What stories will we tell of these crazy times as the USA ventures into yet another war in the Middle East? So much has changed since arrival in my adopted homeland in October 2003. My collective American family has fractured, just like my own birth family. My heart aches for other immigrant families that have fractured with the government’s policy to arrest, detain, or deport family members who are undocumented.

We are told that they are animals, criminals, and rapists. They are eating our pets. They steal our jobs: jobs we don’t want, by the way. The stories we tell ourselves. Such separation and loss are devastating and traumatic for our immigrant families under attack. Their stories will haunt us in years to come.

The loss and abandonment I’ve suffered over the course of my life have shaped the stories I tell. What had I done wrong to be abandoned by the nuns, my husband, and my mother? Was I such a bad person? As a believer in reincarnation after death, I considered the possibility that I must’ve committed a grave sin in a former life. The kernel for the plot of my debut novel, Under the Tamarind Tree, came to life in my imagination.

The stories we tell ourselves.

Many questions about this fictitious former life came to mind. Had I abandoned my family in this former life? What were the circumstances surrounding the event? Who suffered the most with this irresponsible and selfish act? How could I make recompense to that person? What would be my fate after rebirth?

I couldn’t tell this story from the child’s point of view. After all, for the most part, the newly reborn soul doesn’t remember anything about its former life. The fictional son, Richard Cheong, an orphan and only surviving son, is the best person to tell the story.

Richard’s firstborn has his mother’s olive-green eyes. He sees this as a sign that he’s doing something right in his life. With his wife’s approval, he names her Elizabeth—his mother’s middle name. Lizzie, as she is later called, is destined to become a blessing in his life as he struggles to provide for and protect his family during their country’s turbulent years in fighting for independence from Great Britain.

“It’s fantasy,” my mother told me when I described the plot of my novel in progress. “This so-called Richard is nothing like your good-for-nothing father.”

“It’s a story, Mom. It’s not about Father.” It was pointless arguing with Mother. So what if my story is about my father? A daughter can dream, can’t she?

The stories we tell ourselves.

Sometime during the four years I worked at bringing Richard Cheong’s story to life on the pages, I had an epiphany about the cause of my affliction. I had failed the expectations of the nuns, my husband, mother, and siblings because I dared to say No. I lost my value or usefulness to them. This realization hurt. I forgive them and hold no animosity towards those who have already passed on and those still among the living. Being true to who we are as individuals with self-respect and self-determination can come at a steep price.

The Prologue of Under the Tamarind Tree: A Novel, which I share with you below, describes Elizabeth’s birth on June 16, 1950. Whether or not you believe in reincarnation matters not. What matters in the story I tell, about our lives as former British subjects, is the way in which Richard reshapes his life after being orphaned and abandoned at thirteen years old.

The stories we tell ourselves that make sense of our loss and pain.

* * * * * *

Georgetown, British Guiana, June 16, 1950

Richard Cheong cradled his first-born in his arms. He had hoped for a boy-child but would have to wait until next time. He was the only surviving son of seven children. Two boys had died of malaria soon after birth. Two months after his eighth birthday, Edward, the youngest, was found dead under the tamarind tree on the sugar estate road in the neighboring village. His passing had drained their mother’s energies. Her death shortly thereafter had changed their lives forever. Richard had been thirteen.

He had failed his mother in not keeping his little brother safe. A son would atone for Edward’s murder.

Cradling his daughter’s head in his cupped hands, Richard lifted her up to face him. She puckered her miniature lips, sucking on an imaginary nipple. Thick straight dark-brown hair covered her oversized head. He pushed aside the thought of the stretching pains needed for her head to push out into the light. His daughter’s large eyes focused on him. Was that normal for a newborn? Could she see him?

The hairs bristled on the back of his neck. A chill penetrated his muscles and bones. His mother’s olive-green eyes, legacy of a white father who had denied her his name and inheritance, fixated on him. Only Edward had their mother’s cat eyes. Maybe that was why she had loved Edward more than the rest of them.

His East Indian mother, who had passed away a year after his Chinese father, haunted him. Sometimes, she called out his name in the quiet of the night while he stretched out in his Berbice-chair listening to music. She often visited him in his dreams, drenched and shivering. Her chocolate-brown hair, caked with mud, draped down her back to her waist. She drowned him in her grief.

Rum numbed the guilt he bore for Edward’s death. Books immersed him in worlds where weaknesses were overcome and sins were forgiven. Music muffled the sound of his mother’s sobs. Entwined with his wife, Gloria, in the dark nights, he was no longer alone.

His mother’s eyes probed his soul, unsettling him.

“Why you staring at her so?” Gloria said, seated at the edge of the hospital bed. “Something wrong with her?”

“She get my mother eyes.”

“Everybody in the ward say she is a Chinese baby. Look at her slant eyes. Her hair sticking up on top of her head. She don’t look nothing like me.”

“She just a baby. Is too soon to tell who she look like.”

There must have been traces of his half-Portuguese, half-African wife. But that did not matter. His daughter would grow up to be a beauty, like her mother, or her East Indian grandmother, Vijaya Elizabeth Cheong.

“Lewwe name she Elizabeth,” he said. “Like Princess Elizabeth, King George daughter.”

“You forget you did agree to name our first girl-baby, Mary?”

He had not forgotten. His nineteen-year-old Roman Catholic church-going wife had a special devotion for Mother Mary.

“Mary Elizabeth Cheong. How that sound?”

“Mary Elizabeth.” Gloria tilted her head upwards as though conferring with the saints. “You know…that sound good.”

After visiting his wife and baby daughter, Richard made a hasty getaway from the room full of suckling women, fleeing the hospital compound like a parrot released from its cage.

Was he wrong in wanting a boy to carry on his father’s lineage? After all, he was James Cheong’s only surviving son. His father had two sisters in Georgetown, but no brothers—at least not here in British Guiana. He never spoke about the family he had left behind, or of his birthplace in China.

Exiting through the Middle Street gateway on his bicycle, Richard headed downtown to the hardware store where he worked for his father’s younger sister, Bernice Lee-A-Shoo.

Today, he had just cause to celebrate, the right to get drunk. He was a father.