by Gish Jen
“You have to come!” She runs off, her ponytail flying.
“I’m coming!” Hattie laces up her walking shoes and tells the dogs to stay. And who knows what it is about her voice or the situation—maybe it’s just the sight of Hattie in a bathrobe and walking shoes—but even Annie sits like Cato and Reveille, and, though her feet dance madly, stays.
“Good girl,” says Hattie.
She hurries.
The trailer door is open wide. “Sophy?” No answer. The milk crate has a wooden crate set next to it now—a second step. Still, it’s at least two normal steps up from the higher crate into the trailer. Hattie is about to grab the doorjamb and lever herself in when Sophy appears. She puts out one hand, then bends her knees and digs in her heels, bracing with her other. Such a nothing of a chicken-boned wrist she has, but she’s strong. Her feet slide forward in her flowered sneakers, a gap opening at her heel—those sneakers are a size too big at least, thinks Hattie, even as she feels a pull in her shoulder. Then smells wash over her—cigarette smoke, mildew, incense. And there—her first clear view of the entertainment center. An enormous, blaring TV, set on a low table, and showing some sort of space movie. Flashing panels, an emergency, floating astronauts racing time; and below them, assorted picture frames, plastic figures, Buddhas, vases, baskets, a pagoda-shaped lantern, a bowl bristling with incense sticks, white paper doilies. A sagging rust-colored couch faces all this—way too close for comfortable viewing, but there’s no room to push the thing back. Calendar pictures of Angkor Wat on the walls, movie stars; ruffled curtains on the window. The kitchen counter features more kinds of chips than Hattie knew existed—the bags puffed-up and weightless, like the astronauts on TV and quite unlike Chhung, who lies in the larger of the bedrooms, on a mattress on the floor. He’s gripping a pillow as if to strangle it; his eyes are frantic, his brow rucked and slick. His neck tendons stand out like the veins of a leaf. Mum, squatting near his head, looks up.
“He was digging,” supplies Sophy.
“Where does it hurt?” asks Hattie.
Chhung gestures at his left buttock, and down the back of his leg.
“You have any ice? I’ll call a doctor.”
The phone’s out. No one quite knows why, though, out in the living room, Sarun guesses that Chhung hasn’t been paying the bill.
“Maybe he’s over his credit card limit.” He leans forward, his elbows on the kitchen counter, and gives Hattie a once-over: She’s still in her bathrobe.
She blushes but carries on. “Does he have a credit card?”
“Excuse me, ma’am. That was a joke.”
“He did have one once,” says Sophy. “But the company cancelled it because he didn’t ever pay.”
“Do you have a doctor?” asks Hattie.
Sarun guffaws; Gift puts his hand in a floor vent and gets it stuck.
Back at her house, Hattie calls her internist and reaches the nurse practitioner. A herniated disk with resultant sciatica, Leah guesses, but he should really be seen. Does he have insurance? Medicaid? Sophy, standing next to Hattie, doesn’t know. Hattie says she’ll call back, and sends Sophy to the trailer with some ice and ibuprofen in the meantime. Then she calls the church agency that settled the Chhungs. Maybe somebody over there knows something? Or maybe they provide insurance, who knows. But, no. The church agency provides nothing and knows nothing. In fact, though the Chhungs are living on church property, the church does not consider them part of its ministry.
“I’m sorry to say these people are not our highest priority,” says the lady on the phone.
“I see,” says Hattie.
“In fact, they exemplify a carelessness characteristic of our former pastor and raised a ruckus of which they are perhaps not even aware. You might even call them something of a situation.” The lady lowers her voice. “These people, you understand, aren’t even Christian.”
Hattie hangs up.
What about the church with the blue car? When Sophy returns, Hattie asks her about that church—the Heritage Bible Church, it turns out. Ginny’s church. Hattie takes that in even as she calls and explains. There’s no one but a girl with a head cold in the office, though; she sounds as if she’s talking through a kazoo. Can someone call back? Hattie says of course, but is honestly surprised when, a few minutes later, a chirpy woman does call, and with good news: They happen to have a church member who can see Chhung for free. He’s not a doctor, but he is an EMT, which could be better, says the woman.
Better than a doctor? Well, never mind.
“Isn’t that lucky,” says Hattie.
“It’s the Lord’s plan,” the woman goes on. “We’re sending him right down.”
“In the blue car?”
“The car is blue, yes.” If the woman is surprised, she doesn’t let on.
“Well, thanks a bunch. You people do support each other.”
“It’s just neighbors helping neighbors,” says the woman. “Spreading the Good News.”
Anyway: no more digging, that much is clear.
Chhung and his rescue are center table at the Come ’n’ Eat the next day. His rescuers, too, as the Power and the Glory, it seems, knows both the kazoo girl who answered the phone and the chirpy woman who called back, as well as the EMT who came down in the blue car and gave Chhung a used back brace to wear. The brace is a little big, Ginny says, but if he wears it over a shirt it fits great.
“Did you know he used to be an engineer?” she asks brightly.
Chhung? An engineer? Hattie says something about the pit, and Chhung’s house plans.
“Oh,” says Ginny. “You know, I asked someone about that nasty hole the other day. That’s a drainage ditch.”
A drainage ditch.
“He knows how to improve that lot,” she goes on. “He’s smart. He’s just not accustomed to doing the work himself.”
“I bet not,” says Greta, her gray eyes gone dark. “The poor man!”
“The boy hates helping,” Ginny goes on. “But at least they know where he is when he has a shovel in his hands.”
“Do they worry about him?” Grace looks to have slept on her eyebrows funny; the hairs of one are headed up, of the other, down.
“Wouldn’t you?” Ginny is poised and quick.
“A cute thing like that,” agrees Beth.
“Though that hair,” says Candy. “Don’t you have to wonder if the Good Lord intended kids to have that color hair?”
Her own white roots are showing today, but never mind.
“Maybe he can go to school now,” says Hattie.
“Wouldn’t that be a happy outcome,” says Greta.
In any case, Ginny digs into her meat loaf, smiling enigmatically as planning begins. Beth is thinking casserole; Ginny, chicken; Hattie, fish; Candy, quesadillas. Greta is going to bake them a raisin bread in her woodstove, and Grace is going to do a salad from the greenhouse. They know food doesn’t solve anything, but they want the Chhungs to know people are thinking of them. And hasn’t the group always reached out when there’s reaching out to do? Aren’t they the Pride of Riverlake, just as their Fourth of July banner proclaims?
“Though don’t you wonder if there isn’t something the matter with their karma?” says Candy. “I mean, if they are just not in a state of grace?”
Greta considers. “First Pol Pot and now this, you mean.”
“It’s their fate,” says Beth, flatly.
But Hattie just as flatly disagrees. “It’s their luck. It’s their plain bad luck, that’s all.”
An unsupported assertion she would certainly have had to defend back in the lab. Here at the Come ’n’ Eat, though, adamance is enough. Everyone eats peacefully. Then Beth looks back up.
“This may not be the moment to ask,” she says, “but are we ready for a change of subject?”
“We are,” says Ginny.
Beth looks shyly at Hattie. “If things are just not happening with you and Carter …” She plays with her toothpick, turning red.
>
“Maybe you’re wondering, Is he fair game?” says Ginny, helpfully. “Maybe you’re asking, What really is God’s will here?”
No one says anything.
“It’s a reasonable question, after all,” she goes on. “It’d be plain unnatural not to wonder, What is He trying to tell us? Is He sending us a message?”
“Oh!” says Candy, finally.
Hattie considers her glazed chicken.
“You don’t have to answer,” says Greta.
“You don’t have to agree,” says Grace.
“I shouldn’t have said anything,” says Beth.
“I don’t own him,” says Hattie—casual enough, she thinks. Though what a blocked thing her energy is suddenly—her qì. A thing with a life of its own. Or, no—a lifelessness of its own, as Lee used to say, of her own flagging qì, toward the end. It has a lifelessness of its own.
I’m going to miss you, Hattie told her then. I am. I’m going to miss you every single day.
To which Lee fluttered her lashless eyelids and moved her lips behind her oxygen mask and said, Swab. Wanting her mouth swabbed.
Swab.
“You’re a generous woman,” concludes Ginny.
Hattie doesn’t answer, but she does manage to meet Ginny’s green eyes for a moment. For thine is the power and the hogwash.
Flora is wearing all white today, like a cloud or a nurse.
“Here,” she says suddenly, sliding a cup of coffee in front of Hattie; her white shirt flashes bright in the sun. “It’s on the house.” And when Hattie looks up at her wonderingly, she just shrugs. “It’s what I have to give,” she says, then turns.
Sophy: How They Even Got Here
When Sophy’s dad was happy, he would explain stuff like how a country needs two wheels. “Can’t you see how people have two eyes, two ears, two hands?” he would say in Khmer, pointing to his own eyes and ears and hands. “Our land needs two wheels. One is the wheel of the Dhamma—that is the Buddhist wheel, the Eightfold Path, the Way. The other is the wheel of law. If the wheel of law is not strong, the cart cannot go. If the wheel of the Dhamma is not strong, the cart cannot go, either. When Pol Pot came, the wheel of the Dhamma was okay, but the wheel of law was no good. Because of all the corruption,” he would say. “You probably don’t know what that means, corruption. But one day you will know. One day.” And then he would go on to say how, like, in the olden days, Cambodians were lords of all their neighbors, and had reading and writing and poetry and irrigation, and, like, how everything would have been great except that the Thais came, and then the Cham, and then the Japanese—or maybe the Japanese were the Chinese? Anyway, it was hard for Sophy to understand. Like did they all just wake up one day and think, Let’s invade Cambodia? Because it was wack, it really was, the way that, after that the French came and after that the Vietnamese and, like, no one thought, Man, that is so copycat. Like no one thought, That is a thousand-year-old idea, man. They just thought, Let’s do it!
The point being that it wasn’t just because of Pol Pot that Sophy’s family was wack. It was also because the wheel of law was broken because of corruption and invasions, and because there wasn’t enough money to send her dad and his brother and sister all to school, just one of them. Which was why Sophy’s uncle went to public school for a couple of years, but then stayed in the village and had a vegetable farm like his sister who didn’t get to go to school at all, while Sophy’s dad got to go from the public school to a temple school with monks because he was the oldest. And then from the temple school he went to a school in the city, and then he got a big deal job as an engineer and grew a potbelly like a rich person and took a fancy name and started talking like somebody from Phnom Penh instead of from Battambang. Like he started doing the whole m’ Penh clip ’n’ dip thing. And he married a Chinese Cambodian because he was Chinese Cambodian, which was obvious. Like if you ever saw him sitting in front of the TV, you’d see how he has pale skin and Chinky eyes, and kind of an oval face like Sophy’s sister Sophan’s, it isn’t round like Mum’s and Sophy’s, and her sister Sopheap’s. That’s because all four of his grandparents were from China, and if his brother or his sister or any of his cousins were alive they would all be, like, eating Chinese food. Of course, if you asked a lot of regular Cambodians what food is the best, they’d all say Chinese too, but they’d say it in kind of a different voice than Sophy’s dad—like, not as though Chinese food was their food, but more like they had to admit it, even if they only liked Chinese Cambodians a little more than they liked the Vietnamese, who they hated. But anyway, because Sophy’s dad was educated and Chinese Cambodian he married another Chinese Cambodian who was, like, rich and beautiful and tall. She had skin as white as cotton, and she didn’t move all her parts at once, but would, like, turn her head, and then smile, and then pick up her teacup, and then nod. She drank café au lait like a foreigner, and not only could she read and write Khmer, she knew French too, and Chinese. Her French was so good that she didn’t have to repeat things the way other people did when they were talking to French people, and that really impressed Sophy’s dad. But what really really got him was her Chinese, because his grandparents spoke Teochew dialect and his parents knew a little, but he hardly knew any. And here she could not only speak Teochew dialect and Cantonese, because her family were city people, but Mandarin too—like, she even knew the characters, which if you think Khmer script is bad, is even worse. Like practically nobody can read them besides people in China. And that was why, when they got married, Sophy’s dad went and stood on the graves of his ancestors, and told them, and why a flower opened up right near the graves that very moment. Like he turned, and there was this blooming flower that had been closed just a moment before, a white one. Of course, when Sophy and Sopheap and Sophan heard that story later, they were, like, And the flower just opened? Are you sure? Like what kind of flower was that? Not that they would have said that out loud, because that would have been, like, big time disrespectful. But anyway, their dad said that that was one of the happiest moments of his life, and they did believe that, because he never looked the way he looked telling that story at any other time, ever.
And even now he talks about his first wife as if she is their real mother, it’s like Sophy’s mom just somehow ended up giving birth to them by mistake. Like he talks about how things would be different if his first wife had lived—like how Sarun would not be involved with gangs and how instead of asking why why why, Sophy and her sisters would be asking stuff like how they could be more polite and how they could show more respect. As if any kids in America ask that! But that’s what he thinks. He thinks that if his first wife had lived, everyone would be, like, looking at them and asking, Whose family do those children belong to? Because they were so shy and perfect and obeyed every single thing in the Chbap Srey, which is, like, this stupid book of rules for girls. A lot of kids said their moms used to laugh at the Chbap Srey back in Cambodia, but Sophy’s dad’s first wife must not have laughed, because she was the book for real. Like she didn’t go from sweet and shy to loud and bossy as soon as she got married. Instead she talked softly and walked softly and covered herself and didn’t show off, and sat the way you’re supposed to sit, with her legs to the side. She was so perfect that sometimes even Sophy thinks if she were alive they would somehow all still be living in Phnom Penh, in the fancy concrete house with two floors that Sophy’s dad bought himself. He still talks about it sometimes. Like about the roof garden, and the garage for the car, and the big gate in the garden wall with a guard to open and shut it. Which, like, Sophy and her sisters can’t really imagine, because their mom cleans houses and they are poor and dark, even Sophan who looks like their dad is sort of dark. Not as dark as their mom, who is what they call sra’aem, but they don’t have skin like cotton either, because their mom is pure Cambodian. Meaning brown skin and round eyes and curly hair, though people always said she was pretty, and pretty rich too, for someone who lived in the countryside. Which was why she was ori
ginally married to Sophy’s dad’s brother. Because her family had, like, a hut with a tile roof instead of straw, and a mango farm, besides; they weren’t just, like, rice farmers. Of course, it’s sort of wack to think about how Sophy’s mom was married to Sophy’s uncle before she was sort of married to Sophy’s dad. Like Sophy’s mom still remembers when Sophy’s dad and his first wife and some other people came to live with them after everyone had to leave Phnom Penh, which was pretty rough for everyone but especially for the first wife. Because on the one hand it was pretty lucky that they could go live with Sophy’s uncle, like if it weren’t for him, Sophy’s dad probably wouldn’t be alive to remember how great his first wife was and everything. But on the other hand, they all had to sleep in one room and cook their food outside, and eat a lot of things you couldn’t really call food while the soldiers threatened to send them to Angka. (Angka being what they called the people who were running the country, they were kind of like the government except that nobody voted for them, in fact everyone probably would have voted against them if they could have.) Do you want to go see Angka? the soldiers would say. I think it’s time you went to go see Angka. The soldiers took Sophy’s dad’s first wife for one of the Khmer Rouge to marry even though she was already married, and when she refused to marry him, the Khmer Rouge buried her up to her neck and left her to die. Which she would have, except that Sophy’s dad found her and dug her out, and that was so happy! Except that then she couldn’t make herself eat, and died anyway. It was the sort of stuff a lot of kids wrote about in their old town, because the teachers wanted them to, all the stories. But if the teachers didn’t ask, the kids never would. Because, like, who wanted to write about eating bugs and rats? And people not dying and then dying anyway, or disappearing. Like Angka would take people out for a walk and no one would ever see them again. Or sometimes they’d get killed right in front of your eyes, like a soldier would strangle someone with a plastic bag, or hit them on the back of the head like their dad does to Sarun, only not with a newspaper but with a shovel. Right where the soul was, they would hit them, and then they would bury them even if they weren’t dead yet. Like they would just shove them into a pit with, like, a bunch of other bodies and start shoveling.
