Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes

When you must flee and can carry only one thing, what will it be? What single seed from your old life will be the most useful in helping you sow a new one?

But if there's one thing I learned from my mother, it's that losing everything is not the end of the story. She taught me that lost civilizations can be rebuilt from zero, even if the task will require many generations of work.

The dishes I loved best when I was small were the ones that took the longest to make. My puppy sense told me that time equaled loved, and love equaled deliciousness. On the time continuum, instant noodles tasted careless, like nothing at all; the kuy teav noodle maker's hand-cut mee were far superior. But the slowest and best noodles of all came from my mother's kitchen.

There can be no easy reconciliations, only complicated truths, told without shame. The murderers among us would have us believe that history is slippery and unknowable. Insisting otherwise is an act of defense... But the past never goes away. The fear and pain are still there, buried in our brains like mines. It is better to defuse them than to leave them entombed, quietly, waiting for a single misstep. That is why I am telling my story.

But the past never goes away. The fear and pain are still there, buried in our brains like mines. It is better to defuse them than to leave them entombed, quietly, waiting for a single misstep. That is why I am telling my story.

A refugee must learn to be anything people want her to be at any given moment. But behind the masks, I am only myself - a mosaic of flavors from near and far.

We were especially wary in the presence of low-level functionaries who ran the local offices or volunteered for collective missions like celebratory food preparation or announcing the morning exercises. Often, these types were zealots, the kinds of unspectacular sycophants who would have been ignored by respectable people in ordinary times, but were suddenly elevated to minor positions of power. Their faces glowed with faith and unearned self-importance. Who knew when they might make it their mission to root out quiet apostates and denounce them? Worse yet, you could never tell what variety of partisan you were dealing with: the true believer or the canny cynic with a malevolent agenda. Both were dangerous and unpredictable.