Memoir excerpt: The Summer of Two Worlds

The Cambodian community in America was not unlike so many other immigrant groups. We lived by word of mouth, by stories exchanged over meals, by the quiet trust built around dinner tables and bowls of rice. Success was rarely discovered alone; it was passed hand to hand, one family whispering to another, one kitchen conversation becoming a business plan. That is how donut shops spread through Cambodian families across the country. Someone would discover a formula that worked, and before long, cousins, in-laws, and friends of friends would be learning to fry dough, glaze it, and sell it to sleepy Americans on their way to work.

Janitorial services followed a similar path. It was steady work. It was work that did not require perfect English. It was work that required determination, late nights, and a willingness to be invisible. My parents must have shared a meal with other Cambodian families who were doing it well, because by the mid-1990s they had decided to start their own janitorial business.

I was around eleven or twelve when this new chapter began. At that age, I did not understand what it meant to “start a business.” What I did know was that our family now had keys to banks and office buildings that closed their doors at night. When everyone else went home, we arrived.

At first, it felt like an adventure. I would ride along with my mother and brother in the car, the seats sticky from spilled soda cans, KJR sports radio humming in the background. Sometimes the Sonics game was on, and I would listen to Kevin Calabro’s voice climb and fall as we drove from building to building. My brother would tease me, telling me to stay awake, handing me cans of soda to keep me going. The fizz and sweetness of Mountain Dew or Pepsi became part of my nightly routine, a little burst of energy that made the long evenings feel lighter.

My mother always gave me the simplest tasks. I dusted desks, straightened chairs, emptied small wastebaskets. I learned how to change the liners to the trash bins effectively. To save time, I’d grab a handful of extra liners and shove them into the bottom of the bins, so that when they were full, I could just remove the old liner and replace it quickly with the new ones.

My mother told me that if anyone asked, I should say I was sixteen. I never understood why. Looking back at the photos of myself from those years, with my round face and narrow shoulders, there was no way anyone would have believed it. But I obeyed, repeating the number sixteen in my head like a secret password, hoping that no one would make eye contact with me.

The offices themselves had their own atmosphere at night. Fluorescent lights buzzed above, casting everything in a cold glow. The air smelled of copier toner and disinfectant. Carpets muffled our footsteps. Every door we unlocked with our jangling ring of keys felt like stepping into another secret place. Offices that bustled during the day were transformed into silent museums. Coffee mugs still sat on desks, half-filled with cold liquid. Papers were left in mid-thought, scribbles frozen on notepads, computer monitors glowing faintly with screen savers of flying toasters or bouncing logos. I wandered through those spaces like an intruder in someone else’s life.

At first, it was fun. The quietness of empty offices at night made them feel like playgrounds. I got to walk the same hallways adults used in the day, hallways that smelled of carpet cleaner and copier paper. I felt important in a small way, carrying rags and spray bottles, watching my brother handle the heavier work. There was pride in helping my family, in being trusted enough to contribute.

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But the shine wore off as I grew older. By fourteen, the novelty had given way to repetition. Cleaning was no longer an adventure; it was an obligation. I began to notice the gap between the people who worked in those offices and me. Sometimes employees stayed late, still tapping on keyboards while I emptied their trash. I watched them in silence, playing games in my head, wondering what they did for a living. Their desks were cluttered with spreadsheets and printouts I could not decipher. Yet I always thought to myself that I was at least as smart as they were. So why was I the one changing their trash liners while they stayed in their air-conditioned offices?

The shame began to creep in. It was subtle at first, just a twinge when someone looked up and noticed me. But it grew over time, especially when I moved up from dusting to more unpleasant jobs. Taking out the heavy trash, wiping fingerprints from glass only to see them return the next day, and worst of all, scrubbing bathrooms.

Bathrooms were my nightmare. On hot evenings, the smell hit before I even walked through the door. Toilets clogged with things I did not want to name. Sanitary bins overflowing. The metallic and sour stench of bodily fluids hung in the air. I tried to hold my breath as I scrubbed, but the odor always found me. The sounds of the brush scraping against porcelain, the splash of dirty water, the sharp sting of bleach on my hands. Every bathroom felt like a small humiliation, proof that our family’s survival meant handling the mess other people left behind.

“Every bathroom felt like a small humiliation, proof that our family’s survival meant handling the mess other people left behind.”

It was honest work, but I could not escape the feeling that it was beneath me. I wanted to be doing something else, anything else. Yet we were a family business. No one but family got paid, and I was too young and naive to even ask for money. My contribution was expected, and I gave it, though resentment began to rise in me like steam from a mop bucket.

By sixteen, I had grown rebellious. I no longer wanted to spend my evenings scrubbing toilets and hauling bags of trash. I refused sometimes, leaving my brother to do the work alone. I told myself it was unfair, that I deserved freedom, that I was tired of being invisible. Deep down, though, what I really felt was shame. Shame at what we did. Shame at how others might see me. Shame that I could not yet imagine a different life.

Those years as a janitor were my first real job. They taught me how hard my parents were willing to work, how much sacrifice they shouldered without complaint. They taught me that survival was not always glamorous, that sometimes it was bleach on your hands and the echo of a vacuum in your ears. They also taught me the beginnings of bitterness, the early questions about who I was and who I wanted to be.

Looking back, I can see the dignity in the work. But as a boy stepping into adolescence, all I could feel was the weight of humiliation. Cleaning was what we did to survive. It was what my parents believed in. And for better or worse, it was where I began to understand the complexity of identity: the pride of family duty pressed against the shame of being seen as less.

It was my first job, and it left a mark that would shape how I saw every job that came after.

And maybe that was why the internship at Microsoft, only a few years later, felt like stepping into another universe. After years of arriving at offices only when they were dark and empty, I suddenly entered a world of glass-walled buildings buzzing with light, of employees walking with confidence, of free soda and coffee carts where a barista would make me a frappuccino as if it cost nothing at all. For so long, my identity had been tied to the unseen labor of cleaning other people’s messes. Now, for the first time, I was being invited into the rooms where the future was being written.

For the last two years of high school, my mother had grown used to finding my brother and me perched in front of the computer, long after the rest of the house had gone quiet. If we were not outside playing basketball in our makeshift court in my front yard, we were locked into the glow of a bulky beige monitor. The air filled with the sound of the modem screeching, an orchestra of static and tones that became the soundtrack of our teenage nights. Relatives could never get through to us on the phone. Friends gave up calling altogether. My mother’s friends knocked on the door when they needed her, already knowing that the phone would never ring through.

We were addicted to the world of America Online, to the clunky chat rooms, to the thrill of discovering new websites. I did not understand at the time that every hour we spent online was piling up on the bill. AOL still charged by the minute, and I am sure those envelopes in the mailbox made my mother’s heart drop. But she rarely scolded us. She let us chase our curiosity, even if it came at a price she could not easily afford.

That curiosity grew into something more. I taught myself HTML by copying and pasting snippets of code I found online, bending it until I could make a rudimentary website. The pages were hideous, full of neon text, marquee motion letters, tiled backgrounds, but they felt like proof that I could shape this new world. It was like discovering a hidden language.

Through a family my mother worked for as a nanny, I was given a chance to join a high school internship program at Microsoft. It was the late 1990s, and Microsoft was not just a company. It was The Company. Bill Gates’s face stared out from the covers of Time and Newsweek. Windows 95 had changed the world. Internet Explorer and Netscape were locked in a battle that dominated headlines. The word “monopoly” was being thrown around in Washington, but in Redmond the mood was electric. Microsoft was at the very center of the new economy.

The first time I arrived on the Redmond campus, it felt like entering another world. The campus was spread out like a small city. Buildings had code names—40, 41, 42—each housing different teams. The sidewalks were perfectly clean. Manicured lawns rolled out like carpets between glass-walled offices. New construction was rising, including the now-famous Red West campus where executives would soon move. The architecture there looked sleeker, with larger windows and brighter interiors, as though even the buildings themselves wanted to announce that this was the future.

I noticed everything. The espresso machines that hissed in the lobbies. The refrigerators stocked with free sodas, with every flavor of Mountain Dew and Coke you could imagine. To a kid who grew up stretching grocery money, free soda felt like the height of luxury. The walls of offices were plastered with posters celebrating the launch of Windows 98, or jokes about Netscape, or cartoons poking fun at rivals. Each hallway had an assortment of arcade games people could play - all for free! I often wondered how people actually got any work done with copies of Street Fighter II right beyond your cubicle. People decorated their cubicles with Dilbert strips and Nerf guns, and I learned quickly that “ship it” was the highest praise.

And then there were the coffee carts. On almost every floor, a barista stood behind a gleaming cart, pulling espresso shots and steaming milk. The drinks were free. Any employee could walk up and order whatever they wanted, no questions asked. I could hardly believe it. Coffee had always seemed like something adults bought in paper cups when they were rushing to work, something you picked up at a gas station if you had money to spare. Now here I was, a high school kid, staring at a professional barista inside an office building, ready to make me anything I wanted at no cost.

It was the first time in my life that I drank coffee. Not the bitter black kind that older men sipped in diners, but creamy, sweet frappuccinos blended with ice and sugar. I loaded up on them, one after another, until the jitters made my hands shake. It felt decadent, like I was gaming the system. I thought about how much those drinks cost at Starbucks and could not fathom how a company could just give them away. To me, it was proof of how wealthy Microsoft was, how far removed it was from the world I knew. That summer, I became addicted to the frappuccinos as much as to the feeling that I had somehow stepped into a privileged class of people who lived with abundance I had never imagined.

What made the experience even better was the camaraderie of the other high school interns. We were like-minded kids, all obsessed with computers and the internet. Some came from wealthy neighborhoods where they had been coding since middle school, others like me were self-taught, cobbling together knowledge from AOL chat rooms and trial and error. Together we formed a small tribe. We compared code like athletes compared stats. We joked about the quirks of the software we were testing. We stayed late sometimes, huddled around glowing monitors, pushing each other to figure out new tricks. For the first time, I felt like I belonged among peers who saw the world through the same lens of possibility.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was brushing up against greatness. I was surrounded by peers who had the same obsession with technology, kids from wealthy neighborhoods who had been programming since middle school. I thought maybe I had found the place where I belonged.

But every afternoon, when the internship ended, reality waited.

By evening, I was not a bright intern. I was a janitor. My brother and I would pile into the car, our clothes still carrying the faint smell of bleach from the night before. We drove to banks, to office buildings, to places where the lights were already dimmed. Our tools were not computers and whiteboards, but mops, vacuums, and trash bags.

The shame hit me hardest in those moments of transition. In the morning, I held a badge that opened doors to glass-walled conference rooms. At night, we carried a ring of keys that opened janitor closets stocked with rubber gloves and buckets of disinfectant. My shoes squeaked on polished floors, not because they were new but because they were wet from mopping. I scrubbed toilets that would be used the next morning by people who never gave a thought to who had cleaned them.

I hated the smell of chemicals that clung to my clothes. I hated the way my fingers cracked from the cleaning detergents. I hated dragging trash bags that sometimes split open, spilling coffee grounds and crumpled papers across the hall. I hated the silence of empty offices, the fluorescent lights that buzzed above me while the rest of the world slept.

I knew there was dignity in the work. My brother and I joked sometimes to make the hours pass faster. We challenged each other to finish sections first, or to haul more bags to the dumpster without one breaking. We laughed, but under the laughter was a shared truth: this was survival. This was money we needed. It was honest work. But still, I carried shame like a weight strapped to my chest.

At Microsoft, I watched people walk out of Red West holding lattes and cell phones, their laughter carrying in the air. Then I climbed into a car that smelled of bleach, heading to clean toilets. I imagined what would happen if one of them saw me at night, bent over a urinal with rubber gloves on. I imagined the flicker of recognition, the polite smile, the unspoken judgment. The thought made my stomach knot.

The contrast forced me to confront questions about who I really was. Was I the intern with potential, sipping frappuccinos from the coffee cart, or the janitor with bleach stains on his clothes? Was I destined to belong to the world of Red West, or to the world of supply closets and mop handles? The truth, which I did not yet have the maturity to accept, was that I was both.

Still, the shame did something to me. It turned into fuel. Each night as I pushed the vacuum down long, empty halls, I thought about the meetings I had sat in that day. Each time I tied a trash bag and hauled it to the dumpster, I thought about the code I wanted to write. Each time I scrubbed a toilet, I promised myself I would never spend my life doing this work.

Humility was not a lesson I chose, but it was one I could not avoid.

Looking back now, I see that those summers gave me two educations. Microsoft taught me the mechanics of software, the rhythm of a corporate environment, the possibilities of a future with technology. The janitorial work taught me the weight of survival, the dignity of labor, the clarity of knowing what I wanted to escape. Together they shaped me into someone who could chase ambition without forgetting where he came from.

This was the summer of two worlds. In the day I touched the future, sipping frappuccinos in glass-walled buildings. At night I scrubbed the past, bent over toilets in silent corridors. Both belonged to me. And both would shape the rest of my life.