Ma's Canh Chua Recipe: April–December 1975

Abstract:This poem was years in the making, spanning decades of listening to and overhearing my mom share pieces of her eight-month journey from Phnom Penh to the border of Vietnam in 1975. It was impossible for me to learn all the details of her story in one sitting, especially one of bloodshed, which was told in a language other than English and occurred thirteen years before I was born in Saigon. I overheard the first fragment when I was eight and walked into a room where my mom was speaking softly to my crying older sister, telling her about seeing blood in a morning river, presumably from murdered Cambodian prisoners. One of the last pieces was told in a car on the way back from the hospital where my dad was dying; I asked my mom if she would have married him if they hadn't been forced to flee from the Khmer Rouge. Even now, I don't have the story right. The narrator in this poem is unreliable; the gaps are canyons filled with mist. But I work to see glimpses of something more on the other side.