had lived there eight years after fleeing Fi Kha. Afraid Long Chieng soon would fall, it was safer, they decided, to wait out the war in the jungle or slowly try to cross into Thailand. When she walked away from the group to use the bathroom in the bush, she was captured and beaten. This, only the second night they were in the jungle. The dark was blinding, Grandma Joua said. She only remembers the stink of the man’s breath, like sour milk, before she passed out. She did not scream for the others because she feared drawing them into an ambush. After that, the families hid during the day and moved only at night. When Grandma Joua gave birth months later, still they were in the jungle. They had run back and forth in the dark, then decided to get into Thailand but had gotten lost, and then wandered the long way down the country. Because the baby girl cried a lot those first two months, Grandma Joua used opium to quiet her, but had to leave the baby in the jungle. She needed to save her son.
That’s the war, Mr. Cha said. We never knew the true faces hurting us. They hid in the dark, in the shadows. Sometimes they were the same faces you saw many times a day—you just didn’t know. But I’d kill that guy if I knew.
Maiker, Grandma Joua says on the cassette before it ended, I keep all your cassettes because I am the last one to get them and no one else wants them. I listen to them when I am lonely for the voices of the old country.
I knew I, too, should save their cassettes, but I could not spare the money for even one cassette, and each time I erased their words and covered them with my own, I knew I was replacing causes for happiness—their voices, their love, their tears—with my complaints of a tough life in Laos. If I cried during a recording, always I made sure to muffle the sound. On the cassette I sent in 1990, I told my family that a few of those who left for America are now returning for a visit. In all of the world, I heard the visitors saying, the orchids of Laos are the best. And all around Vientiane now, orchids of all colors and fragrances are sold. Orchids from Pha Thi. Centipede’s Back Orchid. Orchid of Village 52. Cut Vein Orchid. Many whites are also visiting Laos for the orchids, and they bring with them the green paper that can flip the communist mind. But Mr. Cha believed the communists are more accepting because the whites are not here to take over like before.
The orchid collectors are slowly starting to come out of Vientiane and into Phondachet, I said into the recorder. You see young whites as often as the old, and most do not look wealthy. The war widows, mothers, grandmothers, some wives, and even the young teenagers who are pushed by their parents to learn the business because it promised food—all who sell orchids now make more money than any man could make, despite some orchids’ fetching only two thousand kip, about three American dollars, because there are so many sellers. But many survive only on what the orchids provide.
I said the Hmong collectors come dressed in creased pants, shirts with ties, gold watches. If they come around to our houses, trying to see who might have orchids, Mrs. Kethavong and I would untie our dogs. Collectors are scared of Mrs. Kethavong’s four dogs because her husband uses them for pig hunting. Sometimes, the men would say okay, okay, they are hungry for fish to calm us down, and we would tie up the dogs and sell the men fish and charge them more. Always, they pay with cash that they take out of their back pocket, a fold in middle of the money so it looks more than it is. They smile when we look at the money, and ask where they might find the orchids no other collector has found yet. They would say, We take to show our wives back home. That is sometimes true because some collectors like to show off the orchids in front of their wives, to stab them with jealousy over getting to own such beautiful flowers, and oftentimes, they would breed them, the different orchids, but all are liars, I know.
I did not tell my family often Hnuhlee would ask why we could not go to America, since everyone who came back carried so much money. Nor did I mention the time she refused to go steam rice inside the house when I asked, forcing me to shove her and slam the door, latching it from the outside, while Bone and Skin ran to bark at three men approaching our house. After the men were gone, Hnuhlee said she only wanted to see their thick fold of American dollars—some girls at school had said always the collectors came with it. What is the wrong in that? Why can’t we go to America? She was twelve and had recently started carrying around the clothes of women. A lot is the wrong in that, I wanted her to know, but did not say.
When I finished recording my words, I called for Hnuhlee to come and say a few of her own. Always, she said the same things, the same words I taught her when she was young and unsure of her own heart to know what to say: This is Hnuhlee, daughter of Yee and Maiker Pha. It has been a long time since I talked to you. I hope everyone is living well. We are okay, just the two of us, by ourselves, waiting for Pa, over here, after you left. Pa has not returned, but soon, we believe. I do not know what I will do when I see him. I do not know if he will remember me, or if I will know him. I am in year seven of school and would like to study English to be a translator, so when you visit I can talk to you in your language. I can read and write in English some, but I speak it slow. If we have just a bit more money, maybe I can make it to the next year. Maybe if I am lucky.
These, the only times my daughter said her father’s name.
On the cassette from 1993, voices tell me to keep Hnuhlee away from the orchid collectors. Grandma Joua says evil spirits mostly like to steal the souls of young girls, and starts listing fifteen to twenty girls that died young, as though, always, they have been on her mind all these years—Phoua, Panyia, Gaosheng, Maizong—then this: Evil is everywhere even here in America, a man has arrived not too long here, why couldn’t he have been buried in the old country because evil is at home in both countries, it can cross back and forth, it carries two faces, listen carefully, the truth is in and around their words, in that space their words carry many meanings, listen to what they don’t say, go on, listen to me, remember what— On this cassette, before Grandma Joua can reach the last of her words, a girl’s faint voice can be heard: Stop speaking like that, Grandma Joua. Tell me what it is. It is not good to frighten people. Just tell me. That young voice, still I hear it, those words seeking, as if, knowing, it alone could set right the world, there in America with both parents at the door.
That was the year Mr. Cha’s oldest son, Bee, twenty-one, which was old to be without a wife, went to the Harvest Festival and kept another man’s daughter too late. When Bee walked the girl home, the man asked him for his father’s name. To keep her so late, did Bee intend to marry his daughter? Bee said sure, he would like to marry her, but he had no money, and they only were talking. But really, you do not know with children—they have their ways, like adults have theirs. The man went to the clan elders of the village, who settled disputes, righted wrongs, and restored honor. They determined that $75, about 55,000 kip that year, was the fine to be paid for soiling the girl and bringing shame to her father’s name if Bee failed to marry her. For marriage, the father requested a bride price of $2,050. If Mr. Cha and Bee refused both choices, the father threatened to go to the Laotian authorities and say Bee had raped his daughter. The man could promise a little handout if they threw Bee in jail and knocked him around, as a lesson and to convince him to pay. Or if Mr. Cha was wealthy, he could pay off the authorities—and the clan elders—and have the problem gone, but that would cost more than the $75 fine because each authority and clan elder has more than two hands.
Mr. Cha asked what should he do, and I said did the children want to get married? The girl was a little shorter than I like, with dark skin. Her figure was delicate—narrow hips, thin legs, small breasts—I feared their children would go hungry. But she was a good speaker, respectful to the elders, and patient with everyone; in another world, she would make a good judge. I told him to pay the bride price. Why waste the money?
I’ll ask for two years to come up with the money, Mr. Cha said. With father and sons working and a daughter-in-law taking care of things at home, or even herself working, they might need four years to pay it off, I thought.
Come up with half, I said. That might buy you more time.
Mr. Cha thought this over, but of course, for him, already the decision was made—only he was shifting numbers to see what was possible and not possible, and even in his mind, as it was in mine, his math did not show the possibility of coming up with half. Still, to marry the girl was the money-saving and honorable thing to do.
In one year, they were able to pay $620. Mr. Cha was confident, since they had been good to his daughter, the man would see they were decent, hardworking people, not slave owners who only wanted a water buffalo and brood sow. But just as Mr. Cha was feeling hopeful, after the man assured him there was no hurry, that Mr. Cha’s name and promise were honorable, the son curse hit again. The younger son, Say, was caught being husband-and-wife with his sweetheart along the path that snaked into the jungle. At night, the girl had snuck out of the house under Say’s urgings. The only daughter of a family with four sons, she was more expensive than Bee’s wife. And unlike Bee, who met his wife at the festival and maybe a little too long into the night talked with her, openly Say and his sweetheart had courted for ten months. But rare are the marriages for love, even now. The father of Say’s girl did not bother with the clan elders before setting a bride price of $6,500—so high that even Hmong-American men would not pay—though some people in the village said the father, knowing Mr. Cha could not afford much, had a good heart to fine them only $20 to restore his name. Say loved this girl, argued that whatever and however long it took he would come up with the money. But Mr. Cha said they could not afford it just then, maybe if he had waited four or five years. But that is men: when they want something, immediately they must have. All orchid collectors are like that. Worse, also, because men think parental love is a competition. So what one son gets, the other, too, must get. Else that means the parents do not love them equal. This time, though, while Say was off trading labor, Mr. Cha walked over and paid the fine to the girl’s father.
One day not long after, the girl, Maida, came home and saw an orchid collector sitting with her parents inside their house. They told her the man was there to buy her orchids. He had heard she possessed the rare Eggplant Petal orchids, which resembled purple butterfly wings with a fiery floret between, but more valuable than the look was that her orchids could cure low energy and fatigue. She ran over to Mr. Cha’s house, but they refused to let her through the courtyard gate; they feared being fined again. And like an innocent prisoner looking for a way, she shook the gate until it almost broke, then, knowing a woman in a sarong should never climb a fence to be loved by just a man, she walked over to our house when she saw Hnuhlee out in our courtyard staring. Maida was fourteen and had a good figure. She was tall, with a solid, wide frame to have babies easily and endure the many labors of a countrywoman. She told Hnuhlee she did not raise her orchids to sell to a Hmong-American man. She wanted only Say to have them, the man she loved.
What do you think, Ma? Hnuhlee asked. Would you do that? Oy! She and Maida walked into the house where I was poaching fish. I wanted to pinch her lips, teach her about saying things and asking questions at the wrong time. Instead, I said, Absolutely not. Maida is strong to love like that.
Only you two see only two ways in the world.
How many ways are there? I said, because there are only two ways in the world. The right. And all the wrongs. Hnuhlee was fifteen, and already believed she knew enough to survive without me. Her family isn’t starving! I said. Is your family starving? I did not wait for Maida’s answer because I knew enough about them. Her parents just want new things! Maida should get to choose who she loves! Who she wants to be with!
Hnuhlee turned away from me and Maida, and started walking out of the house. Why are you yelling at me? she said.
Your father wouldn’t ask you to do that! Which, I was sure, was the truth. Sometimes it is okay to go hungry!
He can’t ask me if he’s not here, she mumbled, her back to me, but clear across the threshold, I heard her.
It’s okay to go hungry, Maida, I said.
Later, Maida refused to go home when I urged her. Afraid Mr. Cha again would be fined, I walked to her house and told her parents she was in my home. That was when I saw the ugly man, who was more than fifty. Short, with three gold teeth, a big mole on his bald head. Some faces—how do I explain this—bring to mind certain things. Seeing this man, I wondered what Grandma Joua might have done to her daughter. These things about the world made me wonder why Hnuhlee’s father, my husband, would keep away.
I fed Maida for two days before, by the hair, she was dragged home by her mother. Her parents had a new stove and bed. The man sat on a new armchair. Maida ran behind the curtain that made for her a private area in their small house and refused to speak to the man. So you have decided to watch your father and mother and brothers go hungry? her mother said. Remember, you’re not the only person in this house! Remember whose hands you ate from all these years! To let Maida decide, her parents took the man to visit some of his distant family in another part of Vientiane: they hoped it would not come to them tying her down; they hoped it would be done by her will.
If she stayed, Maida knew, the man would have her orchids by morning. She wrote a letter, grabbed a paring knife, and walked past her brothers, who were keeping watch. Go on then! said the oldest brother, who was twenty-three years, raising his hands and backing away. From this day forward, this is no longer your home, we are no longer bound by name. I curse your oil-blood will no longer light your way to our people. The youngest brother, seven years, who would recount this to me years later, ran up to her, wondered if he could come with her. When she shook her head, he said, Be a good person, Mai. Go on before Mother and Father get home. Maida bit her lips and nodded and walked out of the house into the time at dusk when the shapes of people, still, you could make out, even as their details faded—the sharpness of their nose and eyes, the locations of scars and moles, the curve of the mouth in feeling; they were not altogether disappearing, but night was only exposing their shapes as hollow spaces in the world where they—their dreams for the future, the history of their love, their desire for life—had once been.
She gave the letter to Hnuhlee to give to Say. When Maida turned to go, she saw Say’s figure standing in the doorway of his house. But it turned away because her parents had sent word to Mr. Cha that there was an owner of her orchids now. No one was to touch her. Maida yelled that he was a weak boy. Why wasn’t he fighting for her? Wasn’t he a man? But too young was she to know the war had taken our best men and left us only boys. And these poor farming boys, they could never hope to win fights against orchid collectors.
In a country where many had very little and love is still the one thing left of your own that you can give someone else, it was Say taking back his love from Maida, I am sure, that drove her to the river, because when you are poor, there is much honor to receiving someone’s love. There at the river, Maida cut the lifeline of her orchids, slashing at the roots, and threw them in. As they floated away, she held on to them.
The cassette from 1995 contained only two voices. Mother says the Lee family, who takes care of Grandma Joua, has shut her in one room of the house. A sickness has left her with little energy to stand or walk. Grandma Joua’s white hair has been cut short like a man’s—they claim it is easier to clean. She is losing her mind, Mother says, screaming awful stuff about everyone. About her past. About her husband. Her son. For being an orphan. For being abandoned. Her memory, too, is fading and, with it, the right words. Grandma Joua, that fast voice, speaks even when nobody is near, like she is speaking to spirits. Mother says she tells everyone they should forgive Grandma Joua because she is old, and no more does she know what is right and what is wrong, what is real and what is past.
But when I reached Grandma Joua’s section of the cassette, she says she has not been cursing anyone. She has chased away old spirits by accepting the words of the Bible, and only she is speaking to God. And no one visits her anymore. The Lees lock her in a room because they do not want to hear the Truth. They call her crazy. But I got no sense of that as I listened to her voice. She sounds as she did back when I was twelve. Her loud breathing, as she speaks her words, is strong as my pulse. Grandma Joua says only one person in the world cares for her now, the Lees’ only daughter, but she is growing up, growing old, and soon will be gone, she is afraid, from her life.
The heart, use it enough, it thickens over. Same as your hands and feet, grows tough. And accepts new love, holds it without feeling pain. In the spring of 1996, Say found a new sweetheart. This time, I will kill myself, he said. By then, Mr. Cha had found a job driving a motorcycle cab. Mainly, his customers were orchid collectors seeking the untouched orchids of the remote countryside. It bothered him because he knew the countryside growers did not want always to sell, but sometimes, too much was the money. Quietly, some who did sell asked for buyers from Mr. Cha, and they would tip him if the collectors were generous. Sometimes, the buyers also tipped Mr. Cha if he led them to good orchids. But his savings was not enough to pay for Say’s bride, whose price was $4,300—her father refusing to accept anything but full payment—though Bee’s wife was finally paid for.
One early evening in the seventh month, Mr. Cha brought over his cassette player-recorder. He had heard I had received a cassette from America. I went to my corner of the house and searched in my bag for the cassette. When I came back, he was crying.
Who passed away? I said, because rarely men allow you to see them weep, except for the dead. Tears dripped down his bony cheek and collected into bigger drops at his chin.
When he caught his breath, he told me he had just made $400. I was so happy for him I, too, started crying—I did not make $400 in two years! I was glad these were tears of happiness. But I was curious, and because he was a man you do not give space to, nosy me said, Made, found, or stole? No person I knew made $400 in a day.
Made, he said. I earned it. He told me two whites, their hair the color of rice chaff, hired him to drive them into the countryside. Were they looking for orchids?
Please just show us the beauties of your country.
Opium? Heroin?
Keep driving, they said, fast. Get us a wind to cut this heat.
Far into the countryside, they asked him to pull over at a roadside grill stand. They requested he join them and bought him lunch. Afterward, they wanted to visit the Emerald Buddha temple in town, near Rue Labeottadok.
Where did you get your yellow hair from—is your grandfather white?
No, no, Mr. Cha said. We have yellow hair, too, going back hundreds and hundreds of years. He told them the story of a Hmong warrior who fought the Chinese. So courageous was he in battle, the ancestors’ spirits rewarded him with gold hair. For however long you live, may gold grow on your head. Strange, I thought, because I did not recall hearing that story from my parents or grandparents when I asked about the yellow-haired Hmongs—always, their looks warning me I wanted too many answers. So I wondered if Mr. Cha had created a story because he was ashamed of his hair, this need for a glorious past so, without shame, he could live life in the present. As though life goes on only by one courageous act or decision, followed by another act, another decision. And on and on, allowing him to say, I got here because all these things happened exactly this way, and only this way. We are the seeds of the spirits, Father had said about beginnings. Only gods have no seeds.
Mr. Cha said one of the two men—the skinny, tall one—touched his hair. Then the other—older and balding—held Mr. Cha’s hair in his hand like he was weighing the worth of it, he, solely from touch, able to know the quality and value of something.
You have beautiful hair, the tall man said. He held Mr. Cha’s hair up to his nose and breathed it in. Mr. Cha felt the end of his hair get sucked into the wet inside of the man’s nose. How would you like to have a drink with us at our hotel?
We’ll reimburse you for any lost business, the old man promised.
If he did not need to drive in the humidity for the money, then he surely was not going to. Mr. Cha thought they might buy his hair, which he was willing to cut for the right price. They stopped briefly at the temple, long enough for the whites to drop a sweat, say they had seen it.
At the hotel bar, no more than two kilo-may from the temple, Mr. Cha sat between the whites. The weather sank the liquor right into his gut despite the lunch he had eaten. The whites spoke to each other over him, sometimes looking at him, both touching his hair. An hour passed. The old white asked if Mr. Cha would like to make more money.
How much? Mr. Cha said.
Two hundred from me. Two hundred from him. Four total.
American dollars? Mr. Cha said.
Yes, they said.
What do I do?
In their room, the men counted the money and handed it to him. Telling me this, Mr. Cha’s shoulders started shaking, a few words, now and then, sputtering through the tears on his lips. Soon as his hand felt the money’s weight, he managed to say, knowing it was real, to keep it, he was willing to do anything except die. Because he still had duties.
I did not ask what happened next, I did not want to urge him on. I was quiet because I was thinking of my own husband. And I stood and went to start dinner.
This too much for you? Mr. Cha said. You won’t even let me finish? I can’t even go on—
Whatever you did, I said from across the hut, raising my voice, wanting to be heard, it was for your children. You are a good father. You try your best without a wife. Would my husband believe I was trying my best for our daughter?
After a few minutes, when I did not return to my seat, when I refused even to face him, Mr. Cha walked out of my house, believing, I am sure, I had insulted him by lying to him. What he did not know was I had come to agree with him about one thing, and I needed to walk away, so he could not see me acknowledge he was correct: it was a good thing for him his wife was not alive to see this.
Days later, I told Mrs. Kethavong I needed a one-day break. You finally found a husband? she asked. He visit you while daughter’s in school? When I did not answer, she said, Go on, but tomorrow you must fish. Tomorrow, all you must tell me. All was this that I told her—I added an ending to the story of my husband as my horse: Finally, I had seen enough to know how it would end, that the last river we must cross is wider and deeper than the Mekong. And, no wings to bear us above the burbling water, he could carry me only so far before tiring and sinking, having only human strength.
I went to Brother Pha, a village elder and clan brother to my husband, who knew the funeral rituals and who also played the qeej. I hired him to go with me into the jungle. Into my ker, I placed a dead chicken wrapped in a bag, boiled eggs, an arrow and bow, a knife, a small umbrella, cold rice, a small bottle of rice liquor, four small cups, two bowls, and sticks of incense. Hnuhlee shouldered a ker full of joss paper folded into the shapes of boats, money for her father.
When we started walking, Brother Pha asked me where we were going. The truth was, I did not know. Thirty minutes outside of our village, we entered the path into the jungle. Ahead of us, the feet of some animal scratched away, the sound of a straw broom sweeping a slate floor, startling me with its flight, unveiling a memory. My husband believed different animals can understand each other. When you go hunting, he said, it is not enough to be unseen to only the animal you hunt—all you must keep hidden from. Gibbons have learned to watch for the quick flight of birds, listen for their urgent, piercing calls; barking deer will raise tail at the ghostly howls of the gibbons; wild pigs will run with the deer, chasing squirrels to their holes. But not everything will run warning others of an intruder, giving away your location. You will have a bad hunting day if you are seen.
Travel this path long enough and it will start to climb, more brushes and branches in your way, black stripes barely visible against the dark jungle green, more fallen trees, their leaves yellowing, scattered, skin on the jungle floor, for you to step over, one foot and then the other, back onto the damp orange ground. In one hand, Brother Pha carried his qeej. His other hand held the gong, and tied to his back was a calfskin drum. I had no place in mind; I would let my heart tell me where to stop; I knew only I needed to get higher, closer to the mountaintops, to where they disappeared into clouds; I listened for the flight of birds.
My back and feet hurt, Hnuhlee said after two hours on the trail. Ma, you mean to cripple me with this weight?
I stopped, in the lead, and looked back at her. She was opening a bottle of water. Don’t be disrespectful, I said. The money you carry is important. Don’t curse it. Hnuhlee’s hair was loose, hung over her eyes, her ears. She looked away when she saw me coming toward her, pouring water on her face. I wanted to yell, she was wasting drinking water. But she knew what we were doing, and maybe she was stopping, slowing us down because she refused to accept it. If ever a mother loves her daughter, it is in moments like this, when she knows for the longest they have shared the same dreams, stored away the same hopes. Hnuhlee, too, had waited all these years, keeping alive that image of her father’s return.
I wasn’t cursing it, Ma, she said. I wouldn’t do that.
I held her face in my dirty hands, cleared away her hair so I could see her better. She is a head taller, dark skin like her father, but I see myself in her eyes, the flat of her cheek, the round of her chin. There was a time when I, too, had walked into the jungle with a ker on my back for this man.
Oy, Ma, Hnuhlee said when she saw me wiping away my tears. We have loved him long enough. Forever he will be with us. We respected his memory. I nodded. Hearing it from her, more than if it came from anyone else, made me feel better about my decision, made me believe this was right. I ran a forearm across my eyes. When I turned back to lead us, I apologized to Brother Pha. We women are holding you up.
Don’t apologize, Sister, he said. I know what it is like to retrace your past. It is better to go slow, that way you are certain you won’t miss a step, you won’t get lost.
In a clearing high in the mountains, a small area seemingly untouched by the war, after six hours of walking, animal cries all around us now, my skin warm and wet through my shirt, I slipped off my pack. The bottoms of my feet stung with blisters. Beside a small stream that ran from a place higher in the mountains, I took out the things I had carried. Hnuhlee helped me build a small altar out of river stones. I stuck incense sticks into the spaces between the stones and lit them. I took out two bowls, filled one with rice and eggs. In the other, I placed the chicken. I poured a small cup of liquor and placed it between the bowls. On the ground before the altar, I laid the arrow and bow, knife, and umbrella.
I looked at Brother Pha, said, We do it here. His eyes narrowed, underneath stirring with doubt, held still to see if I might change my mind. His name is Yee Pha, I said. He was born in Phou Keum. He is the son of Hue and Maitong Pha, who live in America now. He is a dead of war. He has no son to send him home. I am a poor woman with only a daughter. This is all I have money for. You, as his brother, help him, please, to get where your ancestors are.
Brother Pha nodded his head. Do not worry, Sister. I will do what the spirits allow. He soaked the ground with a cup of liquor, then asked our ancestors’ spirits to please hear him. Yee Pha, today we call your name to help you rise. He held his qeej between his hands. With the drum, I moved closer to the stream, striking it as Brother Pha had instructed. As he chanted and played the qeej, its sound the language of the dead, to lead my husband home, I told Hnuhlee to burn the money boats and let the ashes drift down the stream, into the Mekong, into the sea, into the ocean. Wherever the ashes washed up on, whether back on this shore or that other, and whatever they touched, whether five feet from us or five million, I wished my husband would find them and know they were from his wife and daughter.
Rise, I said, hitting the drum to let him know. Hear the call from Brother Pha’s qeej. It is playing to lead you home from where the war has laid you down.
Rise, I said. Follow it through the jungle on trails you cut those nights you were by yourself after you left us in search of your parents.
Rise, I said. Leave your gun.
Rise and follow the trail back to the refugee camp, where your daughter was born. Rise and tread again the path we took when I decided to become your wife, after you came back from war the first time. Rise and let go of the hatred and courage you clung to during the long fighting that turned you into a man and me into a woman. Rise and regain your youth, the right to fear without shame, and know again only a body whole. Rise, go back to Fi Kha, where you first saw me, where I gave you a cucumber as a gift. Rise and go on. Return to Phou Keum on that trail now covered with weeds because the falls of our people’s feet no longer land there to keep it clear. Rise, do not tire. I walk behind you, and if the fortunes are good and the spirits of our people see to it, our daughter will be long before she follows us on this road. Rise and walk between your neighbors’ houses. You are almost there. Walk. Push open the door of your parents’ house. Hear the blow of the qeej. Pick up your shirt. This is your first home, the place where you were born.
Insects stopped chirping and trilling, animals silenced their calls, and all held quiet for my husband’s trip home—that is what I want to tell happened. But the qeej and drum had no effect on the world like a sack and engine block hitting water. No ringing silence even, like the ones in my husband’s stories, those I convinced him to share on nights he could not sleep, of how every jungle skirmish, every bomb drop, every grenade explosion, always, was followed by a fleeting moment of truce to let the earth re-form full, to see where things stand, a moment to allow you to walk away, or stay—a time that many men, if by themselves, would dive headfirst into, he said—before death, again, leveled the living. In truth, the noise seemed to get louder now that I was listening. No pauses of hesitation. No silence from fright. Their cries, all bemoaning the heavy burden of living, were only confirmation for me—a language, finally, I learned to understand—that our debts to the dead must always be paid through our living.
Rise, I said, waiting, the drum beating in time with that of my heart, waiting for that silence, for my breath to catch, for the drum to stop.
Within a month, Mr. Cha made enough money to pay off the bride price of Say’s wife. Within two months, he made enough to buy a three-bedroom stucco house, with a stone-floor courtyard, lights, and glass windows. They shared a hand-pumped well with ten other houses. The house was in a different section of Vientiane, and I needed to walk from Phondachet to the river where I fished, then pay a fisherman to take me across the river, then walk another ten minutes before getting there.
I knew Mr. Cha had started using opium, but had said nothing to him. Bee came and got me the day Mr. Cha awoke from a high that made him cough blood. I found him on the floor of his bedroom, dried blood at the corners of his smile. Settled into the lines of his face and cracks of his hands were dirt and opium tar.
Maiker, he said, lifting his head, stuck there in his own waste. How I’ve let my mother down! It is my destiny to see you, so you can scold me with a mother’s tongue about cutting my hair. A Dutch orchid collector had shaved his head, $250 alone for that gold. The black veins there were like snakes around his skull.
How long has he been like this? I said, turning to Bee, to Say, to their wives.
Four days, Say said. We stopped bringing him food. He won’t let me or Bee help him to use the toilet, to clean. Kept shouting, Only a woman! Only a woman! Lay there, smoked, and fell asleep. Woke up only to do it again. He won’t let our wives help either.
Heat some water, I said to the wives, wondering if they had actually tried to get him cleaned, if their love or sense of duty as daughters-in-law could overcome their disgust. I pushed past the brothers and placed the big plastic tub they used for rinsing vegetables in the courtyard. Stand him up, I said. When I pulled Mr. Cha’s shirt over his head, I saw his chest bones, the thin ridges along his stomach. His pants were heavy with piss and shit. Despite the smell being more awful than a dead man, I did not flinch—he could no more hurt me.
It is too much, Auntie, said Say. He backed away and slid out of the room.
You remember how your wife is in this house, I yelled after him.
Bee stood by the door, wanting to follow his younger brother. I need something to cover my nose and mouth, he said.
Mr. Cha pointed at his son walking away. My luck, he said.
Bee returned with his younger brother, both masked with T-shirts up to their eyes. I told the brothers to hold their father while I stripped off his pants. The two halves of his buttocks were caked brown as though he had sat on muddy ground, a ground already claiming his body. I rolled up the soiled pants, then the shirt over it, and used the bundle to wipe what I could from the back of Mr. Cha’s thighs. I took an empty rice sack from the pile hanging from a hook screwed into the pillar of the house, and tossed in the dirty bundle.
Father, Say said. This is too disgusting.
Too disgusting? I said. Would you give up your wife? The wives were watching us from the door to the bedroom. Say’s wife looked at him, and when he remained quiet, she told me the water was ready. Would you? I said to Say. You talk, but I want you to think if you can be the man your father is. Think if you can do what he did. My words made me wonder if they knew how their father had earned his money, paid off their wives. Did they even care?
The water flooded over the rim when Mr. Cha was placed into the tub, darkening the hard ground. I left them there to wash him. In Mr. Cha’s bedroom, the wives and I took off the sheets, covers, and pillowcases; Say’s wife took these outside to soak. I set Mr. Cha’s opium kit on a high ledge, where he kept pictures of his dead wife next to three canisters of coffee. I opened the window in his room and put his fan on a chair near the doorway.
Mr. Cha sat shivering on a stool by the woodstove when I was finished with his room. His skin was rippled and starting to blue. I could not tell if he needed his opium or if he was cold. I added firewood to the stove and took a stool across the fire from him. A towel covered his shoulders, but his legs were closed.
I have observed and come to a conclusion, he said. You want to know? It is about the world. Bee’s wife poured him a cup of tea.
I had my own thoughts about the world, but I wanted him to talk. If he could keep his head clear and talk, maybe he would not need his pipe. What? I said. The fire grew larger and started to pop.
He shifted, crossing his legs at the ankles, and the towel slipped from his shoulder, and I looked up. The sight struck me. Earlier, because of the smell, it did not cross my mind that I had not seen a man’s private since before my husband left to find his parents. The sight disgusted me. I felt a tightening in my stomach, some muscle pushing back, rejecting, the motions of throwing up. This world has changed, he said. This isn’t what we fought for.
No, I said, knowing the country we fought for was just the grounds that held our dead. But we are the brave ones. We’re the ones left behind. Thinking about days long ago when, once, we were moved to fight for a ground to live on made me feel like an old woman meeting an old man after many years.
This world has made it so that just because you have life does not mean you have a right to live. He took a sip of his tea and shook his head. We were stupid not to leave. Stealing and begging—and just for food? Mr. Cha’s shivers calmed as he spoke, and I started rocking on my stool. Every day a chance to sell our souls. If there is such a thing. He was staring at the open door of the woodstove. And with its many forked tongues, the fire lapped at the air, feeding on it, warming the space between us. You still think that is true, no? I wondered if he still was speaking to me—what was true? That life was only time to bargain with our souls? You still think I am a man? he said, looking up. Without his hair, he looked childish, though his face was dark and wrinkled, even powerless, no resemblance to the man who had stared down a tiger.
Yes, I said. That was not a lie: by providing for his sons, their brides, he had fulfilled his duty as a father; he had seen to it they had families of their own, that whatever happened going forward they would not go alone.
I don’t feel like it, he said. Across the fire, his eyes glistened. My own sons don’t see me as a man in my own house.
When they become fathers, they’ll see, I said.
I wish I were a woman. It would have been so much easier, least I could do it and still show my face. Only a woman, he said, shaking his head.
No, I said. It is not so easy, not even for a woman.
He looked up at me. Hnuhlee, is she about to graduate?
I told him yes. I told him I had no idea how I would find the money to send her to vocational school to complete the training needed to become an interpreter. Still, we were sending cassettes to America, but no more was there much hope in it. The yell-to-teach voices had gone silent. Soon, Hnuhlee was to be eighteen, and people believed too old she was already for marriage. Mr. Cha nodded as I talked, but I was not sure if he agreed or understood. Say brought Mr. Cha a T-shirt and shorts, but he waved him away, sipping his tea without looking at his son. Say dropped the clothes by his father’s feet.
The air inside the house felt less heavy, some steam let through the opened windows. From where the sons and daughters-in-law were huddled came muffled talking. Finally, Mr. Cha said, I want to show you something. He stood, his private hanging from the bottom of his stomach like the purple tongue of a goat. He made no move to cover himself. Here, I thought, was a person who no longer felt shame: he was naked, but there was no more the sense of a man there, and without that, a sense of something to take pride in, to remain modest about, there was nothing to protect, to cover, to clothe. He went into his room and returned with cash. He handed the money to Bee and told the sons to take their wives to buy something for dinner and a Western suit. Tie and pocket square, he said. Find one that will look nice on me. Make sure it’s pressed nice, sharp lines. I am beginning to feel like a new man.
After they left, he brought from his room two coffee canisters. He removed three tins of opium from the top, then deeper into the canisters he reached. All I have left, he said, showing me six rolls of cash held with blue rubber bands. Is half enough?
Enough for what? I said.
He told me for Hnuhlee’s schooling. Ten thousand here, he said.
Half would buy us a new life, I said. I thought to tell him Hnuhlee’s complete schooling would cost only $750, but he had started to count the money. He rolled up five thousand dollars and bound it with two rubber bands.
Can you—, he said, allow me to feel like a man? Once more. He grabbed my hand and placed in it the money rolled tight like a cylinder of metal, and it was heavy, a grenade.
I latched the front door shut. I walked Mr. Cha away from his bedroom. I was afraid I would throw up from the smell that lingered there, and he would see I was disgusted with him, with what we were about to do. I untied my sarong and laid it on the ground before the fire. My skin became gooseflesh; I watched myself shivering. My thighs were white and thin. Still my nipples were tiny nubs, having fed only one baby. The wrinkles on my stomach from carrying Hnuhlee had smoothed away years before. You still have the figure of a young girl, Maiker. Mr. Cha grinned, perhaps to disarm me, to reassure me. I was shy but determined to go through with it, same as the first time with my husband. I told him to put on a rubber. Then I lay down on my sarong, gritted my teeth, and tried not to recoil from his touch, forcing my body to accommodate his, forgiving, as only flesh and skin can be.
All was over by the time Mr. Cha’s sons returned home with a new black suit, and a roast duck and sticky rice for dinner. I excused myself, told them I needed to get home, because it was late, because still I needed to cross the river before getting there, because I knew, when Mr. Cha had finished and pulled himself from inside my body, he was a man again, and I was, again, only a woman.
Mr. Cha’s death, it was not a surprise, a few days later. He, dressed in the new suit, then smoked opium until he passed out, his head hanging a foot off the ground next to the pillar in the center of the house. On the floor of his house that day, when we were done, Mr. Cha had made me promise I would make sure his sons gave him a proper burial. So I dressed in a new sarong and saw to my duties: instructed his sons on what to do, the proper way to do it; watched over his body during the funeral so no one would deface it out of envy or hatred, out of long-held grudges or the feeling that he, as a man, had betrayed us all by becoming the whites’ woman. Your hair, I could have told Mr. Cha that day after we were done on the floor, will grow back, this hard heart of mine, though I do not know what my words would have meant to him.
You say widows and widowers are lucky, that only with a dead spouse are we able to justify the things we do to stay alive, and as such, it is easier to live in a broken country because we have no one to answer to. But that is not true. Every war happens half at home, and the battles there are the longest lasting. War is not a luck-giving thing. Like some big animal, all it does is decide for the world who lives on and who dies. And it is those who live on that are left with the questions of how to live, what to live for, how long to live. Questions that take a lifetime to get over. And maybe that is why I did it, because as a living-on person, finally, I settled on some answers, as I had before I led my daughter into the jungle to say good-bye to her father. I did it so only I would hear the voices, so, still, I could hope, if not know for certain, my daughter will never know how it feels to be an orchid farmer and stand on the corner and sell her flowers for America.
And you? Does it matter if your baby is a boy or a girl? Always, Hnuhlee and I appeal our disagreements to my son-in-law, and he, knowing I, in my own modern way, had let him marry Hnuhlee without asking for a bride price, as always, agrees with me.
I did see my old friend Houa again, four months since the last, on Rue Lab. When our eyes met, she turned away from me. Yellow Squash. Green Squash. But I have learned, when people turn their backs to you, sometimes it is an invitation for you to follow, so I hurried to catch up to her, to close the space, to share with her my luck, my hand reaching to grab her arm, this friend of my youth, the words forming on my lips—Squash Blossom Orchid, for you the flower Asian!—for her to wait.