LOK YEY MEMORIES

There was a missed call from my brother.  He's called me many times, but for some reason, I knew something was wrong.  When I listened to his message, my jaw dropped.  "Lok Yey passed away about an hour ago," he said," at about 2:34 am." 

It was not 2:34 am where I was.  Cat Ba, Vietnam, where the time was about 6 pm in the afternoon.  The walls grew smaller in the already tiny hotel room.  Mich, my girlfriend of 14 years, looked at me and asked,"what's wrong?"  With a faraway look, I told her.  And she looked stunned too.  We just spend two months sleeping in my old room, across the hallway from my Grandma in Cypress.  Just two and a half weeks earlier, we heard her voice every night.  She had dementia and would scream for hours.

The truth was, we should have been prepared for my Grandmother's passing.  She was getting thinner and thinner, she was bedridden pretty much for the last three years, and, even though she was suffering from dementia, she was always stating that she wanted to die.  Sometimes, she was begging for death.  One time, while I was in the room with her, she kept slapping her own head and cried,"die, die, die!" to herself.  She was scolding her own body for being so resilient.  I kept trying to hold her arm, but even with me grabbing her arm, she was still able to tap her forehead.  Her survival skills were intense.  She gave it everything when she was alive.  As they say in basketball, she left every point on the court.


At 94, my Grandmother was an iron-willed survivor.  When Cambodia fell, she left her husband, and headed to the Thai border with my Aunt, Ming Heang, and my two year old cousin, Chan (who would later become my personal bully).  One of the last stories she told me when her mind was still stable was how when she left her house, her favorite dog kept following her.  She gestured for the dog to go back.  Over and over again.  "Go back home, I can't take you, I'm sorry... go back... I can't take you," she cried, as she told me this story.  She  told me her dog followed her for several blocks.  My Grandmother rarely cried. 

My Grandma made it to the Thai border, where she has to sell things to make enough money to get three people across.  Eventually, she managed to get to the United States with my Aunt and cousin.  But what she witnessed on that Thai border was so horrible, she stopped being a Buddhist permanently.  She saw monks partake in terrible things.  These scenarios replayed in her mind during her dementia.  You get an idea what happened.  I can't really repeat it, out of respect to her.  You just have to know, my Grandma became a Christian in America after what she saw. 

My Grandma didn't just become a Christian either.  She started the Cambodia Christian Church from her living room.  This grew into a church that thrives today with lots of members.  She never spoke at sermons or anything like that.  She just wanted a Christian Church to attend.  One didn't exist, so she made sure it existed.  She just wanted to be a regular member.  That's the kind of woman she was.  She made things happen and she was humble about it.

My brother and I moved to her house in Hawaiian Gardens when I was eight years old.  Back then, I saw a tranquil woman who loved to tend to her garden, watch her soap operas (One Life to Live and General Hospital), play Rubik's Cube, watch football and basketball (she was loyal to all California teams), and read her Bible.  Like most elderly Khmers, her bursts of anger were frightening.  Her words were upsetting.  But in hindsight, she just told it like was.  If you did something stupid (which we do 99% of the day), she would call you on it.  She never got upset for no reason.  She told it like she saw it. And most of us don't like the truth.  But that never stopped her from saying it.  Now, if you judged her by her actions, you saw a profoundly generous person.  For example, she knew I loved cherry tomatoes, so she would pick bowls of cherry tomatoes for me, when they were in season.  She did lots of things like this.  She did so many nice things for you that you hardly noticed them.  She never wanted credit for being nice.  She just wanted you to learn how to survive.  That was her reward.

I have memories of different people sleeping in her house.  Folks who escaped the Khmer Rouge got a second chance in America.  Their first stop was my Grandma's living room.  They would stay there for six months or so, get on their feet and find their own place.  Many of these people became successful.  While staying with her, she also made them go to church (she made everyone go to church at one point or another), but that was because the Christian philosophy had done so much for her.    She wanted to share the peace of her chosen religion.  I don't think any of these folks were Christians, they just went to church to please her.

If you wanted to please her, you went to church with her.  As kids, we had no choice.  We went.  But she gave us so much.  And asked so little.  What's your Sunday morning for a Grandma who is doing so much for you?  That's why I watched football and basketball with her.  Football particularly was very strange when I first saw it on TV.  I didn't want to watch it.  But there was Grandma was on Monday Nights, glued to the TV, while the Raiders and Steelers were crushing each other into a bloody mess.    I asked her questions about football and she explained it to me.  Still, football didn't make it any sense, but we would watch football together.  I have fond memories of this.  She loved the Rams, Raiders, Lakers, 49ers... when the St.Louis Rams won the Superbowl in 2000, she calmly said to me, "finally, Los Angeles won a Superbowl."  I didn't have to heart to tell her they were in St.Louis.  I agreed,"yes Grandma, LA finally won one."  She was very pleased the LA Rams had emerged champions.  Since they're now back in LA, it wasn't a total deception.

When I tell my sports buddies, my Cambodian Grandma taught me how to watch football, they don't know what to make of it.  I never thought it was peculiar, because that was what was normal to me, but I've been thinking about her 24/7 since she passed away.  I think I understand why she liked to watch sports now.  The greatest moments in a football or basketball is when the athlete has almost no time and left and must make a decision that will affect the outcome of the game.  My Grandma had made those pressure decisions in her life.  She understood the life or death situation intimately.  When she saw Joe Montana drive to the end zone with seconds left on the clock, she knew the feeling.  Watching sports was cathartic for her.  Just as watching General Hospital was (but that's another story).

She understood survival.  She was very conscious of her existence.  When I hear about a 90 or 100 year old woman who's still around (its usually a woman and not a man), I'm always amazed that this person has seen so much, the advent of the industrial revolution, airplanes, television, refridgerators, first man on the moon, etc.  My Grandma lived through shocking change and adapted in the most extreme conditions.  She didn't just survive these events, she helped others survive these events.  She was a leader, though she never considered herself one.  Her philosophy was that anything could be done.  In the end, she was perfect for America. 

On my way to Cambodia, I was told by my my Aunt, Mum Soth, that a ceremony was being held in a Buddhist Temple in Poitpet, on the border of Thailand.  I was almost in Phnom Penh at this time.  I looked up how to get to Poitpet on the web right away.  Trip Advisor and all the travel site basically called this city "the armpit of Cambodia" and "no place you want to be."  Of course, I couldn't wait to get there.

And suddenly, it dawned on me, my Grandma made the same trip, though hers was a million times more difficult.  Poitpet is the border town in Cambodia that connects to Thailand.  Grandma must have been here.  And now, I'm going there to mourn her.  In the same trajectory.  As the bus passed small towns, people loaded in trucks, and stray dogs, I thought deeply about her.  About the journey that defined her humanity.  She became stronger, more whole as a result of what she endured.

My Poipet was very kind.  I ate traditionally Cambodian food in your typical hole in the wall restaurant.  Food she used to cook.  Every bite brought me back to another memory of my Grandma in the kitchen, deep frying something. 

And the monks I met... they were incredibly kind and giving.  They had her picture on an altar, in their majestic temple.  Streams of flowers.  Tons of offerings had been made to her., including sweets things (Grandma had great sweet tooth, sometimes plopping as much as 6 sugar cubes in her coffee).

I stayed in Lok Krou's house that night, next to the temple.  The head teacher.  At night when the heat was crushing me and I couldn't sleep, I thought about my Grandma at the temple next door.  She didn't like laziness.  So, I was provoked to work.  So, I worked and I read a little bit.  My Grandma loved to read.  A month ago, I was reading in her room and she asked me,"what are you reading, can I read too?"  I would show her the book, and she would say,"that's French, I can't read that."  But I could tell, she missed reading.  So I stopped reading while hanging out in her room.  But tonight, sleeping near her, I read and thought about her. 

Despite being the middle of the night, the heat was severe, easily above 100.  I saw lizzards crawling on the ceiling. I felt something wet on my stomach like a tongue.  It was a frog.  I shooed him away and went back to sleep, but the frog kept coming back.  Soon, I stopped moving.  The frog's cold body felt good.

The next morning, I visited my Grandma again.  The light was perfect on her image.  I said, "I am here in the part of Cambodia were you last were.  It's peaceful now.  I am happy you are not in pain anymore.  You have existed like no one I have ever known, Grandma.  Goodbye and thank you for everything you did.  I will always think of you."

It was then I understood why my Grandma could never convince anyone close to her to become a Christian.  She wanted us to worship Jesus Christ, an estranged God we could not really relate to.  When it was her we worshiped.