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letter! Phanna was to be married and she asked me to come, to be her bridesmaid. After Grandfather left, I got permission from the clinic to go. I paid a man to take me there on the back of his bicycle. I arrived the night before the wedding, and when I got to the house Phanna was getting ready.
    I asked her, “Who is your husband?” She didn’t know. She waved her hand at a clump of young men outside the house, watching the preparations. “Maybe one of them,” she said. I asked her, “And are you glad?”
    There was going to be a priest, several dresses to change into, makeup, cakes, a ceremony, but she looked at me emptily. I was fifteen, so Phanna must have been around seventeen by then. I thought she was very lucky to have been allowed to wait so long, though I knew some of the other villagers called my father’s household the house of the old virgins.
    Father was a teacher, an intellectual, and Mother was educated too. They had not forced Phanna to marry. Mother came and asked her, “Do you want to marry?” and Phanna answered, “As you wish,” because that is what good girls do. That seemed normal to her, and it did to me as well.
    She didn’t ask me about sex, and I didn’t tell her. Such things are never said. But I heard Mother say, “On the first night, you sleep facing your husband. If you turn your back on him that means you’ll divorce. And you let him do what he wants.” I realized that this always happened in marriage—that this was what marriage was about.
    Grandfather wasn’t in the village, and it was decided that I would stay at Father’s house that night. Phanna had made me a dress. I was so proud at the wedding to be introduced as Phanna’s sister; the husband’s family just assumed that meant that this was my real father and mother, my real family. The husband was a boy of about eighteen, from a nearby village. He had been hiding in Thlok Chhrov from the government soldiers who had recently been coming around to conscript all the boys.
    After the wedding, I returned to Chup. My husband returned, then shortly thereafter he left to fight again, this time much farther away. The fighting was becoming intense along the Cambodian border with Thailand. The Khmer Rouge forces were growing. They were now an organized army, based in Thailand. At the end of every year, the Vietnamese forces that occupied Cambodia would go on the offensive and destroy the guerrilla bases there, but after the dry season, as the rains resumed, the Khmer Rouge would move back into the country. Now the government was building a huge wall of land mines and mantraps along the border, to stop the Khmer Rouge from coming across.
    My husband left with his contingent for the border. The weeks went by; he didn’t come back.
    A month or so after he left, Grandfather turned up once more. The first time I gave him money, and he went away. The second time I had no money to give him, and he beat me. It had been a long time since he’d done that. Then he told me, “Prepare your bag. We’re going to visit an aunty, in the city.”

.4.

    Aunty Nop
    “The city” meant going to the capital of Cambodia. In those days Phnom Penh was nothing like the prosperous and wild city it is today. There was hardly any electricity. There were fewer vagrants in the streets. The buildings were wrecked and crumbling, the windows had no glass in them, and the roads were a jumble of stones, mud, and garbage. A decade after the Khmer Rouge had emptied the cities and sent all their inhabitants to work camps, the roads and basic utilities were still not repaired.
    But I was bewildered by all the noise—by all the streets and the buildings. I had never been anywhere so wealthy and so crowded. The country was still Communist, but there were already nightclubs with local music, bars, and huge crowds of people.
    There were giant, cacophonous markets selling everything from cooking pots to car parts, with massive displays of food—fruit and vegetables