Read Online What We've Lost Is Nothing by Rachel Louise Snyder - Free Book Online

away with! She could have gotten money for fictitious school activities, as she suspected her cousins did. She could have stretched her curfew, redefined critical aspects of her life like other immigrant kids. Yet she did not.
    She thought it had something to do with love and something to do with shame. Her entire life she’d watched her parents misunderstand and misinterpret the world around them, and she’d realized that this made her feel protective of them, made her like their parent. The result was a childhood spent shielding her parents from the world, which was ironic given all she knew they’d survived.
    Sofia was born in Chicago, but her parents had grown up in Cambodia. Her father’s brother, her uncle Nimith, had sponsored their immigration to the United States. Sofia loved her parents’ stories from Cambodia, even the ones filled with violence or death or hunger or poverty. The distant relatives who’d died in the genocide—“Pol Pot Time,” as her mother called it—even the uncle Sofia never knew who’d been killed on his bicycle delivering bales of lemongrass to the Boeung Kak Market. She especially loved their tales about nature and spirits and palm trees.
    Most of the more graphic stories she’d heard came from her three older cousins. They spent their weekends together, lounging on Montrose or Edgewater Beach and eating fish amok on Argyle Street, swapping tales about their relatives.
    â€œYou know our grandmother was, like, crazy ,” her cousin Ken told her once.
    â€œDon’t say that, Ken,” scolded his older brother, Sit.
    â€œI’m just saying, she didn’t die in the Pol Pot Time or anything. She died ’cause she was crazy.”
    â€œShut up, Ken . ”
    Their two families met at a Vietnamese restaurant that day (“Not as good as Cambodian food,” her mother declared, “but acceptable”), and the kids had a corner booth to themselves. Sofia didn’t much care for fish amok—white fish in coconut milk steamed inside a banana leaf—but she loved the way it looked. And she loved coming to the city, to Argyle Street, which was more or less taken up by Vietnamese and Cambodians. The smell of noodle soup permeated the sidewalks, and everything from yellow candles to incense to Kaffir-lime leaves and dried jasmine buds was on offer. It was the closest her family got to home.
    On the ride into the city, Sofia had noticed a row of fake palms with bright blue and pink and yellow leaves along the lakefront. The waxy plastic trees felt like an affront to her and made her suspicious of a place that believed if it couldn’t have whatever it wanted when it wanted it, a facsimile was perfectly adequate in its stead.
    â€œI just think Sophea should know about her grandma,” Ken told Sit.
    â€œWhat?” she’d asked. “Tell me what, Sit?” Sofia knew next to nothing about her grandmother.
    Sit buried his face in a bowl of pho, slurping the noodles loudly enough to make the rest of them go silent. Sit’s father glared at him from the next booth.
    â€œCome on, Ken. Why was she crazy?” Sofia asked.
    Sit glared at Ken, but didn’t shush him this time when he began to talk.
    Sofia’s grandmother’s husband disappeared at the height of the Cambodian genocide, as did her eldest daughter. That left her with two sons, Sofia’s father and her uncle Nimith. One day, when she was walking to the creek behind their hut to wash laundry, she spotted a bloated figure in black pajamas. It was not unusual, bodies turning up. All her neighbors had stumbled upon bodies, tried to save themselves from the fates that befell others. The bodies were often not recognizable as bodies, Ken told Sofia. In the water, skin fell off like chunks of steamed fish. The bloated body in the creek had a large, darkened birthmark on the back of its neck. This mark, Ken said, stole Sofia’s