Vantha in 1981. This is how I want to remember him.
At the end of my previous post about the Cambodian family I had grown so attached to, they had moved to Seattle, and I figured I would never see them again. Three months later, I found myself embracing Vanthy in the Seattle bus station. A sudden death in the family, coupled with some unlikely transportation mix-ups, had left me alone in the Pacific Northwest. Sometimes in life you end up in the place you need to be, not because you were brave and dedicated, not because you persevered against the odds, but because you were dragged there, kicking and screaming, through the most improbable set of circumstances.
The Ouks felt lonely in Seattle, and they were as excited about seeing me as I was about seeing them. Vanna and Vantha laughed as they told me about how they’d eaten hamburgers at every meal stop on their bus trip from Philadelphia, because, although they hated hamburgers, it was the only food they knew how to order in English.
The evening of my arrival at the Ouk home in Seattle, I was sitting on their couch amid a family gathering, when a boy I’d never seen before—he was fifteen years old, but from his size you would have guessed about twelve—plopped himself onto the couch beside me, dropped an open algebra book in my lap, and said, “Can you hop me?”
The Ouks I knew laughed at him for his presumption and his inelegant English. “Can you hop me?” they mocked. I helped him work through the algebra problem. His name was Sovatha, and he was a cousin of the Ouks, relocated to Seattle along with his mother. His father had died in the Holocaust.