A memoir piece.
There are periods in life that seem much longer than they were in the reality of the calendar year. There is lived time, imprinted time, contrasting experiences, and the intensity of events that seem to burn themselves in a psyche, becoming contractures in memory. Contractures are a type of scar tissue that forms a raised, immobile mass, often a result of an interrupted wound healing process. I like tangible metaphors, the kind that I can feel in a body to help me grasp the untouchable ways my mind works.
Mental scar tissue is like a speed bump that causes one to slow down, crafting a learning zone one must proceed through with caution before returning to the thoroughfare of personal timeline.
My dad calls them memory cornerstones, the points used to orient borders based on absolute coordinates, transcending the powers of perception, laws and land exchange. Cornerstones are used by land surveyors to orient and base map coordinates. They’re an authoritative point of reference.
Part One: Home Assignment
Home Assignment is a term used in missions organizations for a time period in which overseas workers return to their home or sending countries to raise financial support and attend to logistical or family oriented needs, replacing the previously used term, furlough. First grade lay just around the bend when we moved to Long Beach, CA. The year leading up to that had been a series of misadventures. We’d left Cambodia, where we’d lived since I was a toddler as missionary parents and two little children. A political coup sparked weeks after our plane touched off. Our landlord relayed through teammates that our dog Trixie ran away because of the sounds of tanks and AK-47s. The political unrest was not the cause of our departure. My dad’s mental health suffered in the three years we’d lived in Phnom Penh, overloaded on a cocktail of culture shock, ministry pressure and unresolved trauma. Our arrival in San Diego meant he found treatment and I learned to make mud pies and microwave quesadillas.
After months of visiting churches across the US, fundraising in the front row, speaking a few novelty words of Khmer fitting the attention span of congregants, it was not yet possible for us to return to Cambodia. This was always the goal, since our departure had been a necessity and my parents continued to feel called to work there. So, a home base was established in Long Beach, for its proximity to a Cambodian-American community and the predominately white evangelical communities my parents found supportive.
Our couch-surfing life shifted to a duplex, a room for each person, which I protested by sleeping in my brother’s doorway because we had never been apart. Our neighbor Florence, ninety and so gentle, had lost her husband the month we moved in. My afternoons were full of Jeopardy episodes from her living room floor while she ate the soup my mom sent over, and mud pits dug in our shared backyard with her late husband’s gardening tools. In most pictures from that year I have a smooth blonde side ponytail, which my dad would brush into a curled ringlet secured by a pink or blue cloth scrunchie while I perched on the edge of my parents’ bed.
Across from our house was Hartwell Park, a novelty of grass to my brother Malachi and I. Grass expanses like that did not exist in Phnom Penh. There, we summited sand mountains covered in cat shit on our street and privateered in our courtyard fort. External freedom for us did not exist before Hartwell Park, where we could walk, alone, hand in hand across the street, through the park to the library, no gates or walls adorned in barbed wire or broken glass to restrict us, no chorus of “Barang” to announce our pale skinned presence, no hands reaching out from behind market stalls to touch my blonde curls or pinch our cheeks. Blissfully unaware of our dad’s watchful presence from a distance, we decided this could be normal.
My world spanned the two blocks of East Carson Street, stoplight to the right, Taco Bell to the left; flashing red hand and purple and yellow-framed soft tacos signaled the edges of my mental map of belonging, a flat world with layers one could simply drop off of.
School was a short drive away, a portal to another part of our new world. Los Altos Brethren, home of the Bulldogs, the cold metal bars of the playground and warm, fear-melting hugs from Mrs. Martin, my first-grade teacher. Motivated by the opportunity to earn all five stickers on my weekly paper bear cut-out, I strove to be kind and good and honest. The dark days were those where humanity won out and my bear was turned for the afternoon, meaning the absence of a sticker bore witness to my character flaws.
Other satellites in that California universe were our churches; Cypress Evangelical Free, (words I still don’t understand), and Norwalk Fellowship. Norwalk, CA is just north of where we were living, while Cypress, CA is further east. Long Beach has the third largest Cambodian population in the world, following Phnom Penh, the national capitol, and Battambang, a provincial capitol. It brims with donut shops, the industry dominated by Cambodian American refugees following a mass escape from the Khmer Rouge led genocide in the 1970s.
Sunday school at Norwalk Cambodian Evangelical Fellowship was in the Khmer, a language I understood but couldn’t converse in. Our parents sat through long sermons. The swing set at Norwalk was where I thought I’d counted to one thousand, an accomplishment worthy of running into the sanctuary to loudly whisper to my mom. I learned that I had not, because I’d not yet learned how many hundreds go into a thousand, and I think after hitting one hundred I could only naturally have counted to the highest number there was in my frame of reference. I was often trying to grasp concepts and values beyond my small-armed reach.
Cypress EV Free was a supporting church for my parents’ ministry. It held a wall of framed photos of missionaries it had “sent out.” Our family photo, me as a toddler, my brother slightly older, my dad’s brown hair a testimony to the years before life turned it salt-and-pepper and then white shortly after, my mom, smiling, young, bright-eyed, idealistic. The photos did not change at the rate of their occupants. The church held all the lights and theater of a well-funded evangelical church, smiling upper-middle class families against speckled blue backgrounds filling the church directory, nineties trends, southern California casual and purity culture forming fashion statements. I did not like Sunday school there. I did not know the songs and dances, and it felt like a performance, and churches like that were where we performed. I didn’t know what it meant to belong in a community like that.
Our duplex didn’t have laundry, or maybe it did and I only remember the times my dad and I would bring our dirty clothes tubs to a laundry mat in the center of a strip mall. As soon as the spin cycle was whirling its blurred gyration we set upon the donut shop at the corner where I gorged on chocolate milk and Dad satisfied his soul by speaking Khmer with the owners. His folding has always been precise, loving, for each dish towel and button-up shirt. In Cambodia he would never, could never help with something as domestic as laundry. It would have been insulting to the women employed to take care of us.
In this other land, we took care of our family together, folding laundry, sitting on warm, humming dryers in shared silence. Life perhaps felt less purposeful to him, with no souls to save, and only himself and us to care for. I wonder if this was a burden to him, a burden to not have something or someone to find meaning in. Sometimes I wonder if we were collateral damage in that time of his life, and his calling. I wonder how calling has affected us, how the need to unburden his soul affected our souls. How the meaningfulness of a quiet life can change over time.
My brother and I found meaning in our friendships, in our backyard adventures, our walks to the park. My brother Malachi was in third grade then. He is an introvert, and the quietness of our life there, away from good natured but overwhelming social pressures of adults in churches we were visiting requesting his commentary on our life in Cambodia, a life he had not chosen, and a life he had no control over, was refreshing for him. He made friends with other kids in class. There was another brother and sister duo our age, Max and Mia that we would often play with. Malachi has the best sense of humor in the family. He’s witty and an excellent storyteller. He’s adventurous.
We were raised with the attitude that he should protect me, and though he didn’t often need to those days, sometimes he would try to help teach me about how things worked in America as he discovered them. The fear of God burned into me when he told me I could be arrested for jaywalking. In Phnom Penh in the 90’s, there was no honoring of stoplights, and I had little grasp of the significance of parallel white lines painted across a street. In an attempt to help me understand how things worked, my brother told me I would be arrested if I crossed in any other places, and that the light had to flash the little walking white man. I believed him.
Part Two: Deliverance
My mother’s headaches worsened, until CAT scans, which surprisingly do not involve cats, revealed an “abnormal, normal” mass in her brain. Too deep to cut into, too significant to ignore, our family once again relied on the power of prayer to bring about deliverance.
Deliverance came in the form of enchiladas from Mrs. Hollerman, a lady from the Cypress church, left for us packed as lunches for my brother and I and our dad’s delivery of happy meals to school. Deliverance came in the Langan family taking my brother and I in, for how long or for what reason I still don’t know. Mr. Langan had a special voice he’d adopt at bedtime for his daughter and I, unique to my stuffed bunny, Ears, and Rachel’s polar bear. They helped us fall asleep, and I missed my dad’s bedtime stories, of Sydney the Squirrel and Randy the Raccoon taking Wild Girl Mary and Wild Man Woogie on imaginary adventures, oddly reminiscent of WWII history.
Deliverance was in the confused tension I held over my mom’s miraculous recovery, because my classmate Jackie’s mother did not, her cancer apparently was not in the realm of those prayers or heard by the same God. I remember the hollow, pained look in her eyes, and her best friend Hannah comforting her as viscerally as I remember standing in front of class with Mrs. Martin’s hand on my back saying, “My mom’s in the hospital,” while our classmate Katie Lynn covered her mouth, gasping.
And then Mom came home, thinner, hair growing back in places, a nurse doing home visits to check her at our kitchen table, her spot on the couch reserved for headache naps and focal seizure episodes. She threw me a birthday party themed with Veggie Tales, a bible story based cartoon beloved by my peers and I, that she decorated with perfectly copied hand drawn decorations revealing her artistic talents and precise attention to detail.
Our last night in Long Beach, before arriving at the pearly gates of LAX, we drove our beloved silver minivan, Baloo, to its new owners. In the dark the headlights flashed, the tinted glass of my passenger window shielding the glare of In and Out’s yellow arrow, golden arches and Von’s neon signs. There were mixed emotions and in the silence I felt my brother’s already stoic sadness over the friends and sense of place he was leaving. I felt my dad’s anticipation of meaningful work ahead and relief that we were going together. I felt my mom’s desire for the future to be good, for us to be together and for the return to the language she was still learning, the school she would settle us in, the purpose she was still finding while she helped us find our ways. I felt everything, and I felt nothing.
Part Three: Returning
That chapter closed with a pressure seal and the next opened to the humid air, a cacophony of sounds and smells, and the love of my nanny Ming Sokai. We returned to our missionary kin, the people that understood us, that we didn’t have to explain the concept of home to. We arrived at a new school co-op, Southern Baptist subculture, and our dad’s new role as chaplain during the HIV epidemic, our mom’s work with trafficked girls, and my shadow in the ministries. We returned older.
My dad has told me that the uncertainty and grief he experienced due to my mom’s brain tumor prepared him for chaplaincy work. His faith grew through that. I believe him. The living skeletons are what I remember in those days of visiting his work. The children and wives of the infected soldiers moved around dingy, cracked tiled rooms. There were piles of debris outside each of the hospital units, dotted with children playing amidst rebar. Families were sent into rooms to outlive their fathers and husbands away from the shame that waited for them in their villages. AIDS was still largely misunderstood in those days. There was tremendous fear around contracting it, and more shame around how it was contracted. Many of those men contracted it from prostitutes, as many of those sex-workers contracted it from UN peacekeepers, sent from around the globe to maintain a peaceful election in 1992.
They may have brought about a more peaceful democratic process at the time, but, like the puppet government that ensued post elections, there were severe after effects to the structure of families and public health that lasted for decades as a result. Along with that is the pre-existing cultural norm for men of all ages to visit sex-workers, which we observed every day on the way home from school. The girls would have their faces painted white, lined up on plastic chairs outside of the shanty shacks which formed a ridge around the bend of the main road we had to take around 4pm to get home. The same road, the same time, men and boys lining up for the selection process. I absorbed these things while sitting in the clinic my dad worked in, and doing art lessons with the children alongside my mom, next to my brother in our van of other missionary kids returning home from a day’s lessons.
There was a family at the hospital that impacted my dad more than others. The surviving daughter’s name is Sopheap. Years later, my dad emailed me photos of us visiting with her and her mother in their village, and a photo of my dad and her dad in his last days with the note,
“I found these pics of Sopheap’s dad. We read through this track explaining what Heaven is about and how to get there. It took some time for his AIDS fogged brain to piece together Jesus was the way. A few days later he decided, and a few hours later he died. Then I helped carry him out for the ride to the watt (pagoda) for cremation.
After the cremation I came home, permeated with the smell of burnt bones. You met me at the door, scanned my eyes and face, and told me to sit down. Then you crawled up into my lap, circled my neck with your little arms and big heart, joining me in my sadness, again.” he wrote.
Compassion is a funny sort of thing. Children will repeat the behavior that rewards them, particularly for love and attention. For me, it was empathy, for my brother, stoicism. I was very sad as a child in those spaces, because people are not supposed to have to live and die like that. And, I found joy in the beauty of creating things; the chaos of paint and sharing the novelty of creating for creating sake with those kids. We tried to play in the spaces that felt like ours.
Part Four: Belonging
One was the porch at the house we lived in the longest. There were wooden slats on the floor. Dozens of shoes created a pathway to the front door. This is the welcome mat of South East Asia. Our dog Annie slept there, her nose on the lip of the door. A boundary pusher like the rest of us, she so wanted to live inside, away from the dogs that tormented her below. I don’t know why she held such anxiety in her pale yellow body, but she gravitated toward us for comfort and safety.
Rattan couches curved against the walls, covered in hand-woven checkered yellow and blue fabric. The focal point of this porch was the hammock: Cotton, sturdy, soft with woven rope and carbineers suspending it. A woman, her brother and their mother sold these custom hammocks at the market near our house. They share such a likeness you can always recognize them around the neighborhood as “The Hammock Family.” This was the hammock where my dad and I napped. Where we told stories. Mom read us the Redwall series before I could read, imagining swashbuckling characters in a woodland realm dueling over the buzzing fluorescent bulb at night while tiny geckos picked off the bugs surrounding the light. It was here we swayed through humid air, thunderstorms, monsoons and the winds of change. It was where my dad would play his harmonica, wheezing Amazing Grace in and out, over and over for hours, and where my brother and I mummified ourselves, wrapped as tightly as possible, waiting for him to spin us 360 degrees with all his strength, for an exhilarating, gravity defying moment— Suspended, staring at the floor, floating prone – before the thwack of our body weight swung back around, hopefully still cocooned.
The porch days didn’t last. We got older, our dad’s ministry weighed on him and gave him wings, taking him further away from us even when we sat together at dinner. My mom’s seizures intensified, her memory lapsed, and over time, returned. We rode along with our dad’s passions for adrenaline and compassion, and I watched the gaps between us all grow wider.
It is still uncomfortable, and confusing to navigate the lines of have and have not, of cultural and social differences and language. Now I might call it privilege, but then it was more abstract. Sometimes I’m grateful for the abstraction, because there is room for nuance in that. Nuance and chaos dance together, and need space to do so. We grew older in Cambodia. We came back and forth between Cambodia and the US, foxtrotting with the grace of gangling teens. We grew accustomed to our dual realities, of familiar unfamiliarity and more abnormal normal.
Embodying Life 