Lost in their home

When I was six years old, my neighbors, Uncle Sau and Uncle Nam, came home from a faraway place called Cambodia. Everyone in the village knew them. Even though they weren’t my real uncles, my family loved them like they were.

I had never met them before because they left Vietnam before I was born. My parents and older siblings used to talk about them like they were heroes. They left when they were just eighteen, young and full of energy. But when they returned, they weren’t the same, according to my parents and neighbors.

Uncle Sau would talk in a strange language at night—words that didn’t belong there. My mother whispered that it was Cambodian. I didn’t understand why he spoke it in his sleep or why his voice trembled between fear and anger. His words drifted through the quiet village like ghosts searching for a way home.

Uncle Nam, on the other hand, was always quiet, like a shadow moving without a sound. If Uncle Sau was fire, burning with something he could never put out, then Uncle Nam was stone, heavy and still.

I was a curious child, always asking questions. One evening, I sat beside Uncle Sau as he stared at the sky. “What happened in Cambodia?” I asked, expecting an adventure story, like the ones my oldest brother told me about heroes and ghosts.

He looked at me for a long time before sighing. “We were lucky, little one. We came home with all our arms and legs. Some never came home at all.” His voice was heavy, like a rock sinking in the water.

As the days passed, I noticed more things that didn’t make sense. My uncles never slept at night. While the rest of the village rested, they sat outside my grandmother’s house, awake in the dark. Uncle Sau started drinking from a glass bottle that smelled sour. “It helps him sleep,” my mother told me. But the more he drank, the louder he became—yelling at the neighbors, at the sky, at the war. He was angry at everything and nothing at the same time.

Uncle Nam didn’t drink. He just sat there, quiet, always staring into the distance, as if his body had returned but his soul was still somewhere far away.

I didn’t understand why they had no home of their own or why they couldn’t go back to who they were before. The war was over, but it still clung to them like a shadow that never faded.

One night, as I lay in bed, I listened to Uncle Sau whispering in his strange language, his voice rising and falling like the wind before a storm. Uncle Nam sat beside him, silent as always. I pulled my blanket up to my chin and whispered to myself, “If they are home now, why do they still seem so lost?”