Page 49 of Taipei Story

Our language was rusty, and we didn’t know what to do with these grandparents, who seemed so much older and slower than we remembered them. My mother urged us to spend time with them, but we didn’t know how. We didn’t need them to take care of us anymore, but we didn’t know what to do with them otherwise. Every exchange was tinged with guilt: We had to pretend we wouldn’t prefer they weren’t there. We settled on walking the dog together. Flora and I spoke the best Chinese we had. Look, a duck! Look, a squirrel! Look, another duck! I was always startled to hear Flora speak Chinese, because by then she had spent so much time with her gaggle of Bratz doll white friends that I was shocked she understood any Chinese at all. She refused to speak it at home; she always answered our parents back in English. But with our grandparents, Flora intoned Chinese with all the saccharine sweetness of a C-drama heroine. Gonggong, Popo, would you do me the honor of holding Jack-Jack’s leash?

I remember their patient smiles, their vigorous strides. Popo swung her arms up and down in imitation of the army march she’d learned at school. “Keeps the blood circulating through the muscles,” she told us. “Circulation is important at my age. Go on, you try.” We obeyed. We understood perfectly well whenever she spoke to us. We just couldn’t give an interesting response.

We were polite. We excused ourselves at dinner, and then we fled upstairs. Flora liked doing her homework at the dining room table, but now she did it shut up in her room. Otherwise Gonggong would hover over her shoulder, curious about how they taught algebra in America. What was this new math? Why was she drawing boxes? “Tell him to stop,” Flora complained to our mother, as if Gonggong weren’t even there. “I can’t concentrate, he’s so annoying.”

The only group activity we enjoyed was watching movies. One night we all sat together to watch The Godfather. Gonggong had picked it out. He recognized the cover; that imported bootleg DVD had made it all over China. At first Gonggong had sat there watching by himself, but the score and dialogue were impossible to resist, and by the time Connie’s wedding was over, all of us were sitting in rapt attention, waiting to see how Michael might save his father from being assassinated at the hospital. There were no subtitles; I couldn’t tell how well my grandparents were following the plot. Sometimes my mother leaned over to explain things such as “The older brother is too hotheaded and that’s why they had to kill him,” or “Now control of the family goes to the younger one.”

“It’s hard to be the head of the family,” Gonggong had observed, while my father nodded in agreement. “So many people depend on you.”

The police called around two in the morning. Someone had identified a car similar to ours by the lake. Our parents and the officers at the house all sped out to go investigate. Flora and I wanted to go too, but my mother refused to let us. “Watch them,” she said as she was gathering up her things, though it wasn’t clear whom she was speaking to.

We ended up sitting on the stairs right in front of the front door, just sitting and waiting, hugging our knees to our chest. I remembered staring at the bottom of the stairs, tracing lines in the patterns in the wood. How could this be my reality? How could I be in this moment, right now; how had things culminated in this? Back then, I already harbored fantasies that I could prove any bad situation was an illusion. Maybe if I concentrated on the precise grain of the wood I would find a flaw and expose the dream and wake up.

“Why is it always our family?” Flora demanded. “Other families have normal people, why do we get stuck with fucking Jasmine, what’s her problem even, why is she always doing this? What does she have to be sad about?”

We bitched about Jasmine for a while. Jasmine was selfish and narcissistic, Jasmine didn’t care about any of us, she made our parents miserable, her piercings looked awful, the one in her nose made her look like a cow, and if she meant to kill herself then she should have done it a long time ago and saved everyone all this trouble.

“Don’t say that,” said Gonggong. “Don’t talk that way about your sister.”

We were startled to hear him speak. Until that moment we had been acting like he wasn’t even there. Flora and I were in our own little world, and Gonggong and Popo were in theirs. I realized, in revisiting this memory, that perhaps my perception of Gonggong had been wrong all along. Had I imagined that he couldn’t speak a word of English? How else would he have known what we were saying?

“Your sister is a good girl,” he told us, in Chinese. “She loves you all very much. And she is going to come home.”

“How do you know?” asked Flora, also in Chinese.

“Because I know your sister,” he said. “She’s going through a hard time. It’s hard to grow up in this country.”

He spoke with such quiet authority. Gonggong never spoke with authority to us; he always deferred discipline to our parents. Gonggong was only ever gentle and accommodating with us; if we put up with him, then he enjoyed our time; if we wanted to run off, he didn’t mind. He never complained about anything we did. But he, too, had raised three daughters, in far harsher conditions than these. He knew how to be a rock.

“Don’t worry,” said Gonggong. He put his hands on both of our shoulders. “I know Jasmine. I know she doesn’t want to die.”

Flora began to cry, and so I began to cry too.

We might have spoken more, but I had only hazy memories of the rest of that night. What I remembered: the post at the bottom of the stairs, the fraying edge of our rug. Jack-Jack gnawing passionately at a chew toy. And Gonggong, silent and solid, holding me and Flora against him until the police lights flashed outside our front door, and a tumble of voices spilled through the hallway, and Jasmine was delivered safely home.

MY MOTHER DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHY I WANTED TO KEEP TALKING about Cambodia.

“This again,” she said whenever I asked. “What else is there to know?”

What else? She’d hardly given me a story. How, precisely, had this all gone down? Had Gonggong ever confirmed that his parents were dead? Had anyone in the family survived?

“Well of course, his sister—”

“His sister?”

“Yes, California Grandma.”

“Oh!” There was a woman in Los Angeles that we had only ever known as California Grandma, though her actual relationship to our family had never been clear to me. We understood that she was an older female relative of some kind, and that my mother had lived with her from high school onward. We had met her on many occasions: I associated her with childhood road trips to LA, with dingy Vietnamese grocery stores and grainy taro milk tea and simmering pots of bone broth. California Grandma was just a fact of life—another thread I’d never bothered to pick up.

“So California Grandma was your aunt?”

“Yes, Gonggong’s sister. So your great-aunt. She sent him a letter when she got to a refugee camp in Thailand and told him that their parents had died, and her twin sons had died, and her husband had died. She was the only one who made it out.”

“What happened to her sons?”

“I don’t know.” My mother paused. “Maybe they got sick. I hope—well, I just don’t know.”

I had a better idea now of how all this had gone down. I had read some academic articles. I had learned that the Khmer Rouge rounded up everyone living in cities and called them the New People—the people who weren’t pure peasants, who needed to be culled for the revolution. I had discovered a dozen ways my great-grandparents and my uncles could have died. Maybe they refused to leave their home; maybe they were shot on the doorstep. Maybe they got ill. Maybe they drowned in rice paddies, too weak to keep moving. Maybe they were clubbed to death for asking for food, or walking too slow, or making the wrong expression. And I saw that my question was indeed pointless, because the question wasn’t how they had died; it was how anyone could have survived that death march to begin with.