Why do I make things?

I remember being in a car, on the way home from gymnastics. My parents always put this on, on the way back home. It was a bootlegged cassette tape my parents had brought across the border. Who were the original artists, where are the original recordings? I always wanted to know more, but my parents didn't know.

Sometimes they would put on country music. I came to know the artists, the radio station the music played on, and I could find the music online and read the lyrics.

Both feel like childhood to me. It makes me wonder... who am I, really? Am I Cambodian? Am I Texan?

"Are you Chinese?"

They would never tell me.

When I asked, mom would always say it was a painful time, then try to change the topic. She preferred to focus on the present. There was sadness in her voice, but I would never heard her cry about it.

When she immigrated here, she shared her story with an author who was compiling a book about the Cambodian experience with the genocide. I found it when I was young, hidden in a box in the computer room closet.

It was written in her voice, but she didn't write it.