Meditation: On Family

All families are word problems. This seems especially true when you drift into the exurbs of kinship: those cousins once or twice "removed," or "step" grandparents. There's an odd arithmetic to it: siblings come in halves or steps, some parents are single, while couples come intact (addition) or as exes (subtraction). And there's the difficulty of blood, so often presumed to denote "fullness," and adoption, considered a different kind of addition, post-subtraction. There's the birth father who is more a telephone buddy than a dad, and the dad who married into parenthood. The math is emotional, but we often repress our emotions into number and portion. The "closed" adoption is not a simple equation. Nor is the "open" one. Family is one math problem to which there's no solution, only remainder and--too often--division.

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Math was always painful for me, but not for my father, who enjoyed helping me with my homework. He loved word problems. When I took the GREs the first time--before I decided to skip the math section altogether--I spent at least half the time allotted for the math section sussing out a word problem about baseball. Because I love baseball, I enjoyed this problem, was patient with it, so patient that I had hardly any time left for the rest of the test. My scores came out exceedingly low, but I was proud to tell my father the story of how I figured out that word problem. I no longer remember the content of that problem, only the joy I felt at solving it.

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Here's one of the word problems I live with: what do I call the mother of my daughter's sister?

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One reason I love this problem is that there is no answer to it in our language, or any I can imagine. She is not sister, not in-law. While she's "aunty" to my daughter, she isn't to me. She's fallen between the dictionary's alphabetical cracks. When I state the problem to friends, their brows furrow and they come up with possible nomenclature, but these are words already used for other relations. For now, she's the "other mother" in a family whose bonds are genetic and adopted. My friend, Dennis Etzel, Jr., whose mother "came out" in the 1980s in Topeka, Kansas, has "another mother," but she's different again.

When we arrived in Kathmandu in December, 2004 to adopt our daughter, we were told by the local facilitator that she had a sister. He informed us one hour before we drove to the orphanage to meet our daughter, who'd appeared to us in a tiny photograph, dressed in red, stern, looking away from the camera. Her sister, we learned, was one year older, and was being adopted by a woman in Miami. I remember the pit-fall of that moment of recognition. It would not have mattered to know earlier, because Nepalese law forbids the adoption of two children of the same gender, but that hardly made the news easier to absorb. The US embassy asked after our daughter's sister, too; when they saw the report of two girls found together, two girls whose photos resembled one another, they'd put two and two together. The report was as detailed as it was almost certainly fictional. Found by a road. Taken to the orphanage by the authorities. The facilitator seemed to know more, and what he seemed to know was disturbing, but he never filled out the impressionist picture.

On our second trip to the orphanage, which was bursting with children (Nepal was in the midst of a civil war), we met our daughter's sister, briefly, in a stone courtyard. She had big dark eyes and wore a dirty frock. Her name then was Nirmala. It had been Rita, and would be L. Radhika's name had been Sarmilla, L would later tell her mother. We gave her something, I don't remember what, and I tried to let her know that we would see her again, that Radhika would be ok with us. Did I say all that? Who knows. I only remember the intensity of the effort to express something, anything, in the face of this little girl's loss of her sister. I'm the only one of us who remembers this moment. Was I the only one there? Where was my husband? What memory withholds bears affect, though sometimes we can't locate its particular name.

And so these two little girls (then 3 and 4) from Nepal ended up in Hawai`i and in Miami (and from there to Walla Walla, then Seattle, and now Chicago). We heard from L's mother V that her daughter was very worried about Radhika; as her older sister, she felt responsible for the fate of her younger sister. So my husband made a video: here is Radhika on her tricycle; here is Radhika kicking a ball; here is Radhika's room; here is Radhika's brother; here are her parents. We sent the video off. And then they came to Hawai`i' another year we met in San Francisco, then in Walla Walla, and for the last two summers, south of Chicago. The intensity of coming together, sandwiched in time by months of infrequent contact.

If "does she know you?" is THE question to someone whose parent has Alzheimer's, then "do they look alike?" is the first question everyone asks me about the sisters. Definition 12 of the word "family" in the OED reads: "A category or group of musical instruments which share the same basic method of sound production." When my daughter asks her dad if the purple flower is a daisy and he responds that it's "in the same family," we're talking about similarities. While I realize the inevitability of this question--the nicest thing anyone says about family on facebook is "you so look alike"--I don't find it very interesting. Our culture has institutionalized family into likeness, both where it exists and where it does not. Yes, there's the family nose and even a family sense of humor. But only the first is genetic, especially when my son's jokes are so like my husband's, and my daughter's sarcasm reminds me of my mother's acerbic wit. Then again, the first definition of family in the OED has to do with servants. Go figure.

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I look like my father and his sister, Gretchen; increasingly, I see my mother's features in my face, as well, and hear her laughter when I talk to our kittens. Sometimes I even make what my grad school boyfriend called her "mother noises." Her sense of humor became mine, though perhaps it softened a a bit in me. I acquired her anxiety, though hers was constant, mine explosive and intermittent. She became depressed, but denied it. I couldn't deny it, because mine was worse. But growing up I felt alienated from my parents, not like them in any way. My mother was too insistently practical and rigid, my dad too quiet and detached. Where the puzzle comes together in my middle age, it was in my younger years a jigsaw scattered over a large floor, with little hope of solution, fitting together.

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And so there are two girls, one now 13 and the other 14. They are both short and in constant motion. Radhika plays soccer, her sister volleyball (despite her size).  They are both spirited. They play like puppies. They play with their brother and without him. When I came into the room the other day, he was leaning over to pull out a thorn from L's foot. Gently, slowly. He also pokes his sisters, teases them. She was leaning over to make his hair into a crazy pig tail the day before in the park. L rebels against school; Radhika adores it. L warmly offers hugs to everyone; Radhika does not. Radhika can be sardonic; L is softer, more distractable. Neither one of them likes to read. They are both fierce, in their own ways. "Description" is also a word problem: how to get it all right. Bryant says he hates that the girls are separated; I say it's good they're in touch. Those are the scales we work with. Imbalanced, but. (In Hawai`i we end sentences with but.)

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After a couple of early visits from my father's sister's family to spend time with us in St. Louis and in Alexandria, Virginia, we saw them at only the longest of intervals. My mother distrusted family, spoke critically of my father's sister (a very kind woman), didn't get along with her parents or her brother (there was also a short early visit from his family, which included an adopted daughter). Later, my aunt told me that my father had come to see her and said, "I'm ok, I'm ok," then disappeared for some time. It was my mother's doing, of that she was certain. My aunt forgave my mother, but she didn't refrain from telling my mother's daughter the story.

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To the extent that international adoption is an oft-maligned institution, it's due to trauma. That trauma exists before the adoption, when children lose their parents and extended families, and are placed in other institutions--the third world orphanages our kids spent months in--and then moved across the world into new cultures and languages and families. But the critiques often devolve on those who adopt these children, and are made easier by the frequent corruption involved in such adoptions. Our children don't suffer the kind of racial trauma than many international adoptees do: we live in Hawai'i, which is predominantly Asian, and L lives in Chicago with a family of Indian Guyanese origin. But clearly, it's not easy to get your feet underneath you when so many questions hover over your history, questions that are likely never to be answered. Denise Riley, with whom I once shared lunch in London, said she found her birth mother not because she wanted to find her genetic origins, but to learn more about her history. The irony was that her mother then expected her to care for her, based on that problematic origin. Word problems are also a hermeneutics. Genetics is as much a mode of interpretation as it is our make-up. In other words, it's as made up as it is determinative. But made up things--fictions, interpretations, desires--do often determine us.

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I moved five thousand miles away from my parents. I'd gotten to know my dad better, and discovered in him the kindness that my mother had always spoken of. "He's a saint," my mother would say, but like many saints, he had seemed far away. He came closer in his later years. Before he died, he made sure to close his accounts lovingly. My mother grew ever more difficult, tried to "disown" me at least once or twice, then succumbed to the long forgetting of Alzheimer's. That disease oddly brought us closer. If "closure" is indeed to be desired in our emotional lives, then she and I closed our accounts without too many losses. The difficult story had a happy ending. Or that chapter of it. Time feels different now, more enclosed. Family deaths do that; they alter time. Our maps shrink. We stop getting lost and turn to a GPS. It talks to us in a funny accent, but gets us where we're going. We hope.

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We've taken this word problem and created of it a family. This "other mother" and I have become friends and--during our brief weeks together--co-parents of a kind. While we work at this, the kids slip into family mode seemingly without effort. The first time L and V came to visit and I took them and our kids to the airport, we were heading back over H3 when Radhika started crying. She stopped, and then Sangha started weeping. They only stopped sobbing woefully when I got them home. There's less weeping now, but I have little access to the questions the girls ask each other, or those Sangha asks about his birth family in Cambodia. On occasion, over dinner as we did recently in Chicago, we start talking about what we remember and what has been forgotten. That's a genetic thread of its own. History, and its ruptures, take the place of the supposed truth of origins. The adoption story is a different genre from the biological (or "natural") one. It's hard to tell because one's audience so often doesn't get it. The visa problems, the travel plans, the delays, the coming into a large room in an old palace and seeing your daughter holding the hand of her didi and then taking her into your arms, a smelly child in dirty blue jacket, her sandals broken in winter. How she became sister to her sister, who also became sister to a brother.

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We tell such stories to make them inevitable. And ordinary, as love is.

memory card: "quantum": 5 june

 

 

Is there not a sufficient quantum of distress and misfortune? The door opens to a room of fluttering post-its: lines of Proust, grocery lists, small maps of a house, inspirational blurts. My card would say: I am white; I am not here for you. If this disturbs you, please check my privilege at the door. “We're not the same race,” my son says to me. I am not bird to his bird, but bear, sheepdog, meerkat. Merchant of origins, time's your tarp, cover-up. Find faces in the leaves, death's graft in green. Pinned like butterflies on cork, my son's eyes look out at me. Last night he browsed headphones on amazon, read the 3-star reviews. I tell my student to use the past tense, personal pronoun. Love of origins breeds sentiment: not these leaves in resin, post-it notes. A fan sweeps back & forth; the Black guard thinks he knows me. Short white English professor, woman.

                                                                  --5 June 2014

Notes:

Is there not? 1789 W. Belsham: OED.

Card based on Adrian Piper's work.

Faces in leaves by Binh Danh. 
I found the image on a page with poems by Robert Schultz. Synchronicities. Nominal, if not family, resemblances...
I was thinking of a particular exhibit at the Smithsonian last summer, but when I tried to find it on google, I got this. 

The Suburban Sex Trade

Late last year I drove most evenings to Windward City Shopping Center, at the junction of Kamehameha Highway and the Likelike Highway, to pick up my daughter, getting a ride from soccer practice in Honolulu. Our meeting point was Starbucks, which sits at the corner of the shopping center across the highway from Kaiser Permanente's newly renovated facility. The bus stop nearby is usually populated with Castle High School kids, homeless people, commuters. It was usually getting dark when I arrived and it was dark by the time she and I left for home. One evening I got there a little earlier than usual and parked my car in a stall that faced away from Starbucks, toward the First Hawaiian bank building. Maybe I had the radio on, and certainly I was making an inventory of the day, my time in the classroom, the state of my department, how much I drive these days, and so forth. I noticed a large sedan parked in front of me, one stall to the side, facing me. A local man sat in the car's driver's seat, his arm braced against his car door. I went back to my inventory. There was a young woman in very short shorts knocking at the dark window of the passenger side of the car. The door opened. My scattered inventory continued. A few minutes later I noticed that the car had not gone anywhere, that the man, whom I could see in only shadowy form, was no longer leaning against the driver's window, that there were movements in the car. I returned to consideration of my course on Memory & Forgetting and vaguely wondered if I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. The windows the dark sedan began to fog up, but the car itself went nowhere. Whatever going was happening did not involve the car's engine. People came and went from the parking lot, but no one noticed that car, or me. My vague wondering gathered coherence, its laces knotted. My daughter arrived. It was dark, the man and the young woman had been in the car at least 15 minutes, and his headlights came on. My daughter and I drove home.

I told my husband what I'd seen: "Talk to the shopping center security, not the cops; the cops won't do anything."

I told two ministers, former neighbors, what I'd seen, and the man replied, "It wasn't me!"

I told the woman who drove my daughter to the mall and she said, "I guess Kāneʻohe's more interesting than we all thought!"

I told a colleague, who yelled at me, saying I was complicit, that the children need to be safe. Call 911, he told me.

I told a second colleague about the first colleague; she said we're all under stress.

I filled in an on-line HPD form about the incident; there was no response. I looked several times for security, but found no one. A cashier at Foodland said they wear Securitas uniforms, but none were to be found.

I told a friend, wondering what to do, who said, "prostitution is illegal." 


When I lived in New Haven, Connecticut, one summer, I was in a second story apartment near the corner of Prospect and York (was it?). That corner was where women in Yale gym shorts came to advertise their bodies, where cars went around and around the block slowly. That corner was where one night, and one night only, the prostitutes were men. When my mother drove to pick me up at the end of the summer, I said, "there's something I need to tell you." When she came to the apartment in the evening and looked out the window, she inquired, "where's the action?"

We went to Cambodia last winter with a Baptist missionary group, because the local Cambodians we know attend a Baptist Church. In Phnom Penh, we stayed in a hotel that looked like "Mean Hour" in English. It was a large building with large rooms and beds that were more springs than mattresses. There were no shower doors, just a slanted floor with a drain in the middle. The views were of Phnom Penh, vast, chaotic, full of motor bikes and markets, crowds of people (mostly young, for reasons historical and cultural), and of tourists. There was only one small elevator for those of us staying in this large hotel. I got on with my children (13 and 11 at the time). More than once we were greeted by a young woman (or another) in tight short dress, standing next to a man. She would make eye contact, might look at the kids in a way I could not fathom. She and she and the men always got off at the fourth floor.


When we mentioned this to the group leader, a very devout and beautiful man, he said he liked having an enormous room in that hotel where he could store the mission's supplies (everything from toothbrushes to over the counter medications to toys), that he could keep the room even when he was traveling to other parts of the country.

On Thursday, I presented Charles Reznikoff's "Negroes" to my new class of documentary writing students. They talked about their emotions in the face of a poem that conveyed none. Shock, sadness, anger. "He's calling on us to do something," one student said. I might worry that what I've written asks too little of its reader, or of me.

Meditation: On Honors 491: Memory & Forgetting

We're reading Daniel Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory in my honors class. Many of memory's sins have to do with its lack, others with its false, or incomplete fulness. One of my students said he finds the book "disturbing." "It's like we're just a mechanism," he said, adding that "the NSA already knows what we're thinking and now people know why we're thinking it!" Another student fears her tendency toward "cryptomnesia," a word I could not remember in class, which means "unintentional plagiarism." Cryptomnesiacs are visual thinkers. They set up their days according to images of it. At day's end, they believe these images true, whether or not they acted on them.

Because of this course, I seem to have become a mother confessor of memory loss. In the elevator a colleague with whom I don't usually talk much asks me about the course (some of the index cards I used to advertise it ended up in the elevator for a while, mysteriously). The second time she sees me asks about being over 40, about why she can't remember names. I remember Schacter's diagram sketching out why we so easily forget names, that the the line in the diagram denoting a name sticks out by itself in the top left. Like the oddball in a family, this branch of the tree sits alone, lacking stories, lacking detail, without any way for us to remember its arbitrary beauty. I start to describe the diagram for her as I walk out of the elevator. I've gotten to the outer stick when the door starts to close. "There's a reason!" I call out, as she disappears behind the elevator's trap.


In class, we rehearse our forgetting: keys, cars, alarm clocks. It's like an Elizabeth Bishop poem, our litany of losses. We're spending a lot of time remembering our forgetting. I remember forgetting a student's M.A. thesis defense. I'd been on a trip to England; I'd had a hard time recovering from jet lag. I was sitting on the cream colored couch (before it was reupholstered in another version of the same color) when the phone rang. The committee was in a small room about to launch the defense and where was I? I was where I could not drive in quickly enough, so I appeared via speaker phone. I remember we talked about his unexpected use of a form John Ashbery used in April Galleons. The form was one of repetition with a difference; see the Kalevala. And then I made another mistake of forgetting with that same student. Remember all those directed readings I did for free? Remember the publications? I want to say, but of course those do not count in the face of my unprofessional forgetting.

Avishai Margalit writes about ways in which forgetting can be unethical. Something about an Israeli officer forgetting an atrocity. When I go to amazon to look for his book because I cannot find my own, I see he makes a distinction between "thick" memory and "thin" memory, the memory that binds us together and that which does not. That I had forgotten my student's important dates, twice, bordered on the unethical, was also due to a conflict between us in classes (and yet I was the boss, yes, and hence more ethically challenged). No atrocity that--the student is thankfully now a tenure-track professor in another department--the sense that the sins of absent-mindedness and transience could be interpreted--by him and me--as unethical is a lesson I cannot forget.

But if an army officer acts unethically when he forgets a war crime, what of nations, governments, that insist remembering theirs? The archives of Hitler's Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia are full of faces. Almost all of us remember faces, even when we cannot bear to look at them. Children, parents, people with suitcases and those in pajamas without. Tourism develops around genocide. See Emma Willis's work on "dark tourists." (And there are tourisms that ignore others.) Genocide is not only destruction on an enormous scale; it is also the forced manufacture of memories. Bad ones, vivid ones. Their faces are like suns. We need to witness them obliquely. I cannot look directly at this small girl from the S-21 website because she is sad, because she resembles--at least racially--one of my family members. I cannot look at her because I know this to have been one of her last acts as a living being, that of staring into the camera at those of us who cannot save her.

Memories are like the humidity in Cambodia; they stick to everyone's skin. We traveled with Khmer Rouge survivors. Each one, at some unexpected moment, usually while we eating another large meal, opened up. There were stories about having no shoes, stories about lost family members, stories about walking to Thailand. There were the stories that were only hinted at (something happened in the camps). There were stories that filtered down to their children and to the rest of us. We held those stories as if they were mercury, not knowing how to embrace their poison without wounding ourselves. The wound, we knew, was a gift (in German the false friend for gift is "poison"). But it was a gift we wanted to accept and then to contain, to corral, to put into a box to cool.

Our semantic memory (for facts) is best when we repeat information over time, when we enact the way in which it first came into being. Episodic memories remain because we experienced an event. If you are under 80, try remembering Pearl Harbor, and then turn to your memories of 9/11.  The first set of memories will be textbook, the second set involve waking up in your own bed (in Hawai`i) to the news ("airplanes flew into the Twin Towers and they came down") that we all shared (thick memories) because of our televisions. But the repetition of something forgotten makes for odd memory, indeed. I remember my own episodes of forgetting; they are litanies of something that did not happen, all the more painful because it did not. An odd watered down inversion of PTSD, the persistent memory of something that did happen.

My mother never had an especially good memory. As a young woman, she recalled, she'd heard about mnemonics, had given it a try. She was introduced to a woman whose name also signified a cow, maybe a Jersey. The next time she saw this woman she called her "Mrs. Hereford," and that was the end of her memory experiment. As a child I suffered from loss. Loss of stuffed animal, loss of person, loss of whatever I had misplaced, even at a very young age. Loss triggers memory, but memory triggered what in me proved to be depression. I've read that depressives have over-active memories, and I believe it. Memories clustered when I was depressed, like sequins on fancy dress. They shone like pins. As an adult I experienced my mother's painful loss of her own memories. Whose pain was it? It's its own kind of loss, this loss not of a thing but of memory itself. When memory loss ends, for it is process-bound, emotions associated with loss drain away. For now, an emotion provokes my memory; in that future I cannot know because I cannot remember it, forgetfulness might drain emotion from me. It's part of the mechanism. "Meet Mason on Monday," said my student, when I asked them to write a memorable sentence.




"The Last Modernist," a prose piece I wrote about the ethics of forgetting can be heard here.  The poem originally appeared in Boston Review; Oct/Nov2004, Vol. 29 Issue 5, p 26.

"Awkwardness, Joy, Sadness": a trip to Cambodia

History matters, chronology less so.  That's what a trip like ours to Cambodia (and three days in Vietnam) teaches, if only because its intensity so outstrips sequence. No events on the trip proved banal, but none were as powerful as the few hours we spent in Prey Phkoam Village, Angkor Borei District, Takeo Province, Cambodia, where our son Sangha was born. There we found many of his blood relatives and their entire village waiting to meet us. 

But let me start with Hongly Khuy.  We've known Hongly since 1999 or 2000, when we were in the process of adopting our son from Cambodia.  He was the go-to guy for translations of paper work, so much paper work. He also wrote me large note cards to let restaurant workers know of my allergy to peanuts, an important part of many Cambodian dishes. Hongly has visited several of my classes over the years to talk about his experiences during the Khmer Rouge genocide. His first visit was the most raw; many of the students had a hard time dealing with the fact that he laughed after telling the story of a woman who asked for more food and was killed on the spot. (Such laughter, I've come to learn, is culturally determined, although I also read into it a response to horror's absurdity.) In later classes, he moderated the tale until it lost much of its bite. Nonetheless, students had met a man who nearly starved to death, and who is now at the center of Oahu's Cambodian community of two or three hundred people. 

Outside Battambong, we made a mysterious stop. This was not unusual; those of us who hadn't traveled with Hongly before (this was his 13th mission under the auspices of the University Baptist Church, whose Cambodian congregation he heads) rarely knew what would happen next. The written itinerary was wrong as often as it was accurate, and left many such stops off. I and several others scampered behind Hongly, who was carrying a small bouquet of flowers, past the Buddhist temple on the left, past the monks' housing on the right, to a small cemetery beside a rice paddy. There were several large, engraved stones. Off to the side was a smaller stone, unmarked, on which Hongly put his flowers before he ducked behind some bushes to do other, more secular, business. This was the marker for his father's grave, one of thousands in the area, who'd starved to death in the late 1970s. Hongly found the site at the time and left a brick or stone; he came back later and had the body moved to his village near Phnom Penh. But the stone remains, as does his pilgrimage.

As we walked back to the bus we paused to look at a building next to the parking lot. A dour blue building, it appeared unpopulated. That had been a hospital where many died, including Hongly's nieces and nephews. His sister had seen light flowing out of the building at night when they died.

We got on the bus and went to a restaurant to eat. Such was our trip and, in some ways, a notion of Cambodian history that emerged from it. Memories, often without memorials. A haunted landscape on which was little evidence of what haunted it--after all, the country is full of young people, and is changing rapidly, its cities full of new construction, its roads cluttered with pony carts, buses, motor bikes, and Lexuses (evidence of new ostentation, along with the large gated houses going up in cities and rural areas). Memories like those of James Chan, who grew up so poor he didn't have a shirt for school and got thrown out. Who needed a bicycle tire and was given the money for it by a friend of his brother, who then couldn't afford lunch. Who escaped Cambodia in the late 70s, like so many, spending two years in Thailand's refugee camps, who is still married to the woman (Yun) his parents chose for him 45 years ago. Who played the mandolin non-stop in and out of the bus. Memories like Hongly's, who saved two Khmer Rouge soldiers (they wondered why) and who cannot but forgive those caught up in that net of history. And rituals like eating, whether under a school or house, in a road-side restaurant, or in the bus. Those added a layer of myth, a happier circularity, to the history.

We traveled to Angkor Wat. For Bryant and me it was a second visit. For Sangha and Radhika a first. Sangha, who was given a permanent visa on entry (I could here the immigration men say "Khmer" as they set eyes on him) got in free, the rest of us paid $20. Twelve years ago the place was teeming less with tourists than with landmine victims resting on a crutch, begging, and children begging. There was no security then; you could scramble over the temples as you wished. This time the place was crowded with tourists--local, European, Asian--and we didn't see a single landmine victim. Sellers were the new beggars, urging you into their shops, plying you with cheap teeshirts and books and other trinkets. (The relation between souvenirs and memorials troubles my writing.) The temples here are too magnificent to be mere memorials, but of course they are, to a time in Khmer history when invaders and locals alike built long walls that they covered with carvings of Hindu battle scenes, then long walls they didn't get around to carving because another edifice needed to be constructed. It's an amazing place, resting in a heavy humidity, and hot. As in a mall in Phnom Penh, Hongly ran into someone he knew here, this time a man who lived in Hawai`i for a while, and now works for months at a time with a telecom company in Cambodia.

Our trip was a mission by the Cambodian congregation and friends from the University Baptist Church in Honolulu. There were many sermons, short and long, including one by a Cambodian pastor named Barnabas Mam; his sermon was in Khmer, but those of us stuck in English sensed that it was a stem-winder. This was the 13th iteration of the mission, which stops at small villages, many of them those from which team members came, and at churches (those with buildings and those without). We stopped at many schools to give bicycles, toothpaste and toothbrushes, over-the-counter medications (to the elders), balloons and toys, and to sing and speak. My family is not Christian and at one point I said so, adding that the Buddhist principles I try to live by include compassion, a cornerstone of this trip. We felt awkwardness about the emphasis on Christ and God, but not an aversion. Never did I get the sense that we were putting a dent in the poverty we encountered in these villages, but I also did not feel that our visits were trivial, especially those that involved family.

The least successful of these visits was to the Center of Peace Orphanage in Phnom Penh, where what was often an act of sharing--we brought gifts and songs, and got food and dance in return--seemed more a dog and pony show. Hongly, usually so funny and vibrant, began talking about "obedience and commitment," rather than joy. I felt a horrible weight as we entered the compound, encased in wire fencing, and saw the children seated across from the chairs we came to sit in. (The weight was mostly one of my memories of other orphanages.) They were older kids--the younger ones were on a trip, we were told--and the making of balloons thus seemed odd (though I never tire of seeing my husband making dogs and swords out of balloons). A middle-aged white man sat next to me in the back row. He let drop that these events happen often, that the kids have to sit through lots of singing and dancing, that the well-meaning purveyors of the entertainment never ask the kids about themselves. This was Brian Maher, a Christian minister, as it turned out engaged to the orphanage director Bophal Yos, Obama supporter, and one of the more incisive analysts of Cambodia that we met on the trip. He came to Cambodia in the early 1990s, stayed 15 years, and now moves back and forth between Phnom Penh and Seattle. From him we learned that the human rights violations of the Hun Sen government are mainly land grabs (later, with Sreang Heng of PEN Cambodia, we saw where parks had been taken for large buildings, where people had been kicked out of their homes and mansions built in their place, where a large Korean-financed building had been half-built, then abandoned in the face of the bad business outlook caused in large part by so much corruption). Brian told us that Cambodia has very few orphanages now; many were simply cash cows (we know about that first-hand) and how many were used to manufacture Christians--my words here. The government has closed most of them down. He said most of the children in Center of Peace were abused by family members. The grandmother of one child tried to bury her alive. When he asked them to chart their own journeys, one boy burst into tears. No one had asked him before.  But Brian added that he can't prod too much, because he has no idea how to put the pieces back together. To talk about trauma only sometimes alleviates it, as any reader of Holocaust or genocide literature knows. To talk about trauma can crack, break the nutshell that shields it.

Much of the rest of the trip seems an intense blur of events, children, games and songs, heat, roaming dogs and cats (in villages, restaurants, hotels), the sounds of dog fights at night and restaurant workers by day, calling out orders to the kitchen, long long dusty rides on the bumpy roads in a bus, and three days in Vietnam, where we were tourists and not relief workers or family. As these memories settle, doubtless some will come to the surface, earning their significance with time. But for now, one day and one day only stands out, comes back at all hours, and will. That was the day (December 24) when we visited our son's birth village in Takeo Province.

Several years ago a friend who adopted three Cambodian children with her husband told me that our former Phnom Penh driver was doing research for families who wanted to know their children's origins, that he had done work for her and her husband, that it was good work. Thinking we had nothing to lose, fearing that the corruption that ended all adoptions from Cambodia had touched ours, we asked him to do research for us. Not too long after I sent the first email to him, he sent back a long and very detailed report of his work, beginning with a bribe paid to the orphanage (which had told us nothing more than that our son was from Takeo Province, which is poor), and including two trips. He sent us a long story, a brief genealogy, and photographs.  A couple years later, Hongly's wife's relative Phally went to visit the village we learned about and sent more photographs. We went on this trip because Hongly said he would include the village on the itinerary if we came.

As the time drew near for the long ride to the village in Takeo Province, Sangha grew more and more anxious. He seemed angry that we'd taken him on the trip. He never much likes to travel, but is rarely hostile. There were a couple of evenings when I worried that the trip might implode for us over his unhappiness. I grew anxious that the story we had was not true (amazing how someone who doesn't believe in the truth in her own work suddenly becomes obsessed with it). Phally had made arrangements: there was to be a gift of rice, of lunch, of bicycles, and of the usual supplies. So we went.

As we drove through the arch that marks entry to the temple, an arch that reads Sambo Sakoa (or Ocean of Plenty) in Khmer, I saw a woman out the window to the left waiting for the bus. She was dressed in bright blue blouse and pants. I recognized her, but was unsure why. We got off the bus, stepping into a large public area near a huge gathering of children in white school shirts and many more villagers. An enormous sow walked around. But before I saw any of those clearly, she walked firmly up to Sangha and hugged him. She had tears in her eyes. She'd been in the photographs, was his aunt. Then, while certain moments stand out in my mind, others blur; there is no cause and effect any more, just feeling, confusion, sensation, confusion. The mission team did their bit for the gathered school children, including Sangha, who was called to say something by way of a Khmer translator. But we were drawn back into another crowd, one that contained two of Sangha's siblings, another aunt, a cousin (with orange hair and a cell phone), and dozens of curious onlookers. Photographs show Sangha and his birth family members in a tight circle inside another circle of people looking on.

Bryant and I left for a while to take photographs of the lake, what we could see of the village from its banks, the boats and large pigs strolling on the shore, rolling in the mud, stood in the quiet away from the central event. 

When we returned, we were told that there was a gathering at the one aunt's house, and we should  walk back out through the arch and into the village.  As we started down a small lane between houses (the village was very cramped for being in such a large landscape), a smiling woman stopped her motorbike and invited me on the back. I got on and off we went, down the lane, past people, past dogs, past pigs, past thatched and wooden houses, bouncing on the dirt road. She then led me to the gathering--more hundreds of people under a bright tarp--and Bryant and I were asked to sit on chairs that faced the crowd. Someone brought two glasses and a metal container of tea. Sangha sat in a small group in the front row of the large group. He was next to an old woman who turned out to be his grandmother; she looked stricken throughout the ceremony. She reached out and put her hand on his leg, then pulled it back. He also sat with siblings, a sister who had also been adopted out into Takeo Province at age four and had not returned until the day before this one, and a brother (another brother had left and has not been heard from). His aunt handed him a framed photograph (the photo only awkwardly nestles into the frame) of his birth mother, which he held on his lap. The town entertainer/MC took the mic and sang a song. Hongly was surprised that the song was so sad. But it was a song about losing someone you love and having that person return and so it made sense, even down to the moment he either forgot or claimed to forget the lyrics. Hongly called him to task for that, and the crowd laughed.

There were songs, and there was speaking by Hongly. At least a hundred people stared back, each adorned with a ticket pinned to their shirts and blouses indicating they'd had lunch sponsored by our group. Sangha began to look glassy-eyed, exhausted. Members of his birth family faded into their faces, showing little. And then we had to go. Sangha's orange-haired cousin took me by the arm and we tried to talk as we walked to the bus with the other aunty, more round-faced than the first, wearing a green blouse. We lingered at the bus, as others caught up to us. We got on the bus, Sangha near the back beside a the window, which he opened. Someone thrust a small school photo of Sangha from years ago at him. He pushed it back, wondering how the photograph had gotten there in the first place. Someone else stuck a piece of paper at him, pointing to his sister. It had on it a cell phone number and some names. And then we were gone.

When asked about the event the next day, Sangha said with great economy and wisdom that he'd felt "awkward, joyful because they are family, and sad when we left." He's given me permission to write this. I'm sure I have not done the day justice, but there will be many more days in which to meditate on what it means to find history, family, and then to see the moment close off again. To consider what it means to find family with whom one does not share language or culture. To meet family that's extremely poor and lives thousands of miles away. To acknowledge their grief, while permitting oneself joy in the presence of a son.

On the plane trip from Taipei to Japan's Narita Airport, I read an article in the International Herald Tribune about George Saunders, a writer whose work I know nothing about. It was one of those articles you read because you have time, not because you want to. Saunders came across as singularly wise, a man attuned to the teaching of writing as a spiritual rather than a professional activity. At one point in the interview, he talks about what it means to experience days when you observe everything: “For three or four days after that,” he said of the aftermath of a near plane crash, “it was the most beautiful world. To have gotten back in it, you know? And I thought, If you could walk around like that all the time, to really have that awareness that it’s actually going to end. That’s the trick.” These are days when a parent dies, a child is born or adopted, or the day we found Sangha's village and birth family. To be a writer means to cultivate these days, to try to have as many of them as you can. But they are necessarily rare. The universe opens a louver, then it closes. To have seen that shaft of light is what makes these days beautiful. To refuse the darkness that follows is a lesson at once spiritual and historical.

It was an honor traveling with Hongly and his team. I've known for a long time that Hongly is a remarkable man--Khmer Rouge survivor, community leader, husband, father--but what I learned on this trip is that he is also an ordinary person. There were over half a dozen other people like him on the trip, some older and less mobile than he is. Sambath Neuov, who was wheeled through every airport in a chair, submitted to all the rigors of the trip. Her lovely husband, Tan, to whom the TSA pays foolish attention. Muy Teck Chan, who sells aloha shirts in Waikiki and checks his stocks whenever wifi is up, bought ice cream and Cambodian malasadas and sugar cane juicers at every school stop, making both the vendors (their entire days' supply suddenly sold) and the children happy. Renee Keo, who said only that Thailand's refugee camps were awful places--she volunteered for the Red Cross so that she had something to eat--loved having her hair done by my daughter, and by hers. Her husband also came to Hawai`i in 1981. James and Yun Chan, Hongly and Chana, all of them ordinary beautiful people.

Relevant Tinfish publication, Corpse Watching, by Sarith Peou, can be found here (free pdf).