my father’s only friend
Phanat Nikhom Refugee Camp-Chonburi, Thailand, 1988 (L-R) Lyn and my father, Vuthy
my father’s only friend
Lyn met my father in the Phanat Nikhom refugee camp in 1988, quickly adjusting to the jungle air – thick compared to the vastness of home in British Columbia. Vancouver was ample for exploration of wide freedoms, contrasted with the density that moved in the bodies and boundaries set in barbed wire here in this transition place. Lyn’s peach skin stood stark amidst the haze of golden yet sallow Cambodian faces. Lyn was jovial and kinetic in his laughter. My father was a demure man learning to accept his shadow. To my father, Lyn was an angel, if he ever let himself believe in such auspicious encounters.
Phanat Nikhom, like any place of pain, unveiled missing limbs, ghosts of the unmourned dead, and former selves searching for a spot to rest, final or not. But it also welcomed the volunteers: the fresh energy of healers, listeners, and empaths – who with volition – took on the pain and transmuted it through lessons of how to flush a western toilet, and simple English phrases like, “What is your name? Where are you from?”. Lyn was one of them, but a rarer type, who saw my father not as a pity project but as a lifelong brother whose compatibility and familiarity may have collided in past lives. My father saw in Lyn the key to a loneliness and fear of death that was still budding inside of him. If my father was a moth, Lyn was persistent in leading him to the light, and to the third country, America.
My father set up as best he could, learned not only how to flush a toilet but to call a plumber when the clog was out of reach. America was a distorted heaven of friendly smiles but hostile biases, a place where the dream is conjured but the alchemist lingers asleep. Lyn went back to Vancouver and the Gulf of Alaska, wading his time and feet in the many trickling brooks and streams that called him back home. I came across photos of him and my father recently, Lyn with thick glasses, a whole head taller than my father who was grinning sheepishly. What a clash of worlds, representing the man and the mask that they each wore – of moth and magician.
reincarnate ∞
I don’t remember being murdered —
maybe dragged by my hair,
forced to dig my own grave.
Or did I collapse from
the fourteen hour work days,
limbs burdened, giving way
to gravity and the heat?
It is possible I starved –
barren bones, non-menstrual.
What were my last thoughts?
How cruel, this world.
Papa, I was a good girl.
I hope I made you proud.
Did I know that my spirit
would be called for again,
fractals first dispersed in ether
then bound together in union?
New body and lessons —
but same eyes that seek
into timeless constellations,
energy that ignites the night
with a prophetic hope and fire.
∞Cambodia circa 1977
bud, bloom and birth
When does the lotus
have time to bloom
if it is being suffocated
pinned down, starved of sun
and mired from a mud
dark and burdening?
In a marsh devoid
of hope, stripped of faith,
blindfolded from its own
salvation, petals are ripped
and strewn in silence –
no rite or solemnity.
This death is not an end.
It never is, but instead
the beginning
of another beginning
a curious spin, and
saṃsāra settled.
Revel in the rebirth
of courage mounting,
defiant flesh-pink tips
that bud and rise
ascending karma
reaching to heaven,
a slow unfolding of
layer upon draped layer –
extant beauty, rebelling
against the reign of blood.
Votey is a Cambodian-American, the daughter of refugees who survived the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. She is a trained lawyer and writer of poetry. She is interested in the collective consciousness in each of us. She has been published and cited in legal journals but poetry is where she feels most alive. She has lived in Cambodia for the past three years –– uncovering her ancestral roots, delving into the complete rebirth of a country’s legal system, arts and culture scene, and resurgence of identity amidst changing geopolitical alliances. She is currently based in London.