It’s been more than half an hour since the plane took off from Kuala Lumpur, leaving the colorful landscape of duty-free shops for the blankness of transboundary skies. They’ve reached cruising altitude, the captain announces. Teera feels herself hurtling. Toward what, she doesn’t know. The future and the past lie in borderless proximity.
She turns her face from the window and, closing her eyes, leans back in her seat. Pressing the oversize shoulder bag against her abdomen, she tries to draw from it some sense of anchor, even as she’s fully aware that its contents are the very reason for this headlong flight. Her mind leaps through the events of the past months—her aunt’s death, the Buddhist cremation ceremony in the depths of Minnesota winter, the unexpected letter from the strange old musician, quitting her job as a grant writer at a community arts center, and now this trip halfway across the world. A year ago Teera couldn’t have imagined a life without Amara or this journey she’s taking alone to a land they’d risked everything to escape.
Srok Khmer. That’s how Cambodians refer to the country in their own language. Never Cambodia, for Cambodia is synonymous with war and revolution and genocide. But Srok Khmer is a place that exists in the geography of the heart, in the longing for what is lost. For Teera, it is no bigger than her childhood home, and the more time passes the smaller still it becomes, like a star whose light diminishes with increasing distance. The rest—the destruction, the killing, and all that was lost—she does not, will not, associate with her small private Cambodia. That was Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea. Her country disappeared with her family.
A woman’s voice over the intercom announces that breakfast will now be served. A flurry of activities ensues as passengers let down the tray tables in front of them in anticipation of the meal.
She’s gathered from the snippets of conversations around her that for many overseas Cambodians this is a pilgrimage they take every year they can since the UN-sponsored election a decade ago in 1993. Amidst flight attendants serving food and refreshment, the Cambodian-Americans freely exchange information about their lives. They seem obsessively curious to know what part of America others are from, as if the name of a city or town would pinpoint the exact cause of their isolation.
They reminisce about the old days—the years before the war, before “ar-Pot,” always the pejorative prefix denoting their contempt for Pol Pot, which, to all of them, to every Cambodian, including Teera herself, is more than the man or the monster but has become the epithet of an era. Where were you during ar-Pot?
In her most pessimistic moments, Teera feels this is the triumph of evil—the name that lives on alongside those of heroes and saints, written in history books, casually pronounced on the lips of adults and children alike, gaining magnitude and permanency in our collective awareness, even as our sensibility becomes immune to all the name subsumes.
“I was in Battambang,” says a man across the aisle to his newfound traveling companion. “Awful, awful place. Many deaths there. How about you?”
Teera knows they won’t venture beyond the names of provinces, the scant remembrances and quick summaries of their family’s ordeals. The horrors they experienced might be expressed only in the one question that runs common in all the conversations she’s hazarded upon: Do you still have family back there? Often a head shake will say it all. But Teera knows these same people, like the Cambodians in Minnesota, will have ready answers if asked by outsiders. Many times we almost died. But luckily we survived the killing fields.
Stock phrases, picked up from television and newspaper, recycled words, compressed and distilled of all ambiguities, leaving no doubt as to who was innocent and who was guilty. We are Khmers, but these Khmer Rouge, who knows what they were! Real Cambodians would never have killed other Cambodians!
As for Terra, she keeps quiet and saves her thoughts for paper and pen, her private journey with words, the music of her distilled emotion pulsing through her. She hears it now in the beating of her heart, the rhythm of her own breath.
He puts down the sadiev, his gesture tentative, as if lulling a child back to sleep. Behind him in the upper corner of his bamboo bed, among bundles of clothes, crouch the lute’s companions, the sralai, a kind of oboe, and the sampho, a small barrel drum. Made during the revolutionary years, these instruments are younger and newer than the sadiev. He feels profound tenderness toward all three, for even in their inanimate silence they appear sentient, conscious of his existence, his history and transgression, yet forgiving, always answering his invocation, offering him the music he seeks for his own healing. For nearly two and a half decades they’ve been his traveling companions, his only family. Now, he senses, they must part company, he toward his long-overdue demise and they toward love’s reclamation.
It’s been more than six weeks since he wrote to her about these instruments, and in these shadowy hours, he senses he is about to meet her, and in her face he will recognize the reflection of a dead man.
He hears the first soft chime of the meditation bell at the temple. He takes a deep breath, freeing his mind momentarily of the noise of his thoughts. Even if it brings him only fleeting peace, the act of inhaling and exhaling makes him aware that perhaps his body, like the bell itself, is just another instrument, hollow and mute on its own, yet capable of producing a whole range of tones and pitches when struck. That the clatter and buzz of his mind are not permanent, as he sometimes believes, but self-induced vibrations, transient and hallucinatory.
Ours is a false existence, the monks will soon intone, a variation of the same Buddhist chant they recite day and night. Suffering and despair are nothing more than illusions. Let go of desires and attachments, and inner peace shall be attained . . .
He’d like to take comfort in these words, except that by the same logic, peace, or whatever consolation he allows himself, is also an illusion. He can’t deny the miseries around him. The limbless men begging at the entrance of every market, their legs or arms blown to pieces by explosives buried in a road or rice field. The ragged old widows wandering the city streets, their minds deranged because they’ve lost entire families, might’ve witnessed the executions of their children. The orphans roaming the landfills, scavenging through the refuse for food, for any scraps that will numb their hunger or hide their bone nakedness. They are real, these peripheral, splintered lives, their struggles far from the false manifestations of his tormented conscience. Meditation only makes him see them all the more clearly. The only illusion would be if he allowed himself to believe he’d played no part in the present misery.