Somewhere in the Unknown World Page 19

  Auntie was as nice as they came. Although she was my mother’s sister, she was softer toward me than my mother. She could bear to talk to me and look me in the eye without pain or pity. She laughed and checked in on me from time to time from her seat in the front, beside Uncle, the silent driver, calling back, “Tommy, you holding up back there?”

  I knew she could see me from the vanity mirror of her sunshade. I nodded at her from my place in the back of the van.

  Uncle had married into the family. He was a quiet, intimidating man who looked at everything and everyone around him with suspicion. The only expression he carried on his face was concern. His body was stiff. Auntie said that Uncle used to be a relaxed guy; she said that Pol Pot had done this to him. Whatever Pol Pot had done, it was clear that Uncle was ready for anything, and I knew that I wasn’t, so I stayed off his radar as much as I could.

  Grandma had no smell. She didn’t chew betel nuts, use tiger balm, or like one particular dish over another. Grandma bathed but held no hint of sweet-smelling soaps or floral shampoo, and she wore no perfume. Her skin was gray like the Minnesota winter. Deep lines were carved into her face, suggestions of a life full of laughter and tears. She spent much of her time on the road trip drinking water, washing away whatever smell she might have had. Occasionally, she exclaimed over something on the side of the road—“I’m finally seeing the world!”—to no one in particular. I wished she had a smell that would tell me she was close by.

  My little cousin was cute. Although I was in a wheelchair, he looked up to me. He liked the jokes I told.

  “When do you reach your final height?”

  “When you die.”

  He would shake his head as if I’d said the most incredible thing in the world. The kid made me smile on that trip.

  We must have looked odd. A Khmer family with an old woman and a boy in a wheelchair, getting out of the car to use the bathrooms but never buying food. I was used to people staring so it wasn’t a big deal. We kept the exchanges short. “Hi, where is the bathroom?” Nods of gratitude. We tried to show more of what we felt than say it. Somehow it was easier for people to see Khmer folk than to hear us. Even as a kid, I knew this.

  The rest stops were awesome. They were the highlight of the trip. The best part about them: the fresh air. The closer we got to California, the dryer the air became. The rest of the family stretched their legs at the rest stops. I stretched my lungs.

  * * *

  The California heat was overwhelming. I had on a hoodie and I wanted Auntie to take it off. My skin felt itchy. The uneaten food had started to smell and it bothered my stomach.

  From her mirror, Auntie could see I was getting agitated.

  She called back, “Be patient, Tommy. I’ll come and help you when the car stops.”

  I rolled my eyes because I had no choice but to be patient. Unlike other kids, my tantrum options were low.

  I had imagined someplace by the ocean, but I saw no coastline on our way to California. To my cousins’ and my own disappointment, the car stopped before a small one-story house in a busy part of a flat town. Men and women in thin jackets, who obviously were not from Minnesota, walked by, looking cool, with their chins high. When the family finally unloaded me on the busy sidewalk, people made room for my chair. I saw that the cement below me was cracked and uneven. There was chewed-up, stepped-on gum, cigarette butts, straw wrappers, and other bits of small trash on the ground. I saw my first garbage bushes: plastic bags, food wrappers, and empty cans tucked in the thickets like fruit. We all waited on the sidewalk as Auntie and Uncle approached the front door of the small house.

  I missed my father a lot in that moment and wished he’d come along with us.

  * * *

  Once, my father and I had gone on a drive together after school. It was a splendid autumn day in Minnesota, perfect hoodie weather. The sun was high and the sky was blue and the clouds were white and scattered in the direction of the wind. My father had picked me up from school. My teacher had gotten me ready, helping to secure my backpack to my wheelchair. When she saw my father walking our way, she said, “Mr. Sar, you have a smart one here. Tommy is a witty kid.”

  The lines around my father’s eyes fanned out with his smile. He said, “Yes, he is a smart kid.”

  After school, my father drove us in our old white and brown Buick, bought used but new to us, through the nice neighborhoods in Minneapolis. I watched the back of my father’s head and the big houses on either side of the street from my place behind him. All the houses looked empty, but their lights were on, so we knew they were not empty, just way bigger than the people inside could fill. The trunks of the trees lining the streets were brown, a nice contrast against the grass still green from summer. The leaves were falling off the ash trees, raining yellow color like in a Korean drama. My father and I could have starred in a Korean drama about a loving father and his chill, wheelchair-bound son that day.

  I told my father that fall is my favorite season in Minnesota. I told him I loved the smell of the dry leaves in the air. I asked him what his favorite time of the year was when he was a boy like me.

  My father told me that when he was a boy in Cambodia, he loved the ending of the monsoons and the beginning of the dry season. He said the grass and trees were at their lushest then. The earth gave off its own smell, not at all like dry leaves, but a smell like the dirt itself was blooming.

  I asked my father if he ever thought he’d leave Cambodia when he was a boy.

  He asked me if I thought I’d ever leave Minnesota.

  We both shook our heads no.

  When we got to our house in Minneapolis, we both let out a sigh. It’d been a nice drive. Home was where we needed to be but neither of us really wanted to go in. Except there was no time to linger, because our front door opened, and we saw one of my father’s best friends waving.

  My father carried me inside. His friend greeted us by opening the screen door and then leading the way into the living room. My father set me up in front of the television. He went to the kitchen and grabbed beers for his friend and himself.

  His friend, a short guy who dressed like a teacher from the past, in a button-up shirt and slacks, asked, “Hey, Tommy, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  I looked at my father when I answered. “A naval engineer, like my father was in Cambodia.”

  The friend clapped me on the shoulder. “Good boy.”

  My father said, “Tommy is really smart at school. He can be anything he wants. A lawyer. A judge. Anything at all.”

  Just for fun I asked, “What if I want to be an astronaut one day?”

  My father laughed out loud. “Then you will be an astronaut one day.”

  We both knew there were no astronauts in wheelchairs, but I liked that he said I could be one. He always tried to support everything positive I had to say about myself or the world we lived in.

  * * *

  Auntie and Uncle stood at the door listening for voices we couldn’t hear. From the sidewalk, I could see that the grass on the square lawn was already yellow in places and drying up along the edges of the sidewalk. I thought it would be a cool science experiment to measure the temperature of the grass near the concrete and then in the center of the yard. The sound of a door slamming from inside the house turned my attention away from the lawn. I noticed that the window curtains were old bed sheets, repurposed. I looked away and tried not to judge.

  My father’s childless sister and her husband opened the door together. They were the same height. Both were thin. They had curly hair that was more gray than black. She wore a black shirt with brown flowers on it. He wore a mechanic’s outfit. They greeted Auntie and Uncle, but I could see that their eyes were trained on me.

  I tried not to wrinkle my nose as they moved close to me and started petting me. My California Uncle smelled like car oil and WD-40 (he’d tell me later that he purposely sprayed his hands with WD-40 so that his boss at the car-repair shop would smell him and think
he was always working). I let the California Aunt help me out of my hoodie and fan me with her hands.

  It turned out that the house wasn’t theirs alone. They shared it with another Khmer family, a mother and a father, their two children, and a dog. They pointed to the yellow spots on the lawn and told us that it was the result of dog pee. Inside, the California Aunt and California Uncle had a single bedroom with a television set. They had set up a bed for me near the only window in their room. The rest of the visiting family would sleep in the living room on mats. I felt like an extra-special guest.

  We stayed with the California Aunt and California Uncle and the family they lived with for a few days. The adults visited. We ate good food, not everyday chicken and pork family dishes but the more expensive food that people made for guests, like fish soup in sour tamarind broth and big shrimps fried with garlic in a caramelized soy sauce. The cousins played outside on the square lawn with the other children and their dog. The children, once they had gotten comfortable with me and my wheelchair, were friendly but they didn’t know what I could and couldn’t do so they didn’t invite me to play with them. I spent most of my time sitting by the window in the small living room looking outside at the cars filing past the house. I enjoyed seeing the pickup trucks with men and boys sitting in the open back—something I’d never seen in Minnesota. I imagined myself with them on the truck beds, feeling the wheels run over the road, the bumps and jumps. By the end of day five, I was ready to return home to my family.

  But the aunt and uncle who had brought me decided to take us kids to Mexico for a few days, since we were on vacation. It didn’t make sense to be so close to another country and not go, they said. When was the next time the kids would get to come back to California? The adults had come here from Cambodia, but my cousins and I had never been outside of the States. Grandma didn’t want to come with us. She wanted to spend time with California Aunt and California Uncle. I was excited to go somewhere else. The thought of being able to say to my classmates in the fall, “This summer we crossed the border into Mexico from California,” sounded really cool to me.

  We got in the blue Plymouth van and waved good-bye to the group standing outside the little house with the spotted lawn. Mexico was not as different from America as I’d hoped, despite the excitement of entering into a different country through a checkpoint. We got there late afternoon and ate the food the California Aunt had packed for us. Auntie and Uncle checked us into a hotel that smelled like cigarette smoke. By the time the sun had settled over the horizon, we were all tucked in for bed. My cousins slept on a sheet on the carpeted floor. I got the couch and the comforter although it was hot and I didn’t need it. Auntie and Uncle took the bed with the pillows. In the morning, we began our first and last day as tourists. We got up early and ate the cold rice and meat leftover from yesterday. We got ready and headed outside, loaded the car, then joined the groups of tourists on the busy street admiring men with colorful sombreros and women holding painted maracas in green, blue, red, and yellow with designs like cacti and chilis. When the sun grew hot, we stood in the shade of the buildings and watched a lot of tourists buying colorful trinkets and treats. I don’t even remember what we ate or if anyone bought anything. The dust of Mexico made the biggest impression on me. I had to squint my eyes the whole time, so I saw the country from beneath the fan of my lashes. Auntie took a few photos of us kids smiling and struggling to keep our eyes open in the sun. When Uncle decided we had experienced enough of Mexico, they carried me to the car, everybody else climbed in, and we headed back.

  It was not until the border crossing back into the United States that things got eventful. Everyone had a passport but me. I had no paperwork at all. I could hear Auntie and Uncle talking quietly to each other. I could hear the silence stretch between their words. My little cousin asked if they were going to have to leave me behind. I rolled my eyes but inside me there was a sinking feeling. How come the adults hadn’t thought about getting me a passport when everybody else had one? Surely, if I were left behind in Mexico, I would die. I tried to swallow my fear and act brave. That meant I had to hold my chin up the whole time and look around as if I was just bored. I tried not to watch Auntie or Uncle too closely. I didn’t want them to think I was afraid they would leave me behind. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings, because they were the first adults to take me on a real vacation.

  When my neck grew tired of holding up the weight of my head, I looked at my shoes. I imagined my toes inside them. I wished I was a normal Cambodian kid with dusty toes. I knew that inside my shoes, inside my socks, my toes were pale and wrinkled, unexposed to the elements, weak because they had never exercised, tired despite the fact that they had not taken me far. I saw my cousins in front of me in the van, kicking their legs, their sandals on the floor, and I saw their toes, which were healthy and brown from the days in the sun. Their feet were dirty and I felt a wave of longing to touch my bare toes to earth that was so deep it made my toes tingle.

  I felt Auntie’s eyes on me. When I met her gaze, she tried to smile reassuringly but I saw the cloud of worry in her gaze. She turned to Uncle and said, “How about we block him with the luggage and cover him with a blanket, and just cross over and hope no one finds him?”

  Uncle answered, “You think you can fool the US government?”

  She said, “We have to do something.”

  He shrugged and parked and they embarked on Auntie’s plan to get me back into the country.

  Beneath the hot blanket, I could barely breathe. I could hear the cassette tape my aunt and uncle were listening to, a Khmer rock ’n’ roll song, the kind my father used to play around the house, Khmer rock ’n’ roll that sounded more like old country music. My brothers hated that music, but I didn’t. I knew the song well despite my lack of fluency in Cambodian—“Champa Battam Bong,” a song about longing for a place. Beneath the hot blanket, sweat and tears started to roll down my face. Afraid to wipe them and move and lose everything in America, specifically Minnesota, I let the river run its course, telling myself if I made it back to the other side of the border, I’d tell everyone about the sweat, never the tears.

  When we were safely back in California, in the small house where Grandma, California Aunt and California Uncle, and the other Khmer family with their two children and their dog waited for us, I decided I should be more grateful for the people in my life. I didn’t pester anyone. I spent my days watching television in the bedroom I shared with California Aunt and California Uncle. I got used to the smell of car oil and WD-40. They checked in on me at all hours of the day, asking if I was thirsty or hungry, if I needed this or that.

  We were in the second week of vacation when Grandma asked me if I liked being in California. It was evening. The Khmer family and their dog, my aunts and uncles and cousins were all gathered on the small lawn that was now more yellow than green. The adults sat around a charcoal grill while the kids chased the dog for fun. I knew that when the food was ready, they’d bring me a plate. The window was open so the smell of grilled meat and summer night entered the house. From the garlic and scent of slightly burned sugar in the air, I knew they were making chez sovan, Cambodian beef sticks, and poat dot, Cambodian grilled corn. I could hear the kids laughing, calling to the dog. Grandma and I were in the living room together. She leaned back on a mountain of folded mats and blankets that everyone slept on. She held a plastic cup of water in her hands. Her voice was hushed and serious, in conflict with the mood of the evening. When I didn’t answer immediately, she asked again, “Do you like it here in California?”

  I said, “Yes, Grandma. This has been wonderful. The California Aunt and California Uncle have been so nice and generous to us all, but especially me.”

  She was quiet.

  I smiled at her.

  She took a drink of water from the cup she held with both hands.

  Only the lamp in the corner was on. The shadows in the room were reaching for us in the darkness. In the dim lighting, I saw h
er face, full of wrinkles, turned toward me, looking at me with pity and love, above the rim of her glass.

  I asked her, “Aren’t you having fun?”

  She answered in her usual way. “I have had my fun, Tommy. Don’t worry about me. It is I who worry about you.”

  I must have said, “Yeah, Grandma,” because that was what I did back then, agree with everyone’s worries about me.

  That night, there was a mood of celebration around the meal. The adults reminisced about the good times long ago. The Khmer woman living in the house started talking about how the best deals for rice cookers and other Asian pots and pans were in Chinatown in Los Angeles. She suggested Auntie and Uncle go and buy some before returning to Minnesota. Auntie told her about University Avenue, where there were Asian shops and restaurants, and plenty of pots and pans for sale. The woman laughed. “No, it’s nothing like that. I’ve been to University Avenue. This is way cheaper. Much better. You should take your kids. They’d enjoy it. It is almost like a different country. Way better than University Avenue.” I rolled my eyes at their talk. If Chinatown was even more foreign than University Avenue, I didn’t care for it. I hated University Avenue, I thought it was too “ethnic”—my slur for everything that was not American. I urged the other children, exhausted from their play outside, to join me for a movie on television.

  The next day, early in the morning, before I had woken up, the blue Plymouth van left the little one-story house with the passengers from Minnesota, all except for me. When I got up and I asked where everybody was, California Aunt and California Uncle both said, “They left.” I asked when they would return. They said, “We’re not sure.”

  I kept watch at the window that whole day. A part of me thought that maybe they’d gone to Chinatown in Los Angeles. If that was the case, I was glad they hadn’t taken me. By evening, though, I started thinking about how they should have taken me, too.