Tiger Girl Read online

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR DRAGON CHICA

  “It is very rare that a coming of age novel transcends its inherent limitations and attains the complex emotional resonance of adult fiction. Dragon Chica does this with great aplomb. The book explores with subtlety and depth the mature, universal issues of identity and connection, but it also retains its direct appeal to younger readers.

  “May-lee Chai has performed a remarkable act of literary magic.”

  —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author,

  A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

  “Powerful, witty and profound, Dragon Chica introduces readers to a new kind of American heroine.”

  —Alicia Erian, Towelhead

  “Eleven-year-old Nea has seen the very worst this world has to offer—from civil war in Cambodia, to the rice fields of the Khmer Rouge, to the bullying hallways of American public school. Thankfully, her heart and imagination bloom wide enough to let her continue longing for the best. As she grows into a woman, Nea navigates her difficult life with clear-eyed and courageous idealism. May-lee Chai has written a brilliant and important coming-of-age story about a young refugee who refuses to give up her search for that promised refuge.

  “Dragon Chica is an important and deliciously readable novel that will hold you in thrall; you won’t be able to look away from these pages, even as your eyes fill up with tears.”

  —Nina de Gramont,

  Every Little Thing in the World and Gossip of the Starlings

  “From the killing fields of Cambodia to a Chinese restaurant in the middle of the cornfields of Nebraska, Dragon Chica takes the reader deep into a compelling story about two sisters and the secret histories that surround them.”

  —Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Somebody’s Daughter

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR HAPA GIRL

  “I was captivated by May-lee Chai’s Hapa Girl from the first sentence. It continued to be so powerful that I read it in one sitting. It’s at once brutal and sad, humorous and plucky. Chai has beautifully captured the deep racism and bigotry that lurks in our country with how one misguided decision can change a family’s fortunes forever. Hapa Girl made me think about the bonds of family and the vicissitudes of place long after I finished the last page.”

  —Lisa See, Snow Flower and The Secret Fan

  “Easily labeled a coming-of-age story or a narrative about racial tensions in 1960s America, this memoir—whose title employs the Hawaiian word for mixed—is truly an homage to a loving marriage. Only the strongest kind of love could survive the crucible of a community hoping for a family’s failure. Highly recommended . . .”

  —Library Journal

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR

  A GIRL FROM PURPLE MOUNTAIN

  nominated for the National Book Award

  “Gripping and historically grounded read”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Tragic, funny, lyrical, and respectful, this intimate and unforgettable family chronicle is also a history of modern China.”

  —Library Journal

  tiger girl

  a novel by

  MAY-LEE CHAI

  First published by GemmaMedia in 2013.

  GemmaMedia

  230 Commercial Street

  Boston, MA 02109 USA

  www.gemmamedia.com

  © 2013 by May-lee Chai

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5

  978-1-936846-45-0

  Chai, May-Lee.

  Tiger Girl / May-lee Chai.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-936846-45-0

  1. Cambodians—United States—Fiction. 2. Refugees—United States—Fiction. 3. Self-realization in women—Fiction. 4. Family secrets—Fiction. 5. Women college students—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.H2423T54 2013

  813’.54—dc23

  2013021807

  Cover design by Howard Wong

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1 War Stories

  CHAPTER 2 The Apsaras Who Fell to Earth

  CHAPTER 3 The 108 Little Hells

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 4 Uncle

  CHAPTER 5 The Monk’s Cell

  CHAPTER 6 The Knife Thrower

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 7 The Sisters Who Turned into Birds

  CHAPTER 8 The Plan

  CHAPTER 9 The Good News

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER 10 The Gangster

  CHAPTER 11 The Homecoming

  CHAPTER 12 In the Days of the White Crocodile

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER 13 The View from the Aquarium

  CHAPTER 14 The Lost Boys

  CHAPTER 15 On the Altar of Miracles

  PART SIX

  CHAPTER 16 The Day After

  CHAPTER 17 Sacred Heart

  CHAPTER 18 Tiger Girl

  PART SEVEN

  CHAPTER 19 The Family Banquet

  CHAPTER 20 Return to the Palace

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PART ONE

  A mountain never has two tigers.

  —traditional Cambodian proverb

  CHAPTER 1

  War Stories

  “You’re so lucky,” Ma said to me, the highway straight as a ruler’s edge, the fields dense and green, ripe to be harvested. “Too bad you can’t get good grades. You don’t try hard enough. You’re not stupid. You could do better.”

  It was August, just before the start of my sophomore year of college, and Ma was driving me back to school after a summer spent helping at the Palace, our family’s restaurant.

  I stared out the window at the blowing grass laid low in the ditches, the yellow-tasseled heads of the late summer corn whipping back and forth in frenzied waves. Darkening clouds lumbered across the sky like war elephants amassing on the border of some ancient battleground. Thunder rumbled, and I thought, Oh god, don’t let it storm, no tornadoes, god not now, don’t make us have to pull over in some shelter or, worse, have to spend the night in a Motel 6 like last spring. Not when I’m so close to making it through this summer without having another fight with my mother.

  I didn’t believe in any particular god, not in the rule-ridden god of the Baptists who’d sponsored us to come to America when I was eight, not in the blood-drenched god hanging on the cross in Sourdi’s husband’s church, not in the god of money whose three porcelain henchmen perched on the shrine in the back of Ma’s restaurant. But I prayed to all of them now: god of weather, god of wind, god of mothers, god of Nebraska, hear my prayers. I clenched my fists so hard that my nails dug into my palms.

  “I was a good student. I received a nineteen out of twenty on an essay in français.” Ma pronounced it the French way. Frahn-say. “That’s like an American A+. But the war was coming. My parents had to pay for my brothers’ education.”

  “I thought you got married at sixteen?”

  She ignored my interruption. “And then I had so many children. What chance did I have? I wanted to go to college and become a poet.”

  “I thought you always wanted to own your own restaurant and become a rich woman?”

  “No. That was only after your father fell ill and we were so poor. I wanted to become an intellectual, but we couldn’t afford it.” Ma sighed. “I had to use my brother’s copybooks. I had to trace their letters with my pencil, but I was a good student.” She didn’t add, not lazy like you, but I heard it in my head, her voice so disappointed because my GPA had fallen over the course of freshman year and I’d decided not to take any more pre-med classes and I
wasn’t going to become a doctor and be rich the way she’d hoped. “My teachers wanted me to go to lycée. They begged my parents to send me. They said I was a girl with potential.”

  “Good thing you didn’t go. The Khmer Rouge would have killed you.”

  She inhaled sharply, and I knew I’d gone too far.

  The heavens opened and rain fell like rocks. Giant goose-egg raindrops splattered across the windshield and battered the top of the car.

  The world went gray, as though a light bulb had gone off in the sun.

  Ma slowed to a near stop in the far left lane.

  I craned my neck, wondering where all the trucks had gone, and tried to see if there was traffic coming our way.

  Ma squinted her eyes, leaned forward so far that she could have rested her chin on the steering wheel, and eased the Honda to the shoulder. We crept forward, inch by inch, but it seemed as though the world were racing past us. Water poured down the middle of the highway, rushing toward the drainage ditches on either side. I watched as the rain beat the corn to the ground and the wind blew the rain in horizontal streaks across the windows.

  As we sat on the shoulder, I thought, I could ask her now. Ask her about the lie. The lie that separated us. The lie that kept me tossing and turning at night and ruined my concentration during the day. The lie that she was my mother.

  I wondered if maybe this storm was happening for a reason, but then I felt hokey and stupid and superstitious. I didn’t believe in fate. Miracles, sure. The fact that we were alive at all was a miracle. But this storm’s stranding me in the car with Ma felt less than miraculous. It felt like punishment.

  The counselor at school had urged me to speak to my mother. “Be honest,” she said. “If you’re honest with your mother, then you can expect she’ll be honest with you.” A lovely sentiment, I thought, but she didn’t know Ma.

  My mouth felt very dry. My palms were sweaty. My throat felt tight.

  The storm howled outside the car. Ma gripped the steering wheel as though she were the captain of a steamship, as though if she could just keep the wheel steady, we’d hold to our course, even as the world melted around us, swirling, as if we were being drained from a cosmic tub.

  Then, abruptly, the rain ended. The wind hushed while the clouds seethed like molten lead, and for a moment I held my breath, searching the sky for signs of the copper-colored bruises that signaled a tornado was imminent, but the storm was moving on.

  Ma and I sat silently side by side, watching the water in the ditches lap angrily at the edges of the highway.

  Finally, a few rays of sunlight pierced the cloud cover and a truck zoomed down the road, splashing muddy water across our windshield.

  Ma pulled back onto the interstate.

  “I hope you’ll study harder in school this year. I’m depending on you. You’re the only one to go to college. You’ll have to support the others when I’m gone.”

  It was like a miracle, I thought. As if Ma had a groove in her brain where she could set the needle so that she’d never skip a track. And I realized she’d probably been an excellent student indeed, far better than I, a kind of genius even. I must truly have been a great disappointment, the way my concentration could be broken by something as ephemeral as the weather.

  And, like that, the moment was gone.

  I knew I couldn’t confront my mother then and ask her to tell me the truth, to explain to me why she hadn’t told me before. Questioning my mother felt like questioning her love. I hadn’t the nerve.

  When I was eighteen, just before I left for college, my older sister, Sourdi, told me the truth. She explained to me that I’d been adopted, a wartime arrangement that was never meant to have been permanent. In 1975, as the Khmer Rouge were poised to take over Cambodia, my birth mother fell ill after her latest child, a son, was born. My father had fled the country, afraid for his life. He’d been associated with a faction in the government that was no longer in power. As the American war in Vietnam spread to Cambodia and Laos, as American bombs laid waste to the countryside and refugees flooded into the cities, the American-backed government of Lon Nol grew increasingly unpopular, and its ministers increasingly paranoid. They sensed potential threats from everywhere—from the Chinese merchants, whom they accused of being a fifth column for China; from those loyal to Prince Sihanouk, whom they suspected of plotting against them; from their own soldiers, whom they increasingly refused to arm.

  Then, one day, soldiers came to the house, threatening to shoot my father, and my mother thought to shout, “Go ahead! Kill him! He’s caused me nothing but trouble!” She complained that as a husband he was worthless. They used to be rich but now they were poor. What kind of life was this? She shouted loudly so everyone could hear, the soldiers, the servants, the neighbors. She wanted them to hear how much she hated her husband so they would think he was weak, not powerful, not someone who could overthrow a government. The soldiers left that day without shooting my father, but he knew he had to leave. Who knew when they’d come back? Who knew when they’d change their minds? My mother agreed, and my father fled in the night, promising to send for her and the children when he was safe and established in another country. He did not know, could not know, that the Khmer Rouge would take over the capital before he could send for my mother. No one believed Pol Pot could win. No one knew what he was planning.

  Before the fall of Phnom Penh, my mother made a decision. She gave me, a precocious, talkative, energetic toddler, to her younger sister to take care of. She knew I enjoyed staying at my aunt’s house, playing with my older cousin Sourdi. My aunt was energetic, her husband kind; they had gotten used to taking care of me while my mother had been recovering from the various illnesses that afflicted her.

  Then, in the chaos of the Khmer Rouge takeover, I was evacuated with my aunt’s family to the countryside. My mother and her sister were separated. They did not know how to find each other. My aunt raised me as her own, taught me to call her Ma the same as her children. She changed my name, calling me by my nickname, Neary, “gentle girl,” and not Channary, “moon-faced girl,” a fancy name for a different era. The Khmer Rouge were killing city people, the educated, the business classes, the Chinese, the Muslims, and then anyone they grew suspicious of—the pale-skinned, the myopic, the clever, the poor, the dark-skinned, the far-sighted. Eventually, I escaped with my aunt’s family to a refugee camp in Thailand, never suspecting that the woman I called Ma was not really my mother, or that the siblings I grew up with were really my cousins.

  I would not see my real mother and father again until I was eleven and living in Texas, where my family had been sponsored by a Baptist church to come to America. The rest of our extended family—grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins—had all died as far as we knew.

  One day we received a letter through the Red Cross: a man named Chhouen Suoheng was writing to Ma, saying he and his wife had been looking for her for years. Ma was overjoyed to discover that her older sister was alive and in America, but Sourdi was worried. I didn’t know then that she knew these were my real parents and that she was afraid they were going to take me away.

  After he found us, this man whom I called Uncle, just as Sourdi did, invited us to move in with him and his wife, to help them run “the family business,” as he called it, a Chinese restaurant they’d purchased in a small town in Nebraska.

  Our reunion was fraught with troubles. No one told me the truth. I called my birth mother Auntie, my father Uncle. Auntie was ill, suffering from PTSD and depression. She’d been wounded in the war, her face scarred beyond recognition. Once she’d been a beautiful woman; now her face was split in two by a long purple scar, dark on one side, shiny and light with scar tissue on the other. She was addicted to painkillers. She took too many antidepressants. Her moods varied with the drugs.

  Worse, she didn’t like the Americanized child I’d become. She found me rude and loud, nothing like the refined daughter she remembered. She blamed her sister for having raised me wrong. I
had no idea why this woman stared at me so intently and criticized my every move. I had difficulty understanding her Khmer; she had difficulty understanding my English. She grew increasingly paranoid, certain Ma was having an affair with her husband, convinced they were planning to abandon her. She became obsessed with finding her oldest son, hoping he’d survived the Khmer Rouge. She set fire to the restaurant, lashing out at the people around her. Fortunately, the damage to the Palace was repairable. However, the damage to our family was not.

  My father in desperation sold his stake in the restaurant and moved with her to Southern California, where they opened a donut shop and devoted themselves to tracking down their eldest son. But the trail ran cold, and my birth mother grew more depressed. She ended up overdosing when I was in high school. Suicide or accident, we’ll never know. Despondent, wracked by guilt, honoring his wife’s last wishes perhaps, my father broke all ties with our side of the family. We assumed he was still looking for his son.

  I would never have known the true story behind the people I called Auntie and Uncle if Sourdi hadn’t told me just before I left for college. She seemed to think it was a gift to tell me the truth.

  Maybe I should have left well enough alone, but the truth had a way of sitting under my skin, like grit in an oyster. I wanted to rub it into a pearl, I wanted to expel this scratchy thing that kept me from feeling wholly myself.

  I wanted to know why my father had rejected me. For that’s how I saw Uncle’s behavior. Because he had not claimed me as his own and asked for my return, I assumed he had not wanted me.