Trigger Warning: This piece depicts themes such as intergenerational trauma, the Khmer Rouge, genocide, and war trauma.
I had a dream where I was surrounded by a jungle of foliage, and I was wading through a swamp-like bog. It was thick and viscous.
There was a web of vines above my head, casting a protective shadow onto my body. The web later morphed into something more concrete—budding flowers and unripe winter melon wrapped around a plastic green rope.
They had formed walls, echoing the walls of a greenhouse. In the place where the door would have formed stood my grandfather in a worn and sleeveless top. His arms were thin and sinewy.
Upon waking, I look to my windowsill where a tiny succulent takes its last breath. I had truly, honestly been trying my best to keep it alive. But every now and then I forget to water it.
Perhaps this time, three months was too long of a time of neglect.
I thought of the faux greenhouse my grandfather cultivated, the way he took it with him to every place that we lived. The way the dirt nestled underneath his fingernails after every time he returned from the garden, as if it were a monarch migrating home. The trips that we made to the home improvement stores. The beeline he made to the seventeen types of fertilizer.
I thought of coffee filters nestled into the soil. Eggshells decorating the top of plastic pots, like sprinkles on a cupcake.
Although I was raised in a beautiful garden, the remnants of a rice paddy engulfed in the wet breath of hell lingered.
When I see my grandfather bent over with a tiny shovel, carving out a home for delicate basil, I can easily imagine him knee-deep in shallow waters, hunched over golden stalks half a decade ago. I can trace the skeleton of youth under his face—sweat beading over his skin—dripping onto what would become the livelihood of over seven million people for almost four years.
In a brutal regime where cultivation was the path to success, it was no wonder that upon arrival, my father chose to pursue studies in agriculture.
In the land of opportunity, what better chance at greatness is there, other than doing something you already know you’re good at?
And wouldn’t my grandfather and father excel at the things where—for a long, long time—failure meant death?
I wonder if every time my family member takes a rake in hand, every time he pinches a leaf from a stalk—he feels the heat of the sun bearing down on him in a land thousands of miles away.
If he feels the coolness of the same soil, the same water, the same seed.
If it haunts him. If it misses him.
Because it haunts me. When I slurped winter melon soup as a child, hating the flavor and letting the liquid slide down my throat as fast as possible, I hadn’t considered how it could have come to be.
How was it that my grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, aunt and uncle, every -ather and -other, had such a green thumb?
How else, I tell myself now, other than their shared past—the reason I am here and not there in the first place?
How else, other than the silent horrors they never speak of?
The horrors that they don’t need to tell me.
They are already whispered to my ears, every time my grandfather tends to his garden.
Visual Credit: Photograph by Polina Tankilevitch, modified by Julianne Le
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