Link to article (hippocampusmagazine.com)
By the time I was a young woman of 24, I thought my past had been erased, too. My family was gone. My country had drowned in its own blood. All I had left were images and aromas: the smell of a charcoal fire in my motherâs open-air kitchen, the sweet perfume of my fatherâs pipe. Only smoke remained.
I spent my first nine years in my motherâs airy kitchen. In my memory, the room was constructed of pure light. Two wide windows framed a bright tropical sky.
In my dreams Iâm back in that kitchen, chopping onions and garlic, running to fetch wood and water, and falling asleep in a hammock as Mae rocks me to sleep. But of course, that world is gone. My mother left me nothing but her songs and recipes, and aromatic memories to last the rest of my life.
The Cambodian people had learned a great deal about endings. They had forgotten everything else and learned only how to survive.
I understand this mindset. When you are hungry, the past and future darken, until only the present hour is visible. Many nights I, too, dreamed only of rice. It focuses the mind but narrows hopes.
I was not a child when my mother died; I was a young woman. But she was the only thing keeping me from the streets, the only treasure left in my life. And what had she left me? No gold at all, only a trove of recipes â useless to a girl with no money to procure the ingredients.
I blamed her for keeping me too soft, for failing to prepare me for how hard our world had become. Maybe my kitchen education, and all those delicious memories, werenât a strength at all. Maybe it was a weakness to begin life with every luxury, only to lose it all, one golden thing at a time.
I feel small and low when I speak of my refugee life, an inconvenience compared to what so many endured. In Saigon, the bullets rained, too. But our Vietnamese philosophers murdered more selectively.
It would be tempting to affect a survivorâs bravado, as if I had achieved my continued existence through will and wit. But my chief survival advantage was being born to a family that could afford to fly to Saigon. We used our dwindling gold to flee to a place where wearing eyeglasses did not put our lives in immediate danger.
I did not deserve my survival. I was a âNew Person,â as soft and spoiled as any obedient Asian girl from a middle-class family. But I suspect that I can trust you with this information. After all, youâre reading an essay in a literary magazine right now. Which means you are, most likely, as soft as I was then.
Softness is not immutable, but it does not disappear all at once; it slips away slowly. You might not even notice its disappearance at first.
When I first met my future husband Chan, I tried to be his silvery moonlight woman. In our first years together â running from Saigon, then waiting for years in the refugee camps â I strove to follow the Chbab Srey. But I discovered that obedience could not be exchanged for rice and was therefore of little use. âYou are not an Asian woman at all,â Chan told me once, smiling his half-joke smile.
My parents must have wanted a moonlight life for me. Why else would they name me Chantha, âthe light of the moonâ?
My family left the world before I could disappoint them.
In Cambodia, who has time for being silver-soft? There is too much work to do. We cannot wait for a manâs permission to survive. We have to shine like suns and sparkle like diamonds. Iâve often wondered why, in a poor country where women work as hard as men to feed their children, feminine softness is so highly prized. As for me, I no longer consider it a valuable attribute.
The first nine years of my life were beautiful, magical, a perfection. I hoard my delicious Battambang kitchen memories like a buried box of gold. Those images became my recipes for building a future.