The Rent Collector

I have been quiet today because fear in my heart has been fighting with frustration in my brain, leaving little energy for my mouth. Halfway through the day, my brain declared itself the winner and started to work out a plan. Grandfather loved luck, but I am tired and can no longer wait around for its arrival.

“I’ll keep taking him to doctors. I’ll keep searching for a answers. O just don’t think anything will change until he has the desire to get better. I can’t rely on Grandfather’s luck any longer. So yes, as naïve as it may sound, I believe reading will help Nisay. I want to think reading will offer him hope.”

I told Ki I wanted to hang the clock on our wall because I liked its flowered face—but that’s not exactly true. There is more. It helps me to remember that even though something is broken, it can still serve a purpose. […] Sometimes broken things deserve to be repaired.

“But literature is unique. To understand literature, you read it with your head but you interpret it with your heart. The two are forced to work together—and quite frankly, the often don’t get along.”

“People only go to the places they have visited first in their minds […] Perhaps that is how learning can help you.”

“Words are like ropes […] We use them to pull ourselves up, but if we are not careful, they can also bind us down—at times by our own doing.”

“Most teachers will agree that the true mark of a hero, what sets him apart from everyone else, is sacrifice. A hero gives something up, sometimes even his own life, for the good of others.”

“The only real dreams I have anymore are usually not pleasant.”

“Nightmares?”

[Sopeap] nods. “Perhaps a symptom of old age.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “How do you keep them away?”

“Rice wine.”

It was just days ago I wanted to kill the criminals myself. But my desire was for revenge on crooks, thugs—dark images of evil that gathered in my head when I pictured the men who beat my husband and Lucky Fat—not boys, especially this boy.

“We’ll read it together later,” I tell [Sopeap], “just as soon as I return.”

[…] “Of course,” she finally answers, but the words ring with hollow conviction. And then she adds, “No matter how much we cling to hope, our stories seldom end as we expect.”

“I distance myself from heaven and then complain that heaven is distant.”

Sopeap said that literature has the power to change lives, minds, and hearts. Until this moment, reading to others on this rickety old bus about tigers in India, I had not fully understood what she meant.

I don’t mean to be a skeptic to lack hope, or to harbor fear. However, experience has been my diligent teacher. Still, I hate it. I don’t want to raise a child of doubt I want my son to believe to hope, to dream that the future holds brighter days. […] And it must be true; some hope must remain in my heart, for I am standing in the hut of the Healer. If all hope had died at Stung Meanchey, I would not be here.

The soldier behind Samnang furrowed his brow in confusion and then cast a glance at another, perhaps his superior. Sopeap didn’t offer either man time for mental debate. The girl I’d berated moments before carried herself like a woman of culture, a wife, a mother, a queen.

The openings are shuttered tight. What I most envy, however, is [Sopeap’s] front door that locks. Still, in a world where everything means something, I’m also reminded that, like her home, Sopeap allows very few people inside.

“To this day, if we look carefully around Stung Meanchey, if we search for stories that teach truth and goodness, stories with lessons that can soften and change our hearts—we will discover hope.”