Memoir excerpt: The Strength of Her Back, the Tenderness of Her Hands

America moved fast. It assumed fluency. It demanded adaptation.

My mother became a nanny. Not because it was easy, but because caring for children was the one skill she carried across oceans and borders. She couldn’t read or write English. Not because she wasn’t intelligent but because survival had never afforded her the time.

“All I knew,” she once told me, “was how to take care of kids. So I did that. And I prayed you’d have more.”

She folded laundry, warmed bottles, braided hair that was not her own. She did not complain. But she did watch. She paid attention to everything. She protected us in ways that no curriculum could ever teach.

Her life wasn’t measured in degrees or promotions. It was measured in the strength of her back and the tenderness of her hands.

As a child, my mother, Im, was traditionally beautiful in the way old songs remember women—graceful but grounded, her beauty a quiet kind that refused to beg for attention. She had high cheekbones like the curves of Kampot’s hills, a slender nose, and brows that framed a gaze too intense for someone so young. Her skin held the warmth of ripe tamarind, her hair thick and black as river silt, often knotted into braids by her full sister, only to be torn loose when she ran wild with the boys barefoot across the compound. Even then, there was something decisive in her—a girl forged not for decoration, but for endurance.

Her grandmother raised her. That was the shape of her world—tight, disciplined, survival-minded. One full sister by her side. A tangle of half-sisters she wouldn’t even meet until she turned sixteen. Her mother, distant in both proximity and warmth, appeared only as a shadow—until the day, in the early 1960s, that her grandmother died and she went searching for her mother. But the reunion was not tender. Her mother shut the door in her face. Im was left to survive on her own.

So she did.

She lived with family friends in Kampot, fending for herself, learning the rhythms of the market, the language of resourcefulness. There, still just a young adult, she was married into a wealthy family—a man with a booming taxi business that reached from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. In that marriage, she learned not just comfort, but calculation. She understood money—not just how to count it, but how to stretch it, hide it, and survive with and without it.

Then the Khmer Rouge came.

Her husband, her first love, died of starvation.

This was not just a loss; it was an unmaking. He had once been a man of means. Their life together had been one of comfort, even elegance. She knew the weight of money in her palm, the rustle of crisp bills folded into silk purses, the small, daily rituals of dignity: silver spoons in porcelain teacups, pressed blouses, warm bread at dawn. In that life, she walked with her chin lifted, knowing that her place in the world was secured by something solid—income, reputation, a name that opened doors.

And then, overnight, all of it was gone.

The Khmer Rouge made hunger a weapon and wealth irrelevant. They did not knock when they entered—they stripped. They erased. They turned status into shame and history into suspicion. What was once admired became punishable. A successful business? Evidence of corruption. Clean nails? Proof of softness. Speaking French? Proof of treason. There was no virtue in what she had earned. There was only risk. She buried her jewelry, sold off what she could, and tried to vanish into the dust.

But no amount of hiding could keep the world from falling apart.

Her husband, once surrounded by drivers, employees, family, died in the dirt—quietly, invisibly. Not from violence. From absence. From the simple, brutal truth that there was no food. No favor. No future.

His death wasn’t just a grief. It was a reckoning.

She learned, in that moment, that security was a fiction. That status could be shattered. That identity, when tied to wealth, was like a silk dress in a storm—elegant, but useless when the sky cracked open.

What she lost then wasn’t just a husband. It was an illusion.

And still, she did not fall.

She let the illusion burn and stepped through the ashes. Her hands, once manicured, now blistered with labor. Her feet, once carried by chauffeured cars, were raw from walking barefoot in the fields. The silk had long since rotted off her back. But she found something else underneath: muscle, grit, fire. The kind of strength that doesn’t announce itself, but endures.

To lose everything is to see the world as it is, not as it pretends to be. She no longer measured people by title or wealth. She measured them by what they could carry in silence. By how they looked after others when there was nothing left to give. By whether they could smile at the end of a day that had tried to break them.

Starting over stripped her of illusion, but not identity. In fact, it made her identity sharper, heavier. She knew what mattered now: food in the bowl. Kindness, when it was rare. Her name, not because of who her husband was, but because she had kept it alive. Alone.

She became someone who could not be bought, could not be flattered, could not be frightened into forgetting who she was.

She had once belonged to the world of wealth.

Now, she belonged to herself.

And it was in that bare, stripped-down version of life, nothing but labor and breath, hunger and heat, that she met my father.

It was 1976, and the country was still bleeding. The old world had been reduced to ash, and the new one had no shape, only orders barked in the name of Angkar. People were moved like cattle from one district to the next, names traded for numbers, families splintered and scattered.

She did not meet him in any way that resembled romance. There were no flowers. No introductions. No soft candlelight or borrowed time. Just a chance encounter in a field, or at a checkpoint, or on one of the endless forced marches that stitched strangers together under the eye of a rifle. The details blurred over time—but not the feeling. He saw her. Not as a victim. Not as someone broken. But as someone still standing.

He had nothing to offer. No dowry. No promise. Just his presence, and the quiet steadiness of it. She had nothing to offer either—except everything she had become. The woman who had buried a husband and survived starvation. The woman who had been abandoned by her own mother, raised by a grandmother whose hands never stopped moving, whose love was bread, whose discipline was law. The woman who had learned, at sixteen, that family doesn’t always come when you need them—but that you could still choose to be the kind of person who shows up anyway.

She met my father not as a girl, not even really as a widow, but as a survivor. She carried a past heavy with names she didn’t speak and homes she would never return to. And he—he recognized the fire in her.

They were not saved by each other. But they chose each other. And sometimes, in the wake of all that had been stolen, that choice was the only freedom left.

They did not fall in love like people do in stories.

They built love the way people do in war: Brick by brick, word by whispered word, over rice fields and footpaths, through the cracked voice of a lullaby and the quiet offering of a meal.

They chose each other while the world was still collapsing around them.

And from that choice, my beginning would one day take root.

As a woman, my mom became majestic.

She moved with a kind of thunder beneath her silence, a commanding presence in every room she entered—whether it was a crowded market stall or a narrow hallway in Park Lake Homes, side two. Her body bore the history of labor: strong arms from lifting children and sacks of rice, shoulders shaped by years of carrying others. But her face had not surrendered its beauty to time. Her eyes remained sharp, scanning, calculating, protective. Her mouth, even in rest, held a flicker of defiance.

When she dressed, she did so with intention. Bold colors, gold earrings, red lips that never needed permission. Her style wasn’t for decoration. It was armor. It was a memory. It was proof she had survived.

She was outspoken. Loud. Proud. Never one to bend just to be liked. If she thought something was right, she held her ground like a tree in floodwater. She could spot dishonesty like a blade in sunlight, and if she felt cheated, she would not go quiet. That was the worst thing you could do to her—take from her what was hers without consequence. Injustice lit something in her that no one could put out.

People noticed her, not because she asked them to, but because she couldn’t be ignored. Her voice, her walk, her energy—it filled the air. And when life tried to quiet her, she only stood taller.

She was a monument in motion.

And I wanted to be like that.

To speak without fear.

To hold my ground.

To believe, as she did, that the truth was louder than shame and far more powerful.