Dragon Chica. Mai-lee Chai

I almost didn’t care if the snake bit me, or squeezed me to death, but finally the snake extended its forked tongue, touching a stone in its path, then quickly it slithered away, farther and farther, slinking in S shapes into the dark jungle behind us.

      Then I heard my mother whisper.

      “Are you awake?”

      “Yes, Ma.”

      “Don’t move. There’s a bomb hidden in the dirt.”

      “I know, Ma.”

      “I can see this one,” Ma said. “There’s an arm bone beside it. So there must have been two bombs. But the person only stepped on the one. The explosion exposed the second bomb. Lying here, I can see it.”

      “I won’t move, Ma.”

      “I fell asleep,” Ma whispered. “I dreamed we were walking in the wrong direction.”

      “Are we, Ma? I saw a snake. It went behind us.”

      “Yes, that’s right. We’re going the wrong way. In my dream, I realized at the last second, but before we could turn around, I stepped on the bomb. Then I woke up.” My mother’s voice was parched, a raspy sound, the same sound when she cried without tears.

      “It’s okay, Ma. You didn’t step on the bomb. It’s good you had that dream.”

      “I know,” she said.

      And then slowly she got back onto her feet. She woke Sam and the twins, ordered Sam to hold onto her back. Then she picked the twins up, having wrapped them in cloth slings so she could carry them.

      I woke Sourdi, and we turned around and walked in the opposite direction. Like the snake.

      That’s how we didn’t die. Ma’s dreams kept us alive.

      Later, Sourdi would claim she was the one who was awake, she was the one whispering to Ma, and that she’d told me this story later. I only thought I remembered. But Sourdi never mentioned the snake. That’s how I know this is my memory, not hers.

      After the storm that destroyed the apparition of the Virgin Mary, Ma didn’t tell me what her dream was that convinced her that we needed to move again.

      “Where are we going, Ma?” I asked.

      “I don’t know yet,” she said. “But we should start packing.”

      CHAPTER 2

      The Letter

      A week or so after the storm, the next part of our miracle arrived with the junk mail—Lillian Vernon catalogs, coupon flyers for various grocery stores—and the bills, which Ma was ignoring since we’d be moving soon anyway. We almost threw it away, but when Sourdi was clearing the table for dinner, she discovered the letter. The envelope was battered, torn along one edge. The Red Cross had sent it first to our sponsors at the Baptist Church in our old town, and the Baptists had forwarded it to our former address in East Dallas before the post office had sent it along to our latest apartment.

      At first I thought it might be from One Arm, although I couldn’t imagine why he was writing through the Red Cross. Maybe he’d been sent back to Cambodia, I thought. Maybe he was sending Ma back the money he’d stolen from her, but I was wrong.

      “You should open it,” I suggested slyly to Sourdi, who was holding the envelope up to the light so that she could just see the outlines of the letter folded inside.

      “It’s for Ma.”

      “It might be important. We might have to call her at work.” (She’d found a temporary job in another restaurant while we waited to find out where she wanted us to move.)

      “You open it.” Sourdi pushed it across the tabletop at me like a dare. I snatched the envelope up, and I was ready to rip it open, truly I was, but the paper seemed so fragile, the neat handwriting on the front so precise, like something ancient discovered in a tomb or a time capsule, something that might disintegrate if exposed to air. I examined the envelope instead. Whoever had written the address had also decorated the envelope with vines and curlicues, little dots, like leaves dancing across the pale blue paper.

      “That’s Khmer. You don’t remember, do you?”

      “What?” I had no idea what she was talking about.

      “It’s how we used to write.” Sourdi took the letter from me and put it on top of the refrigerator where the little kids couldn’t get at it.

      I didn’t correct her. It was the way she used to write. Never me. I never learned.

      When Ma came home that evening, she was surprised that we all looked up the moment she came in the door. I turned off the television. We waited while Sourdi grabbed the letter off the refrigerator and held it out to Ma.

      “This came for you.”

      Ma reached for the fragile, airmail envelope with the spidery handwriting on it. Then she withdrew her hand quickly as though the letter were a snake that could bite. She sat down heavily in her chair, staring. Sourdi put the letter on the table before her.

      “What is it, Ma?” Sourdi looked frightened, her dark eyes narrowing. Because she was afraid, the rest of us felt afraid, too.

      Now we clustered around the table, pressing close to Ma.

      She told us to back off, to give her room to breathe. We were suffocating her, we were like animals, she said. Like animals in a cage, pushing against each other out of fear until the animal in the very center would have the life squeezed out of it.

      We backed away. Ma took a deep breath and ripped open the fragile airmail envelope.

      “Golldang! Golldang!” Ma said in English. Then she began to cry. She held the letter in one hand and covered her face with the other as her shoulders shook.

      “What happened?” Sourdi tried to read the letter even as Ma flapped it through the air. She grabbed hold of an edge and bobbed up and down, trying to keep the page smooth as Ma continued to wave her hand. Sourdi could recognize a few words in Khmer, but not enough to read the letter. “Tell us, Ma!” she begged.

      But for several minutes, forever, all Ma could say was “Golldang!” in English, over and over, like the chorus of a song.

      “Golldang” was our all-purpose exclamation word. We had heard it so often that we learned to use it the way other people might say “Oh!” It could mean anything. The letter might say we had won a million dollars, or it might be telling us that we’d failed in the U.S. and were being sent back to the refugee camp in Thailand or even back to Cambodia. Who could tell?

      Finally, Sourdi began to cry in frustration, biting her trembling lips, sniffing her runny nose, as fat tears rolled down her cheeks. Then Navy and Maly and Sam cried, to see Sourdi crying. I wanted to slap all of them. I stamped my foot on the linoleum. “I’m going to call the police!” I shouted in English.

      Then Ma uncovered her face and looked at me quizzically. She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Don’t shout,” she said. “Did I teach my girls to shout like this?”

      I hung my head.

      Ma wiped her nose on a paper napkin, then sighed. She spread the letter out on the tabletop, smoothing it flat with the palm of her hand. Then Ma told us that everything was going to be all right. We were saved, she said. It was a miracle. She smiled.

      It had been a long time since I’d seen Ma smile like this, with her whole face, even her eyes.

      Seeing her smile made my entire body feel light.

      The letter was from a man named Chhouen Suoheang. My Uncle. The man married to my mother’s oldest sister. The letter meant that we had family, alive and living in the United States, in a place called Nebraska, in fact. We looked it up on the map in my social studies book, and yes, it was there, a real state, part of the United States.