DAUGHTER—
After they dropped off their bags at the villa where they would be staying, they were driven to Uncle Kiv’s office. In the car, she wound down the window and felt the sunlight on her face.
‘Put on your sunglasses!’ warned her father. ‘You don’t want to get wrinkles around your eyes!’ After seeing advertisements for Oil of Olay on television, he had bought his daughters bottles of moisturiser from the moment they reached adolescence. He stocked up on anti-aging creams for them in the same way a homemaker would stock up on toilet paper or toothpaste.
She ignored her father and continued to look outside, watching women ride side-saddle in tuk-tuks in their best pink or red flannelette pyjamas. There was no distinction between sleep clothes and day clothes. The town went to sleep for the hour just after lunch. Shops closed their shutters, women and men hushed children beneath mosquito nets, students walked home from school, their feet ready to melt into the road. In the streets folks lay down like sun-soaked sponges and let their stomachs do the work of digesting. People slept anywhere and everywhere, their chins resting between their collarbones, their heads dropped downwards as a traditional greeting, a sign of respect or else a winking symbol of soporific defiance.
The foyer of Kiv’s building looked like the entrance of a five-star hotel. They went up in an elevator to the guest lounge, where they sat on a white sofa suite that looked as if the plastic had been pulled off it moments before, in a room that looked as if it had been built yesterday. A bucket of charcoal was in a corner to absorb the smell of new paint.
She and Alison sat in silence while her father talked to his brother and sister-in-law. Children should be seen and not heard, girls in particular. She and her sister were both over twenty and yet they would always be children in this world where you accorded respect to experience. The quiet was a familiar quiet.
Uncle Kiv looked like a healthier version of their father. His cheeks were rubicund; he had more hair and a restless energy. Auntie Suhong had a calm, worldly presence. After a time the adults turned to her and asked how she had enjoyed Beijing, and she told them she had enjoyed it very much the second time around, when she was not so much alone and understood more about the culture. Returning to the city was like meeting a familiar foreign friend. The summer palace sparkled in the daytime, and she met up with all the Chinese friends she had made, and even her dear professors. In Hong Kong she took a ferry to visit her aunt and uncle in Macau. She slept in the same bed overlooking the bay, and realised that only a year ago she was in the same spot, lying awake, wishing she could let go and live a different life with her newfound lover instead of having so many hang-ups and anxieties. Yet all that seemed an eternity away. That evening, the last before she flew out to Cambodia, she had slept well.
And now, sitting in her uncle’s air-conditioned lounge room, she didn’t feel like she was anywhere far from home at all. Her father and uncle had made their family homes compellingly alike, with bay windows, muted drapery, tiled floors and white walls. And everything was new. Everything.
‘This is your first time in Cambodia,’ her uncle mused. ‘One of my staff has planned a tour. But is there anything in particular you’d like to see?’
‘I’d like to maybe find out more about recent Cambodian history,’ she confessed hesitantly.
‘Ah, there is nothing to say about those bad times,’ her auntie sighed. ‘Thinking about them only makes you feel sad all over again.’
‘I will take you to my office,’ her uncle told her, ‘and you can interview some of my younger staff. In them, you will see the future of this country. They are very ambitious and …’ He searched for the English word and could not find it, so inserted the French instead: ‘… agressif.’ It was a positive thing to be agressif in this country.
It was then and there that she realised the difference between her father and his brother: her Uncle Kiv had gone back to Cambodia; instead of fearing it, he had planted his feet firmly on the ground and decided to rebuild. Her father had stayed in Australia and had started his own business, but he had inculcated in his children the need to tread lightly.
They tiptoed through Uncle Kiv’s headquarters and downstairs to his offices. The managers were handsome men and women who looked barely twenty.
Inside his office, her uncle had architectural plans and models of his latest investment projects. They spread across his table, across his desks, and some even rested on boxes. It was like an empire expanding to fill all the empty spaces of the room. Uncle Kiv crouched down behind his desk and opened a safe. He emerged with two blocks of newly minted banknotes, each the thickness of a novel and bound with white paper strips. He handed one to her sister and one to her.
‘We can’t take this much money, Uncle,’ she protested. She wasn’t being polite. She and her sister really could not take it.
‘Take it, take it!’ he insisted. ‘Just for a bit of fun. I’m going to make you both instant millionaires.’
It was a million Cambodian riels, the equivalent of US$250.
‘We really don’t want this, Uncle.’
‘Nonsense. What kind of children don’t want money? Put it in your handbags now, before you lose it all.’