Tiger Girl by May-lee Chai

overjoyed. Everyone was talking to him, telling him their troubles, sharing what they hadn’t wanted to say before, when he’d seemed like a lucky man who’d escaped before the Khmer Rouge took over, like a man who wasn’t like them, a man who couldn’t possibly understand.
    I’d wanted Uncle to see the donut shop as a success. I’d wanted him to see what a good businesswoman I was and be impressed and proud. Not this.
    â€œThere is so much suffering in the world,” Uncle said. “There is so much suffering among my people. But today I know I was spared for a reason. I will devote myself to helping them all.”
    I hadn’t imagined Uncle’s survivor’s guilt could get any worse. I was wrong.
    I was mopping up the sticky floor, sloshing suds of Pine-Sol across the tile. Hearing Uncle talk, I wondered if he even remembered that I was the one who’d written the press release, called the newspaper, found the reporter who’d written the story in the first place.
    Was I somehow the one thing about the past that should remain forgotten?
    Nursing my sense of martyrdom like a scab I couldn’t stop picking, I mopped furiously, attacking the grime that I had once mistaken for an actual pattern on the tile. Gradually the floor lightened by three shades, from a deep dusty dirt color to a pale vanilla.
    Sitan emerged from the back, where he’d been washing the last of the trays. “I’m gonna head out. Congratulations, Uncle,” he said. “This has been the best week ever.”
    â€œFunny how a little PR works magic,” I said bitterly.
    â€œWe should buy a tree,” Uncle said. “It’s almost Christmas. We should celebrate.”
    I looked around the front room, thinking about the needles that would fall all over the floor. “No space.”
    â€œOh, a tree! A live tree! Wouldn’t that be lovely?” Anita beamed. “We should put it in that corner. Right under the ‘Open’ sign.”
    â€œYeah! We could get some lights, really fix it up. It’s Lillian’s first Christmas. She’d like that.”
    I sighed but didn’t argue. Thinking about a tree made me feel sour inside. Another reminder that I’d chosen to spend my Christmas away from my family. The rituals didn’t feel the same away from them. The twins always competed to see who could create the more lavish tree decorations, dividing the tree in half and draping shiny garlands and strings of popcorn, metallic balls and silvery icicles and clothespin angels through the thick green boughs. In Texas, Ma hadn’t celebrated Christmas when I was little, but as the twins entered junior high, they only remembered life in America. They couldn’t imagine celebrating without a tree, the same way they couldn’t imagine answering to anything but their American names—Jennifer and Marie instead of Navy and Maly—and Ma couldn’t deny them. One year they’d glued Chinese crispy noodles spray-painted gold onto construction-paper rings and enveloped the tree as though it were one of the “Chinese salads” they’d concocted to compete with the McDonald’s that had opened in the next town over. Sam was a good big brother to them, humoring their little-girl whims. He set up the ladder and held it tight as they put up the various angels at the very top—blonde angels with gossamer rings, pink-haired fairies, a red-headed mermaid, and one year a Cambodian
devata
, complete with gold tiara. Now my little sisters were teenagers, fifteen, and Samwould turn eighteen soon, old enough to enlist. Yet here I was in California. When would we celebrate Christmas together again as a family? I wondered if I’d been foolish to come here.
    As it was so late in the season, just eight days before Christmas, we soon discovered that most of the tree lots had sold out long ago. Uncle drove us by all the grocery