REGIONS OF UNLIKENESS by Amy Quan Barry
“Oba wants to know what your name was.”
Like the other houses Bunhati’s is made out of bundles of sticks, the roof a sheet of corrugated tin and somewhat rusty. Arun slaps at a something biting her on the shin. The whole neighborhood has crowded in the dirt yard in front of Bunhati’s, even the chickens and goats seemingly swarming in to look.
“Sawahardi,” says Arun, stressing the wrong syllable. She and Bunhati are sitting on tree stumps. Everyone else squats in the dirt. Both Bunhati and his wife Oba are drinking water from used soda bottles, but Arun has been given a new half liter of water, its seal unbroken. She wonders if it’s the same water she bought for Bunhati yesterday out at Ankor Thom, the noonday sun like a furnace, and how he had bowed deeply as she handed him the bottle and quickly stashed it in his jacket.
It’s not even ten o’clock but Arun is thirsty. She loosens the cap, offers the bottle to Bunhati’s children, a naked little girl and her brother, their hair wild and matted. Both children run and hide behind their mother. Due to their size, Arun guesses neither child can be much more than four though they move with such agility it makes her wonder.
Bunhati laughs, turns to his wife and speaks. When he finishes, Oba and the neighbors nod slowly. An old woman yells something out from the back of the crowd, her deep voice quivering as though she were singing.
“She wants to know do you know what your name means,” Bunhati says. Arun shakes her head. Twenty feet away there’s a steep drop where the river runs. Through the trees the water is red-brown and sluggish. Each spring like clockwork the whole neighborhood is inundated, the occasional animal carried off. Arun tries to imagine what it must be like to live here – the house itself a single room, the hardness of the packed dirt floor, at night the mosquitoes’ constant drone, the lack of privacy, the hunger. “Morning sun,” Bunhati says. “Arun means morning sun.” He laughs again. “But it a boy’s name. Arunny is the name for girls.”
“My name is Arunny,” says Arun, “but my family shortens it.” He looks at her blankly. “It’s a nickname,” she says, “a less formal name.”
Bunhati explains this to the crowd who fall silent, a few of them shaking their heads. Many of the older men wear sarongs wrapped around their waists, the younger men dressed in long pants and tee shirts printed with Western logos on the front. Most of the women wear a traditional long skirt embroidered with elephants along the hem, though some of the younger women dress in western clothes. After a while Oba enters the house and comes back with a tray filled with half-sized bananas. She goes back in and comes out carrying a second tray loaded with a fruit Arun has never seen before, the fruit small and hard and green. On the tray there’s also a brand new roll of toilet paper kept clean in a clear plastic bag. “If you need restroom,” Bunhati says, pointing to a wooden shed by the riverbank. Arun nods, wonders what the family uses to clean themselves.
After she has been offered food, the rest of the neighbors are invited to eat. When they come forward to help themselves, many steal a closer look at Arun, speak with Bunhati before withdrawing. She wonders what he is telling them. Do they even understand what adoption is? Do they remember the days when many of them tried to stop bringing children into the world?
The last person to come forward is an old man, his sarong clean but strangely wrapped. As he nears the tray Arun sees that he has no hands. Each wrist is perfectly flat at the base and heavily scarred. Oba peels a banana, then hands it to him, and the man holds it dexterously between his stumps. After a few bites he begins talking with Bunhati, who never looks the man in the eye as Arun has learned throughout Southeast Asia is a sign of respect. Bunhati nods repeatedly as the man talks, and when he finishes, Bunhati turns and enters the house. He comes back out with a plastic bag and kneels on the ground. Carefully he unwraps a magazine, its cover yellow and brittle. Gingerly he turns the pages as though it were a sacred text until he finds the one he wants.
“Do you know this man?” he asks, holding the magazine out to Arun.
She takes it in her hands and looks at the picture. The article is written in Khmer, the writing fluid and rippling, but under the photo are two words written in English. “Yes,” she says, “it’s Pol Pot.” Arun looks up. Everyone is staring at her, waiting, Bunhati’s face pinched and anxious. For a moment she doesn’t know what else to say, what these people want to hear. The old man is still holding his banana between his stumps. In the distance Arun can hear the river rushing through the trees. Can this really be the country where she was born? “He was a bad man,” she says finally, handing the magazine back. “He did terrible things.”
Bunhati translates her words, and the people nod solemnly, the old man placing his stumps together in front of his face as though in prayer. There are tears in his eyes. He speaks at length, his voice high and quivering. “He is grateful,” says Bunhati, “to know that the world knows what happened here.”
Arun thinks of her parents’ house in the States, its vastness, of her own private bath with a separate shower and tub, and the live‑in housekeeper who cleans it every other day. “We know,” she says to the man without looking at him. “We know.” The sunlight slashes through the trees in long bright stripes. A rooster pecks savagely at a hen.
When she flew in Sunday, Arun told the man selling tickets at the taxi stand that she needed a ride. He studied her for a long moment, glancing back and forth between her large pack and her face before waving at a tiny figure across the unpaved parking lot. In the distance Arun watched Bunhati and several other men run to their mopeds, the sound of their engines roaring like motor boats as they sped over. “But I have a big bag,” Arun said, as the first man to reach her began to lift it onto his moped. “I need a car.” Within seconds Bunhati arrived and spoke sharply to the man who then turned to Arun and said something plaintively in Cambodian. The man tapped his nose with his finger. Arun shook her head. The man looked at her more closely, then handed the bag to Bunhati who solemnly perched it on his motorbike in the space between his legs.
“I am Bunhati,” he said. “I speak English. I will serve.” The other men watched as Arun straddled the back of the moped. “Where shall we go?” asked Bunhati.
“The Bakong Hotel.”
Today after much discussion and because it’s her last day in Cambodia, Bunhati has agreed to take Arun to the outlying temple grounds containing Tep Pranam. Yesterday after a long day of touring he suggested they spend her last day at Preah Khan, the jungle temple, but she tapped her finger in the guide book and pointed to a different set of outlying buildings.
Bunhati took off his baseball cap and wiped his brow. “But Preah Khan very pretty,” he said.
Arun swung her leg over the seat as she got off, careful to clear the motorbike’s exhaust. “The book says Tep Pranam has been cleared of mines.”
“One hears stories,” Bunhati said, his face momentarily weary as he replaced his cap.
Now after a week the back of Bunhati’s dilapidated moped is the one place where Arun feels like a native. Neither of them wears a helmet, the hard dirt road heavily rutted, large stagnant puddles scattered here and there, the water red with clay. They pass a group of monks walking down the middle of the street, their alms bowls wrapped in the folds of their orange robes as the traffic parts around them. Arun sits back and watches the countryside rush past. By now she has learned to keep her balance without holding onto anything the way the young Cambodian women do as they’re ferried through the streets.
Because of the cautious way he drives, Arun guesses Bunhati is in his early forties, his face a deep nut brown and smooth, only wrinkling when he smiles. Something about Bunhati seems different from the other Cambodian men Arun has encountered, something far off and alien, but she chalks this up to the fact that he speaks English and must be better educated. Despite the heat most days he wears long pants and a polo shirt, a windbreaker and a baseball cap, his appearance always neat and clean.
They pass a group of children sitting in a dusty yard. Each morning on the way out to Ankor, she has watched the children come running out of their stick frame houses to wave and shout hallo to the foreigners whizzing past. Though there are numerous children out this morning, no one waves at her, her long black hair streaming in the wind.
Arun flies out tomorrow. She is twenty-two years old and still can’t believe she hasn’t felt anything. No stirring of emotions, not even relief. In Lombardino’s after graduation her father slid a white envelope across the linen tablecloth, cleared his throat. “Your mother and I thought it was time,” he said, finishing his second scotch.
“You fly into Bangkok, and from there you can go wherever you want,” her mother said helpfully, as if she were trying to sell Arun on the trip. “You don’t have to spend the whole time in Cambodia.”
Within an hour of landing in Siem Reap, Arun realizes Cambodia means nothing to her, that this isn’t some grand homecoming but simply sightseeing. She doesn’t speak the language or know the customs, the people are poor and alien, the local food something to be avoided. Even Ankor with its pristine art, its miles of carved sandstone bas-reliefs, is just another holy ground, the monks with their shaved heads identical.
As a child growing up in California there was a period in her life when she would lie in bed and imagine what her family was doing in Cambodia – what they looked like, how they spoke. But here on the back of Bunhati’s moped racing toward Tep Pranam, Arun can’t believe she was ever born here, that any one of these people could be related to her.
In front Bunhati sits erect, his eyes carefully scanning the woods. Some of the older guide books mentioned bandits out at the less visited sites; only a few years ago during the country’s civil war the Khmer Rouge offered a $100 bounty for every American head. A half hour out of town they pass fewer and fewer dwellings, the scrubby woods stretching endlessly out on both sides of the road which has begun to narrow. The last person they passed was fifteen minutes ago, a small boy prodding a water buffalo with a stick. “Almost there,” says Bunhati as they round a sharp corner, and then somehow Arun sees it.
“It’s a girl.”
The body is probably only a few hours old, though the skin is already shiny and gray and somewhat bloated from the humidity. Gazing down on it, Arun wonders how she ever noticed it from the road, the thing barely bigger than the length of her hand. She and Bunhati are standing in a small clearing surrounded by brush. Just down the road Tep Pranam rises over the trees, the temple’s roof like a giant lotus blossom. “I think it born dead,” says Bunhati. He pulls a white handkerchief out of his jacket and lays it over the small naked corpse, clasps his palms together in front of his face in prayer.
Arun can feel her heart racing. “It’s a girl,” she repeats. On the ground the handkerchief looks like a patch of snow. It’s almost noon, the sun directly overhead, Arun’s black hair broiling in the light. Who did this, she wonders. Who gave birth here by the side of the road, then crawled away? She watches as Bunhati prays and thinks of the story he told her about himself back at his house made of sticks. Bunhati was born in southern Viet Nam during the war, but as a child his family and tens of thousands of others like them fled the fall of Saigon and got stuck in refugee camps along the Thai border.
“That where I learned English,” he’d said. “We lived there more than thirteen years.” He told her other things about the camp, how the tents rattled in the rain, how the food was distributed, what it was like living with thousands of other people crammed within a few square kilometers. How at fifteen, he buried his whole family when an epidemic swept through the camp. “The water very bad,” he said, playfully tousling his son’s hair. “Many people died.” In a sudden sweeping gesture he waved his hand over his house and yard. “All this mine,” he said, his voice rising. For a moment he looked fierce, his eyes burning, but then his wife put her hand on his shoulder and he softened. Bunhati said he was thirty-one. He met Oba in the camp and married her within days of their meeting. Nine years ago their paperwork came through and together they were relocated to Cambodia where their first child Sreyprich was born. “Cambodia my adopted home,” he said. “It peaceful.”
Arun looks around the clearing. She has never seen a dead body before, the thing tiny but perfect, the soles of its feet crusted with dried blood. She imagines that if Bunhati lifted the handkerchief, she’d see her own face on the body, her eyes milky and still. “We have to bury it,” she says softly, “before the animals find it.”
Bunhati drops to his knees and begins digging with his hands. For a moment watching him, Arun can’t recall what she’s just said, but then the wind lifts a corner of the handkerchief, and she too drops to her knees, her hands ferociously scraping at the earth.
At first their progress is slow, the ground red clay and firm. Arun pulls out a small pair of scissors from a travel kit she carries in her day bag and cuts an empty water bottle in half, hands the bottom to Bunhati. The bottle halves make the work somewhat easier, though neither scoops up much dirt at a time. The work is hot and tiring. After an hour the hole is less than a foot deep. Arun sits back on her haunches, wipes her forehead, the sweat beginning to sting her eyes.
That is how the afternoon passes. Bunhati keeps digging, his pace steady. He has begun to sweat through his shirt, dark rings forming under his arms. It’s a little past two and the hole is twice as deep. Arun takes a drink of water, glances at the handkerchief and the small lump it conceals. “Tell me of America,” says Bunhati. “Tell me of your childhood.” Like hers, the palms of his hands are stained a deep red.
For an instant Arun thinks she can hear something fluttering in the trees, the sound like a loose tent flap in a strong wind, but she shakes it off and re‑adjusts her sunglasses. “Sometimes in the States when you have a lot,” she says slowly, wanting to make herself clear, “you have to consciously decide to be happy.” Bunhati nods the way he does sometimes out of courtesy though he doesn’t understand.
They dig in silence. Arun can feel the tips of her ears burning. The corners of the handkerchief dance in the breeze. In the heat her head begins to swim. The feeling is not exactly unpleasant. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine herself as a baby. At home there are no photos of her before her adoption at six months. She sits thinking of babies, their milky breath, but all she can see is this ragged red hole they’re digging in the earth.
Finally Bunhati sits back. He gets up and heads out to scour the area for rocks. Arun wonders if she’ll tell her mother about this, how she found the body of a little Cambodian girl by the side of the road and gave it a home. Within a few minutes, she can see Bunhati carefully picking his way across the clearing back to the grave, his arms full of stones. There is something strange in his demeanor, his movements precise and planned. “Don’t rise,” he says sternly as he piles the rocks by the mound of dirt. Meticulously, with as little movement as possible, he scoops the corpse up in the handkerchief and lays it in the bottom of the hole. Using his hands he begins to shovel dirt onto the body. Arun helps him, her fingers cramping now and then, and when they’re almost done, Bunhati places a layer of rocks on the grave, then another layer of dirt, then a final layer of rocks. Despite the fact that they’re finished, he seems anxious, his eyes scanning the ground.
Bunhati wipes his forehead on his sleeve. He claps his hands together, bows his head silently, and remains praying for whole minutes. Arun sits listening to the sound of the wind. Finally he stands up, extends his hand to her. “Listen,” he says, his words clipped, “follow my feet exactly,” and then Arun understands, realizes the small orange things flapping in the distance at the far end of the clearing aren’t some kind of flowers but flags. Her knees begin to weaken.
“I can’t,” she says, her head swimming, stomach turning at the thought that they’ve spent the afternoon digging in a mine field.
“Yes,” says Bunhati emphatically, and then he turns and takes a step back toward the road.
For a moment it’s like she has a thousand eyes, every leaf distinct, the smell of the freshly dug grave rising up in waves. Knowledge changes everything. This is the land of my people, she thinks. Arun takes a deep breath and puts her foot down.
Amy Quan Barry’s work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Yorker, The New England Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.