Vignette #6: The Widow Waitress

Lina likes to sit with me at lunch, and tell me fragments of her life. She’s one of the waitresses at the café, but it’s difficult to think of her as such. She’s too forward, too amiable, too chummy. When I arrive, she without fail plops down in the opposite chair to chat and teach me Khmer. Like most Cambodians, she looks younger than her years, and yet, like all those who survived Khmer Rouge, has a melancholy in her eyes that makes her age seem irrelevant. Her bright face does a courageous job of camouflaging the somberness, but it’s always there, lurking in the back of her dark pupils, like black diamonds set in a gold engagement ring.

The first time I shared a table with Lina, or rather, Lina shared a table with me, she told me about her lesbian Japanese friend, whose sexual orientation she neither agreed with nor understood. But, as Lina reassured me, “Ot panyiha”—it wasn’t really an issue. She spoke fondly of the woman, and was clearly sad her foreign friend had returned to Japan. It occurred to me that Lina too might be gay, and this was her way of telling me without really telling me. My dinner arrives.

The second time I met Lina, she told me about her dead husband and one of her dead brothers, mentioning them casually, like two perished houseplants. Her spouse died in a motorbike accident, struck by a hit-and-run SUV, the driver of which she claimed to be a government minister who offered no apology and suffered no consequences. The brother died at the hands of his own wife’s jealous lover, who drowned him in a basin of boiling water after a merciless drunken beating. He too, escaped punishment. Another waitress brings out my lunch, and Lina disappears to the back.

On the third occasion, Lina tells me about her 11-year old son, who likes school and learns English at the Christian church they attend on Sundays. She pronounces Jesus “Jay-soo” and finds it peculiar I claim not to be Christian, or Buddhist, or Jewish, but does not press for an explanation. I want to ask the name of her church, but do not know the word for church in Khmer. I resort to calling it “p’tea Jay-soo, pagoda robhas Jay-soo”. The house of Jesus, Jesus’ pagoda. She understands, but cannot remember the name of the church. This time she watches me eat, and smiles when I look up from the plate.

The fourth time we meet, she recounts her experience as a refugee in Thailand. She was six when the Vietnamese overthrew Pol Pot. With her father dead, her mother dead, a sibling and cousins dead, she was taken to a camp just across the border to live with her mother’s sister. Four years later, Lina and her remaining siblings returned to Cambodia, where they grew up with another uncle. The aunt moved to Long Beach, married another refugee, and had two daughters who are now both medical students. Lina mentions the daughters suggestively, as if I might be a suitor, and then just as quickly, dismisses the idea silently, refilling my glass of iced jasmine tea, and asking me about work.

And so I come to know Lina, glimpses of her life like shards of glass on the sidewalk, inviting me to peer inside the broken window. Our limited skills with each other’s language force us to speak simply and directly. The blend of Khmer and English entertains us both, as we find indirect paths to communicating when we cannot find the words, and the inevitable misunderstandings bother us not in the slightest. Mostly she talks, and I listen, failing to understand the source of the sudden bond we’ve formed, and not caring to understand.