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.

Sovatha thanked me for the help and called me “grandfather,” a term of respect in Cambodian, but comical in English, especially considering I was actually only nine years older than he was. Everyone laughed at that, too. I must have seemed old as dirt to Sovatha.

Then another boy about the same age appeared on the couch on the other side of me. He was too uncertain of his English to say a word; he just dropped his book in my lap and pointed to where he needed help. His name was Teng, yet another Ouk cousin. I put my arms around the two of them and announced to the room that now I had two grandsons. The three of us call each other “Grampa” and “Grandson” to this day.

Teng was living in the U.S. with two older brothers. His parents were still in Cambodia. The three brothers—the oldest was 18—slept in a basement that a kind family had allowed them to use. Because of the Khmer Rouge destruction of Cambodian society, Teng had never been to school before he came to the U.S. and was illiterate. He had to teach himself to read Cambodian so that he could make use of an English-Cambodian dictionary so that he could read the Cambodian translations of the English words.

During my stay, I slept in the same bedroom as Vanna, Vantha, and Vanthy. They owned one single bed among the three of them, which they let me use. They slept on mats on the floor. I remember hanging out in the room one day with Vantha. He was lying motionless on his mat, staring at the ceiling. I thought at first he was sick. But there was something bothering him. I could see two compulsions warring in him. It tore him apart to talk about it, yet to hold it inside was even worse. So, haltingly, he told me his story.

Vantha—laughing, fun-loving, devil-may-care Vantha—had had a friend in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. Their friendship sustained both of them during the horrors. This was the one person he trusted, the one person he could tell his true feelings to, without fear of his words being reported. In secret, they met and fantasized about escaping from their Khmer Rouge overlords. And, in those furtive, stolen moments of intimacy, they swore to each other the mightiest oath two teenage boys could make to one another under such harsh conditions. If the ultimate terror struck, if the Khmer Rouge soldiers ever came to take one of them off to the killing fields, they would flee together, bolt off into the jungle, and try to make it to Thailand or Vietnam. Odds were that they would be killed, but the slim chance of survival would be somewhat greater if they made the attempt together, and if they died, well, at least neither would die alone. They pledged to each other the only thing of value either had: his own life. They would survive together, or they would die together.

Then one day, the moment came that they had planned for. But it didn’t happen they way they had imagined, in the night when they could have slipped away under the darkness, or out in the rice paddies, where at least the sanctuary of jungle cover was only a short sprint away. They came for Vantha’s friend at dinner, in the communal dining hut, in front of hundreds of eyes. The two boys looked at each other, each knowing what was about to happen, but neither daring to speak it aloud. There was no escape, not from here, not in this crowded place. Still, they had vowed to make the attempt, hadn’t they? The one thing they had sworn never to allow to happen was for the soldiers to take one away and leave the other alive.

Vantha’s friend’s hands trembled as he reached over and handed Vantha his rice bowl and said with feigned confidence, “The brothers want to speak to me, Vantha. Here, hold my rice until I get back.” He said this knowing he would not be coming back. Vantha held the bowl, still speechless with fear, as the soldiers escorted his friend away. He never saw him again.

Vantha told me this story like a penitent in a confessional. He was a coward who had broken his promise, and as a result, he had survived and made it all the way to America, while the corpse of his brave, devoted friend, lay forgotten in the killing fields.

I told Vantha what was obvious to me and what is surely obvious to you, but in his grief and guilt, he could not see for himself: that his friend, in his last words, and final gesture of handing the rice bowl to Vantha, was actually saying, “I love you, Vantha. Take care of yourself. Eat. Survive.”

I could hardly have been surer if I’d had the ability to reach into the spirit world and ask the lost friend myself. His friend’s deepest wish was that if he had to die, his best friend might live and prosper. And if he knew that Vantha had found his way to the United States, a place where he need never again live in terror or in hunger, then his bones might rest a little easier in that forgotten jungle grave.

Did my saying that offer him any comfort? I don’t know. I hope it did.

I didn’t stay long in Seattle but I returned to visit again that year, and the next year. The Ouks had no car at first, and didn’t know Washington, so I’d rent one and we’d explore together. I put three thousand miles on a rental car in two weeks. That winter, eight of us got caught in a snowstorm on the Olympic peninsula in a Chevy Cavalier. The next summer, I took Vanthy and Sovatha on a road trip to Montana. Two years later, Vanthy and I went on a road trip through California. (I’d invited Teng to come with us, but he turned me down because he wanted to go to summer school. How many sixteen-year old boys have you met who ever turned down a road trip to California with two older guys and no parents so he could go to summer school?)

Thirty-seven years have passed since then. After I got married and had children, I had fewer opportunities to go to Seattle. Sometimes one or more of the Ouks would come back to Philadelphia to visit me. And we talk by phone sometimes. Vanna married, had children, and became a businessman. Vantha, who hated the “th” sound, also had a family. In 1990, he was struck by Guillain-Barré Syndrome, a rare, devastating disease that turns a healthy young man into a bed-ridden invalid in two weeks. He never really recovered, and died too young. I like to think that he and his friend are reunited at last.

Vanny married, too, and returned to Cambodia with her family for a time. They worked as missionaries. Sadly, her husband died there, perhaps killed in a robbery. No one really knows.

Vanthy tried college, but it didn’t work out for him. Except that was where he met his wife. They have two daughters.

Sovatha had a difficult adolescence and got into some trouble, but grew into a fine man. He has a family, too, and he works as a draftsman. In his free time, he ministers to troubled Cambodian youth through his church.

In 1995, I visited Sovatha for the first time in eleven years. I walked up to his front door, unannounced, and knocked. He opened the door, looked at me, and said, “Hi, Mark. Come on in.” If you had been there, watching, you would have thought that I dropped by his house every day. It’s always like that with this family. No matter how long I’m away from them, whenever I return, it feels like I was never gone.

Sovatha once told me that during his teen years, the time he spent with me helped him to see that there was love in the world, that there was family, and that a better life was possible than the life on the street that beckoned. I was really taken aback by this. All told, I’d spent maybe three weeks with him during his youth. I guess you don’t always realize how deeply you affect other people.

Teng spent ten years hitting the books and won his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Washington. It amuses him to tell his American friends that it took him ten years to get his degree, because they say things like, “Well, don’t feel bad. It took me six.” He doesn’t tell them that he means ten years of school, lifetime total. “I had a professor in college,” he deadpans, “who thought he was a big deal because he skipped second grade.”

Teng sponsored his parents and three young siblings from Cambodia. They lived in his house for years and he supported them. When his American friends heard that he was living with his parents, they would say, “Why don’t you move out? You make enough money.” The possibility that a young man might be supporting his parents, rather than the other way around, is hard to imagine in this country. He eventually got married too, and is the proud father of two wonderful kids.

Teng and I went backpacking in the Colorado Rockies, back in the days when I was still young enough to try something like that. He was amused at how impractical I was in the wild. The experience seemed to bring back lots of memories for him. We would sit at our campsite in the evening, and he would reminisce about the time his family managed to get their hands on a raw water buffalo hide, and how they boiled it for three days. Even then, they could just barely cut it with a knife. They ate it anyway. It eased their hunger a little. For myself, I just marveled at how many different knots Teng could tie a rope into.

Thank you, my Cambodian family, for the joy and laughter. Thank you for your kindness and your love. Thank you for the many ways you have enriched my life.