WHY THEY DON’T SPEAK FRENCH

My mother and Yiey sit by the woodstove. I am upstairs after work, but I can hear them. I’m working on my business plan for a CSF. I’m writing lists in my computer and sketching notes and fish on a brown paper bag. Monkfish, cod, hake, dogfish. To do:

1. Inspection. A jamoke from the state boards your boat and your truck, and looks at all your stuff.
2. Teach customers how to shuck, fillet, eviscerate, process, and freeze so they don’t get sick and sue you.
3. Sole proprietor. How to do it? File for insurance. Prove how you won’t make people sick with your fish.
4. Get federal permit to harvest and land, federal dealer’s permit, state permit to sell to shareholders in a CSF, forms for estimated taxes and other fed tax forms, mobile vendor license from the city so you can go to the farmer’s market.

“What are you doing?” my mother shouts.

“A business plan for homework,” I shout.

“My grandfather had a business,” she shouts.

I imagine a fishmonger dragging eels, gasping for breath, on a cart.

“In Paris,” she shouts. “Where he studied.”

My eyes pause, as I hear this, on the hake fins I am shading, overwhelmed with the paperwork to sell the fish you catch, the rules, the government that thinks it is god.

“A banker,” Yiey shouts. “At home speak French. Pa say in France, you lucky, you learn French and Khmer.”

“You lived in France?” I shout.

“Until I am five,” she shouts.

“But if the Khmer Rouge hear you speak French, they beat you till you die. She never hear a whisper of French,” my grandmother shouts. She must be talking about my mother.

“Here, you can be clever, like a rabbit,” my mother shouts. “You can have a business. If you can keep your mind from Cambodia.”

I imagine them downstairs, sitting side by side. My grandmother with a scarf tied over her thin hair. And beautiful Lydia, my mother, her black hair fashioned in spirals she made with a curling iron, wearing a polka-dot dress. She shouts, “He hiccupped. See!” and I imagine one of the red dots flick in her red silky dress.

Who am I?

I come from a fisherman, a hunter of crickets, and now from a family of bankers in France.