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The Khmer Growers

a m h e r s t , m a s s a c h u s e t t s

“We came in 1982, early spring, still cold. And the trees— no leaves. We thought all the trees were dead. Then everything started to grow. It’s like my life started when the trees, the leaves, and the flowers came out. And here I am, living and getting along with everything, growing with the flowers and the trees.”

Sokehn Mao opens his arms wide, lifts his face to the sun, and laughs, a sweet and happy sound. He had seen so much death by the time he was eighteen that it’s no wonder he thought it was possible that all the trees in America had died too.

Translator, teacher, and community organizer, Sokehn Mao is a bridge between Cambodian and American cultures. He spent the first eighteen years of his life in Cambodia. Since coming to America, he has lived near Amherst, Massachusetts, where his family has created the garden I have come to see.

Five minutes’ drive from the Emily Dickinson homestead and the Lord Jeffery Inn, a group of rice farmers from Kampong Chhnang province in central Cambodia, refugees from a decade

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of civil war, genocide, and invasion, have translated a three- thousand-year-old farming tradition into the local idiom of a New England field. Two of Sokehn’s aunts created the gardens, and they remain the backbone of the small group of gardeners known as the Khmer Growers. In creating a garden for their com- munity in exile, using public land they can never own, they give new meaning to the idea of the garden as refuge.

“This is Wentworth Conservation land,” Sokehn says as he guides me up the path toward the garden. “Dog trails, people trails. A beautiful place.”

It is cool under the leafy canopy of New England trees—oak, maple, hemlock, and pine. We’ve stopped halfway down a wide dirt track that passes through a late-summer tangle of wildflow- ers and bramble. Sokehn picks wild blackberries, then reaches to- ward me, palm up, offering me some. They’re dark and sweet.

“The first Khmer family arrived in November 1981,” he says. “Then, one by one, the local churches sponsored Cambodian families. Most of the families that came to Amherst were con- verted to Christian and are former farmers, rice farmers, as I am myself.”

“You converted?” I ask him, not sure I understand. “When we left Cambodia, which we call Kampuchea,” he

says, “we went to the refugee camps in Thailand controlled by the UN. There’s a lot of missionaries. In order to come to the United States, you had to be sponsored by the churches. All of a sudden, as soon as you left your country, you become the Chris- tian. You sort of go along with that, because you want to come to America.” Sokehn has been baptized three times. “We don’t care what we become. In the Thai border camps,” he says, “we’d go to the Buddhist temple in the morning, offering the monks break- fast, then lunch, their last meal of the day, then we’d go to church. We did that here too, for a few years. Now we just go to Buddhist temple.”

They did whatever it took to keep the family together, to get out alive.

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“So, my whole life in the rice field. I work side by side with my aunts, my uncles, my cousins. In Cambodia, as soon as you big enough to pick up a hoe, a rake, you go along with the parents. If you cannot do the rice field, you take care of the oxen and water buffalo.”

Was Sokehn’s father was a farmer too? “Well, he used to farm,” he says, “but when the French came,

they harass him so much he became a Buddhist monk. Then the French wanted to disrobe him, so he just became a soldier. In Cambodian culture, every family travel with the soldier. So when they fight, the children are in the foxhole while the husbands are loading up their gun and shooting. I live through wars all my life. I see death and skeletons. There were so many massacres. I’m in my foxhole, watching. Flares everywhere, shooting everywhere, the whole forest turn to gunfire, bombshell. We don’t carry bod- ies. We use a tractor to bury them, because so many die. So it’s a sad history for Cambodia,” Sokehn says, slowing his walk, his voice slowing too.

“But the riches . . .” He begins again, brightening after a long pause. “Everything is so mountainous. You walk to the woods, all you could hear, just animal cry. You could hear monkeys, you could hear deer chasing each other. You could see elephants graz- ing tall grass. In the countryside, there’s plenty to eat. You don’t need to go to the market. You feed yourself. Lots of edible herbs and fruits and spices all over the forest. And I used to know them all, because I used to go there with my grandparents, my uncle, and my father too. And each house has mango trees all around the house, and jackfruit, at least five kinds, and papaya trees, ba- nana trees, everywhere. Sometimes you just sit on the porch and use a hook on a long stick to pull on the fruit and just pick it right there, or you climb the tree. So that’s why there was no starving in Cambodia before the wars.”

Before the wars, rice and water shaped the land and the lives of the rural people of Cambodia, where Khmer (pronounced “k-my”) signifies both the people of the majority ethnic group

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and their language. The Khmer have more than a hundred words for rice. In Khmer, si bay, “to eat,” translated literally, means “to eat rice.” For millennia before Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge seized con- trol of the government in the 1970s, the cycles of daily life re- volved around the growing seasons. In April, during the brief period between the late winter harvest and the seeding of nursery beds for replanting the fields, the Khmer traditionally celebrated their New Year. It was a time of feasting and celebration, when the world, and each individual, was washed clean. Having per- formed the rites of cleansing and renewing themselves, each house- hold then carried the statue of the Buddha from its family altar down to the water and washed it too.

In addition to the rites each family observed, the whole nation awaited the traditional opening of the planting season. Every spring the king would come out into his garden and make a cere- monial pass over the land with a plow. Then everyone could begin planting. In Sokehn’s time, it was Prince Sihanouk who performed the ritual opening of the land.

Even though there is no one in America to plow the “sacred furrow,” it would not occur to the Khmer Growers to begin their planting season without performing the ancient rites of blessing the land. Before the growers planted for the first time, Sokehn explains, a holy man offered prayers and blessings. He asked the spirits from the past who dwelled there if they would please leave so the Khmer could carry the spirits of their own ancestors into the fields they were about to sow.

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As we emerge from the woods, I catch my first glimpse of the gar- den—a huge, intricately patterned field, lush and exploding with life. Yellow and rust-colored heirloom sunflowers sway in the light breeze at the near corner of the field, and just beyond them sodden sneakers, shirts, and pants hang upside down on stakes to dry. Farther down the path that runs along the bottom of the garden, I see a field hut constructed from large branches, its roof

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a large blue tarp. “All this,” Sokehn explains, “is done by two ladies.”

We stand before hundred-foot rows of yellow, red, green, and orange chili peppers. Beyond these, trellises support what appear to be cucumbers and ripening melons unlike any I’ve ever seen. Long rows run east to west, short rows north to south, a mosaic of green. Here and there, swaths of white cloth—remay—cover long beds. An air of peace and plenty rises from the warm, wet earth.

As Sokehn leads me toward the field hut, I turn and see a figure in dark, loose clothes wetting down one of the long beds covered in white cloth. She wears a conical straw hat and stands quite still as she directs the spray from a garden hose over the thin white veil. All around her the beds of vegetables and herbs whose names I do not know, some lifting sprays of small white flowers above ruffled, deep green leaves, spread to the distant edge of the great field rimmed with trees. Above the trees, a raft of soft white cumulous clouds floats in a turquoise sky. Where am I?

The motionless figure in the distance summons countless im- ages of the war in Southeast Asia. At Christmas 1972, midway through my last year of college just down the road from here, Richard Nixon, advised by Henry Kissinger, ordered the United States military to blanket the Cambodian countryside with bombs. The assault focused on villages, markets, and temples—on civil- ians—not just on the jungle at the border with Vietnam. A vis- ceral memory of the fear and dread and sorrow of that time takes hold of me. Here in a town I once knew well, I find myself face- to-face with the survivors of the television war of my coming of age, the war that split apart the generations and racked our na- tion. I am shaken to realize that I feel as if I am in a foreign coun- try, unable to speak the language and suddenly afraid.

Raucous teasing, abrupt calls in syllables I cannot understand, come to us on the wind. I see a thin woman dressed in a dark, long- sleeved shirt and baggy pants, her head wrapped in a dark red

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woolen scarf, move out of the hut toward the row she had evi- dently been weeding. A sturdy woman dressed in a black hooded L.A. Raiders sweatshirt and blue nylon pants calls after her. Then she turns and bends from the waist, as if still in the rice fields of home, and lifts two handfuls of freshly rinsed greens from a blue plastic kiddy pool at her feet. When they see us walking toward them, both women rise from their stooped postures and stare, impassive as we approach.

“Remember, we bow to show the elders respect when we meet them,” Sokehn reminds me. As soon as we exchange bows and smiles, I begin to feel more at ease.

The two ladies, elders referred to as Yeh, are Sokehn’s aunts, Prak Ky, the woman in the L.A. Raiders sweatshirt, and Prak Kom, who wears the red scarf. Their family name, Prak, precedes their first names. As Sokehn’s mother’s name is Prak Kann and his brothers, sisters-in-law, and cousin all use a variation on the name Mao, it takes me some time to learn who is who. They are all sweetly patient with my mistakes.

Sokehn introduces me, then speaks in Khmer with his aunts for a few minutes. He will show me the garden, he says, and then, when Prak Ky’s daughter, Mao Danh, arrives from her job at the University of Massachusetts, he will leave me to visit with the women for a few hours.

Every available space inside the hut is crammed with burlap bags and brightly colored plastic tubs of purple, red, green, orange, and yellow chilies. Bunches of herbs lie nestled in boxes. I look up and see that the growers have tucked lengths of cord, plastic bags, clothespins, and feathers under the ropes that lash the blue plastic tarp to the limbs supporting it.

“This shed here?” Sokehn says, following my gaze. “Every child, man or woman, boy or girl, they have to learn to make this in the rice field. So you make this under a palm tree, and then you attach strings to the tree and tie cans to the string and then just sit under the shade when the sun becomes too hot at noontime. Then you can just pull the string and scare all the animals, ele-

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phants and things like that, away from the field.” He leads me out of the shade into the heat as we talk.

“Elephants?” “Oh, yes,” he says, laughing. “Plenty of elephants. My uncle

had two.” “What did he use them for?” “My grandfather was an herbalist. We used a lot of elephants

for hunting and at the same time for collecting herbs and spices from the forest. This is sweet basil,” he adds as we pause by a plant, thrusting the leaves he has plucked toward my nose. “Smell it?”

Fresh lemon, without the bite. I pause to taste it while he keeps going.

One by one, Sokehn introduces me to every plant in the four- acre garden by name, scent, taste, folklore, and use. For him, the story of this garden is also the story of the beauty, and destruc- tion, of Cambodia.

“In Cambodia, the countryside is so beautiful,” he says wist- fully. “Everything I do or walk or sing or dance, Cambodia is al- ways in my mind. I look at the trees here, not my trees. I drive on the road, and it’s not the road that I used to be on. I look at the sky, sometimes it’s too gray. Cambodia, the sky is just white and blue. It’s almost like you’re looking at a canvas, a painting of a deep blue sky, it’s so beautiful.”

In moments here in the garden, Sokehn remembers the Cam- bodian landscape as if that lost world of peace and plenty might still exist somewhere. He slips easily from the past into the pres- ent tense, touching each plant tenderly as we pass. It is as if the middle period, the time of terror and suffering between his early childhood and the present, never occurred. In the garden, it is possible to make this return.

Sokehn pauses before a long, raised tier of trellises woven from slender branches. It looks ceremonial. “These are yard-long beans,” he says, once again an energetic and cheerful guide. “We usually grow at least ten beds, and each bed has two rows.” Prak

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Ky and Prak Kom cut and wove all the branches to make the trellis.

“This is spiceall. It’s ugly and disgusting. But what you do is cut it and dry it. Smell,” he says, breaking a leaf and handing it to me. Gasoline. My head jerks back. Sokehn laughs.

“You only be able to eat it when it’s dry and you pickle it. Af- ter you boil rice, you pour the hot rice water over the spiceall, then you put hot peppers and other ingredients, and you make into pickle. Then you eat it with smoked fish. The elders, the men, they love to sit under the tree drinking plum wine, eating smoked fish made with this.” He tosses the spiceall leaf away.

“This is Thai basil,” he says when we reach the next plant. It is his favorite among the five basil varieties they grow here. Gee krahom is dark green with an inverted purple V on each leaf. Beside it grows purple Vietnamese basil, and beside that fish- cheek basil, which tastes like a delicious blend of citrus and salt. Next come two rows of farm-crab basil. Its yellow-green leaves resemble oregano but give off a delicate scent and taste light and fresh. This is the basil in greatest demand in Asian markets, used for seasoning soup or fish. “You put that and Thai basil in your chicken soup and you’re in heaven, baby,” Sokehn says.

He sweeps by the large beds of frilled lettuce and past the small patches of pigweed and cilantro the gardeners grow just for themselves, then stops to pick a leaf of frog’s-leg basil and hold it out for me to smell. “This garden is not only for Cambodians,” he says, “but for Vietnamese, for Laos, and now the Americans start to be interested.

“These are sweet sticky pumpkins,” he explains as we move on. “This has a harder shell. We’ll let it stay like that until the plant dies. The longer it stay in the field, exposed to the sun, the harder and thicker the shell, so the longer we can preserve them, because in Cambodia there’s no refrigerator, no freezer. We use the inside mixed with coconuts and sticky rice to make a nice dessert. Have you ever heard of Hippie Delight? In Cambodia, you mix everything in with this, you in heaven again.”

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Sokehn peels the outer stem off a section of pumpkin vine to show me how Cambodians prepare it for cooking. “If it gets too old, we do this,” he says, pinching out a blossom’s pistil and sta- mens. “The flower you put in at the end for color and smell.” He holds it before me.

I lean into it, startled by its delicate fragrance. “Why don’t we make perfume out of this?” I ask, holding the fleshy yellow flower to my nose.

Sokehn finds this wonderfully amusing, and I can hear him laughing as he sweeps me past three kinds of pumpkins that send their vines in profusion down the aisles of rich, dark mud. We step over them and come to the wax melons. The bean trellises are dwarfed by these sapling trunks and the intricate thatch the women have woven across the top to support the weight of the ripening fruit. The height and heft of the trellises will give the melons room to grow to their full length—three feet—and to curl in a wide graceful arc at the bottom. In Cambodia, these melons would be harvested three or four times a year. In New England, they can be harvested only once.

Winter melons share the trellises. They’re fatter and shorter, fuzzy and deep green. In the next aisle Sokehn reaches out for something that looks like a warty, crenellated cucumber. Bitter melon, he says. “I hated these when I was a child. I’d cry when my mother sent me out to harvest them.”

We keep moving, sweat glistening on our skin. Here and there in the garden we pass the women at work, weeding, watering, harvesting.

Sokehn tells me about the hard times in the first two years of the growers’ use of the fields. Birdwatchers complained that the noise of the pump, which draws water from the adjacent pond for one hour in the morning and one in the late afternoon, fright- ened away all the birds. “They used to hear animals singing and talking, but now they hear water pumps, and they say it scare all the animals away and they cannot hear the animals anymore,” he says.

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Someone cut the growers’ irrigation hoses, and then their pump was stolen. All the proceeds of the year’s labor, four thou- sand dollars, went to replace it. It was stolen again. Sometimes local residents out walking on the conservation trails, angry over the growers’ use of a few acres of conservation land for the gar- dens, let their dogs chase birds through the newly sown fields. In one season the growers had to replant their garden three times.

Gradually, they have been accepted. Within a few years of planting their first seeds, the growers easily produce enough to feed the 150 Khmer people in the area. They sell some of their or- ganic produce to a local upscale grocery store and to Asian res- taurants in town, but they take most of it to farmers’ markets in Lowell and Springfield. With the money they raise from the sale of their produce, the growers have helped fund the two temples, or wats, for Khmer families in the area, Wat Kiry in Pelham and Wat Santivara in Leverett. They send money back to their native village, where five hundred American dollars will build a school and one hundred will pay for a clean well. Most precious of all, they have been able to help restore the village’s Buddhist temple. As word of their generosity spread, the growers began to receive letters from eleven other villages. They try to help as many as they can. Their nonprofit organization also sends donations to Amherst’s sister city in Nicaragua.

Walking slowly back toward the hut as we speak, we come upon a row of magnificent three-foot-tall plants with huge trans- lucent leaves, each shaped like a heart and veined like a great river delta. “Kbat,” Sokehn says. “Arum. A cousin of the taro. You eat the stems, and then the root is for dessert. It’s beautiful. In Cambodia we don’t have plastic or paper bag to go shopping, so we use arum leaf. When you go to the store, if you buy rice, they just put it right in the center and wrap around. It’s very flex- ible. Or sometime you want to cook fish, you roll it up in three layers, you bury it underground, make fire on top, and an hour later, there come the fish, and the skin just come off with it.”

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The taro does not flower. When a plant no longer reproduces in the wild, that is usually interpreted as a sign that it was do- mesticated long ago. The tie between this plant—now known as elephant ears—and Sokehn’s ancestors probably reaches back thousands of years.

We have been making a wide loop back to the hut. Thirsty and hot, my shoes caked with mud, I am grateful when Sokehn reaches down, parts thick green leaves to pick what looks like a fine green apple growing from a knee-high leafy plant, and hands it to me. Its crown mottled as if a thin white glaze of sugar has been poured over it, the Asian cherry eggplant is a gorgeous, glis- tening orb on his open palm. Just as he moves to throw it away, I take it from him and bite into it. Its flesh is soft and pulpy. It tastes nothing like eggplant but is as sweet and refreshing as an actual apple.

Trailing just behind Sokehn, listening, thinking, I eat as he talks. “And here is the famous water grass,” he says. Long, wide rows of bright green leaves. “It’s like asparagus,” he explains. “You cut it and it grow right back.” Water grass is the growers’ main crop; it sells fast, in great quantities, at Asian markets. The growers have timed the planting of each hundred-foot bed to provide them with a continual supply. In Cambodia, it would be grown in water, but because it would be invasive if grown in the pond beside the garden, they have learned to grow it in raised beds covered with remay to hold moisture and protect it from pests and the harsh sun.

We have stopped before Prak Kom, the woman whose head is wrapped in a dark red scarf. She works doubled over at the waist, pulling the long blade of her knife through the stalks with little rasping sounds, as if shaving a man’s stiff beard, stopping just short of her bare toes. She appears agile and light as she takes hold of the stems and tosses them onto a neat pile beside her. She must stand, bend, and lift hundreds of times a day. When she first glances up at me, she looks forbiddingly stern. Then she smiles,

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squatting low to rest for a moment, her long knife loose in one hand. She looks young and confident, serene and at ease. I notice that there are deep scars at her wrists. Her hands are gnarled, the knuckles enlarged. There are livid scars around her ankles as well.

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As a car rounds the corner of the field and stops beside the field hut, Sokehn looks up to greet his cousin. Mao Danh’s arrival marks the end of our garden walk. Sokehn introduces us in En- glish. We bow shyly to each other. Then Sokehn turns to say that in a few hours he will come back to take me up into the hills of Leverett to see the temple.

It’s quiet in the cool of the hut, where I take a place on a plank inches above steaming July mud and learn to shuck water grass from the Khmer women working beside me. Mao Danh tells me how she and her family escaped from Cambodia in 1979.

“I left over from the dead,” she begins. “We walk through the jungle. We almost to the Thai border. Everywhere people dead— children, man, woman, all dead. Then we see a line of Vietnam- ese soldier come out of the trees. I think, ‘Oh, no, we going to die again.’ My mother say, ‘At least we die together.’”

What does it mean to be left over from the dead—“to die again”? Mao is as sure that her English is inadequate as I am that she is speaking in spontaneous poetry, language of such elastic inventiveness and compression that it startles me time and again. Hers is a consciousness that has registered the threat of random annihilation not once but many times. It is as if she is her own ghost and visits herself, full of disbelief for the life, or lives, she has passed through.

From 1970 until 1979, from the time she was eight until she was eighteen, Mao witnessed unspeakable atrocity and was threat- ened with death over and over again. For four years, from 1975, when Pol Pot came to power, until 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded, she lived outside, in a work camp, sleeping under a palm or a mango tree. “Never had a house to sleep,” she says.

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In their rural village of Trophong Chhnang, the five Prak sis- ters worked the family’s farm, using oxen and water buffalo to tend the rice. “We use bamboo pole with two buckets to carry water,” Mao explains. Their father had died young; their broth- ers had become Buddhist monks. They worked hard and lived simply, their lives revolving around the two centers of Cambo- dian culture, the extended family and the Buddhist temple. Then the wars began.

The family was driven from its village repeatedly, as it was captured, then liberated by warring factions. By the time Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia during the New Year’s celebrations in April 1975, declaring “Year Zero,” many in the Prak extended family had relocated to Phnom Penh. The Prak family was among the millions who were forcibly evac- uated from the capital city in a matter of days—the largest mass exodus of an urban center in modern history. Many of their kin, most of them men, were executed. Those who survived were sep- arated from one another, segregated by age and gender, and sent to work camps, where they endured years of forced labor, starva- tion, and terror. Many were tortured.

This was the era of the “killing fields,” the reign of terror when the Khmer Rouge waged war on their own people. Anyone who had served in the military, as Sokehn’s father had, or who was educated—and wearing glasses was enough to mark you as one of the educated—was captured, killed, and buried in shallow mass graves just outside each village.

Of Cambodia’s fifty thousand Buddhist monks, only three thousand survived. Village temples that were not destroyed— their stones used to build roads—were systematically desecrated, used to store weapons or manure. Some were transformed into places of torture and death. A policy of enforced agrarian reform uprooted millions, both urban and rural, and within a few years devastated land that had been kept fertile for centuries. The pop- ulation was pushed to the edge of starvation. Skilled rice farmers were forced to adopt disastrous irrigation policies. “With water

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we can have rice, with rice we can have everything,” a slogan of the Khmer Rouge, accompanied the violent imposition of collec- tivized, intensive agriculture on people who had traditionally practiced small-scale, sustainable rice farming and fruit and veg- etable gardening. Starving in fields of rice they cultivated at gun- point, the Khmer were forbidden to eat anything they grew.

In 1979, the Vietnamese invaded. “I’m eighteen year old,” Mao says. “Sokehn’s younger than me. We run together through Thailand.”

Thousands of Cambodians fled through the jungle. Many were forced back across the border, walking on paths sown with land mines. For every hundred who attempted to cross the Thai border, ten survived.

“We stay in Thailand for a year,” Mao continues. She shows me how Thai villagers drew their fingers across their throats as the Khmer refugees passed by on the trucks that picked them up as they emerged from the jungle. As she makes this gesture, Prak Ky and Prak Kom, who have been chattering and laughing while clipping and bundling water grass, fall silent. Then only the sounds of birdsong and the humming of insects punctuate Mao’s story.

For years each of the sisters thought the others were dead. Now they work side by side in the garden, except for Sokehn’s mother, Prak Kann, who is partially paralyzed from the after- effects of torture. It was she who reached America first. She worked as a chambermaid at the Lord Jeffery Inn for seven years, earning the money to pay someone to find news of her sisters. One by one, as they were located, Prak Kann used her savings to bring them to America to join her.

As Mao tells me her family’s story, we sit before a mountain of bright green, working steadily. The slender and flexible stems of water grass branch into beautiful spearlike leaves four or five inches long. Mao shows me how to strip the lower leaves from a fat handful of the stems, separating out those that are too small

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or have yellowed. The Khmer women are dexterous; they work quickly, gracefully, every movement efficient and smooth.

First we sort the water grass into healthy bundles, then fasten them with rubber bands. Prak Ky takes the bundles I have lined up on the plank beside me and evens up the stems with a knife she sharpens on a rock beside her bare feet. I watch, amazed, as she holds the water grass on her thigh and slices through it. These women handle their field knives with unblinking confidence. When Prak Ky, Mao’s mother, has a big enough pile ready, she stands, bends from the waist, and rinses bundle after bundle in the blue plastic kiddy pool beside her. Bunched, clipped, and washed, the beautiful greens are packed lightly into boxes and covered with damp cloths until they are taken to market.

A pot of soup simmers on a fire built among rocks just outside the hut. The smoke helps a little against the mosquitoes. I am in shorts and a sleeveless shirt, my braid pinned up, my skin slathered with bug repellent. Prak Ky and Prak Kom, who have been working in the fields since dawn and will work here until dark, are dressed in long-sleeved tops and long pants. Each has wrapped her head in an improvised version of the traditional kroma, the Khmer scarf that serves as baby sling, shawl, or gro- cery bag, as need arises. They work the fields in these heavy clothes, barefoot, using their sharp serrated knives for harvest- ing. They take turns picking the produce, then washing, sorting, trimming, and packing it for the market.

Every now and again Davi, a twelve-year-old girl whose black hair is pulled up in pigtails, rolls a wheelbarrow mounded high with freshly harvested grass to the edge of the hut. She unties her load, and we add it to our pile. She is the youngest of Mao’s children, the first generation born in America, and she comes to work in the fields with her mother, her grandmother, and her great-aunts.

“My mom’s mouth is sharp as a gun,” Mao says. “Sharp as a power, you know? She gave me double life.”

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Mao calls me back to her story. Since I am not sure just what she is telling me, I simply listen.

“I forget nothing yet,” she says next. Her narrative moves forward with what sounds like a memory—“Always hungry, always hungry”—but then it becomes the story of a dream. “Sometimes I dream of going to a rice field and stealing rice. I get caught. I wake up and I’m shaking. Sometimes it takes me a minute to know where I am.” She pauses, then adds in a hushed voice, “Sometimes I dream I have to go back to my country and wait till my name come up again.”

The story that frames these fragments suggests the powerful logic of traumatic memory, its creative force—a collage, associa- tive, cumulative, full of fragments and elisions. This one ends in surprise.

Once a year the Khmer Rouge allowed family members to see one another, always under the fanatical guard of Angka, or CPK, the Communist party of Kampuchea. Mao Danh tells me a story from one year when she was reunited with her mother. “One time I go to steal the rice to feed the family. It was not ripe, so we put it on the fire. One girl got caught and they beat her. I heard the screaming.” Prak Ky had made a fire between three stones to cook the rice. They heard the screaming of the girl who’d been caught nearby, but they could not see her. Then suddenly the screaming stopped. Prak Ky told Mao to hide the rice, so they stuffed it into the mosquito netting where they slept. In a moment the Khmer Rouge soldiers came to them where they sat on the ground. One asked Prak Ky at gunpoint if they had any rice, threatening to kill her if they did. “She invite them to go in,” Mao says. Then, quoting her mother, she adds, “‘If you find one grain, you kill me, no question.’” The soldiers left.

I can see it: a woman staring down a soldier, perhaps no older than one of her own sons, daring him to search them, knowing they would be killed if he did. Prak Ky’s voice triumphs. They are saved. But Mao cannot forget the girl who got caught with rice they stole together; she was probably beaten to death. Though

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Mao is safe in America and has been for twenty years now, she returns to this moment in her dreams over and over again, hear- ing the cries of the girl whose death she cannot forget. Random cruelty, arbitrary survival. It will not come to rest.

Mao’s memory of the girl who died while she was spared finds a counterweight in the story of Prak Kom, the aunt, as Mao says, who came back from the dead—the slender woman whose ankles and wrists bear thick scars. She was captured with her husband, a soldier, in 1970. The family assumed she was dead, executed by the Khmer Rouge. Then one day in 1980, in the hos- pital tent in the UN border camp, they heard a woman call out Prak Kom’s name to a skeletal patient curled up in the fetal posi- tion. When Prak Ky heard her sister’s name, she drew near to study the emaciated face. Mao remembers the moment when her mother and the sister she hadn’t seen for ten years recognized each other. How they wept. Then they made a plan.

“I steal her from the doctor,” Mao says. Late one night they put Prak Kom in a borrowed baby stroller and snuck her into their tent. Mao became her nurse. “I remember changing her. My aunt smell. Ooh! Diarrhea, look like mucus coming out.” Mao ate less so she could give her ration of food to her aunt. “I feed her, I give her a bath, I wash her clothes. She stink. It so hard to take care of her. If she die in the house, what are we gonna tell the Thai soldier?”

Mao remembers the night they had last seen her, when she was taken away. “They take her because her husband was a sol- dier—they lived at the base. The Khmer Rouge, they shoot that night. Look like I gonna die that night. Oh my God. A lot of peo- ple die that night.”

Mao cannot tell me when or exactly where this was. Her memory and the story Prak Kom told her when they were re- united ten years later seem to have fused, forming a seamless present tense.

“They tie her, like a dog, you can see her hands—they used a chain. She got an infection. They tie her to a pole. They want to

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kill her. They killed her husband right away. The Khmer Rouge broke in. She saw him killed, ten feet from her. Couple months she kept prisoner. They ask her, ‘Are you a farmer? Are you rich? Are you Vietnamese?’ Anybody related to the Vietnamese they kill. My aunt and my mother look like Vietnamese. She say, ‘I’m a farmer. I’m Cambodian. If you don’t believe me, give me a rope and I’ll make a cow leash.’ And my aunt do everything real good and real fast. ‘Okay, you’re free,’ they say, ‘but don’t go far. We watch over you.’ They thought she was going to fight back. They pushed her to work hard, harder than other people. They treat her like a criminal. ‘We don’t have to torture you,’ they say, ‘you’ll die anyway.’”

A trick with a rope woven by damaged and swollen hands, and a woman is unchained. At least in the fields she would not be alone. Prak Kom could do the work she knew, touching the earth, feeling the way it remembered her.

Prak Kom was lost to her family more than once. Before she could recover enough to travel, the family was offered the chance to come to the United States. They had to leave the Thai border camp without her, so they bribed someone to go to her later, giv- ing them money to feed her and nurse her back to health so she could get her papers to leave. A year later they brought her to America to join them. “When she get off the plane to come here, and my mom, she see her all these years later, oh, how she cry. They just cry and cry and cry, they so happy,” Mao says. “We eight people in my family,” she adds, her head bent over her work. “We all get out alive.”

In a book of maps showing genocide sites documented by the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale, I find the Prak family’s province. The legend reads: “Burials: 28. Mass Graves: 1,943. Prisons: 10. Memorials: 2.”

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Davi has begun to linger near the hut, so I ask Mao if it is all right if I go for a walk with her through the gardens. “Sure,” she says.

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As we both stand so that I can be properly introduced to Davi, Mao adds under her breath, “She born in America, she don’t know nothing.” I must look confused, because she clarifies. “My children grow up safe here. I work to send them to college. I no want them to clean toilets like me for the rest of their lives.” She turns from me as she says it, her voice expressing bitterness for the first time. I hardly know what to say.

“Your work has dignity,” I offer. There are so many others, so many immigrant and refugee gardeners I have met, who also clean our toilets and wash our dirty laundry, sweep our houses, clean our offices, mow our lawns. In their gardens, they work for pleasure. They are knowledgeable and skilled. In what they create, they see a reflection of their true worth, which may rarely be glimpsed by the uncomprehending.

Inside the hut, the others fall silent, sensing something in the air.

Davi is ready for our walk, so I thank Mao and follow her daughter out into the fields. She takes me to her favorite part of the garden, the rows of ripening baby corn.

“Do you think of yourself as Cambodian or American?” I ask her.

“Both,” she says. “It depends.” It depends on where she is, who she is with.

We are far from the hut now. Davi walks along the irrigation pipes, one bare foot before the other, using her outstretched arms to keep her balance.

I ask her if she has ever been to her family’s village in Cambo- dia. No, she tells me, she doesn’t want to go to Cambodia. First she says it’s because they have snakes there and she hates snakes. But then she adds that the first time she tried to watch The Killing Fields she couldn’t sit all the way through it. It made her cry, and she couldn’t sleep for days. Then, when she realized that she needed to know how it had been for her family, she made herself watch it straight through to the end.

“That part where the guy sucks the animal’s blood right

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through its skin because he was so hungry?” Yes, I say, I remem- ber that. “I realized how horrible it must have been for them then. I was afraid to ask them if they were ever so hungry that they had to do anything like that.”

We’re both quiet for a moment. All around us, food. The sound of birds. Peace.

When I ask Davi what she thinks of the garden her family has created here, she does not hesitate. “I think: they have done well. I think: they are very strong and brave. I am proud of them.”

As we pick our way back through the rich mud of the fields, past rows of water grass ripening under the white remay held down by clumps of mud, we see Sokehn talking to two men sprawled under a white van just outside the hut. Davi’s uncles are making some last-minute repairs so they can help load up to- night. At 4 a.m., Prak Ky and Davi will rise, eat, and drive east to sell their produce at the Lowell Asian market.

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It is blessedly cool in the car as Sokehn takes me up into the hills of Leverett to see Wat Santivara, the Cambodian Buddhist tem- ple the community has built. We park along a rutted dirt road and walk up a hill toward the temple. Along the way I notice piles of stones, some taller than others, some made with large stones, some with small, at the edge of the road. “Each stone is a prayer,” Sokehn says, not pausing to look.

A path of wide, flat fieldstones with pine needles, princess pine, and ferns showing between them curves ahead and disap- pears into the trees.

“Where does that path go?” I ask. “Nowhere. That’s where the Buddhist nuns do walking medi-

tation.” I feel as if they’re here but I just can’t see them—there is such

lightness to the air, a sense of serene presence. Inside Wat Santivara, Sokehn and I stand alone before the

main altar, surrounded by a riot of color and the random collec-

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tion of offerings, from grandfather clocks to vases of plastic flow- ers. Sokehn attempts to teach me how to distinguish among the many statues of the Buddha, each representing a distinct branch of Asian Buddhism. One small Buddha sits isolated on its own step.

“Is that one special?” I ask. “That one is made from the ashes of a holy man.” As I stand before the altar, transfixed by the Buddha made of

plaster mixed with human ashes, Sokehn walks out the back door and calls for me to follow him up a path through the woods. As he rushes ahead, I walk with my head down, as much to shield my face from twigs and branches as to try to absorb what I have seen. Just as I realize that I have lost track of Sokehn, light spills onto the path, which has ended at the verge of a green meadow. I look up and am blinded by the light of the midday sun reflected by a great white dome looming several stories above me, no more than twenty yards away. An enormous golden Buddha sits in serene meditation in a shallow niche set into the dome’s outer wall. I am so stunned that I do not hear Sokehn calling to me un- til he has turned and come halfway back, gesturing wildly for me to follow him.

The Japanese Peace Pagoda stands by itself in a great clearing with a sweeping view across the valley. It was built, Sokehn tells me, by Japanese monks promoting the practice of nonviolence. We sit on a bench beside a small pond in a clearing below the vast white dome with its four golden Buddhas, each facing one of the cardinal directions. Behind us are the ruins of a burned-out Jap- anese temple. Wildflowers bloom from cracks in the crumbling steps. At the far edge of the woods opposite the pagoda I can see the arched frame of a new temple.

“People come with hammers, and skills, some days,” Sokehn says. “Anyone who feels spiritual, wants to use their time to earn merits, they come.”

Wind stirs the Tibetan prayer flags—yellow, green, red, white, and blue—strung between the trees around us. We can see fat

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golden carp in the pond. Frogs sun themselves on slabs of rock arranged to form widely spaced steps that appear to float on the surface of the water. We step from one to another to cross from the grassy meadow beneath the Peace Pagoda into the temple garden. Eight-foot tall Tibetan marigolds sway in the breeze. Behind me is a cairn, stacks of white prayer leaves held down by rocks.

“At the rice fields, in the evening, or here,” Sokehn muses, “it’s really beautiful. The crickets, the frogs. In the evening, so quiet. The frog came out. The snake chasing the frog around the pond. Crickets came out. The birds. Everything. It’s so beautiful. It’s like you listen to music.” He comes by himself often in the evenings.

As he turns to look at the water, sorrow draws near. Sokehn, who touches each green thing in the garden with knowing ten- derness and can recount its names and uses, its place in his peo- ple’s culture, chooses this serene place to tell me how beautiful Cambodia was in his childhood, how rich and full a life his fam- ily and his village once lived. “Let me start at the beginning,” he says. “Cambodia would be compared to South America, or the Amazon, tropical. Beautiful. Rain, cold, and then hot. Three sea- sons. Rice growing three seasons, along with the weather. We grow with the monsoon season, so the rice taller. And the dry season, tends to be shorter. And then the cold, which is another shorter rice. When the leaves start to fall off, the evening cold. Late in the evening before they go home, they build fire, put rock inside the fire, then wrap towel around it, and you take it to your bed with you, to warm you up. Or if a house not too tall, like an elephant height, ten or fifteen feet, then you make a fire under the house and then you spread charcoal. There’s no insulation, so in winter it’s really difficult, but also enjoyable, because family members, friends, all sit around the fire telling ghost stories until midnight, when you go to sleep.

“Rice farming is really hard work in Cambodia. You get up at five o’clock in the morning. You had to work before the sun hit

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you. By eleven it is so hot that you have to put everything away and take a long rest for a couple of hours, then you go back again until seven o’clock in the evening. So by seven o’clock we round up all the animals, pack up, and leave the fields, back to the vil- lage. Then we make a fire for the animals, to keep the mosquitoes away, and all the animals that attack the livestock. And then we’d go back again after late dinner or supper, eight o’clock at least. You work again till eleven or twelve. So it’s hard labor, rice farming, but these people feel connected. It doesn’t matter how hard you work, because the thing that they used to touch, and the thing that they used to taste, and the thing that they walked through, then cooked by their own hand and sweat, they love it.”

Quiet for a moment, Sokehn watches a frog leap from a rock into the water. When he turns back to face me, his narrative makes an abrupt leap. “Nineteen seventy-five,” he says, “this is the last day. The Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia to communism, and then turned Cambodia to slavery. Culture stop,” he says, slicing the air with one hand. “No more Buddhist, no more child- hood, no more school. Everyone had to live under one roof, so that the leaders can watch you all the time. That’s when the edu- cated people, the soldier, and anyone who resist their movement were killed.”

Dappled light spills through the trees, lighting his face as Sokehn recalls a night of chaos. “My whole family were about to be executed. They came to the house. They spare the young peo- ple. They know we educated. These people have to be destroyed because they city people, they have been corrupted, they been spoiled by the Western ideology. So that’s when they took all of us and kill one by one. My family were in jail, and my mom was being tortured and my father was executed, and no one know what is happening.”

The fragments do not cohere. Sokehn’s narrative veers for- ward and back in time. They did not kill “all of us . . . one by one,” because Sokehn is here now. As for Mao, so for Sokehn, it seems nearly impossible to sort I from we when speaking of the

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collective unit—“the fabric of this closeness,” as Sokehn puts it —torn by the violence.

Above him, the prayer flags stir in the wind. I hear the plash and clunk of frogs disappearing into water. Then Sokehn says something about his brother’s bones. Which brother? Surely not the two I have met, each with a lovely Cambodian wife and healthy children, each with a lovely garden around his American house. What bones? Until now Sokehn has never said he had a brother who died.

This brother was a doctor, so beloved by the whole village that they dared to send representatives to the executioners to beg for his body so they could give it a proper funeral. Sokehn describes the outpouring of grief, the chanting, weeping, and singing, as they burned his flower-laden body. It seems incredible, but somehow Sokehn and others found a way to perform this Buddhist ceremony. Later the family sifted the brother’s bones from the ashes, divided them up, hid them in their clothes, and carried them out of the country when they fled through the jun- gle to Thailand. When they were finally able to leave the UN bor- der camp for a relocation center in the Philippines, they had to figure out how to get the bones out of the country with them. One of Sokehn’s brothers had married while in the camp and his wife had given birth to a child, so they hid their brother’s ashes in a container of baby powder and carried them safely to America.

“After you cross the war-torn country,” Sokehn says, his eyes meeting mine again, “and all the trouble, then you face a new war—is America, the new culture, the culture shock. The most culture shock is not the eating or behaving but is the language. A lot of the Cambodian elders cannot speak the language, and they feel depressed. Their skills, they had learned from their parents for years, those skills have been in Cambodia for thousands of years. Now they feel very paralyzed. They feel useless. The lan- guage that they use to speak with is no longer useful to them. The skills that they have learned from their parents, the things that

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they used to do, is no longer exist in America. And nothing else for them to do in America. In Cambodia they would be venerated for their wisdom.”

The sorrow in Sokehn’s voice reminds me that for every gain these immigrants make in America, there has been an attendant loss—of language, landscape, kin, and culture, the deepest mean- ings of home. You can be free and marooned at the same time.

“What they give up in Cambodia,” Sokehn says, “it’s a trag- edy. Because now they have to give up even their own identity. They want to do something, to be creative or to be useful, maybe not to Americans but to themselves, while they have a few life left in America. So they start to grow their garden. And a lot of the Cambodians have their kitchen gardens. You can see at the dif- ferent apartment complexes, each family has a few feet or so. These are the skills that they came with—their hands, their knees, their legs, this knowledge. So as soon as they put the seed on the ground and it grow, they feel special. Maybe they’re not good at raising their children in America, but this is thing they wanted to show America and their children—this is the thing that they’re good at. In Cambodia, they’re good at building their own house, they’re good at raising their children, they’re good at farming, they’re good at everything. But now, since they’re no good, they feel so useless. This is the best skill that they will con- tribute to the society.

“The garden is their spiritual place. As soon as they start to see the thing grow, they feel so connected. They can be here all day long. They even ask people if they can build a house here, be- cause they don’t want to go to town, they don’t want to see any- one, they just want to talk to their own garden. And that’s how they want to do, these growers. I mean, they’re not crazy. This is the thing that’s so kind to them. It doesn’t speak a foreign language. It speak their own language. Whatever they touch, it grows right out.”

It is not only words that have the power to bind and connect,

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to shape the anarchic flow of human experience into a continu- ous narrative that begins to heal what has been torn apart by vi- olence. There is also the silent and mysterious transaction of a hand burying a seed in the darkness of the earth.

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It is the Year of the Iron Snake, and Sokehn has invited me to come to the Khmer New Year celebration in mid-April, the festi- val celebrating the time of rest after the rice harvest.

The first time I saw Wat Santivara, it was empty but for Sokehn and me as we stood before the altar while he explained the origin of each of the statues of the Buddha. Now not an inch of floor space is showing. Rugs have been spread for us all to sit around the altar. Cambodians from all over western Massachu- setts have crowded into the room, many in fine clothes and jew- elry. Squeezed in beside Sokehn, I can see whole families, young couples with small children held close. To the right of the main altar, a man speaking in Khmer is shouting into a microphone. A huge floodlight towers over him. Behind me, a Buddhist nun, all in white, leans forward, smiling, greeting friends. All around us everyone is talking. On the altar, the main Buddha has been draped in a glittering length of cloth. In addition to the array of large Buddhas that Sokehn showed me months ago stand count- less little Buddhas, including one with an electric Day-Glo whirli- gig attached to its back, a psychedelic halo turning in dizzying spirals back and forth, back and forth.

Behind us the doors open. I feel a hand touch my leg. A woman to my right gestures that we must make room—the monks are coming. As I squeeze myself into an even smaller space, bare brown feet appear beneath the hems of saffron robes. I look up to see a monk reach back to take the hand of the monk behind him. Like schoolchildren asked to link up on a class trip, a string of grown men holding hands pick their way carefully through the parting crowd. Feet, robes, hands, the din, the lights—in a mo- ment they have somehow reached the raised platform. Each

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monk sits beneath his own portrait. Some wear orange, some brown, some saffron. The monk whose robes brushed by me, the one led by the hand of a younger man in front of him, was, I now realize, the Venerable Maha Ghosananda, the father of Cambo- dian Buddhism. He sits quietly at one end of the dais, waiting pa- tiently for the moment when they will all begin to eat.

I remember the story the abbot of the New Haven Zen Cen- ter told me about Samdech, as he is known. In the early 1980s, Maha Ghosananda came down from his temple in the mountains of Thailand to begin his peace walks. He stopped to plant a tree in every village of his homeland that had been deforested during the war, wrapping a swatch cut from a monk’s robe around its slender trunk. Then, bowing with respect, he taught those who had survived the genocide and religious repression to revere the tree as they would a monk, for both were now quite scarce in their land, once richly fertile, where all the temples lay in ruins.

Today the men and women of the Khmer community lay a feast before their venerated monks, climbing the steps from the kitchen below with huge round trays bearing bowls of rice, soups, vegetable curries, noodles. They make their way without spilling anything, bending to rest their trays on the edge of the dais while they place the great array of dishes before each of the waiting monks.

In Cambodia, for these people to fill a monk’s simple bowl with food harvested from their rice fields and vegetable gardens was to participate in an ancient tradition. Here in this modest temple tucked into the hills of Leverett, the ancient connection between food and the sacred is restored.

“Chaos!” Sokehn shouts in my ear, laughing. As I turn to face him, I see a young father dressed in a dark suit praying, his head bowed over his folded hands, his tiny boy in his lap. The boy catches one strand of the man’s prayer beads with a small finger as he too, guided by his father’s whispers, bows his head to pray.

Fragments of memory like bright fish rise from the depths of memory. I can see my Italian immigrant kin crowding into our

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house after a family baptism, first communion, or wedding, feel the emotional pitch, the din, the blend of sacred ritual and earthy irreverence. Hardworking people who kept their faces impassive, their inner lives veiled in the world of white people, they crowded together in church, dressed in their finest clothes, then afterward pulled their chairs in close around the family table, drinking cof- fee and eating pastry, the men in fine suits and fedoras with col- orful feathers tucked into their satin hatbands, my great-aunt Mary in her finery, a cloud of perfume following her everywhere, together with the jangle of her big silver bracelets and the glitter of her earrings, necklaces, and rings. An ethnic enclave, a minor- ity people at ease among their own, easing into their native di- alect, gesturing with their hands, throwing their heads back to laugh. We too had once been part of a network of kin whose lives revolved around a sacred calendar. We celebrated every sacra- ment and feast day with a meal that recalled the old country, with recipes passed down through generations.

From feeling overwhelmed and outside, I have passed into a state of longing for my own people, and find myself comforted by this glimpse into another ethnic community’s rituals of adapta- tion and self-preservation.

Once all the food has been laid out before the monks, they be- gin to eat. It seems impossible that anyone could consume such an enormous meal. The growers, I know, are happy to work in the kitchens and have been preparing traditional Khmer food for days. The years of starvation and forced labor under the brutal Khmer Rouge, the time of terror and torture and death, when it seemed their entire culture would be annihilated, find an answer here in the spectacle of plenty, the obvious joy in the faces of those who serve the food, the gathering of the remnant people, who will spend hours in the temple today, to cleanse themselves for a new year.

When the din has numbed our senses, Sokehn takes us out into the woods beyond the temple to show us where Maha Gho- sananda and the other monks slept before the temple was built.

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It is a long dank shed, with light showing between the boards, primitive kitchens, a bare earth floor. It seems impossible that the monks lived here through a New England winter.

Later, in a friend’s backyard in rural Leverett, the assembled generations of Khmer friends bring food for a picnic. A success- ful son arrives from Lowell in his flashy car and is solicitous to his mother, Prak Ky, who is dressed in a stylish pale peach suit. Prak Kom sits down beside her, her thin frame enveloped in a clean white shirt and pants. I show them photos of the summer days I spent with them in the gardens, and they sit and pass them around, pointing and laughing at each other.

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By late October, when I visit again, there have been several hard frosts in Amherst. The last of the melons, wax and winter, have been harvested. The sweet sticky pumpkins have been picked up. The withered vines and brown cornstalks have been pulled for composting. The beds are being prepared for winter.

The trellises have been dismantled and the hut is being taken down bit by bit. Winter is coming, and with it the sadness of hav- ing to move back inside. Then Prak Ky and Prak Kom feel their old hurts again: the diabetes that follows years of starvation; aching joints and racing heartbeats and headaches, the physical aftereffects of torture, starvation, and forced labor. Soon there will be long dark months when nightmares and flashbacks, the psychic legacy of extreme prolonged trauma, return to haunt them. With the move back indoors, away from the garden, the wide blue sky, the blooming flowers and singing birds, the long hours of hard but satisfying work in the sun, depression and a profound sense of uselessness threaten to return. Winter is when they feel most like refugees.

“What was it like to come to America?” I ask Mao. She thinks for a long moment before she answers. “It’s happy

and sad together. Culture shock, like you come from nothing and you see more and more. I don’t believe myself what I’m seeing.

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I don’t have much to bring—one pot, clothes. We hungry a lot, we don’t have money. It’s so easy here. If we stay here, we’d be strong as buffalo. I can’t believe it, you know? I still can’t believe it. What push me here? I never think, I never dream of a life here. I have electricity, lights, refrigerators, but I still crazy about lan- guage. At my age I don’t want to go frontward anymore. It’s okay if I just speak a little now. I don’t want to put any more in my mind.”

When I ask her what it’s like to work in the garden with her family, she bows her head and says something so softly that I al- most do not hear her.

“Heaven,” she says. “We calls this place heaven.”

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