The mechanical whirring fan in the corner of Dawb’s fabric stall has made ten rotations in the past three minutes. She wouldn’t usually notice this, but maybe it’s because of her stall neighbor’s absence that she has no one to talk to and has resorted to numbers. She thinks about going home and harvesting her honeydew melon after a long day. It still amazes her that a garden can be grown right in her backyard. Back in the old country, she and her siblings walked miles, over and across hills, just to reach their plot of rice. When she tells her daughter this, Kay blinks at her and turns away, back to whatever device or book she’d set her eyes on before her mom had disrupted with meaningless reminiscences. Dawb understands what a PhD means, but can’t her own flesh and blood spare her five minutes?
“PhD means more work, more assignments and reading, less time,” Kay tells her one afternoon. “You think it means a Doctorate. You only see the result. You don’t see the work I have to put in.” This is an explanation, Dawb knows that. She also knows that Kay is putting down boundaries—stop bothering me.
The Hmong mini-mall is an indoor venue that boasts numerous individual booths and stalls, varying from fabric goods to silver jewelry. Each stall is sanctioned off by hanging walls of fabric, either floral or boasting snail shell patterns. Such thin dividers make for perfect conduits of gossip; whose husband is chatting up which woman in Thailand, whose daughter recently dropped out of school, which auntie is haunted by the ghosts of those she wronged. Dawb’s neighboring stall is owned by Peng, who sells jade she sourced from Laos. In her absence, her teen daughter manages the stall. She wears headphones so that she can pretend not to hear Dawb and taps away on a device with little knobs at the end. Her hunched back, arms tucked in, reminds Dawb so much of her own daughter at that age. She can’t remember when Kay outgrew her, learned to flower herself into someone who can go places without her mom. Now, it’s Dawb who needs Kay beside her when she goes to grocery stores and post offices. Kay understands and speaks fluent English. This is also the best opportunity for them to spend some time together, even though it amounts to nothing most of the time.
Pew. Pew. Pew. Gaming noises erupt from the girl’s device like dish soap bubbles taking to the air. Peng used to joke, “Those shooting effects sound so much like what we had to run from back in our old country. I almost fell on my ass one time I walked into my daughter’s room and heard grenades going off.” Dawb once chastised Kay about the same thing, telling her she couldn’t stand the shooting noises of her video games. They gave each other the silent treatment, but after that, Dawb heard it faintly: the turned-down volume, muted sounds so soft you wouldn’t catch them unless you focused.
Dawb takes her lunch break when the sky bleaches over. She shares hard-boiled eggs with Peng’s daughter, who pinches the chalky yolk then eats it. After Kay leaves for college, Dawb makes less rice, though she doesn’t notice it. The two used to spend gut-open nights bagging leftover rice and giggling over gummy hands. Back then, dinner nights boasted one basket of bamboo-steamed rice. Dawb is lucky if she can eat a handful these days. Rice doesn’t taste like it used to.
A customer arrives, picks out a set of bangles and pays the forty dollars. Peng’s daughter handles it with ease, and Dawb herself feels a prickle of pride. Not too long ago, the girl was a sapling in plaid pajama pants, a second away from blowing over in front of the store’s tacky entrance. Peng had to teach her how to greet customers, with Dawb intermittently butting in to share extra tips, like not to linger around customers too long because it suffocates them and they’re less likely to buy from your shop.
Moua pops in to say hi. His dark eyes flit around Peng’s space. Dawb knows he’s looking for Peng, who is away in Laos right now scouting for quality jade. Peng’s daughter giggles behind her fist, tossing her headphones aside to say, “Try again tomorrow.” Moua raises his bushy eyebrows, jangles his keys, and walks to his post. It’s no secret that Peng harbors a one-sided crush on Moua, the security guard. She makes coconut sticky rice cakes every Friday to tide him over the weekend. Glutinous enough to make him stick to me, hopefully someday, Peng says. Even if he has no plans of reciprocating her feelings, he’s grown a soft spot for her.
Yuck, old people falling in love, Peng’s daughter would say, pretending to gag. But Dawb knew she was secretly happy for her mom. Love in a new country is something to celebrate. It’s exciting to think that there can be romance still waiting for you after the violence, and you can still meet each other in another time and place even when war threatened to tear you apart.
In the next stall over, Vang’s Shoes & Accessories, customers whisper about incoming locust storms. Dawb searches up videos on her tablet. Clips play of people swarmed by dozens of insects, so fast that they blur and become sound. The buzz blends in with the mechanical fan, becomes a different noise altogether, sad and waxy. Dawb thinks of her daughter, how like a locust swarm, she can feel her everywhere at once. She thinks of the grasshopper she caught for Kay, the way Kay never wanted to lose it, the way she never wanted to lose Kay.
Phoua Lee is a Hmong American writer from California. She is currently an MFA Creative Writing student at California State University, Fresno. Her writing has been published in Asian American Writers’ Workshop, ctrl + v, Slippery Elm, and Poets.org, among others.
