by May-lee Chai
“Your mother was waiting for you. She was very ill, but she was trying to stay alive for you. She wanted to see you again so very much.”
Paul nodded, listening intensely.
“She tried to find you everywhere. But no use. The Red Cross couldn’t find you, we didn’t know where you might be. She was very brave, but she’d been injured in a minefield. Some of her wounds never healed.” Uncle’s voice cracked, and he looked away, wiping his eyes, and we all pretended he wasn’t crying in front of us. “I made sure she was buried properly. She no longer believed in such things, but I paid monks to pray for her soul. I paid for the temple to hold the ceremony to guide her soul to the other side. I didn’t want people to think I did not respect my wife.” Uncle bowed his head and looked away. “If I had known what Pol Pot was planning, if I had known that leaving would cause my family harm, I would not have left you. But after Lon Nol took over, everyone grew paranoid. There was a civil war in the country. You were too young to know about this, but I was accused of being a spy. I didn’t even know who I was supposed to be spying for. Some people said I was a spy for Sihanouk. Some people said I was a spy for the CIA. A man came to the house and threatened to do something terrible if I didn’t turn myself in. In the beginning, I thought it was ridiculous. Just empty threats to intimidate me.
“One day some of Lon Nol’s soldiers came to the house and put a gun to my head. Your mother was very brave. She shouted at the soldiers, ‘Go ahead! Shoot him! If he’s a spy, I want nothing to do with him!’ And they let me go. Maybe it was only a game to intimidate me. Maybe they only wanted money. But other men were killed that day. Colleagues. Everyone was very paranoid. There were real spies in the government, some for the CIA, some for Sihanouk, some for the Vietnamese, maybe even some for Pol Pot. No one knew whom to trust. Even our allies, the Americans, had bombed us. Fourteen months under Sihanouk. Maybe you remember the refugees from the villages pouring into Phnom Penh. Shanty towns sprang up. There were beggars, children and women, so poor and pitiful. Gangs of thieves roamed the streets. Soldiers from rival factions hid among the survivors and fought each other, throwing hand grenades at cyclo drivers, into theaters, in front of restaurants.
“I tried to keep you safe. I hired a driver to take you to elementary school. It was no longer safe for ordinary people to walk or ride in tuk-tuks or cyclos. Your mother was ill. She couldn’t watch you, a growing boy. You were so clever—you didn’t want to stay inside all day. You found ways to escape the house. I used to beat you, I was so afraid you’d be hurt, but it was no use. What does a little boy know?
“When the Americans’ ally, Lon Nol, overthrew Sihanouk and proclaimed himself head of state, we thought the bombings would stop. Lon Nol was Sino-Khmer. He reached out to the Chinese business community. He said he wanted to stop the war, make Cambodia strong and prosperous again. That’s why I agreed to work for him. I didn’t like him, but we were all looking for a solution. But the American bombings didn’t stop. The Americans sent ground troops. Lon Nol did not object. We thought he must be mad. But what did he know? The Americans were fighting the Communists in Vietnam, but they accused Cambodia of harboring the Viet Cong. They bombed the border, trying to keep the Vietnamese out. The Americans sent troops into the mountains. But the Communists were strong, too. The Soviet Union and China gave them weapons and money. The Americans said Lon Nol was corrupt. He took their aid money and didn’t pay his troops. It’s true. He didn’t. But we were a small country, and we were like grass trapped beneath warring elephants.
“After the soldiers came to the house and threatened to shoot me in front of your mother, I realized I was putting the whole family in danger. If I didn’t leave, they would come again and again. What if they shot the children? I thought. Your mother agreed. I would leave, and she would denounce me publicly as a coward who had abandoned the family. Then, after I had established myself abroad, I would send for you all. Your youngest brother was only a year old. We didn’t think it was safe for the family to travel. Not with so young an infant. I thought it would be safer for your mother to stay in Phnom Penh. Her family could help her with the children. I would leave all the money with her. I figured no matter how bad things got in the countryside, Phnom Penh would be safe. The Americans would not let the capital fall. That’s how we all thought in those days.
“First I went to Malaysia and worked for a Chinese businessman. My father’s family had made its fortune in the pepper trade, and I thought I could be a liaison for him with foreign trading companies that we had worked with. I went in the fall of 1974 and tried to establish myself in business. I sent letters to your mother. Not directly, in case she was being watched. But I sent them to friends to let her know I was okay, and that I would call for her soon. She wrote to me, sending the letters through a third party. But then, in April 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took the capital, suddenly there was no word from Phnom Penh. It was like the whole country had disappeared off the earth. I could not send a telegram. I could not call. I could not reach your mother. From the few accounts from Western journalists still in the capital, I knew something terrible was happening. I tried to buy a ticket to return immediately, but I could not find a flight going in. Then my bank accounts were frozen. I had no money. I wrote to friends in Thailand, in Hong Kong, but no one knew how to reach you.
“When it became clear to the world that something had gone terribly wrong in Cambodia, I was able to come as a refugee to America. I still had some business ties. But for four years, I heard nothing. I could not find my family. I could not find you. Then, after the Vietnamese Army invaded in 1978, more information began to pour out into the world. I found your mother through the Red Cross. I was living in Texas by this time. I was able to sponsor her to America. But it was too late! She told me what she had had to endure. She told me how she had to watch our children die.
“She should have hated me. She should have blamed me. What kind of man am I? A man who cannot protect his family! A man who leaves his family! But she blamed herself!”
Uncle was crying without tears. His face was contorted by grief, a mask of his former face. His body shook and he put his hands in front of his eyes.
Anita touched his arm, and eventually his breathing steadied.
“I wish I could have seen Mai again,” Paul said simply. His voice was quiet, seemingly calm, but I could see the veins on his neck throbbing from the beat of his heart.
The food on the table congealed on the platters around us. None of us had any appetite at all.
After Uncle regained his composure and was able to drink a full cup of hot tea, Paul decided to tell us a story. I thought he’d start with how he came to be in America, his sponsors, how he’d been living all these years, but no, he wanted to tell us about something he remembered from back when he was a rich kid with too much time on his hands.
“Do you remember I captured a baby white crocodile? Everyone was talking about the ghost crocodile in those days. It was a bad sign, a magic beast. The servants were so afraid, but you told them not to worry. It was just a superstition, just a story. It couldn’t really hurt us.”
“I’d forgotten. You caught something. Some kind of animal. Your mother was upset about some animal. I don’t remember.”
“It was a baby white crocodile. Just like the story,” Paul insisted.
He described how he and his friends had overheard the servants talking about the rumors of this giant beast swimming into the city via the Mekong, escaping the river and climbing the banks near a rubber factory. It was living in the slums around Phnom Penh, hiding in the shanties that had sprung up after the peasants started moving from the countryside, trying to escape the Americans’ bombing raids on the northeastern border. Entire villages were being built from the bits and pieces of garbage that the city people had thrown away, the scraps of tin and the bricks they could steal here and there. The boys had been warned to stay away from the shanties; it was dangerous, there were soldiers hiding there, spies, thi
eves. But my brother had heard about the crocodile and now he wanted to see for himself.
The white crocodile had appeared in Phnom Penh in the first year after the fall of the old government, after it became clear that Prince Sihanouk would not return. Workers spotted it lurking in the shallows of the Mekong where factory effluent poured directly into the muddy water. Then refugees from bombed-out villages swore they’d seen it crawling in the shadowy overgrown alleyways where they sold fruit. The rumors grew more urgent: The white crocodile is hungry. It eats small children and dogs. Teach your children to run, fast. Every missing person became a sign that the crocodile was near. The police stayed clear, but a group of soldiers came and shot up a farmer’s fruit stand, saying the smell of rotting papaya in the sunlight was attracting the beast. The rumors continued, spreading like a summer influenza from the shanties to the street markets to the schools and temples and churches. At the cathedral, a priest offered up a Mass and the penance of his parishioners if God would remove the monstrosity. Monks and their novices chanted through the night: the white crocodile has returned, the world is ending, a new world is dawning. Over and over, their prayers drifted on the wind, thick as incense. It was hard to tell if the monks were mourning or rejoicing.
My brother was different. For him, the white crocodile was an opportunity.
He was still in primary school, maybe eight, nine years old, when he convinced his friends that they should not only skip class to look for the white crocodile, but that they should also capture it. He’d even thought of where to put it—in the courtyard pond of his best friend Arun’s house.
“Your yard is the biggest. You have a fish pond.” My brother ticked off its crocodile-worthy attributes on his long, tan fingers. “Plus, now that your father has broken his leg, he won’t think to look in the back. And the servants are too busy to bother with the yard.”
Arun’s lips quivered. He picked at his nose as though there were a direct pathway to his brain that could be tapped if he only dug deep enough. “I don’t know. My mother will get angry at me.”
“Your mother!” My brother laughed. “Ha ha. Arun’s afraid of his mother!”
The other boys laughed, uncertain. They were young, after all. They were all in fact afraid of their own mothers. They were not sure how to turn on a friend and make something ordinary seem like a moral flaw. Soon they would, but not quite yet.
My brother was ahead of his time.
The next morning all four of the boys went to school as usual under the watchful eyes of their family servants. They waved politely from the school yard, waiting for their escorts to turn the corner and disappear from sight. Then one by one, the four boys ran back through the school’s front gate and down the broad street, meeting under the flame tree across from the fried-cricket stand as planned.
My brother commandeered a tuk-tuk to take them to the slums, where their families would never let them go. They clambered into the back seat of the brightly painted wooden cart attached to the small moped. The driver was a teenager, barely out of boyhood himself, but he confidently headed into the crowded streets, steering around oxcarts and bicycle-powered cyclos. The boys were thrilled to be out of school and in the thick of the city. They waved cheerily at the honking Renault 2CVs and the occasional black Mercedes that sped past them. The tuk-tuk wove around garbage and potholes and bands of street children coming to beg. No matter how bad the terrain, the young tuk-tuk driver could navigate without tipping over.
That’s when my brother realized how useful this teenager might be. When they finally stopped at the edge of a row of shacks where the dirt road ended at the river’s bank, my brother invited their driver along. “Come with us and we’ll buy you something to eat.” The boy, fresh from a village, had no reason not to trust them, my brother said.
Together, my brother, his friends, and the tuk-tuk driver walked to the bank of the river. There they saw many dead and discarded things: bloated fish, drowned lizards, a shoe, a man’s leg. And then, in the shallows, insects buzzing around its yellow eyes, was a baby crocodile, already more than a foot long. It appeared lost, too young to be away from its mother. It looked emaciated, pale, sick. Not dark like ordinary crocodiles, but chalk-colored. The boys approached, and the crocodile startled. It tried to head to deeper water, but it was caught. It thrashed about, its hind leg trapped in a plastic soda ring, the kind that arrived with the Americans, holding their cans of Coca-Cola together. Trash thrown into the river had trapped the baby crocodile on the bank and kept it from returning to its mother, and now it lay dying in the hot sun.
My brother told the tuk-tuk driver to go pick it up. “I’ll buy you ice cream when we get back to the city,” he said.
“What’s ice cream?” the driver asked.
“The best food in the world,” my brother said.
“I want rice soup noodles,” the driver said, bargaining. “I want an egg.”
“Fine, a bowl of soup noodles with an egg in it, but you have to go down there and pick up that crocodile and bring it back to us.”
The driver looked at the creature dying in the dried mud.
“I’ll buy a whole bowl of noodle soup just for you.”
“With an egg,” the driver said.
“I promise. With an egg.”
The driver smiled widely, believing he’d gotten the better end of the bargain, and scampered down among the detritus along the riverbank. He pushed through the thick reeds and edged past the garbage, the rotting human leg, and the leather shoe, until finally he was standing on the dried mud. He was leaning over to pick up the crocodile when the creature whipped its tail once and bit the teenager on the finger.
“Ow!” he cried out, loudly.
“You’re okay. You’re bigger than he is. He can’t hurt you,” my brother coached, from the safety of the road. “Go on, grab him. Just hold his mouth together with your hands and pull him up.”
The driver looked unsure. He held his bleeding finger in the air.
“I can see your finger. You’re fine. It’s not a big bite. Just be fast this time. Come on! Do you want your soup noodles or not?”
The teenager wiped his bleeding finger on the back of his sampot and charged at the crocodile. He kept his hands outstretched and danced around the crocodile, which flipped its tail feebly and made a second, halfhearted lunge at the driver. This time the teenager was prepared. He grabbed the crocodile’s neck with one hand and clamped the other around its mouth. Then he pulled the creature from the earth and ran back up the riverbank toward the road, smiling broadly.
“Good job!” my brother said. “Now we need something to carry it in.” He ordered one of his friends to empty his school satchel to hold the crocodile. “Wait. Don’t let go of it yet,” my brother commanded the driver. He uprooted a reed from the side of the road and wrapped it around the crocodile’s snout. “There,” he said, satisfied, and they stuffed the beast into the book bag.
They climbed back into the tuk-tuk, setting the thrashing satchel on the seat of the moped, and the driver, standing balanced on the pedals, drove them back into the city.
But when they paused at an intersection, waiting for an elephant to pass, a police officer spotted the crocodile’s tail poking out of the bag and ordered the driver to stop. “What have you boys got there? Come here!”
My brother grabbed the satchel with the crocodile, and he and Arun took off in one direction, his two classmates in the other. The police officer decided to cut his losses and grabbed the driver, pulling him off his moped.
From a hiding place behind a stand where a woman sold drinks from a bucket, my brother watched as the police officer dragged the teenager off and another officer confiscated the vehicle.
My brother said he felt bad the driver had been caught, but he figured there was nothing he could do. He didn’t want to get caught himself and be forced to give up the crocodile.
So he and Arun waited until the cops disappeared and then hired a cyclo driver to take them back
home.
While the servants were busy, the boys dumped the crocodile in the fishpond in the courtyard garden of Arun’s house, but the beast was listless. It floated to the side of the pond and stayed there, refusing to wreak havoc among the goldfish as they’d hoped.
The next morning the baby crocodile was dead. The gardener found it floating on the surface of the pond, belly up. Arun’s mother called to complain, but my brother said our mother didn’t have the heart to punish him. He said he was lucky our father never found out about the escapade.
The servants would gossip for months afterward. How had the crocodile gotten into the yard? Where had it come from? And what had given it such a ghostly color?
“I used to wonder if I’d caused it all,” my brother said. “If everyone was right about the white crocodile. If I’d caused all the bad things to happen.”
“You were just a boy,” Uncle said. “And it’s just a superstition.”
“I know,” said my brother. “But that’s how I thought.”
Uncle looked away, as though he felt even guiltier than he had before.
“I wonder what happened to the tuk-tuk driver,” I said, at the end of the story. “Did you ever see him again?”
“Him? Ha. That kind of person was king under Pol Pot. That kind of boy had it easy.” Then he laughed a bitter ha ha ha, which made me realize how much anger he held inside his bones.
PART FIVE
Don’t keep a thin tiger as a pet.
—traditional Cambodian proverb
CHAPTER 13
The View from the Aquarium
Back at the apartment, I could tell Paul was disappointed. He looked around at the bare walls, the spartan furnishings, the small kitchen, and I knew he was weighing the present against the heft of his memories: the three-story home, the courtyard, the servants. He stood in the very center of the living room, in front of the couch that was now my bed, looking this way and that, pigeonlike, as though his eyes couldn’t quite focus on the smallness of the place, as though he thought that if he found just the right angle he’d discover the magic portal that opened up to the penthouse he’d been longing for.
