Cambodia, 1981 (excerpt)
by Staci Stokes Morgan
In the winter of 1981 my daughter’s mother was born. Her mother had crossed the border between Cambodia and Thailand and finally collapsed there in the no-man’s land of tent villages and shanties. She was shaking from pain and weak with malaria and starvation. The father of my daughter’s mother, an American serviceman from Detroit called Tex, neither knew nor would he have cared about the birth. By the time she delivered their baby he didn’t remember the woman, and he had never known her name. My daughter has her grandfather’s wide, broad nose.
