War Keeper

Pa Houa had spent hours in front of a screen foraging through old, forgotten phrases. The poem she was trying to write had vanished. The longer she sat, the more tense her arms and legs became, the more her cursor crawled between caesuras and spaces reserved for commas. She tried tearing down the curtain of her page with its left margins and straight edges only to discover her poem had resurfaced with tentacles thrashing at a mysterious grammar.

It was almost 1:00 a.m. when she looked down at her phone. She closed her laptop and heard the distant drone of a car accelerating home. The dirt field next to her house decayed into silence as it swallowed the dark all around. Once a thriving plum orchard, the field had regressed into an empty lot of overturned stumps and mangled roots. Across the street stood a house for sale that had been on the market for a few months. It was a renovated ranch-style three-bedroom home with a new add-on to create a fourth bedroom.

Pa Houa walked into the kitchen to turn off the lights and continued cycling through words in her mind, still caught in the throes of her poem. Light. Alight. Illuminate. Illuminance. Illumine. It had been another June day of 105 degrees.

“If only to illumine my hands with one breath,” she whispered.

In bed, she could hear the words resounding in the dark. Luminescent. Luminary. Bright. Brightest. Brighten. “If only to brighten my hands with one breath.”

Pa Houa moved to the town years ago to attend graduate school nearby. Her modest two-bedroom rental paled in comparison to the revamped house for sale across the street. When she finished her MFA, her mother urged her to move back home.

“I can’t; I teach during the school year,” Pa Houa explained to her mother.

As an adjunct English instructor at the local community college, Pa Houa often came home depleted after long days lecturing back-to-back classes on all manner of academic essays, followed by long weekends grading those essays. Her mother didn’t know it had been the only job she could find that was loosely related to her field, and how she had been managing to survive on its meager income by agreeing to take on more classes whenever other instructors backed out.

“What about now? It’s summer. Are you teaching now?”

“This is when I write my poems,” Pa Houa rebutted.

“Can you write your poems here? You’re an unmarried Hmong daughter; it makes me sad to think of you living all alone in a place where there are no Hmong people.”

“I’ll try to visit soon,” she replied before hanging up the phone.

Her mother had not been wrong to question her. Pa Houa had not spoken proper Hmong in years, nor had she made any effort to attend family or cultural gatherings. She could not even be relied upon to prepare a simple Hmong dish of boiled greens. Even though she had eluded the basic duties of being a Hmong daughter, she was not oblivious to the hardships her parents had endured. Growing up and through the years, she watched her parents grow weary from the demands of life in America. They had fled Laos after the country fell to communism and ended up in a refugee camp for years before resettling in California, where they managed to raise nine children on government assistance and food pantries. It baffled Pa Houa how her parents found their way through it all—the doctor’s visits, the school and work drop-offs, the parent-teacher conferences, the rent and bills, laundry and grocery shopping, and everything cluttered in between.

The next morning, Pa Houa woke to the voices of people talking in the street. Even in her stupor, she could distinguish enough to realize the voices were speaking an erratic combination of Hmong and English. Peeking through the curtains, she saw, to her astonishment, a Hmong family backing a large moving van into the driveway of the house across the street.

The father was driving the van while the mother stood in front of the garage gesturing to him with her hands. Next to the mother stood a teen girl who would momentarily look up at the van and then back down at her phone. Two giggling children ran out of the front door and onto the lawn, chasing and skipping underneath the shade of a large sycamore tree that covered most of the yard. They stopped and lay down in the shaded area of the grass to cool off. At half past nine, the temperature had already risen to the low nineties.

Then an elderly Hmong woman, a grandmother, walked out from the garage, slow in her steps and hands clasped behind her. She wore a long floral skirt with a black blouse. Her gray hair had been pulled into a short ponytail bound by a purple scrunchie.

“Mom, stay in the house,” the father shouted to the old woman in Hmong as he lifted a large cube-shaped box from the van, “it’s already too hot out here.” He took a swig of water from a bottle and then pulled a bandana from his back pocket to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

The old woman did not respond to him. She stopped in front of the lawn to observe the children playing and then walked over to the sycamore tree to feel its bark before heading back the way she came.

Pa Houa closed the curtains and threw herself back on the bed. She would no longer be the only Hmong person in her small town, which was home to mostly working-class people, many of whom took jobs at the local poultry factory and fruit-packing farms. People kept to themselves and rarely did Pa Houa ever feel the pressure or expectation to be Hmong. Would that change now with the arrival of the Hmong family?

After a quick shower and a breakfast of strawberries and toast, Pa Houa returned to writing. With little to go on other than a few ragged lines, she read her poem out loud to hear its cadence more closely.

“I drink the sunlight in my bones,” she repeated, “tracking backward on a map,” she continued, “until the billowing grass beneath me … ”

“Until the billowing grass beneath me flattens into stone?”

“Until the billowing grass beneath me bleeds into my dreams?”

Pa Houa read out loud some more. None of the lines seemed to meet the tension nor achieve the musicality she had hoped for in the poem. Her sonic impulses seemed adrift and unable to direct the language one way or another.

Sound had lately become an obsession. She didn’t care for it when she had been required to write poems for workshop, but during the last year, after her roommate moved out, Pa Houa started to recite her poems out loud in all the rooms of the house. The more she read out loud and became attuned to the natural pulses of language, the harder she worked to string together the strongest combination of words she could think of to achieve a mellifluousness beyond what her ear imagined possible. She liked the clash and clang of a range of sounds that included a sprightly variation of highs and lows, hards and softs, deeps and shallows. Sometimes it happened that she could tune in to the syllabic rhythm of a line before she wrote the line, in a similar manner to humming a tune or tapping fingers to a beat: until the billowing grass beneath me dah-da dah-da dee-dah.

In the middle of reciting to herself, she heard a knock at the door. On her porch stood the Hmong mother from across the street with the little girl peeking out from her side. The mom wore large black sunglasses affixed to the top of her head. She looked sweaty in a black tank top and tan linen pants. The girl stared up at Pa Houa with a wide grin and messy long hair.

“Hi, we just moved in across the street,” said the mother. “I’m Bao.”

“Welcome to the area, I’m Pa Houa.”

Bao seemed surprised. “Are you Hmong?”

“Yes, I’m Hmong,” Pa Houa replied.

“They told us when they sold us the house that an Asian person lived across the street, but I didn’t realize you were Hmong! We’re also Hmong, and this is my daughter, Libby.”

“Hi, Libby! It’s nice to meet you.” Pa Houa bent down and shook Libby’s hand.

“I was curious to know if there were any Asian grocery stores here. Or better yet, any Hmong stores? I checked my phone and didn’t find anything.”

“There aren’t any Hmong stores,” Pa Houa replied, “but if you drive to the next town which is about thirty-five minutes away, there’s a large Asian grocery store called P-Q Market.”

Bao seemed relieved, and after they finished chatting about the grocery store, Pa Houa shut the door and returned to the kitchen table. She had questions for Bao and didn’t get the chance to ask. On her laptop, she typed: “Until the billowing grass beneath me gives way to solid ground.”

Over the next few days, shipment after shipment arrived at the Hmong family’s front door while the cardboard and packaging material accrued on their driveway. On her way out to the grocery store one morning, Pa Houa met the father who had been flattening and sorting boxes. He didn’t say much apart from a friendly hello and that his name was Kong. Dressed in a faded black t-shirt and athletic shorts, he reminded Pa Houa of her older male cousins who were often boisterous in one another’s presence but then became stoic when alone.

Pa Houa ran into Bao again, and this time, she made sure to ask her questions. The family was originally from Sacramento and moved to the town for a slower change of pace, plus they got a good deal on the house. Kong’s mother was getting older, too, Bao said, and they had grown weary of living in suburbia surrounded by traffic and a maze of new housing developments. Fortunately, they both had careers that allowed them to work remotely, Bao, an HR administrator, and Kong, an IT specialist.

Pa Houa found it rather unusual for a Hmong family, especially one with an elder in the household, to willingly uproot themselves and relocate to a small town where no Hmong community existed. Why leave the comfort and safety of their relatives and larger clan, and what will they do if they need a shaman? They didn’t seem like converted churchgoing Christians as evidenced by the twisted red-and-white strings Pa Houa saw on Bao and Libby’s right wrists. But perhaps times were changing, and community or no community, some Hmong were choosing to go elsewhere.

The arrival of the family served as a distraction that momentarily alleviated the concerns and obsessions Pa Houa had been having over her poem. That Saturday was too hot to do anything or go anywhere comfortably during the afternoon to early-evening hours. She decided to get back to writing.

On the couch with her laptop, she began by reading her lines out loud and then stopped after a few minutes. It occurred to Pa Houa that her poem seemed too rigid in its approach to language, and too willing to conform to the rules of grammar and syntax. English had always been structurally chaotic to her, and it made sense to try and reflect that discord in her poems. How far into dismantling the rules of English could she dare herself to go?

Pa Houa looked at the words on her screen: “I touch earth more than I will ever touch heaven.” She continued typing other combinations of phrases: “on more earth will I touch heaven” followed by “the earth heavens into touch.” Then came another arrangement: “heaven touches more than the earth.” Pa Houa kept the last version as it seemed to offer coherence and yet a reader might have to pause and ponder the line for a second.

Then came a new line: “listening to the beginning of a river in the middle of winter.” The line spiraled into other linguistic configurations until Pa Houa typed: “the winter listens for a river that begins in the middle.”

“In the middle,” she repeated.

Pa Houa happened to look up from her screen at the window facing the empty field. Something moved in the middle of the field. It looked like a person trudging along as if carefully navigating the dead stumps and small mounds of dirt. The person appeared slightly hunched over with hands clasped behind them. Pa Houa stood up and walked to the window for a closer look. To her shock, she realized the person wandering the field was the grandmother from across the street. She was wearing an ankle-length skirt that seemed to catch on the overturned roots whenever the hot breeze kicked up.

Pa Houa slipped on her sandals and sprang out the back door toward the field and into the midday heat. Out on the dirt, she did her best to avoid the occasional holes in the ground along with the small lizards that would startle and then scurry off. By this time, the grandmother had ventured farther into the field, and Pa Houa tried to pick up her pace as beads of sweat slid down the sides of her forehead.

“Niam Tais,” she said, addressing the grandmother with the proper title in Hmong, “where are you going? You must go back to your house. It’s hot out here.”

The grandmother looked confused. Her skin appeared droopy under the midday sun and her eyes slouched in a way that seemed forlorn. The field was full of thorns, and she was wearing plush white slipper socks that had become dusty.

“I am Hmong, too,” Pa Houa clarified. “I live across the street from you.”

“Me ntxhais,” the grandmother responded, addressing Pa Houa with a term of endearment to mean daughter or young girl, “I have nowhere to be, but I will go back now.”

Pa Houa led the grandmother through the field. The grandmother moved slowly as if attempting to recall her way back to the house. Even as the old woman’s blouse felt warm to the touch, she seemed somewhat oblivious to the heat.

They passed Pa Houa’s house first and stopped in to cool off. Back inside, Pa Houa sat her down on the couch and handed her a glass of water.

“Why were you out in the field?”

“Me ntxhais, I am an old person whose heart is governed by grief,” replied the grandmother. “I walk so that I can feel that my feet are still working.”

Pa Houa could hear the inflection in her voice more clearly now. She had a deep, melodic voice with the tendency, like many Hmong elders, to stretch the sound of her words and elongate the tonal shift in a singsong manner. She then began to talk about the distance between home and homeland, and how her body had traveled across continents and oceans. “It will be difficult for me to find my way back,” she lamented.

“I have one more thing to say,” she added. “Please don’t tell my son and daughter-in-law that you found me in the field.”

Before Pa Houa could answer, there was a knock at the door. It was Kong.

“Have you by any chance seen an elderly Hmong woman? My mom,” Kong asked urgently, even as he attempted to remain calm.

“Your mom is here,” Pa Houa replied. “I was about to walk her back to your house.”

Pa Houa had not lied, but she also decided to honor the old woman’s request and not mention anything about finding her in the field.

“Thank you so much,” he exclaimed as he peeked into the living room to find his mother seated on the couch. “I’m so sorry for the bother.” He called for his mother to come and together they walked back across the street.

After the incident, Pa Houa retreated from her poem. She spent the rest of the day assessing the events and mulling over whether she should have said something to Kong about finding his mother in the field. The incident raised new questions. Had they mistreated the grandmother? Why the need to hide what happened? And why did she wander off in the first place?

Another voice in Pa Houa’s head encouraged the idea that perhaps by taking the side of the grandmother, she had done the right thing. Then it surprised her to think she had taken a side at all in a situation that happened to be none of her business. Or was it now?

That evening, Pa Houa went for a walk. Most people had spent the day indoors to escape the heat. One house belonging to a young family she often saw at the grocery store had left their screen door closed while the front door remained open. She could hear chatter from the television.

Passing an abandoned parking lot and an auto repair shop, beyond the apricot orchard and toward the intersection leading to the highway, she thought about calling her mother. She wondered what advice her mother might have as to how she should proceed in her interactions with the Hmong family. Would her mother scold Kong and Bao for their negligence? Would she suggest this issue be dealt with by the clan? Or would it please her mother to know a Hmong family had moved in across the street?

As Pa Houa walked, she recalled how her mother often picked large ripe cucumbers, mustard greens, and other seasonal produce from her backyard to gift to her mother during their visits with each other. Pa Houa’s grandmother, who died years ago, always accepted the vegetables with gusto knowing her own daughter had not forgotten her.

By now, the light was nearly gone from the horizon, and the moon, almost full, had begun to rise in the east. Returning to her poem, it occurred to Pa Houa that her concerns over language and word choice seemed trivial given the situation with the niam tais across the street. What did it matter to anyone whether she wrote a poem, and if she did write a poem, what did it matter whether she had obeyed or disobeyed the rules of grammar, syntax, word choice, or sound?

Approaching her front door, she looked across the street and noticed the grandmother’s plush slippers from earlier in the field had been haphazardly thrown in the yard. One slipper ended up by the curb, soaked in a small puddle of water that had collected after the children dumped their kiddie pool. The inflatable pool had been propped up against the trunk of the sycamore tree while a yellow foam noodle lay on the lawn. Pa Houa stared for a few more minutes as tears welled in her eyes. She could no longer contain her reaction. She opened the door, set down her phone and keys, and let out a loud bawling cry that surprised her. How could anyone be so cruel as to discard an old woman’s slipper by the curb? Pa Houa pulled a tissue from the box and threw herself on the couch.

And what was it about shoes that bothered her? She thought about the shoes worn by the dead as part of Hmong burial attire. She could see those handwoven hemp shoes in her mind with their strange, pointed tips.

“They are the most important shoes your feet will ever wear,” her mother once told her at a funeral. “Without them, your spirit cannot cross the rivers or climb the high mountains. You won’t reach the ancestors. Your feet will hurt too much.”

The plush slippers weren’t the same thing, but they stood for the same thing in Pa Houa’s mind, for protection against the elements, for moving forward or finding the way back, whether in life or in death. It was more than just a pair of shoes, or the idea of shoes, it was an object bound to the survival of one’s spirit in the afterlife.

After a few minutes, she took a deep breath and stood up from the couch. Pa Houa felt embarrassed by the realization of her outburst. Why get so emotional over a pair of slippers? It’s not like the old woman was wandering in the afterlife, and they were, after all, cheap plush slippers, the kind sold at most dollar stores.

A few weeks later, Bao came by her house. The family was planning a day trip to a local national park on Saturday and Bao invited her to join them.

“Sure, I’d love to go,” she replied. She hoped that by tagging along, she’d have a chance to observe the family and their interactions with the grandmother.

That Saturday morning, she met the family in their front yard, and they all piled into their minivan. Apart from some light chatter and occasional pointing out of a landmark, no one really spoke during the drive. Pa Houa learned the boy’s name was Simon and the teen was Mel. When Niam Tais asked Kong what they would see in the park, Kong announced they were on their way to see one of the biggest trees in the world, to which the children chuckled.

During the drive, they traversed a lake that curved alongside the road before passing through a small mountain town lined with tourist shops and cafés. After going through the park entrance, they continued winding their way upward, oohing and aahing at how high they had come while peering at the landscape below. They drove the main road slowly alongside giant sequoias whose remarkably large size and stately presence wowed them beyond belief. At their first stop, they joined other parkgoers on a long path that led them to the giant tree. Pa Houa kept her eye on Niam Tais and often waited for her whenever she fell behind. Kong and Bao did the same, and they each took turns guiding Niam Tais along while the children strolled ahead. Niam Tais walked slowly but did not seem to tire as the excitement of seeing the giant tree kept her spirits high.

When they finally arrived at the world’s largest living tree, a giant sequoia that towered high into the sky almost beyond what their eyes could see, the children squealed with joy. Libby even ran over to tug on Niam Tais’s hand before walking Niam Tais over to the tree.

After a series of photos and selfies in front of the tree, they returned to the car where they devoured a hearty lunch of sticky rice, Hmong sausage, roasted green beans, and pepper made from red and green Thai chilies. Moving on through the day, they visited other stops in the park to admire the natural wonders of the sequoia wilderness while also encountering ragged trees that had been scorched by wildfire.

Later in the afternoon, they stopped at a short loop trail lined with sequoias. The trail surrounded a lush green meadow and had little to no incline which Niam Tais navigated with ease. Niam Tais stopped for a second and stared into the meadow while the rest of the family walked on.

“Our old country was just as beautiful as this,” she said to Pa Houa, “and I’ll never see it again as it once was.” She then resumed walking to catch up with the others while Pa Houa trailed behind.

Niam Tais’s comment echoed in Pa Houa’s mind. This land did not belong to Niam Tais and she did not belong to this land, but its beauty served as a reminder of what she had lost. Home for her was far away in an unreachable time and place that no longer existed as she knew it. Her sense of belonging had been taken away, and it led Pa Houa to think of the first peoples, the Yokuts and the Mono, who lived here among the sequoias and whose lands were stolen from them. This place, their belonging.

Pa Houa looked out toward the wide green clearing enclosed by a fortress of trees. Then, it came back, her poem. She began to visualize lines dangling from the branches and words propped up against random pieces of fallen wood in the meadow. The tree line transformed into a study on enjambment. The shape of the forest shifted into the shape of a poem even as there was no left margin, no stanzaic pattern, and no page. She then stood at the foot of a tree and looked straight up to notice how the main trunk appeared as one long line of vertical poetry, and how the branches leapt as offshoots of phrases connecting back to the long line.

Pa Houa began to picture how her own poem could be restructured to match the natural composition of a meadow surrounded by sequoias. She had seen and been inspired by the visual work of other poets, but the visual piece she once attempted for workshop failed to impress her professor who commented that the stylized “look” of the poem seemed unnecessarily decorative. She never had the courage to attempt anything visual after that experience.

In this brief moment, something changed for Pa Houa. She began to think of the textual as the visual and the visual as the textual. She imagined poems existing in their own unique habitats, much like these sequoias thriving in the ecosystem of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Poetry is not only text, she realized, but text stimulated and transformed by the evolution of space around it.

During the ride back home, everyone except Kong napped contentedly, having spent a long, full day at the park. When the car pulled into the driveway, the sun had already set. Pa Houa thanked Bao for letting her tag along before heading across the street to her house.

A few days later, she ran into Bao when she stepped out to check the mail. Having just returned from the grocery store, Bao was unpacking bags from the car.

“We’re headed to Chico next weekend to visit my family,” Bao said. “My mother-in-law isn’t going with us, it’s too far. Would you mind checking in on her? She’ll be in the house alone for the weekend.”

The question caught Pa Houa off guard. “Also,” Bao added, “it’s okay if you can’t do it.”

“I’ll be around,” Pa Houa replied, “I can look in on her. I can sleep over if that’s easier.” Pa Houa was surprised by her own response, but it did not seem to show on her face.

“Actually,” Bao responded, “it’d be great if you slept over! It would just be for two nights.”

The following Friday morning, Pa Houa walked across the street to talk to Bao. Ahead of her arrival to stay with Niam Tais later that day, she wanted to ask Bao if there were any particular things she should know about the house or about Niam Tais’s routine. She could have easily texted Bao, but she thought perhaps coming in person would give Bao the chance to show her around.

She rang the doorbell, stepped back, and then turned around to look at her house. How small everything seemed—the shrubs beneath the bedroom window, the potted cactus on her porch, and the front door with its small, frosted window in the shape of a diamond. The peeling light brown trim on her house needed a new paint job while the dusty stucco exterior had not been pressure washed in years. Her old Toyota Camry with more than one hundred thousand miles also looked unfamiliar from where she stood.

Pa Houa rang the doorbell a second time and waited another minute. She heard someone on the other side of the door fiddling with the handle in an attempt to unlock the dead bolt. The door cracked open just enough for Niam Tais’s face to peer through.

“Me ntxhais, you’re here,” she said, opening the door wider and gesturing Pa Houa inside.

“Where is everyone?” Pa Houa replied, slipping off her sandals and leaving them by the front door next to a pile of shoes. The afternoon sunshine poured down from a skylight window just above the entry hallway.

“They left early this morning.”

Pa Houa followed Niam Tais into the kitchen. There was a handwritten note for Pa Houa letting her know they had left early and apologizing for not properly helping her settle in. It went on to explain how to operate the light switches with dimmers, where to find keys for the house, what buttons to push for the ceiling fan, and other bits of household information. In the refrigerator, she would also find a pot of Niam Tais’s meal of traditional steamed greens and boiled chicken. Pa Houa set the note down and looked up at the surrounding rooms.

The house appeared sprawling on the outside, but the inside was actually smaller than she pictured. The kitchen had been updated with new white cabinets and marble countertops along with a farmhouse sink and hardwood flooring. On one side of the kitchen stood a modern dinette set that took up most of the limited space, while the other side led to the main dining room complete with a wooden table and matching chairs. In the living room, a large gray U-shaped sectional sofa sat in front of an enormous flat-screen television. Two sets of French doors led to the backyard where a tree bursting with lemons and a large rosemary bush lined the side fence. Pa Houa looked out from one of the French doors to see that the new fourth bedroom extended into the backyard.

The decor, though minimal, seemed typical of a home retail store. In the hallway hung a rectangular mirror with a thick bronze frame. The common areas of the house had been decorated with triple-wick candles in various tropical scents, stylish wood bowls, fake blue hydrangeas arranged in glass vases with faux water, and other small accessories. The house smelled of a strong chemical air freshener that initially overpowered Pa Houa’s senses when she walked in. Even as the decor and smell were not to her taste, almost everything in the house, including the house itself, appeared clean, tidy, and new.

After getting acquainted with the house, Pa Houa went back home to grab some toiletries, sleeping clothes, and her laptop. She let herself back into the house and walked around calling for Niam Tais. Pa Houa stepped farther into the hallway and realized Niam Tais’s room was the new add-on to the house. The door to the room had been left open. Pa Houa walked in and heard Niam Tais shuffling around in the en suite bathroom.

Light streamed in from a large padded window seat that faced out to the lemon tree and rosemary bush in the backyard. A plain, gray armless accent chair had been positioned next to a large oak dresser. On one side of the room stood a full-size bed covered in a light green comforter. On top of the nightstand was a small lamp and an old radio, along with an assortment of cassette tapes.

Pa Houa walked over to peruse the items on the dresser. On a clear acrylic tray stood a few medicine bottles and ointment jars that included Tiger Balm and a box of unopened Salonpas. Next to that was a woven basket that contained various odds and ends, from scrunchies and large snap hair clips to cough drops and a twisted copper bracelet typically worn to ward off bad spirits. Pa Houa steered clear of opening any drawers as she had already gone too far in her examination of the items on the dresser, but one of the drawers had not fully shut and something in it caught her eye. It was a small photo album with a thick cardboard cover featuring a floral pattern that had already begun to fade from extensive wear. The album’s binding had fallen apart and been rebound with packing tape.

The first photo was of a man standing in what appeared to be a dusty field. He was tall and skinny with his hair parted to one side. Dressed in bell-bottoms and a stained white shirt that hugged his chest, he had one foot propped up on a rock and one hand on his hip. The clothing and the slight blur in the image along with the rounded corners hinted at the photo’s age dating back to the 1970s. The next photo showed a younger version of Niam Tais and two other women dressed in somewhat disheveled Hmong clothing that did not include coins nor colorful embroidered accents. Their outfits instead consisted only of the Hmong jacket with stripes on the arms along with accompanying black plants and a thin, dirty sash.

Pa Houa was so captivated by the photos she did not hear the bathroom door open.

“Me ntxhais,” said Niam Tais as she walked into the room, “those are just my old photos.”

“They’re beautiful,” Pa Houa replied, concerned she had been caught snooping around, though Niam Tais did not seem to mind much.

“Was this your husband?” Pa Houa asked, pointing to the man in the first photo.

“Yes, he was,” she replied as she sat down on the bed. “It has been a long time since I’ve talked about him.”

Pa Houa sat down at the window seat. She could hear the singsong cadence building up in Niam Tais’s voice. With so much to tell and not having had the chance to tell in such a long time, Niam Tais shifted into a storyteller.

“A long time ago, before the war, no one could have ever guessed that we were reaching the end of one path only to start on another. The Americans arrived, and the war, with its ravenous mouth and sharp fangs, began to eat into our lives. I did not go to school, and I was not educated, but I knew enough to know that the Americans cared little for our survival and more for the use of our men, our brothers, and our sons to fight in their war. They didn’t care if we starved, if we drowned, if we were bombed at, or if bullets ripped our skin. They didn’t care that we were so poor we had no shoes, or that our children walked around naked, or that our clothes were so torn we often patched them up with other pieces of cloth. I once made a shirt for my baby out of ten different pieces of cloth. I could barely feed a family of hungry children who cried all day begging for something to fill their bellies.

My love as a mother was not enough to save my oldest son from fighting in the war. I did not want him to go, but he went on the promise they’d give him clothes, food, and shoes. He longed for a pair of shoes. These were all the things that I and his father could not give him, apart from the poverty he inherited. My son was very sad to leave us, but he would go in his father’s place, as my husband, the one in the photo, had been too ill to fight. My brokenhearted son never came back home, and I later heard he died near the Plain of Jars, his body blown to pieces, nothing left to find of him but arms and legs, they said. I have no photos of him, and it has been so long I don’t remember what he looks like.”

Niam Tais continued speaking as if lost in a trance of the past, channeling into the present a history that could not be found nor heard anywhere else but through her. She seemed to forget Pa Houa was in the room.

“In the end, the Americans did not care that our village had been torn apart, or that our animals had fled, or that our fields had been razed. They moved us from village to village claiming to protect us. We could no longer farm to feed ourselves. They had taken away our ability to be independent, and when we became reliant upon the Americans for our safety and livelihood, they ended the war and left us with nothing. No Hmong person who lived through this war will ever forget 1975, when the Americans flew away in their planes without a care for what would happen to us. We became orphans all over again. I had with me six children. What was I to do, and how was I going to carry the lives of these children? My husband and I, like everyone else in our village, debated quietly in the tenuous safety of our home as to whether we should leave. We had to be careful. There were spies in the village and everyone pretended to continue living like normal even as we all knew that each family had been stockpiling their own supplies and packing in secret. No one was stupid enough to think they were safe now that the country had fallen to the Pathet Lao.

Each night, we discussed when we should leave. The waiting seemed like an eternity. The timing had to be right. One day, when we heard the Pathet Lao might be doing a sweep in our area, we decided it was time to leave. We were heading for Thailand, and we knew the journey would be long. We would live on the run. That night, my husband snuck out to check on his brother’s family and a few other relatives in homes nearby. We all decided it was time to go. We would all flee together and live in the forest for as long as necessary.

I strapped my baby to my chest. A small bag of rice hung from one hip and a pot hung from the other. On my back, I carried a basket containing some old fabric, a plate, and the few possessions I owned. My husband carried one child along with other provisions we would need. Two of the older kids each carried a younger one and we all went like that into the dark of the forest, slow-moving lumps trekking one after the other. I looked back at my house and whispered a farewell that I hid in my heart. My husband said not to look back for it might trick our spirits into staying behind.

We were supposed to be joining another group on the run, but our party did not arrive to the meeting place on time. We were delayed when a few Pathet Lao soldiers stopped us along our way. Their guns were pointed at the children and we women froze in our tracks as tears pooled in our eyes. The soldiers knew we were up to something, but my husband and brother-in-law paid them some money, and they left us alone. After that incident, we moved even faster, afraid we’d run into them again. From what I can remember, we traveled mostly at night and made camp only when the men decided it was safe. After a few hours, we would run again. The days came and went. The moon moved through its phases. It was like this again and again, fleeing as phantoms through the forest.

One day, we came upon a deserted village. All the villagers had fled, and no one was in sight. But as we got closer, we could see the village had been ransacked. There was debris all over the place. Some of us wanted to keep moving and leave these haunted places undisturbed while others thought we might be able to find things we could salvage. We went toward the village. We were afraid to look in the houses, and when we did, we were horrified to find a few dead bodies.

And then, in one of the homes, we heard a noise that scared us. It sounded like something moving around but also whiny and crying. No one wanted to peek inside, but after a few minutes, I realized the sound was a small child. I went in the house and found a little boy, about two years old, huddling in the corner. He wore nothing but a torn shirt, and his eyes looked terrified. The others followed me and told me to stop as the little boy could be a ghost. But I said no, that is no ghost, that is a scared child whose parents are probably dead. I wanted to take the child with me, but the others refused, and I wept quietly as we left the village. I was mad at my husband for doing nothing about it, and he found it hard to speak, too. I knew he wanted to take the little boy with us. I thought of my eldest son, his body parts found in a field, and now this little boy, left behind in the village and discarded among the debris.

A few hours later, during our trek through the forest, we heard something rustling in the leaves. We stopped in our tracks, worried that the soldiers had found us again. But then someone said loudly, ‘It’s the little boy!’ I turned around, and when I saw the little boy, I ran to him even though I had my baby strapped to my chest. I hugged the little boy and said to him, ‘You clever little boy, you are coming with us now.’ He had followed us in secret and kept his distance the whole time. I took him in as my own. Even though he was one more mouth to feed and one more body to look after, the little boy demonstrated such courage that everyone welcomed him to the group. That little boy is still with me today.”

Niam Tais paused. Pa Houa wondered if the little boy was Kong, but she did not dare ask.

“A few days later, my daughter died.”

Niam Tais stopped at this point. She had been on the verge of tears and now the tears could no longer be restrained. Niam Tais began to cry. Pa Houa walked over to the bed, sat beside her, and placed a gentle hand on her back.

“All this talking has tired me out. I should sleep for a bit. I will tell you the rest of the story another day.”

Niam Tais lay down on the bed and fell into a comfortable position on top of the comforter. Pa Houa held back her own tears as she thought of the little boy. She had read books and heard stories of the difficult journeys undertaken by Hmong refugees after the war, and her parents had mentioned it in passing. But this was different. Niam Tais’s story unsettled her in a way she had not felt before.

She sat back down at the window seat to regain her composure but all she could do was stare out of the window. The leaves on the lemon tree in the backyard swayed underneath the sunlight while the rosemary bush stood resolute. A mockingbird landed on a branch before floating away to reveal the exquisite fan of its black-and-white feathers. Pa Houa’s thoughts roamed in all directions as she began to follow the tangents of ideas in her mind.

What should she do about her poem? The poem wasn’t a waste of effort, but it seemed lacking in substance and emotion. What was she even offering to readers that could for a moment transform their view of the world? Should she take it upon herself to translate Niam Tais’s story into a poem? What was within her rights to say or do, and what could a poem say or do to bring justice to Niam Tais’s experience? Pa Houa’s mind buzzed with energy as goose bumps appeared on her arm.

But as she continued bumbling through ideas while staring out of the window, she could not shake from her mind the image of Niam Tais and her broken heart. Pa Houa could not disremember finding Niam Tais in the field and Niam Tais lamenting that she had no place to be. Pa Houa could not make Niam Tais belong to poetry when the belonging Niam Tais desired had already been obliterated by a war. In spite of her sincere intentions to honor Niam Tais’s grief, in spite of their shared history around this war, Pa Houa understood that these stories survived as oral heirlooms existing only in voice and memory. They belonged to Niam Tais who had been their keeper for decades.

The air conditioner turned on and a sudden draft of cold air came through the vent above the door. Niam Tais huddled in closer to her body as she slept. Pa Houa walked over to the closet to find a blanket or throw with which to cover her. She opened the closet door, and when she looked down, there at the bottom was a pair of new slippers, placed gently together, side by side.