Tom treats me like a servant in the day, but he invites me to drink with the Australian embassy staff in the evening. He’s new on the Thai border and my least favorite of the immigration officers, arrogant and short-tempered. But I accept his offer because I consider this, too, part of my job, not only to work as a Cambodian interpreter but also to try to educate the staff, as I’ve been here longer than any of them. Besides, I know he’ll buy the beer, and without the alcohol, I cannot sleep.
Tonight all three of them are there—Tom, Richard, Sandra—sitting at a table outside the Bamboo Garden, which caters mostly to foreigners, under a hand-lettered sign that says BAMBU GARDIN. I am the only Cambodian man—the only Cambodian here. The other two translators—Thais who speak Khmer with an accent, and who have their own families to return to in the evening—are absent. Only I have nowhere better to go.
My favorite of the three Australian officers, Sandra, looks about forty years old, pale and fleshy. She wears a red felt hat with a floppy brim, as if she must shield herself from the soft glow of the streetlights. Dark freckles dot her body, like bugs in a sack of rice, speckling her face, her neck, her arms. Of the three embassy officers, she is the kindest, and the most emotional, especially when she’s drunk.
Tonight, after her fourth beer, she leans her face close to mine and says, “These poor people. How can you stand it?”
Her tears embarrass me.
I don’t want pity. What I want is for them to understand. Of course this is a foolish desire. I know what the Buddha teaches: desire is the cause of suffering. And so I have tried to eradicate desire from my heart. I have tried to weaken its pull on my mind. But still it remains. A wanting. A deep lake of yearning, wide as the Tonle Sap, which expands more than ten times its size during the monsoon, only to shrink again in the dry season.
Even after we have lost everything, we still want something. Having escaped from Cambodia to Thailand, the people stuck in Khao-I-Dang camp want to get to America or Australia or England—or any country that will have them. They want this not for themselves, but for their children. I, who made it to Australia and then came back to the camps to help my people, want to go home to Cambodia. And the immigration officers, what do they want?
THE NEXT morning, Tom doesn’t look at me or the Cambodian applicant, who has been bused here from Khao-I-Dang for this interview, along with the other hundred refugees waiting outside the building for their turn. I suspect Tom is tired or hungover. He stares at the file lying on the table and absently twirls an orange Fanta bottle clockwise with his thumb and forefinger. Water drops cover the glass like beads of sweat, except near the lip, which he wipes with a handkerchief now before taking a sip. He drinks a dozen bottles of orange Fanta a day, because—as he confided to me when he first arrived a month ago, nervous and sweating—he is afraid of the water, afraid of the ice, and isn’t taking any bloody chances. So every morning in the Aranyaprathet market I fill an ice chest to keep the bottles cold.
“When were you born?” Tom finally asks the applicant, who stares intently at the floor while I translate the question into Khmer. He wears the cheap, off-white plastic sandals distributed in the camp last week. One of the side straps has broken.
“I’m a Rat,” the man answers, glancing up at me, not Tom.
Of course I don’t translate this directly. The man, Seng Veasna according to the application, nervously holds his hands sandwiched between his knees. Seng Veasna means “good destiny.” He looks about fifty, the father of the small family sitting in a half circle before the officer’s wooden desk. I calculate quickly, counting back the previous Years of the Rat until I reach the one that best suits his age.
“Nineteen thirty-six,” I say to Tom. He checks the answer against the birth date on the application, submitted by Seng Veasna’s relatives in Australia. The numbers must match, as well as the names, or the officer will think the man is lying and reject the application. Each question is a problem with a single correct answer, except that a family’s future—not an exam grade—is at stake.
It is my job to solve these problems. To calculate. To resolve inconsistencies.
I did not wish to become a translator or to perform these tricks. I had wanted to become a mathematician and had almost finished my baccalaureate when the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975. I’d planned to teach high school, but it was not my fate. Instead, I now work in this schoolhouse made of timber and tin, at the site of an abandoned refugee camp. This building alone still stands, used for immigration interviews. Inside, three tables for three teams are set in a wide triangle, far enough apart that we can see but not hear each other.
The arrangement reminds me of the triangle I have traveled from Cambodia to Thailand to Australia—and now back again, to Thailand, retracing my journey. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, I left Cambodia, crossing the minefields to a camp like this one on the Thai border. Australia accepted me. In Melbourne, I washed dishes in a refugee hostel and took English classes. Language has always come easily to me, as have numbers. Before the war I’d studied French and some English, and like a fool I’d kept an English dictionary with me after the Khmer Rouge evacuated us from the city. For this stupidity I almost lost my life; when a soldier discovered the book, I survived by claiming I used the pages for toilet paper—very soft, I told him, ripping out a few to demonstrate.
After the Khmer Rouge, I learned some Vietnamese from the occupying soldiers. In the refugee camp, I learned a little Thai. When I first arrived in Australia, English sounded like snake language, with so many S’s, hissing and dangerous. But then the words began to clarify, not individually but in patterns, like the sequence of an equation. A door opened, and I no longer felt trapped. I still felt like a stranger, though, useless, alone. I had no wife, no children to keep me there. After three years, I got my Australian passport and returned to Thailand.
First I worked in a transit camp in Bangkok, where the refugees who had been accepted must pass medical tests before they can be sent abroad. The foreign aid workers didn’t trust me, because I was Cambodian. And I didn’t want to be in Bangkok. After six months I heard the Australian embassy needed translators on the border. That’s where I wanted to be, where I could be useful. I jumped at the chance. One step closer to Cambodia, to home.
I had to come back. I think it is my fate to work in a schoolhouse after all.
“Why did you leave Cambodia?” Tom asks the applicant now.
Of all the questions, I dread this one the most. When I translate it into Khmer, Seng Veasna laughs, lifting his hands and opening them in the air in a wide gesture of surrender. For the first time during the interview, he looks relaxed, as if all the tension has drained from his body.
“Doesn’t he know what happened in our country?” he asks me. His tone is intimate, personal. For the moment, he has forgotten his fear. He seems to have forgotten even the presence of the embassy officer, although I have not.
“You must tell him,” I say in Khmer. I understand the purpose of this question is to distinguish between economic and political refugees, but I also know that this man cannot answer, any more than the last applicant, who just looked at me in disbelief. He cannot answer any more than I can. Still, I urge him, “Just tell the truth.”
The man shakes his head no. He cannot speak. He can only laugh. I want to tell him I know this is a nonsense question, a question they do not need to ask.
Why did you leave Cambodia?
I’ve told the embassy staff many times that if they ask this question, they can never get the right answer. I’ve explained to the other two officers—although not yet to this new one, Tom— that nearly two million people died. One quarter of the people in Cambodia died in less than four years. Then the Vietnamese invaded. There was no food, no medicine, no jobs. Everyone has lost family. Myself, I lost my mother and father, two brothers, one sister, six aunts and uncles, seventeen cousins. The numbers I can say; the rest I cannot.
Even now, the fighting continues in Cambodia and on the border. Sometimes in this schoolhouse the muffled boom of heavy artillery interrupts the interviews.
“Why is he laughing?” Tom asks.
“He does not understand the question.”
“Ask him again. How can he not know why he bloody left the country?”
I see Tom’s bottle of Fanta is almost empty. I take another from the ice chest, pop off the cap, wipe the lip with a clean handkerchief, and set it on his desk before turning back to Seng Veasna to explain in Khmer. “I know you don’t want to remember. But you must tell him what you’ve gone through.” When the man still does not speak, I add, “Uncle, if you don’t answer he will reject your application.”
At that, Seng Veasna glances quickly at Tom then back to the floor and begins to talk, without raising his eyes. I repeat his story in English, the story I have heard so many times in infinite variations, the same story that is my own. And when Seng Veasna is finally through and the interview finished, to my relief the officer Tom stamps the application ACCEPTED. One done. Ten families still wait outside. The morning is not yet half over.
HERE’S WHAT I don’t say to the immigration officers:
Try to imagine. The camp is like prison, nothing to do but wait and go crazy. Forget your iced bottles of Fanta and beer. Forget your salary that lets you live like a king while you make the decisions of a god.
Imagine. It is like magic. You wake up one morning and everything is gone. The people you love, your parents, your friends. Your house. Like in the film I saw twice in Australia, The Wizard of Oz. I watched it first with my second brother’s son, who was six, who had been born on the border but raised in Melbourne and cannot even speak Khmer properly. The flying monkeys scared him so much I had to turn off the video. But those monkeys reminded me of home, of when I worked in the forest surrounding Lake Tonle Sap. They reminded me of the monkey god Hanuman and his army, who helped Rama rescue Sita. So, later, after my nephew went to sleep, I watched the rest of the movie. The next week I rented the video and watched it again alone. I didn’t like the singing and dancing, so I fast-forwarded through those parts. But the girl’s wanting to go home—that I understood. And I understood, too, the wizard who has no power, who cannot even help himself, although he also secretly wishes to return home.
I want to tell the immigration officers—imagine you are in that movie. Then maybe you will understand. You are the girl. Only there is no home to return to. And instead of Oz, you have woken up in a refugee camp.
Each day you have nothing to do but worry and, if you are lucky enough to have a ration card, to wait like a beggar for handouts of rice and canned, half-rancid fish. At night after the foreign aid workers leave, the soldiers who are supposed to protect you steal what few possessions you still have, and they rape your wives and your daughters. You want only to get out. To find a new home.
Every day you hope for an announcement on the loudspeaker that an embassy is conducting interviews. You hope for America but any country will do: France, England, Australia. You check the list on the wall, search for your name, squeezing your body in between the others. The people clustered around the wall have a certain rank smell, almost sweet. You wish you could wash this stink from your own body and purify yourself of this place, of this longing. On one side of you stands a husband who has waited for years, checking this same wall; on the other, a mother who’s been rejected twice and so has little hope, yet she still comes to look. Behind you a father squats in the sun: he can’t read, so his son checks for him while he waits. If you’re lucky enough to be listed, you must be prepared to go to the interview the following day.
Imagine. The bus picks you up early in the morning, exiting the gate past the Thai guards with their machine guns, taking you out of the camp for the first time in the years since you arrived. As the bus rattles over the rutted road, your mind clenches in fear. The child in front of you presses her face to the window, enraptured. She points at the rice fields, the water buffalo, the cows, which she has never seen before because she was born in the camp. “What’s that?” she asks, curious. “And that?” Her father names these things for her. You know he is thinking of the interview ahead, as you are, and how much depends on it, how her future depends on it; perhaps he is thinking, too, of how the shirt he has cleaned and pressed is already stained with sweat.
ALL THE questions are difficult. Especially the ones that seem the simplest to the immigration officer. What is your name? Where were you born? How old are you?
Take, for example, this morning, when officer Richard asks a young man, “What is your brother’s name?”
“Older brother Phal,” the boy answers. He is skinny, frightened.
“What is his full name?” Richard, over six feet tall, has wide shoulders and a large belly like a Chinese Buddha. Although he smiles often, his height and massive torso scare the applicants, especially when he leans toward them as he does now, both elbows planted on the table, intently studying the boy. The young man stares at the floor. He looks like a real Khmer—wide cheekbones, full lips, chocolate skin. “Don’t be scared,” Richard says. “Take it easy. We’re not going to do anything to you. Just try to answer correctly, honestly.”
Still the boy hesitates. I worry Richard may take this as a sign he is lying about his relationship to the sponsor, although I’ve tried to explain to him that Cambodians don’t call their relatives by their given names; it’s not polite. You call them brother or sister, aunt or uncle, or you use nicknames, so you may not know the full given name. Then there are the names you may have used under the Khmer Rouge, to hide your background to save your family’s lives, or your own. I have explained this all before, but it does no good.
In the end, Richard says, “I’m sorry,” and stamps the front page REJECTED.
I can do nothing. Although siblings have lower priority, I believe the familial relationship is not the problem. Rather, the boy is dark-skinned and speaks no English. Richard, like the others, prefers the light-skinned Cambodians, who have more Chinese blood, softer features, who can speak at least some English. If they are young and pretty, and female, even better.
Just as important is the officer’s mood, yet another variable I must consider. Tom is more likely to accept an applicant when he has been to a brothel the night before. Sandra is more likely to approve after she has received a letter from her children in Brisbane. Richard, usually in good spirits, is most dangerous when he has a hangover or digestive problems. Today, he seems to have neither trouble. He has not been running to the toilet or popping paracetamol pills for a headache, so I don’t know why the day doesn’t seem to get easier.
The next couple is neither young nor pretty. The wife’s lips and teeth are stained red from chewing betel nut.
“When was your seventh son born?” Richard asks.
The husband and wife look at each other, confused.
“Was it eight or nine years ago?” the man asks his wife.
“Nine,” she says. “No, eight.”
“No, tell him eight.” The wife gives her husband a scolding look, then smiles weakly at the officer, showing her stained teeth. By now Richard is laughing and shaking his head.
“Eight,” I translate.
“Do they know his birth date?”
The husband looks again at his wife. “Dry season,” she says. “I remember it had stopped raining already.”
“Around December or January,” I translate. Then I add, “It’s not that they’re lying. It’s that these things aren’t important. Birth dates are not registered until a child enters school, if then.”
“How can you not know when your own child was born?” Richard asks me. His generous belly shakes as he laughs. He does not really want an answer, so I say nothing.
“What’s wrong?” the wife asks me.
“Never mind,” I say. “Don’t worry.”
I am forever in between.
To the people in the camp, I explain again and again. “Look, you must remember your full names and birth dates. In Cambodia it’s not important, but in the West, it’s very important. If you don’t know, make them up. One person in the family must write all the answers down, and everyone must remember. You must practice.”
They look at me funny at first, not quite believing me, like Richard watches me now, still chuckling. Because he is amused, I calculate he will accept the couple. I decide to say nothing and just smile back.
THAT NIGHT at the Bamboo Garden, Richard calls the owner to our table. “Your food is spot-on, very aroy,” Richard says, emphasizing and mispronouncing the Thai word for delicious, using the wrong tone. “But, mate, that sign is spelled wrong.”
The owner, a slight man in his sixties, nods his head. “Yes. Thank you. Yes.”
“I mean, you gotta fix that spelling.” Richard points to the sign above him. “Darith, can you explain to him?”
Shit, I think, even here I have to translate. In polite language, I tell the owner in Thai that the big foreigner loves the food very much.
The owner smiles. Richard nods, happy to be understood. I think that’s the end of it. But then Richard pulls a long strip of toilet paper—which is used in place of napkins—from the pink plastic container in the center of the table. In large block letters, using the pen he keeps in his shirt pocket, he writes: BAMBOO GARDEN. He underlines the double O and the E, then points again at the misspelled sign.
The owner’s face darkens, without me having to explain. “Thank you. Yes, I fix,” he says, as he takes the piece of toilet paper from Richard’s outstretched hand.
THE YOUNG woman sitting in front of the desk this morning is both pretty and light-skinned. Her hair, recently washed, is combed neatly into a shiny ponytail that falls below her narrow waist. As she passed me to take her seat, I could smell the faint sweet scent of shampoo. She wears a carefully ironed white blouse, and a trace of pink lipstick which she must have borrowed from a friend or relative to make herself up for this occasion. Officer Tom, to whom I have been assigned today, watches the girl with interest, charmed. Her sponsor is only a cousin, so normally she would have little chance of being accepted.
“What do you do in the camp?” he asks. “Do you work?”
The young lady speaks softly. Out of politeness, she doesn’t meet his eyes. “Yes, I work, but . . .” Her voice trails off and then she turns to me, blushing. “I don’t want to say, it’s a very low job.”
“What is it?”
“I work in the CARE bakery, making bread.”
Tom eyes me suspiciously. “Why are you talking to her?”
I could answer him straight, but I’m annoyed with him today. I did not sleep well last night. I am getting sick of this job, this place. For all I do, it seems I have done nothing. “She was talking to me,” I snap back. “That’s why I talked to her.”
“What did she say?”
“She says she doesn’t want to tell you, because she feels embarrassed.” As if on cue, she turns her head away. Her ponytail ripples down her back.
“What exactly does she do in the camp?” Tom says this in an insinuating way, as if he suspects she’s a prostitute. I don’t like the way he looks at her. Maybe he is undressing her in his mind right now. For her part, the girl waits quietly in the chair, knees drawn together, looking at her hands lying still on her knees. Her fingernails are clean, cut short. This, too, she remembered to do for the interview.
“She has a wonderful job,” I say to Tom. “You know the bread from the CARE bakery in Khao-I-Dang, the French bread you eat every morning? She is the baker.”
“That’s very good. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?” He relaxes back in his chair and takes a drink from the Fanta bottle. I don’t know how he can drink this stuff, or how I can watch him drink it all day. I submerge the thought and clear my head to concentrate on the task at hand. He continues, “Ask her what she is going to do if she gets accepted to Australia.”
“What are you going to do in Australia—tell him you’re going to open a bakery,” I say, all in one sentence.
Raising her head to face him now, she answers in a sweet, composed voice, “I want to open a bakery shop in Australia.”
I translate. “She wants to work in a bakery in Australia, and when she can save enough money, to open her own bread shop.”
“Good, good,” he says, and stamps the application ACCEPTED.
THAT NIGHT at dinner with Sandra and Richard, Tom asks me out of the blue, “Why did you come back here?”
The restaurant sign is gone, creating an empty space over our heads. In response to Tom’s question, I shrug my shoulders and look away, hoping he’ll get distracted, perhaps by the attractive waitress waiting to refill our glasses. I glance at her and she comes forward to pour more beer for everyone.
“You came back, didn’t you?” Tom persists after the waitress has stepped back into the shadows. “Your mother’s Australian, isn’t she? And your father is Cambodian?”
I’ve heard this rumor, too, mostly from foreigners. I think it is their way of explaining why I can speak English.
“No, I am all Cambodian,” I say. “But I have Australian citizenship.”
“So you went through the Khmer Rouge and all that?” asks Richard.
“Yes. All that.”
Sandra, who knows this, watches me. Her jaw tenses under the shadow of her hat.
“I don’t get it,” Tom says. “Why would you come back? Seems to me everyone else is trying to get out of here.” He laughs, lifting his glass. “Myself included. Cheers, mate.”
I lift my glass. “Cheers,” I say. I should leave it at that.
Sandra is still watching me with concern, her eyebrows drawn together. “How about that storm this afternoon?” she asks, to change the subject. “I couldn’t hear a thing.”
Maybe it is the beer. I don’t know. I look straight at Tom. “You don’t know how much the people feel,” I say. He doesn’t respond.
“I couldn’t hear a thing,” Sandra repeats, more forcefully this time. “I can’t believe how loud rain is on a tin roof.”
“Yeah,” says Richard. “I had to stop an interview.”
“The way you treat people, you don’t know anything,” I say, still looking directly at Tom. He shifts in his chair and dips a spring roll into sweet red sauce. With his other hand he ticks the Formica table-top. His eyes study the waitress. As if he hasn’t even heard me. I often feel this way around the immigration officers, invisible. Sometimes they talk about the Cambodians, calling them lazy or stupid, as if I am not there, or as if they have forgotten that I, too, am Khmer.
“If you ask me, these people don’t really want to come to your country,” I continue. “If you open the gate, they will go back to Cambodia. They won’t even say good-bye.” I want to stop, but I can’t. “And don’t ask them why they leave the country. You think they want to leave their home? They laugh when you ask them that. You should know. The real situation is that they want to survive.”
Sandra has stopped talking. Richard looks into the half-empty beer glass, then takes a sip. Tom loudly crunches on another spring roll. I don’t know why they are the way they are. It’s not that none of them cares. There is Sandra, and others like her. And they are sent from country to country, without time to learn the difference between Cambodia and Vietnam. It’s not easy for them. I tell myself that they are just worn down, but the new arrivals have the same assumed superiority, the unquestioned belief that they know everything: what is wrong, what is right—that they are somehow more human. I signal to the waitress for another round.
THE NEXT night, instead of beer, Tom orders me a Fanta orange soda, grinning as he slides the bottle across the table toward me. The restaurant sign is still gone.
“No, thanks,” I say.
“Go ahead, mate.”
“No, thank you,” I say again.
“Why not?” asks Tom.
“Oh, leave him alone,” says Sandra.
I stare at the orange bottle.
“It won’t kill you,” says Tom.
“No, not me.” I try to make light of it. “I gave that stuff up a long time ago, in 1976.”
Tom laughs. So does Richard in his booming voice. For all of their attention to dates from the applicants, for all their insistence that the numbers must match exactly, they ignore what those dates mean. But I am telling the truth. It was 1976, the second year under the Khmer Rouge regime. It was the rainy season, cold and miserable. I lived in a single men’s labor camp on a hill in the rice fields. One night I heard the guards calling, “We got the enemy! We got the enemy!” What enemy, I thought. We were in the middle of nowhere. The real purpose of the guards was to keep the workers from trying to escape or steal food at night. When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see the man sleeping next to me. Clouds blocked the stars. Then I noticed the feeble flames from lit pieces of rubber tire, burned for lamplight, and got up to see what had happened.
Near the compound’s kitchen, three Khmer Rouge leaders gathered around a skinny man kneeling in the mud, his elbows tied tightly behind his back. His shoulders were pulled back like a chicken’s wings, tensing the tendons in his neck. He had dark skin and long hair that fell below his bound wrists. I’d heard rumors of resistance fighters, “long hairs” who lived in the forest around Lake Tonle Sap, but I had never seen one and did not believe until then that they really existed. I had thought them the product of our collective imagining, our wishing someone had the courage to fight back.
Comrade Sok kicked the man in his side, and he fell over into the mud. Sok was a big man, twice the size of the prisoner. When Sok kicked him again, the man’s head hit a water buffalo yoke lying at the edge of the kitchen. One of the other leaders pulled his head up. The prisoner’s eyes were closed. Comrade Sok said, “Why do you resist? What do you struggle for?”
The man seemed only half-conscious. He opened his eyes briefly, then closed them again and spoke very clearly, slowly enunciating each word. “I struggle for all of you, brothers, not for myself.”
“You struggle for me? We have already liberated the country.” Sok kicked him again. “We have no need of your help.”
The man said once more, “I struggle for you.”
Then they threw him like a sack of rice into an oxcart. Everyone was watching. We couldn’t help him. We couldn’t do anything.
The next day, while I was cleaning the abscesses on my feet using water boiled with sour leaves, the oxcart returned—without the man, loaded instead with bottles of soft drinks and cigarette cartons. Comrade Sok explained this was our reward for capturing the enemy: one bottle for three people, one pack of cigarettes for ten people. The next time we captured the enemy, we would receive an even greater reward.
The cigarette packets were Fortunes, with a lion insignia. The soda bottles were Miranda orange. I teased the two younger boys with whom I shared the soft drink, dividing the bottle into thirds, the top being the largest, the bottom the smallest. “What part do you want?” I asked. Of course they chose the top two portions. “Okay, I’ll take the bottom,” I said. “You don’t mind if I drink my portion first . . .”
“No, that’s not right,” they protested together. I was only making fun. I poured the drink into three tin bowls we usually used to eat the rice ration, giving the boys most of it. They were excited about the soda, which they hadn’t tasted in a long time, if ever. But all the while I was trying to make them laugh, I felt sad. A man was killed for this.
The drink was flat, not even enough liquid to fill my mouth.
THE APPLICATION lying on the table today in front of Sandra is a difficult case. This morning, when I dropped the files on each of the three officers’ tables, I made sure this one came to her. The sponsor in Australia, a daughter, got citizenship by claiming a woman was her mother. Now that the daughter is in Australia, she claims the woman is not actually her mother, but rather her aunt, and that the woman sitting before us now is her real mother.
The mother hands me the letter from her daughter, which I translate. In it, the daughter explains that this woman is her real mother and confesses she lied before. She did not know her mother was alive then. She was alone in the camp, with no one to take care of her. That’s why she lied.
Sandra asks me, “Do you think they are really mother and daughter?”
“Yes,” I say, and hand her the letter, which she adds to the file lying open before her, with the previous and current applications and small black-and-white photos. “You can even see the daughter looks like her.”
“Well, they cannot do that,” Sandra says. “She lied. The law is the law.”
“I can tell you, this is a story many people face, not just these two. They do not intend to lie, but because of the circumstances they must do it, believe me. Think of your own daughter, if you were separated.” And then I add, “Of course it’s up to you, not me.”
“She lied,” Sandra says. “It’s finished. I have to reject them.”
“I can’t tell them straight like that,” I say. “Would you let me explain nicely to them the reason they are getting rejected?”
“All right, go ahead.”
So I take a chance, a calculated risk. There is nothing to lose now. I know Sandra loves her own children, and also that she has a good heart. I say to the mother in a soft, even voice, “Look, your daughter lied to the embassy even though she knew what she was doing was wrong. A country like Australia is not like Cambodia. The law is the law. When you say someone is your mother, she’s got to be your mother. Now she cannot change her story. So from now on, I don’t think you will be able to meet your daughter anymore for the rest of your life.”
Tears began to well in the mother’s eyes. I feel bad for what I am doing, but I know there is no other way. I keep my voice firm, steady, and continue, “So now, after all you’ve been through in Cambodia, after how hard you struggled to keep your family together, to survive, now you are separated forever.”
The mother begins to wail, a long piercing sound that fills the entire room, so that the teams at the other two tables turn around to look at us. “Oh, my daughter, I will never see you again!” she cries. I translate what she says for Sandra. “After all we survived in the Pol Pot time—when you were starving, I risked my life to steal food for you. When you got sick, I looked after you. When you could not walk, I carried you in my arms. And now you lie. You lie and you are separated from me. I cannot see you for the rest of my life. Ouey . . .”
I translate it all, word for word. The father is crying now, too, but silently. He sits in a wooden chair, with his back straight. Their young son watches his mother’s face and sobs as well, echoing her wails.
“Please, tell them to go now,” Sandra says. She looks away and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
In Khmer, I dismiss the family. “Go, go. Don’t cry anymore. Even if you die, nobody cares. You will never see your child anymore.”
As the mother walks away, the applicants at the other tables watch her leave. The building is silent except for her voice. She cries all the way out of the building, gripping her husband’s arm. Her son whimpers too, clinging to her legs through the sarong, almost tripping her.
I start to laugh. “Well, Sandra, that’s it,” I say. “Send them back to the Killing Fields. Don’t worry. There are more coming.”
Sandra looks at me, stunned. She opens her mouth and closes it again, without saying anything, like a fish gulping seawater. The freckled skin around her eyes is red and puffy. I can see the beating of her blood beneath the translucent skin of her left temple, a small pulsing disk, like the flutter of a bird’s heart. She looks away, down to the table, and starts idly shifting through the papers. She isn’t really looking at them.
“I’ll get the next family,” I say.
She nods, her face still turned away from me. I grab the list and go call the next family from the dozens of others waiting outside the building. Some stand in the sun. Others squat in the shade of three small coconut trees, fanning away flies.
“Keo Narith,” I say. No one steps forward. The crowd looks agitated, nervous. The mother is still crying. “My daughter, I can never see you again!” A group has gathered around her, asking, “What happened? What happened?”
“Keo Narith!” I call again.
Still, no one answers. I remember the name because it rhymes with my own, and I saw the family members board the bus when they were called in the morning. They must be hiding somewhere now in the crowd or behind the coconut trees or around the corner of the building. I hear a man to the left of me say, “The embassy is not happy today. They reject easily.” It’s true, when too many people are rejected, the next applicants don’t dare answer. They’d rather wait for months or years until they get back on the list again.
AFTER WE drive back to Aranyaprather, the embassy staff meets again for dinner at the Bamboo Garden. The owner has fixed the sign: two small, oblong O’s are now squeezed into the space that held the U, and the I has been changed to an E, but the shades of paint don’t quite match. Tom and Richard are talking the usual bullshit. Richard expands on his most recent stomach problems. Tom no longer talks about leaving. He has a Thai girlfriend now, a prostitute he claims is a waitress at the bar who has never slept with a man before him. “She’s been saving herself,” he says.
Sandra looks at him, disgusted, and interjects, “Yeah, right. You really believe that?”
As the men continue talking, Sandra turns to me and whispers, “Darith, I changed it. I changed the file, when I got back. I’m letting them go.”
I say quietly, “You made the right decision.”
“I know,” she says, her eyes shining, urgent. “I understand.”
I think, there is more than any of us can understand. I feel something I cannot express: an opening, an exit. It is like the feeling I had when I first crossed the border after the end of the Khmer Rouge regime: gratitude, mixed with weariness and hunger. The day I arrived I could still taste the foul pond water I’d drunk in darkness the night before, so thirsty, not seeing until morning the body of a woman in the pond, close to where I slept on the embankment. I didn’t know then what would come, how many years I would work before returning to the border I’d fled. I wonder, does Sandra—who, out of the corner of my eye, I can see is still watching me as I glance down at my beer glass—really understand? How many families will remain stuck in the camp if I can no longer do this job? I weigh all of this: duty, desire, two halves of an equation, as I turn the glass in my hand.
All the while in my heart I am thinking, hoping, I can quit now. I can leave this place. It’s time to go home.