Page 50 of Taipei Story

“Wait.” The thought had just occurred to me. The Cambodian genocide began in the mid-seventies. This was recent history. This wasn’t distant the way World War II felt distant. This was only one generation away—this was living memory. The Beatles had broken up before the Khmer Rouge started the massacres. “You would have been born by then. You would have met them, right?”

“I didn’t meet them,” said my mother. “I was too young. My sisters met them. Your eryi remembers our grandma very well. She remembered that she wore such nice dresses. She was—how do you say it? A dainty woman. She was small and elegant and pretty. We had a photograph of her, and Eryi liked to show it to me all the time. This made me so jealous—that she had met Grandma, and I hadn’t.”

“Do you still have that photograph?”

“Oh, no—I’m sure it’s lost now.” A pause. “I remember how she was standing, though. Turned to the side, one hand on her hip. We used to imitate her pose all the time.”

“Did you ever ask what happened to them? Your grandparents?”

“Of course,” said my mother. “All the time. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t meet them. No one would explain. When I was little, I used to sit outside and watch the planes flying across the sky, and I would think to myself, maybe that’s Grandma and Grandpa coming to visit.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Wow.”

“Yes, but of course, they were never coming. So that was a silly thing to think.”

“Wait, then, California Grandma. So she . . . so she made it to the US? Alone?”

“Yes. Oh—I forgot to tell you. Well, so you know how I went to California to finish high school?”

“Yes?” I had never asked about the circumstances of this either. I had just assumed my mother wanted to study abroad.

“Well, so, after my aunt had been living on her own for a few years, my father told her that he had three daughters, meaning he had extras, and she could have one. She lost her boys, remember.”

“So they sent you? As a replacement?”

“Yes.”

We were both silent for a while.

“Jesus,” I said. “Mom. I’m so sorry.”

“Why are you sorry? I was excited. I was so happy when Gonggong told me. I couldn’t wait to get out of China.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell us about this?”

“You never asked.”

“I was supposed to ask about why you were sent to replace your aunt’s dead sons?”

“Well, yes. I would have told you if you had asked. But you never asked.”

She said this in a matter-of-fact tone. I knew she wasn’t saying it to hurt me, but still it stung. I had been planning to ask. I had promised to undertake this project ever since I began to learn Chinese. I would interview my grandparents, and I would understand where I came from, and I would have a full historical record of everything they had gone through. But California Grandma had passed away years ago. Gonggong was dead. Popo could barely speak; Popo didn’t even know who I was. All my connections to that generation were severed, and all I had now were stories from my mother, and she seemed disinclined to confirm more than the vaguest details.

“Lily, is everything okay?”

“Yeah.” I sniffled. “I just—I just really want to know more. I feel like there’s all this history that we’ve lost.”

“Then you can read a history book, can’t you? Don’t be sad.” She must have heard me crying over the line. “Things just happen this way, right? I left the island. Your dad left the village. Your gonggong left Cambodia. This is just what people do; they live their lives, and when circumstances change, they go off to find somewhere better, all right? What’s there to be sad about?”

“Mom, am I bothering you?”

“No.” A pause. “Why?”

“I’m just really trying to find out what happened to our family, but it seems like you don’t want to answer anything. Like all these questions are just annoying to you.”

A longer pause. Then: “I’m sorry. It’s not annoying. I just—it’s not a happy thing to talk about, you understand?”

I didn’t know what to say. I had always imagined my parents would be pleased at my attempts to reconnect—that they had been waiting all these years for any one of their children to take an interest in our culture and our past. I thought that my studying Chinese was closing the circle. I thought I’d be rewarded for caring.