After her father passes away, the narrator in Pik-Shuen Fung’s novel Ghost Forest considers the questions she wanted to ask her father, who stayed in Hong Kong while the rest of the family migrated in Canada after the 1997 handover:

"What were you like when you were a kid?

What are the things you wished you'd known?

What makes you sad?

What makes you happy?"

I thought of how I didn't ask my father any questions about his life in Cambodia before the Pol Pot regime took over. The year he died, I emailed him about his siblings. What happened to them? He took so long to respond that I thought he just ignored my email. Finally he wrote back. He had three brothers, one was a vice governor who was murdered by the regime, another a nurse, killed during a purge, and the youngest was a conscript in the Khmer Rouge military, sent off to reclaim an island from the Vietnamese, never to return. His sister disappeared, to be found through a radio programme in the nineties, with two children she had with a man she had been coerced to marry.

I meant to ask him more questions, but I was so busy, so caught up in everyday exigencies, that he died before I could. Later, while sorting his belongings, I found a sheet of paper printed with the text of his email. I thought of him, sitting in front of the computer, recalling his siblings and searching for the right words in his third language, a language he was never comfortable in, the only language we shared.

Of his youth, I know very little. He was mostly raised by his uncle because, according to my mother, his parents only wanted to be with each other. He spent time at a wat, living with monks during his studies. I got my only glimpse of my dad as a young man from his cousin, about 12 years younger than him and as close to him as a brother. While working on his eulogy for my father, I asked him, What did you guys do for fun? Smiling, he said that Dad used to take him on his motorbike into the city and they'd go to the cinema.

Before I could ask him any more questions, Dad's cousin died 6 months after the funeral, of a heart attack in his home in Minneapolis. I mourned him, and I also mourned my father all over again. Time keeps resisting my attempts to understand the past, to recover the lost history of my father.

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