Thinking of My Mother

My mother grew up with her grand-mother. Her father was killed during the Pol-Pot when she was a baby. After the Pol-Pot collapsed, her mother walked to the Khmer-Thai border to collect humanitarian-aids distributed by the UN, and she got stuck there due to the civil war raging. I would guess that was when my mom was around 3 or 4. She then lived with her grand-mother and an aunt who was more or less ten years older than her. Her grandmother had some land and orchard, and my mom talked about she had a lot of food growing up. But she seemed jealous of my great-aunt who she thought received more attention. Her mother got remarriage at the border and stayed there because it was too dangerous to walk back. Whenever there were villagers came back to the village, my grandmother sent words, medicine, gold and whatever she had back to her daughter and mother and sister. My mother said she found instant noodle to be very tasty and she would ate every last drop of it.

When she was six, my mom went to register herself for school, but because she looked so small, they put her in a class for pre-school. It was in someone house because they didn’t have a classroom for it. Her grandmother wasn’t that interested in that, she thought girls who go to school could write love letters to their lovers and that was not a good thing. However, her grandmother didn’t stop her from going to school. My mom talked about how hard it was to get pencil and paper, I think this was probably due to the country didn’t even have enough to eat. After a few weeks in the pre-school, the teacher believed she should go to first grad.

I think my mother really enjoyed going to school, there was a sweetness and playful tone every time she talked about her school years. The village used kerosene lamps to light during the night and her grandmother didn’t want her to use it for reading because it was expensive, the solution was she read by pointing incense to the letters in the books. These were not novel and stuffs like that, they didn’t have any of those, she was reading her notes. I have the sense that she remembered everything they taught her. She said she woke up to review her lesson and then when there was enough light, she had to go carry water from the river to refill the big jars in the house before she could go to school. To be frank, I am not sure at what year she started carrying the water.

She talked about lots of odd things in school like she hated the military training in middle school, she said she couldn’t crawl like other, and she talked about some soldiers mocking her and her friends when she carried water up to a military post on the top of a mountain. Another story I remember well is she talked about she couldn’t go to study with one of her teachers because she was a girl. This was not discrimination on the teacher part, but this was a informal class at one of the teacher’s house, and because as a girl she couldn’t stay overnight outside her house. There were other male students who stayed with this teacher and tried to learn things from him and in turn they would go help the teacher did fishing in the early morning. She would copied note from one of these students. She said the teacher was very educated. He was from Phnom Penh and married a village girl and pretended to be half-witted so the Pol-Pot didn’t kill him.

I listen to Khmer songs in the 60s to try to grasp the world my mother grew up in. I know she grew up in the 80s and 90s, but I think Cambodia didn’t change much between the 60s to the 90s. My mother said when she was little, every Sunday, the Voice of America played two songs at the end of their program and she would wait at one of the neighbours’ who had a radio to listen to these songs. When I was little, I didn’t really like those songs, but I’ve grown to be pretty fond of them these days. These days those songs give me a picture of quiet Cambodia, rainy, lush and peaceful, where rural areas were far apart and had very little contact with one another and the outside world. Not much happened on the surface and people would observe every little thing that happened around them. One of the songs I like talks about a girl bathing in a water-fall deep in the jungle. Surrounded by the wild flowers and birds, she was reflecting on the violent stir happening inside as she realised how much she love a man, she was perplexed by her ability to have such love intense. There is a Khmer phrase that express uncontrollable love “I love you so much, I’d swallow you whole”, this is meant to protect someone. I heard people talked about those who just sit around and sobbed when contemplating about their lovers, the villagers thought that were the result of voodoo and not real love. Another song talks about a fisherman daughter siting by the river in an evening, she observed the golden wave crushing and following one other, and listened to the thunders from afar. The fish smell on her made her unfit for a man she love and she resigned. In another song, a guy was standing in front his lover’s grave. He smelled incense and smoke from candles, as the vultures flying overhead, he argued with fate itself, blaming fate for being cruel, he begged the nearby the trees to fall down and crush him to death and that all the volcanos to explode and destroy the whole of earth. One of my mother’s favourite song is about a white female elephant wandering, grazing bamboo leaves, following the herd. The elephant think about its mother and wonders if the mother was shot by poacher or lost somewhere in the wood. Her grandmother didn’t like the song because it also say living with other is not like with your own mother.

I can only extrapolate from the picture of my village when I was little to have a glimpse of the world my mother grew up with. The dried season is from October to April. It is dried and hot and things look somewhat dusted. The cicada sounds embedded in the air. The mangoes ripped in April, there are so much of them that we had to preserve them, and there were lots of jackfruit and lots of other fruits too. There were papaya, banana, guava and other fruits and vegetable all year round. We eat almost every part of these plants and almost at every state of their life. We cook banana when they are green, the banana trunk and flowers were used as vegetable and the leaves were used for packaging. When hungry, I went around the farm to find fruits. Sometime I went around with a tool to dig for crickets. I talked with my mom about what to make for dinner from afternoon until evening. Our house were close, and we just chilled. People sit around, napping or gossiping. There were people who try to grow things, but there weren’t much they could do as it was dried and we didn’t have any water-pumping-machine. Some people repair their house, especially the roof, and those who had cows try to fatten their ox to prepare them for ploughing the rice paddy during the rainy season. The monsoon season is between May and October. Heavy rains fell with frequent thunder and lighting. People grudged going out to find grass for their cow or feed their pigs. The street was mudded and the trees were almost dark green, with their leaves have with water. My village was almost empty of people because many of them stayed in the rice paddy. People also went to collect bamboo shoots, vegetables and mushroom in the forest. We eat lots of frogs fish, water-bugs, snails and other crustaceans from the rice paddy and the pond around.

People call the period between December and January as cold season. It is divided further into three parts and the name given to each part are based on three type of flowers that bloom during that season, for example the cold of such and such flower. A skinny lady near my house got up very early to collect leaves around her house to start a bonfire. When I got up, I went to sit with her and her grandson, who was my childhood best friend. There were other people come to join us too. She told us folklores or story about the Pol Pot. Sometime we threw tuber or green banana into the fire and ate those when cooked. I still remember the aroma of burning leaves and the scene where I sit with them.

For a few weeks during this cold season, rivers that run through my village were full of fish that came from the Tonle-Sab, one of the biggest fresh-water body in South-East Asia. Men in the villages went to fish, sometime overnight, the children were tasked to bring the fish back home, and the women would gut them, preserve them as fermentation or slow-grill-drying. I remember I was so excited running back and forth between the river and the village, either carrying food from the house the river, fish back to the village. The preserved fish was one of the main source of protein we had.

The UN estimated that more than half of the children in Cambodia were malnourished, even up to 2000. I think I was born in a lucky area where there were lots of fruits, vegetables, and fish. My area probably had around ten houses built close to each other, with our farms radiating from the houses, and further away was the rice paddy. Our houses were made of wood and grass, and sometimes had zinc roofs, and had two floors. The lower floor did not have walls, let alone doors, there were just wood support standing and between them crisscrossed hammocks made from banana fibre or old clothes and a few bed frames. This was where people actually lived. The upper floor were used to store valuable properties such as pillows, new clothes and some clean pots and pans used on religious occasions. The elders said that our house weren’t always that small and flimsy; we used to have strong wood houses with tiles roof, but the Pol Pot regime burned most of those down to bring about equality. People go back and forth to each other as if they were family members of the household, and actually, many of us were related. If I was playing at my friend’s house, people there would ask me for help if they needed any, and when it was time to eat, I would just eat with them, and my parents didn't worry I was lost because they could see me or at least hear me. We shared everything, ranging from pots and pans to farm equipment to clothes. People knew the details of what plants and herbs grown on each other's land because when we cooked, if we didn’t have any ingredient, we would ask each other, and if they weren’t at home, we would just take it. When we cooked something unusual, they would go around and share it with everyone else, at least with those whose houses were adjacent to us.

There were rarely any visitors to our village. Sometime my relative from another district came to visit us and that was an excuse to kill a chicken. The most frequent visitors were people who refilled lighters for a fee. Sometimes, a circus came to perform tricks, and they tried to sell their medicines. People would flock to watch them and their monkeys. As I grew older, more people came to our village as the dirt road through the village was gradually improved, and these days it is asphalt. The sounds of vehicles had become more and more frequent. Reflecting backward to my mother’s time, I would guess it was much quieter than when I was little, and the nights were probably darker as they used less kerosene. I remember when I was little, people used fish oil lamb to light at night and it gave off an odd fishy smell. I can see that the sources of disruption in daily life were weddings, funerals, and a few major religious events.

My villagers would describe themselves as Buddhist. Every houses had a shrine with Buddha’s drawing and people offering flowers and water and pray to the shrine. Elderly people went to the pagoda four times per month, ideally I mean, based on luna calendar. Every morning, the monk walked around the village and many people waited to offer them food and money. People considered becoming a monk as one of the highest honour someone can bring to their family. Some time people invited monks to have lunch at their place and people would kneel before them. To walk over a monk’s shadow is considered to be a sin. On the top of Buddhism, the villager also believed in local spirits. Some of them had origins that we knew of and some we didn’t. They lived on all sort of beings, such as big trees, large snakes, termite hills, brook, or even in a person, and they protect those things. If one happened to pee on a termite hill that a spirit lived on, the spirit could make them sick and they had to offer wine and banana to appease the spirit. There were a few people in the village that could allow these spirit to take over their body temporarily so that people could talk, argue, reason and bargain with the spirits. Sometime when someone lost something, say a cow, they could go to talk with one of these spirits and see if they could advise something. People believed in rebirth, but at the same time, they also believed in some sort of family spirit. If some people in the large extended family did something wrong, the family spirit would punish a member of the family, and to fix this, people has to come together and resolve the issue. An example of problem I can remember are something like two members of the family were in conflict and the family spirit weren’t happy about this and they punish a third member. Another common problem was that if two people lived together as couple without any offering to the spirit, the spirit could make other people seriously ill. So I would say underneath the world of social interaction between human and our animals, one had to be observant to the world of the spirits and navigate with them appropriately if one to survive and do well. But I should note that mom didn’t seem to be believing in all of these that much. If we got sick, she would call a doctor instead of consulting local spirit. She did participate in these events when the village celebrated it, but she wouldn’t initiate it. My mother didn’t even believe in ghosts while most of my villagers did.

As a child, my mother liked watching Chinese movies. There were people bringing TV from village to village to let people watch it for a fee. I don’t know how frequent this was. She said sometime she couldn’t pay for it and just listened to the voice outside their clothes-walled area. There were also a kind of classical play came to perform in the village. When I was little, I still saw them came one or twice every year. They dressed up colourfully and glittering and wore ashen makeup and sang Khmer classical songs. Usually they stayed in the primary school in the village. My mom said she and her friends liked to dress up and performed those plays. She said she didn’t have supple limbs as her friends and they had fine fingers like thorns on the orange trees. She played giant role because she was chubby and her friends play the role of prince and princess.

The Pol Pot ran off to the Khmer-Thai border and some of them hid in the wood. The village life stopped during their raids. They came during one of the play, and people panicked and ran over a lady. People thought they came to kill. There was a story that they took an entire family and killed all of them near the river. They also came to asked for food and tobacco. My mom said her grandma gave whatever she had in the house to the Pol Pot solider. Once her grandmother climbed a tree. When the Pol Pot left, people tried to find her but she didn’t answer them even she was just above them. When I grew up, there were no Pol Pot coming anymore. The country had achieved peace. But people talked about them all the time. Back then I couldn’t understand it much. But I always had this idea that the government should put the Pol Pot and his team in a cage, and drove them around the country so people could throw stuffs at them.

My mother won a seat to go to high school. This didn’t mean she got financial support or anything like that. The Pot-Pol were overthrown by the Vietnamese, who then installed a Vietnam friendly government in Phnom Penh. The western power and China were not happy about this and they considered the Phnom Penh government as illegal. The Pol Pot held Cambodia seat in the UN until 1991. The US didn’t give, and in some cases prevented, aids to go to the government in Phnom Penh and its people, and my grandmother had to walk hundreds of kilometres to the border to get the UN’s aids. As the Pol-Pot tried to take back control, the government made it hard for people to pass middle school exam because they wanted to send those who failed to the army. The military training that my mother hate was a preparation that if the situation got worse, they would sent girls to the front line. My mother was one of the few people in her middle school who got a seat. But she couldn’t go to high school because it was at the town. She accepted this as one accept that human didn’t like fly like birds does.

I guess by now she was around fifteen. Unable to go to any high school, she wanted to do sewing. She asked her grand-mother to do an apprenticeship with a master who lived in another village. Her grand-mother said she didn’t have the money to pay for the fee. They got into some argument and I don’t know how things escalated, but I think her grand-mother said my mother needed to do a reality check, that she was only an orphan after all. My mother attempted suicide by taking a bunch of pills before she went to bed. They found her didn’t wake up as her routine to fetch water. They were able to save her. Other relatives intervened and chipped in some money to pay for her apprenticeship.

The sewing master was a middle-aged lady. She had several children and some of them were girls around my mother’s age, and they stayed friends until my mom passed away. My mother biked to their place and often stayed with them. They were well-off and they had a wedding salon business. They needed hands and my mom helped them. They were kind to her. She talked about how she acquired a taste for coffee as she stayed with them, sometimes drinking a jug of coffee. The wedding salon often took her to travel to faraway villages. This family also had a TV so my mother watched all the Chinese movies she wanted after she helped them collect the fee. In her spare time from sewing, she bought vegetables in the village and biked to the town to sell them. This was how she got money to buy fabric to practice her sewing. My imagination of this period of her life is quite fun and free. She was a lot more independent, she met new people and was learning new skills.

In 1991, her mother returned to the village with her husband and two children. A political settlement between all factions in the civil war had been reached, known as the Paris Accord. I think this is due to all major powers no longer being interested in sponsoring either side of the war. A UN agency was created to run the country temporarily until the election was to be held in 1993 to form a new government. All parties in the war could join the election.

My mother got along well with her stepfather and had a very good relationship with her siblings. Her mother arranged for her to get married when she was 19. To take my grandmother's side, most of my mom’s friends in the village had got married by this time. I don’t know what was the living arrangement.

My father had dark skin as charcoal, while my mother was fair as a boiled egg. He was almost 10 years older than her. In Cambodia, some people drink water that rinsed over the Buddha or other sacred statue. When my mother protested about the look of the man her mother wanted her to marry, her mother said she wouldn’t wash her husband and drink from that. I talked about marriage with my grandmother when I thought my parents should divorce. To my grandmother, marriage is a practical thing for both men and women. One should marry someone who is capable in the art of surviving. My grandmother met my father at the refugee camp and she believed my father was entrepreneurial and he didn’t drink. He did gamble though, but my grandmother didn’t mind that because she did it too.

In Cambodia, a wedding ceremony is a serious business and can be melancholic. It is a two-day event, with most of the relatives from both sides participating. There are around ten ceremonies observed during a wedding, each lasting about an hour. These ceremonies serve different purposes, ranging from asking permission from deceased relatives and the local spirits for the union to one intended to enhance the couple’s sexual desire (though it is not explicitly talked as such). The wedding begins with the bride and groom observing ceremonies separately, and gradually they perform them closer together. The event ends with the groom walking behind the bride, holding her scarf as she walks forward, symbolizing his commitment to follow her. Many people cry during weddings. The bride and groom cry, realizing they are leaving behind the carefree life of being single. The parents and relatives cry, believing their beloved children might move to a faraway district. My mom cried during one of the ceremonies where she was led to sit next to her husband-to-be. As with other aspects of Cambodian life, a band of traditional music performs from the beginning to the end, and the tones are often quite bemoaning.

The entire event incorporates both animistic and Buddhist elements, reflecting the spiritual beliefs that Cambodian people hold.

After a while, my grandmother left to Phnom Penh when her husband got a job there. My aunt and uncle also went with them. A bit about my grandmother’s remarriage. Her husband had a wife before marrying her. He married her because his wife decided to emigrate to the US and had left home for a while to wait for the departure, at least that’s what they said. On the day of the marriage, the wife came back and helped prepare the food for the ceremony. This is not usual at all, her case is the only one that I know of of this kind of arrangement. My grandmother and that lady have been pretty good friends since I ever understood the relation. After my grandmother got to Phnom Penh with her husband, she left the house to work in an orphanage as a cook. She didn’t need to do that but her husband drank and was verbally abusive toward the other wife. He didn’t mess around with my grandmother; she beat him a few times, but she said she couldn’t stay in that house. These days all of them are still married, I don’t know about the legality. But my grandmother only visits the other wife, that’s what it sounds like to me.

The villagers considered my grandmother as unusual, with a mixture of admiration and criticism. People don’t leave the village nor do they marry people they didn’t know any family history about. The village liked my grandmother because she was quick, effective, and could manage complicated things. They said she could catch a baby falling while trying to catch a plate at the same time. I don’t know if this is true. But I also agree that she is out of place among the villagers. Now she is living in a remote area in Cambodia close to the Vietnamese border, driving a motorcycle on the mountains and has had several accidents. She lives pretty close to a few bands of used-to-be hunter-gatherers. My uncle wants her to stay with him in the city, but my grandmother finds life in the city depressing and believes it would make her sick. She chose this, in my opinion, because she doesn’t want to deal with family life. At her age, people live with their children, helping them look after the grandchildren, but I don’t think my grandmother likes small children.

I listened to lots of her mountain stories. She told me about one member of the tribe broke their legs when collecting wood. Their healer left this person in a cottage in the jungle and at night a tiger came to lick to wound and broken bones heal. My grandmother was very impressed by this. My mother simply didn’t believe in it. Once my grandmother believed she had to become a monk for one month to cure her illness and she decided to do that in a pagoda near my district, my mother was enthusiastic and encourage her mother to come and do it. She said the very least it made her mother rest for a month.

My aunt and uncle complain about my grandmother living in the mountain. (I never visit here place, it takes at least a day by car to get there, my parents and sister visited the place a few times). They worries she had accident or fall ill without people near her, and they also resent her using their money for her farm projects. I defend her choice and explain to my aunt and uncle that if it make her happy, why not, those farm projects don’t cost that much money. My mother said she doesn’t feel love from her mother as her mother was never available. My mom thought the farm was more important to my grand-mother than the family. Since my mother passed way, I talk a bit more with my grandmother, frankly I can’t quite detect her grief, but I also don’t think she doesn’t love my mother.

The marriage to my father both freed my mother and tied her down. As a married woman, she could now make decision by herself, but she also had a family to take care. Good news was my father often was willing to take care of me so my mother could travel far from the village. This didn’t happen that often, maybe one or twice very year or so, but it was better than before she was married. At the turn of the century, there was a big celebration at Angkor Wat. I was a toddler. My mom wanted to go there, but the other villager believed that the world temperature would drop to below zero Celsius in that day and could kill them. My mother was able to convince another person in the village to go with her. I only know this event because later she talked about the fireworks she saw. I’d thought about this a bit when I went to see firework at the Charles river MIT on July 4th, 2023. Another big trip she took when I was toddler was when she went to the sea. This is almost the opposite side of Cambodia with our province. Back then I would guess it was a two days to travel one way. My father supported and encouraged traveling. Later in life, my mother travel to a lot more places and more often, those were with me, my father or she did it with other people. She went to most places in Cambodia and even been to Vietnam and Thailand.

My father was obsessed with chicken. There was a version of cock-fighting where they had cockerels fought with the rules similar to that of boxing. My father kept lots of chicken for that. He crossbred them and gave many of them names. He got up at four or five to train the male chickens to build endurance. He ran with them and made them rehearse fights. He had a pot of herbal medicine that he boiled to lukewarm and used to warm hot towels that he applied on his chickens. The chickens walked everywhere in the house, sometimes stepping on food or clothes. They pooped everywhere. My mother and I were so fed-up with them, but my father insisted on keeping them. My mother thought the chickens were useless because usually he didn’t allow us to eat them, not even the female ones, when we needed it. She also didn’t like his friends who came to talk with him about the chickens. These people sometimes stayed for hours and just sat and looked at the chickens. Lots of them tried to buy my father’s chickens; they could offer $25 to $200 for a male chicken, but my father usually refused to sell them. He often cited the high price of his chickens as the reason he kept them. My mother said she would rather not get anything from the chickens as long as they didn’t annoy her.

My father travels almost continuously. My mother said he didn’t seem to be able to stay home. I doubt if he travels for the liberal reason to experience things. He has no interest in tourist destinations whatsoever. He just likes to go out with his motorcycle or car to see what people are doing with their farms or stuff like that. He used to take me with him a few times, and he stopped at his friend’s or acquaintance’s place and talked with them. I heard that when he traveled to new places where he didn’t know anyone, he would stop at a house and talk with them, and in this way, he got to know them. My mother said his friends were not serious friends because when he was sick, they never visited him for a hello or anything. My father says he gets a lot of business ideas from his friends. My mother didn’t seem to care too much if my father went somewhere or not, but she definitely didn’t like it when he traveled when there was work to be done at home.

Among the people who live around us, probably half of them don’t talk with my father. I think each of them has had arguments with him several times on one thing or another. It can be started by him or by them. My father doesn’t believe in double-faced people. If he thinks someone does something wrong, he will say it to their face. He can dislike a family because he dislikes one person in the house. When I was little, he used to trap and kill some villagers’ dogs when the dogs came to attack his chickens. Those who still talk with him also don’t like his bad mouth, but they think he is good on the inside. One of my villagers is pretty stingy, and I’ve heard that she gave him some money because she pitied him. This is probably half a month to a month of money she would spend on her food. She herself didn’t talk with him a few times before. My father can be helpful. He would drive people around to places, hospitals, or even courtrooms. He is not afraid of getting into arguments to defend people. There was an old lady near us who was mistreated badly by her niece. She gave her land to them, and when an argument broke out, they chased her from the land. The villagers thought it was unfair but didn’t want to engage because they already predicted this outcome and had told the lady about it. They also worried that if the niece and aunt got back together, they would be on the wrong side, as this had happened before. My father helped the lady in this case and accompanied her to court for over a year. He offered her to stay with him and said she could eat whatever food he had, but she chose to live elsewhere. I don’t know why, but one theory is that my family’s house is too close to her niece’s.

As far as I know, my mother didn’t have arguments with the neighbors. I don’t know how my father’s arguments with others affected her, but my father and my great-aunt fought a lot, and I would guess their conflict gave my mother a lot of headaches as she had to manage them. After my mother passed away, when I talked with my great-aunt and my father, they would tell me about each other’s faults. I guess they both had some points, but it was really a lot.

My grandma probably be right to think my father is entrepreneurial. My father has changed so many trades and businesses since I could remember things. The first thing I remember was we were sleeping in an orange orchard. My parents bought the fruit when they were still small and green; some people needed money and they sold their fruit early. My parents took care of the fruit tree by watering them and waiting for them to ripen and then bringing them to sell in the market at town. I remember my father grumbled when my mom and I walked to the village at night to watch TV with other villagers. He was left alone and he was afraid of ghost. Later we were selling sugarcane juice to middle school students in a nearby district. Then my parents moved to sell it in a high school. I remember the scene where my parents went to meet the high school principal and we brought a bag of oranges for him. Those days, quite often, I went with them to the high school, riding a cart with my mother while my father rode a motorcycle pulling it. Later, my father sold the only piece of land he inherited from his mother to buy a threshing machine. My parents took these machines to the rice field to rent them to the farmers, and they took rice as a fee. They often spent multiple nights there, and I stayed with my great aunt, my mother’s aunt whom she grew up with. I am not very sure how much my mother was into that business, but my father was very keen. When he pulled the family to do something, my mother had to be fully working for it even though she was anxious about the money its involve. During the selling of the sugarcane juice, most of the time it was my mother who stood selling it, and my father would go to do some gambling nearby with the excuse of finding a place for me to nap. For the threshing machine, he would control that machine with help from a few workers, and my mother went around to find people who wanted to rent it. Well, at least this is the account I heard from my mother, and my father definitely thinks this didn’t give him enough credit. But there were times I saw with my own eyes that supported my mother’s claim. When we got the fee as rice, she was the one in charge of drying it. This is a laborious and heavy process as it involves moving tons of rice each day, spreading them thin on the ground in the morning to dry under the sun, and collecting them back to avoid humidity at night, or worse, rain.

I remembered spending lots of time with my mom talking about what to make for dinner and stuff like that while my father went out for cock-fighting. My mother liked to try new food, and now that she had a family, she could afford to test a lot more things. She said she could tell the ingredients in a food by just tasting it and then would try to reconstruct those foods. However, she rarely had all the ingredients and tools to do that. As a child, I was rather specific with my food. I only ate food that I used to eat, and I was not that interested in my mother’s creations. I remember she tried to add new stuff into my food, suggesting it improved the taste, and I just said I knew what I liked to eat and she didn’t need to suggest anything.

Before I could go to play with my friends, my mom made me do some chores and some farm work. She said I needed to be tough so that when difficult times come, I would be prepared. When I was in primary school, I needed to do some study first before I could go to watch TV with my neighbor. I sensed that my mother continued to like education throughout her life. When I was in middle school, she said she wanted to go back to school when things settled better. She told me she found the students in uniform to be very beautiful. They looked like angels to her. But things never got better for her; she fell sick and there were always things to do. I’d thought I would be able to help her go back to school one day.

My mother had some irritation on the skin on her head. It caused her itches. She went to a skin specialist but it didn’t help. She used lots of products, both chemical and natural, but it didn’t get better. She would ask people to massage her head, scratch it, and apply ointments and stuff like that for her. I did that many times. I remember applying a mixture of sulfur with coconut oil on the itch on her head. At one point, she shaved her hair off. She didn’t like how it made her look, but she was desperate. It didn’t help. I don’t quite remember how things turned, but I think my mom’s health deteriorated from there. She started to have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart issues, and more. There were a few theories to explain this. My father said my mom’s eating habits were not good, that she would eat anything without thinking of its consequence. My mom didn’t want to throw food away, and she didn’t like to have food left in the kitchen as she would clean everything before she went to bed, so the only option was to eat everything. I think this theory is too far, but it does contain some truth. Another explanation is that my mom received too much wrong treatment for her skin problem. There was an injection in particular that sounds crazy. There was a joint medicine used in terminal patients that one of its effects is suppressing itch.

When I was around sixth grade, my parents went to the hospital more and more frequently. And then she got pregnant; she went to a children’s hospital in Siem Reap. She stayed there for a few months with my father. I didn’t know what was happening. I stayed with my great-aunt. I remember when my mom was recommended to change the hospital, and when she traveled from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, she asked one of the villagers to take me to meet her at a café, and we had breakfast together. Later, I learned that she was very sick back then but she didn’t take much medicine because she worried it could affect the pregnancy. My parents always wanted more kids, and when she was pregnant, the doctor warned her it could have lots of complications and they suggested abortion. She stayed in Phnom Penh for a while, and when it was time to deliver, they sent her to give birth at Siem Reap. This was over a 300 km car ride on bumpy roads. The baby was delivered at Siem Reap Angkor Hospital. My grandmother and my father were with her. However, the baby boy passed away a day after birth. My grandmother left a few days later. People said they didn’t believe my mom would survive, and they wanted to send her to Vietnam. But she didn’t have the money and decided to get treatment at a clinic in our province. Miraculously, she got better in three months.

She came back home. She couldn’t do the same heavy work as she used to, but she continued to do the house work and everything as usual. She was very clean. We used wood for cooking and the smoke darken the pots and pans. She scratched them almost everyday to make them shine. The tree around the house sheds lots of leaves, there were dust from the street as people and animal walks, all those required lots of labor to keep the house clean. She kept going to receive treatment from the doctor who treated her after the child birth. He got his training in Vietnam and was the head of the provincial military hospital. We were so grateful of him and my mother often brings fruit for him and his family.

Later, my mother got pregnant again. I was about to finish my middle school. The doctor was furious, he thought it wasn’t safe for her and strongly recommend her to abort it. She agreed to that in principle and they waited for the abortion specialist to discuss the mater. They said they were not confident because she had waited somewhat too long already. I didn’t know too much of the story, only heard it from the discussion my parents had with the neighbour.

I left home to stay in the town for high school. My mother would had done that if she had the support. She found a dorm for me to stay, however, my friends from the village stayed in a pagoda. The dorm was sponsored by a French NGO, they worked in the refugee camp and after the camp was dissolved, they came to work helping poor students with potential to study in high school. The offered food and shelter and some money to spend at school. To be frank, I don’t think I was qualified as poor compared to other students in that dorm. My mother said she could pay for the dorm just to let me stay because they would have their eyes on me, however, we never paid and I got free food and shelter. Also I don’t think they would let us pay.

My mother provided me any money I need for study, this includes money some private classes I did for mathematical olympiad and books. She also told me to buy food. I spent around 50 USD dollar per months back then, and in my mind it was a lot of money but I could even pay for some of friends meal at several times per months. My sister was born a few months after I arrived the dorm. My father now had changed his business to dealing with mango plantation. At this point, I called home a few times per week with renting telephone. And because the phone was rent, I talked with my mom only a few minutes at a time. I guess I didn’t had much to talk with her either, the conversation mostly consist of what about our food and stuffs like that.

Around this time, the road from town to my village was much better than when I was little. In the past, despite the distance being around 18 km, people rarely went to town. Sometimes the flood destroyed part of the street and people couldn’t travel for a few weeks. When I went to high school, the street was better maintained and there were alternative roads that didn’t get flooded. Many more people had motorcycles. My parents had one, if not two, and the same with several of my villagers. My village had electricity from 5 pm to 9 pm that was run by burning wood. There was talk about soon having electricity from Thailand that would be 24/7, and these days they have it. People started to sleep outside the village, and some of my villagers moved to live in another district.

During high school, I was so absorbed with immediate things around me. I spent time with school work and my friends. On the weekend, I spent six hours at my teacher’s home solving math problems, and during breaks, I didn’t go home either. I met my mother when she took my sister to the hospital or when they brought me some fruits. My friends who lived in the pagoda biked back almost every weekend. When I went home, I stayed only a day or two and sometimes just overnight. I remember the first time I went back home, I slept near my parents and my sister. I cried, realizing how much I missed everything and I was worried that the elderly people in the village might die when I was away. My mother’s health wasn’t that great; she was hunched from carrying my baby sister. My sister probably had a stomach problem; she cried a lot, and my mom had to hug her for her to sleep. I didn’t know how much my mother slept back then. When I woke up, I always saw her carrying my sister. She got up at five to prepare food for my father and his workers.

By the time I was in high school, my father had started his mango business for a few years already. Mango trees naturally start flowering in January, and the fruit ripens around March and April. The rest of the time, they don’t give anything but green leaves and twigs. People rented their mango trees to my father, and he applied chemical sprays and fertilizer to make them give fruit outside their natural season. The price of the fruit is better than those in the natural season. When my father first did it, me or my mom helped him run the machine while he did the spraying. But as I went to high school, his business grew larger and he hired a few people to help him. My mother made breakfast and lunch for them to save money, and she thought people worked better if they were fed.

How did my father get into this mango business? While taking a bus, he was sitting next to someone who lived near the Vietnamese border. They told him about chemical products that induce mango trees to flower in any season. He got their number and later he went to visit them and learn more about it. In Cambodia, you would be considered rude and snobbish if you don’t talk to the passenger sitting next to you. People would talk about all sorts of things, from their work and their children to the story of their family members killed during the Pol Pot and how they survived it. However, people don’t usually visit the passenger they sit next to.

By the time I went to college, my father’s business expanded to producing around one hundred tons of mangoes every year. Now instead of producing for the domestic market, they sold the fruit to Vietnamese merchants who in turn shipped it to China. When the fruit was young, they wrapped them in paper bags, blocking off sunlight to make the skin look pretty.

My mother didn’t think the business was going as well as my father thought it was. To her, the investment cost was too high and my father neglected to count many of the expenses. They bought a new concrete house and a piece of farmland as a pet project. The land and the home were estimated to be around 170K USD. This was a lot of money in my village. And they had a car, a bike, a few motorcycles, and eleven cats. They had debt too, but they thought it was light and they could shrug it off anytime.

My parents started to have more serious arguments. Because my mom couldn’t help my father with his farm business, he complained about his workload. My mother said he should have known that and adjusted his expectations, and if the mango business was too intense, he could just stop it. My father had a relationship with a woman in another village. Our family knew each other. My father acted as if they were close friends. My mom knew about it. My grandmother thought it was a normal thing. She didn’t like it, but it was not the end of the world. To her, it was not unacceptable if a man had a mistress as long as he came back home and fulfilled his responsibilities in the family.

By this time, I talked more with my mother on the phone. I had my own phone now, and I would talk with my mom for over an hour at a time sometimes. This habit continued, and we talked on more and more serious matters. She told me that she found my father and the lady from the village together in one of our houses. She said she told my father she didn’t want to know anything about it and that it shouldn’t have happened at our home. This was the new home they bought and didn’t live in. My mother didn’t confront them. She left and only talked with my father about it later. I told her that I thought that was a dignified move. I said whether she wanted to continue with my father or not, it was up to her, and I wouldn’t have any problem with any decision she made. My father somehow wanted my mother to be friends with that lady. He said my mom should take my grandmother as a great example.

Throughout my undergrad years, I lived in Phnom Penh. I traveled quite a bit. Whenever I wanted to go somewhere, my parents would say go, and they paid for it. At this point, my parents paid for everything for me. I had quite a nice room to myself near the university. I went to cafes to meet with friends if I didn’t go to class. At some point, I got some tutoring jobs that could pay for my living. But it was rather boring; the students were either tired or not that interested. My mom said I shouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it. I could see my mother was happy when I was around, breathing, playing with my sister. She said she didn’t expect anything from me. She wanted me to go to school, study, and become a good person, and hopefully one day I could live by myself and not depend on her. And her initial wish was that I finished my high school.

I left for the US in November of 2018. In April of that year, my sister had some health issues and my mom took her to the hospital in Siem Reap. I went to join her in taking care of my sister. The hospital didn’t allow more than two people to take care of the patient, but my sister was very clingy to my mother and didn’t want my mom to leave her sight. I went there to help run any errands my mother needed. I slept under my sister’s bed with my mom, but usually she sit near my sister. When my sister got better and left the hospital, my father came to join us. We decided to take a trip around Siem Reap. We went to Angkor Wat a bit. After that, my mother suggested we take a boat trip to a floating village along the Tonle Sap lake. We went there and she said it looked better during the rainy season as there was more water and it was less hot. My parents and my sister had been on this kind of trip with my aunt before and they went farther than the trip I took with them. The water was the color of falling leaves, probably due to lots of boat traffic. There were lots of people living in small floating homes. We got to a place where the owner sold souvenirs over a floating crocodile farm. By the evening, I went to meet my friends before leaving for Phnom Penh, and my parents went back home.

Before I came to the US, I went back to my village to talk with my villagers. One neighbor and my grandma on my father’s side cried because they thought that was the last time they would see me. The rest were not that dramatic. I don’t know what was going on with my parents. I know my mom was happy, but I am curious if she shared some sentiment with the neighbor that was crying. In the village, we had people who came to the US as refugees after the war and then went back home. People’s feeling is that they are unpredictable. Those people help their relatives financially, so the villagers think the US is a very good place. On the day I flew, my parents, my grandma, my aunt and uncle, a few cousins, and many friends came to see me off at the airport. My father brought the mistress with him as they were some sort of close friends. There were some arguments in Phnom Penh, and he wanted to come back home before I left, but somehow he decided to stay. There was lots of photo-taking at the airport. Unlike the grandmother who cried, my grandmother on my mother’s side was pretty cheerful.

I think my sister, born when I left for high school, gave my mother a good substitute. She was more occupied with my sister. When my sister started school, my mom made breakfast for her and biked her to school every day. When she thought she was not strong enough to bike, she would walk to take her back from school. This might be about 2 to 3 km. My sister lied a lot. My mom gave her some pocket money and told her not to buy certain items, but she would get those and then lie about it. I heard that at one point my sister was angry at my mom and then she packed her clothes into a plastic bag and went to stay with one of my mom’s friends. As she grew older, she also helped my mom a lot with the housework. Before she could go to play with her friends, she had to do some chores first. I heard that she could cook lots of dishes by herself.

After I arrived in Boston, I called my mom quite often. We talked about my father, my sister, her health, the neighbors, or our relatives. I think by this time, she became more and more hopeless about her health. She no longer thought she could go to school. I could see she forgot things, like phone numbers and dates. But my impression is she was not lonely. Every time we talked, I was the one who mostly made the calls, and she was always with someone or talking on the phone. My father was away a lot, and it was a good thing because they would have arguments when he was home.

I planned to go home at Christmas 2019, but I went home a few weeks before the semester ended because my mother was in a coma. She had hyperglycemia. She was sent to the military hospital where she gave birth to my sister. My father called me, and everyone in my family was crying. They didn’t know what happened, and the doctors didn’t tell them what was happening. My grandmother came very quickly from her mountain house. . The villagers also came to vist my mother.We were able to afford a hospital room, so we could have as many people coming. Some of the villagers tried to clean the bathroom, and some just came because they thought she would die. I flew back and landed in Siem Reap. My father and my sister came to pick me up. By that time, my mom was already over the critical condition. She had an abscess deep in her left thigh, and they had to use lots of antibiotics, which in turn upset her stomach a lot. She was in severe pain after she woke up. My mom usually put up a strong face, but she no longer did that.

After the initial shock dissipated and my mom woke up, the villagers went back to their homes. They visited in small numbers and only came every few days. I was in the hospital with my grandmother, my sister, and one or two of my mother’s friends. My sister refused to leave the hospital. My father continued his mango business as usual and only came during the evening or when he brought food from our home when some of the villagers made it. When my mom was better, I left for Phnom Penh to renew my visa. My mother was in that hospital for 32 days, and she left the hospital in a wheelchair. I was only back at home for a few days, and it was time for me to leave again. The neighbor who cried before I first left was so surprised and very happy to see me again. My mom blamed herself, saying we could have taken a trip together; she had saved up some money.

This time I took off from Siem Reap. So only my family and my mom’s friends went to see me off. I think we went to have a nice dinner before I left. I wanted someone to help my mother and suggested that she should stay in the new house because it was more convenient. She agreed to those. We asked a neighbor to come cook for her every day and do some cleaning around the house. We paid them a small fee. I think this happened for around a few months, but my mother stopped that because she didn’t want to pay, even though I was the one paying for it.

When COVID started, I told my parents to be careful. People were terrified. My parents had enough food to last for months. I think they were pretty careful and also scared. There were people taken from their homes by the government and put in schools and places like that because they tested positive. I was worried that if they took my mom to those places, she wouldn’t be able to cope with it. One of the bad things about COVID was that my mom couldn’t go to the hospital for her diabetes treatment. She could go to get medicine, but she couldn’t meet her doctor to discuss anything. When the initial shock disappeared, people started going out. They were wearing masks and all, but they were no longer confined to their homes. However, my mother still couldn’t meet her doctor.

Things were unkind to my mother. She had a few accidents. First, there was a cow running over her. I don’t know the details. She was at home but forgot to close the gate, and a cow escaped from the rope that tied it and ran around. She didn’t talk much about how serious it was. My father blamed her for being reckless and forgetting to close the fence. Later she was stung by a bunch of bees when a neighbor tried to harvest bee larvae from a giant bee nest on a tree nearby. She was trying to put a mosquito net for my sister, and during that time the bees stung her.

My mother also was very worried about the debt. I think this might be one of the reasons she stayed with my father. When COVID hit, the Vietnamese merchants didn’t come to buy the mango, and my father lost all his mango business. They had to pay monthly interest for the loan they took for the investment, but they didn’t have income to do that. The house and land prices collapsed. They sold the house and the land for half of the original price and still couldn’t pay all their debt. There were a bunch of other miscalculations and wrong investments. People blamed each other. My mother said my father should have listened to us to pause the business, and my father said we lost because my mother used all the money for the hospital payment. A fortune-teller told him that he would have 400K in 2022 but before it happened, it must be kept secret to everyone except my mother; otherwise, he would lose everything. Somehow my mother told this to my aunt. My father kept blaming my mother about this, saying her mouth didn’t have any cover. Usually, he didn’t care about fortune-tellers, but it seemed he was so serious about the aforementioned prediction.

When I talked with my mom, she told me a lot about what my father said to her. She repeated his words almost verbatim. My sister was glad if he wasn’t home, and if my father was home, she would go to play with her friends. He had more mistresses, and we were baffled how those people even liked him. We didn’t think he gave them money. I kept my stand with my mom about the issue that it is up to her. I didn’t talk much with my father. He didn’t use a phone that could call via the internet. Besides, I kinda didn’t want to talk and didn’t know what to talk about with him. I used to talk with him when we were in a car together, and I told him my opinion of their marriage—more or less the same thing I told my mother. I said they had had two children together and went through a lot. If living together meant one of them was unhappy, they should depart but act as adults and be kind to one another. I think at one point my father wanted to get my contact, but my mother didn’t give him my number.

My father didn’t want to leave the family with divorce. He wanted everything. I could see my mother wanted to win my father, and she was hurt. One time, my father wanted to bring an electric fan to his farm. My mother thought he wanted to bring it to his mistress’s house. My mother gave an excuse that my sister needed it, and somehow they got into a fight over that. Eventually, my father destroyed the fan. I gave her my cold opinion. I said what he had done to her was unacceptable, it was cruel, and when someone did that to us, we shouldn’t value them anymore, and that should imply they couldn’t hurt us, that we shouldn’t pay attention to their actions nor their words. This is the way to limit their destruction on our peace. To fight back, to try to win, all amounts to giving them significance, which they don’t deserve. We should be strategic and only take a fight that has practical importance. The fight over the fan was so insignificant.

One night, my grandmother called me and told me my mother couldn’t wake up, but they weren’t that alarmed because she was in a coma before. It took them a while till they could take her to the hospital, and later my grandmother called to tell me my mother had a major stroke and the doctor suggested bringing her back home. I told them to take her to the military hospital. After a while, my grandmother said we should take her back home because the hospital fee was very expensive. My sister and I insisted that she stay. I kept paying for the bill, but my money was running out, so I did a GoFundMe and got more money. Later we brought her back home and had a doctor come to administer her the medicine. The villagers stayed around my home; some did praying, some just sat with my family, and some cooked food for others who were there. And there were monks coming to do chanting.

I didn’t go home. The excuse was that I didn’t have the money, but actually one of my roommates said they could pay for my flight. I was afraid to walk in my village when my mother was not there. I cried most of the time for the first few days she was in the coma. However, people in my family didn’t sound that desperate. My guess was that they saw her wake up from a coma before. By the eighth day or so, people started to talk about letting my mother go in peace. Her back somehow had dark bruises, and her face had sunken. By this time, I no longer had any feelings. I became practical, but I still didn’t know what to do. There were a lot of phone calls; some suggested we should stop the treatment, but probably only one of my mother's close friend, my sister and I insisted on continuing. My father was there all the time and didn’t have an opinion either. He just did what people told him. One of my mom's friend talked with me crying and said she was unable to accept it.

The night before she had the stroke, I called my mother and talked with her for a few minutes, but she had visitors and was engaging with them. My grandmother had come to stay with her for more than a week already. I don’t remember the occasion. A few nights before that, I called her; she was talking on the phone with her friend. Thinking back, it was rather odd. So many of her friends and loved ones came to visit her in those last couple of months. The villagers said she looked as if she had recovered.

On the ninth day of the coma, my sister lit an incense and spoke with my mother. She said if my mom wanted to go, she should go because she didn’t want her to suffer. My mother passed away ten days after the stroke. I still didn’t have any feelings.

I was very practical during the funeral. My sister went to the market to buy flowers with my father. She helped people decorate the coffin and things like that. My mother had known so many people, and many of those came to her funeral, and we got lots of donations. My father decided to distribute all the donations back to the elderly people who came to the funeral. Frankly, I wasn’t happy with the decision because we really didn’t have any money. And I was surprised my grandmother allowed that.

My grandmother, aunt, and uncle left after the funeral. My grandma promised she would come back if my sister needed to go to the hospital or if something like that happened, but in the meantime, her farm needed her. One of my father’s sisters-in-law stayed with us for a few months after the funeral. Her daughter was a few years older than my sister, and they were friends. My father now mostly stayed at home with my sister or at least came back before dark after work. I don’t remember talking much about what was happening with them. I think I talked a bit with my sister to make sure she was okay, and people said she was okay.

I don’t remember when I started to talk more with my sister. I guess it was around three to six months after the funeral. I was trying to make sure she could read well. So I called her to read for me, and I listened. Sometimes she asked me questions about when mother would come back or where she went. I didn’t know how to answer her. She was always angry at my father. She fought with him, used swear words with him, and sometimes said she would break his car brakes so it would derail and kill him. I knew they had some legitimate reasons to be mad at each other, but I was more or less neutral as I was so far away, I guess at least compared to my sister and my great-aunt. My sister said she remembered what he did. He couldn’t understand why my sister was so antagonistic toward him, and in turn, he acted unkindly toward her. When I explained to him why she was angry, he became defensive. I tried to reason with my sister a bit, but she wouldn’t hear any of that. Frankly, I didn’t know what to do with him either. On the one hand, he is my father and it was practical to talk with him and have him take care of my sister, but on the other hand, he was cruel to my mother. I heard some of my cousins say if their father did something like that to their mom, they would punch him and never talk with him again. I never confronted him or said anything and acted as if what he did was okay.

I gradually talked more and more with my father. The initial motivation was that talking with him could help him be less angry, and hopefully, he and my sister wouldn’t get into too many arguments. He is a difficult person. Sometimes he complained about my haircut and simple things like that. During the Pol Pot regime, he was around ten. His great-uncle was a regional commander of the regime, so his family was protected from being murdered, but my understanding was that they also suffered hunger like others. He lived with his uncle, and one day wandered into a torture prison. He offered a prisoner a piece of fruit, and when he came back the next day, they had died. When he talked about this episode, he always said he didn’t understand it. He left his great uncle. After the Pol Pot regime, his father died when he was around fourteen, and since then, he had to fence for himself because his mother didn’t like him as he was physically weak. He lived with descendants of Chinese immigrants and helped them with their business. Later he ran to the refugee camp at the border to escape being conscripted into the army and to cure his tuberculosis. So to him, my sister’s life was easy—she had food, a house to stay in, and that are everything one needs.

These days I talk with my father once every week or two. We can talk for an hour or longer. The conversation is usually about my sister; sometimes we venture to topics like geopolitics, farming, or simply gossiping about other neighbors. He was so alarmed to learn about gun issues in the US. We also talk about how unhealthy food these days has become and how to live a simpler life. Sometimes I wish I had talked with my father earlier; it might have soothed him and made him kinder toward my mother. I wish I had talked more to both of them to prevent them from hurting each other and themselves. I was too shy about the issue.

My father remarried with the help of my grandmother, who thought the marriage would help prevent me and my sister from having to take care of him when he falls sick. His own mother and siblings refused to meet his new wife because they thought my mother hadn’t passed away long enough. I abstained from the decision-making process. I said I was still mourning, and he was an adult, so he should decide for himself. However, I had one condition. When my mother was with us, she didn’t want that lady to come to our house. So we wouldn’t allow her to come over either, even after she passed away; the house was built on her ancestral land, after all. My sister agreed to that. One day, when my father stopped by the house with that lady, my sister went to tell her to leave the house, and my father and her got into a fight for a month or so. Later, I learned that my sister went to his wedding after he tricked her into thinking he would buy her a new phone.

I don’t know what has happened to his marriage now. But he seems to be at home a lot. My sister, however, is now living with one of my mom’s friends whose house is nearby ours. I used to ask my father if he missed my mother. He said of course he missed her. He said he often feels like he is waiting for my mother to arrive, much like the time when he waited for her to come back from the hospital. My neighbor told me he sometimes talked with them about my mother and he cried, describing how he missed the scene of finding her as he got back home from his travels. He is still doing his mango business, but he has changed the type of mango he works with. I heard he joined work with one of the relatives, and eventually, they got into an argument and now they avoid each other after the harvest.

Sometimes the debtor calls me. It is not my debt, but it is pretty unpleasant. I can only imagine how much it stifled and oppressed my mother. These days, when people need money, they call me. Many of those are legitimate. I help them with what I can. But my mother never called me for that. I wish she had; it pains me to think she had to deal with those on her own. My relatives tell me about some of her struggles that she never told me about. I know she didn’t want to worry me or make me sad, but I think it would have been better if we were in it together as a family. I remember she talked about not having food because she was too weak to cook. She couldn’t eat the neighbor’s food because there was too much salt or oil. I suggested she should hire someone to help, but she refused. Looking back, I wish I had pushed that idea harder. We were worried about money, but I think we could deal with that if we were more serious. I guess we didn’t really believe in death.

My sister is now 14. The neighbors keep their eyes on her and some intervene when they think she has done something wrong. They each have their own way. I think she doesn’t like a lot of their advice, but she knows they care about her. She is very different from me. I usually don’t understand her. She has done many things I find pretty baffling. But she seems happy and engaged in her day-to-day life. She studies and does all the things her teachers tell her to do, but that’s about it. I talk with her a few times per week. Lots of times it is about her studies, or we read something together. She tells me about her friends and teachers at school, and sometimes we try to understand the root of their behavior and find an appropriate course of action. She is not fighting with my father anymore, but she simply doesn’t care if he is mad at her. She dyes her hair, colors her fingernails, had boyfriends at 13, and goes to places with her friends even though we don’t allow it. My father has learned to tolerate and maybe accept her behavior after my sister ran away last year. I like that my sister isn’t conforming to people’s expectations of her. But I also don’t want her to clash too much with the villagers. I keep telling her to moderate her behavior and explain my stance. I don’t know what I should expect of her, but I am happy with her and her growth. I can’t help but wonder what my mother would think if she saw my sister now.

I think my mother shouldn’t worry about me now. I miss my mother, and I cry often, but when the crying stops, I take up life and enjoy it. I love bird watching, hiking, taking long walks with my friends, and doing and learning maths. I live in Cambridge, MA. Sometimes I walk around one of the streets and am amazed by the thought that one of my intellectual heroes probably strolled on the same very street decades ago. Sometimes, I read in my bed in the morning, drinking hot cocoa. I have lots of friends who I believe love me and would feed me if I ever needed that. Obviously, I am very lucky and so many people have helped me, but I don’t think I could have come this far without my mother’s support and love.