Whether her father remained at large or met his demise, her mother would never forgive him for the death of their second born, a son he didn’t know, would never know he had.
Again, Teera reaches for her shoulder bag and extracts her journal. Sitting down at the desk, she feels the bone-aching need to write but doesn’t know where to begin. Her mind hums, abuzz with thoughts, afraid of what it will discover in stillness. She flips the journal over, noting the imprint of its flowered logo, with the words “White Hibiscus” etched into the leather cover. From the inner pocket of the back flap, she pulls out the black-and-white photograph she carries from journal to journal, each time giving it a new home between the pages. It’s the only image of her parents Amara managed to smuggle out and retain, and over the years it’s turned jaundiced and papery, its edges frayed, its surface spidery with wrinkles and cracks, all the vulnerabilities of age, while her parents remain forever young.
They are at a party of some sort—perhaps a soirée, as Amara was fond of saying, a word so out of context in their Section 8 housing when Teera first noted her aunt’s incessant use of it. Oh, I remember the soirées we used to have, Amara would reminisce, pronouncing it with a proper French accent. There was this one soirée where I sipped my first champagne . . . I was twelve, and I didn’t know that champagne was not made from champignons!
In the captured soirée, her mother is the only one wearing the traditional sampot phamuong—a long embroidered silk sarong—and matching court blouse, with three strands of pearls resting on the square neckline, while everyone else sports Western attire, the women in those black dresses so emblematic of the 1960s and the men in suits and ties. The young Channara—who looks to be in her early twenties, but with a confidence that makes her seem older, worldly wise—embodies what Teera has come to see as the paradox of much of the educated Cambodian elite at the time, ideologically progressive yet morally conservative.
Teera notes the correct way her mother carries herself, the self-possessed uprightness that calls to mind the arrogant superiority of another educated woman she saw in a newspaper article recently. Ieng Thirith, the former Khmer Rouge minister of social affairs, appeared in a photograph alongside her husband, Ieng Sary, and other surviving regime leaders who would be tried if the proposed tribunal ever takes place. Teera wonders if her mother ever crossed paths with this woman. Did Channara consider herself a Marxist? A Communist? Had Suteera’s father returned in those couple of weeks before the Khmer Rouge takeover, would her mother have gone with him? Teera remembers her mother as steely resolute about everything she believed in. In the black-and-white photograph she’s holding now, the youthful Channara stares at the camera with a sternness and austerity softened only by her extraordinary beauty.
Teera’s eyes shift to the young man next to her mother in the photograph. Her father, his face turned so that only his profile is captured, smiles adoringly at his beautiful young wife. Her parents, happy and in love—or so Teera imagines—are surrounded by friends and intimates. A man has his arm around her father’s shoulder, pulling him so that he leans slightly to one side. From behind, a woman pitches forward to whisper something in her mother’s ear. And a bit off to the right, a group of festively dressed children gather in a semicircle, with Amara in the middle cupping something in her hand, maybe a butterfly or bug, Teera imagines. Even as a little girl, it seems her aunt could summon a crowd. This makes Teera smile, and she imagines Amara’s gentle but firm voice explaining to the throng of tiny listeners how to handle a delicate creature, a fragile life.
Ah, Sangkhum. Teera remembers how Amara would sigh with happy nostalgia whenever they looked at the photo together, as if this one word brought to life a time, before war and revolution and genocide, when there was indeed evidence of “Society,” a time when art and culture thrived, when ideas marked your sophistication, allowed you to move with ease from one circle into another. You must study hard and do better than your American classmates, her aunt would then add, as if it was all part of the same conversation. Your mother was right. Education makes all boundaries porous, crossable.
In this lush setting, Teera sees it so clearly now, the cultivated sophistication of her parents’ milieu, the vibrant atmosphere of learning that seems to lie just beneath the dull, filmy coat of the monochrome paper. As she continues to stare at the photograph, she half expects the surface fissures and tears to mend themselves and the stilled scene to burst into life, in the full brilliant colors of the tropics.
They are all outside on the pillared marble veranda Teera recognizes as her childhood home. Mon rêve sur le précipice, her polyglot grandfather would rhapsodize, holding her tiny hand as they walked the grounds, always with a touch of sadness in his tone, as if speaking of something long passed. The sprawling estate stretched across the outermost tip of what her grandfather nicknamed Chrung Pich—“Diamond’s Point”—facing the confluence of the country’s three principal rivers: the Mekong, the Tonle Sap, and the Bassac. 1962? Amara had written on the back of the photo, the question mark in pencil, as if added later, doubting the indelible assertion in ink.
If it was 1962, that would mean her aunt was seven, thirteen years younger than her mother, and her grandfather had just returned from his post as senior advisor to the ambassador at the Cambodian Embassy in Washington, DC. Le Conseiller, a title he would’ve retained in perpetuity, Amara explained, had it not been for the Khmer Rouge. Amara said she had little recollection of those first seven years of her life in the States, or—when Teera asked—why they suddenly left after such a long sojourn abroad to return home. But Teera knew this couldn’t be true. Amara had to remember, or at least had to have some inkling why the patriarch abruptly gave up his highly prized diplomatic post in the embassy and moved the entire family back to Phnom Penh.
Whenever Teera and Amara managed to talk about the past, their cautious exchange was riddled with “I don’t remember . . .” which was often code for “I don’t want to talk about it . . . at least not yet.” Teera guesses that for Amara to recall those early years in the States would inevitably lead her aunt to wonder what life might have been like had the family never returned to Cambodia. What if they had all survived?