Anchorage Daily News

Toc Soneoulay's father breathed raggedly, his cancer-wasted body limp under a sheet in their Jewel Lake living room. An overnight bag rested near his bed. Following Lao Buddhist custom, it was packed with clothes for him to wear in his next life.

Though the family had prepared her father in all the traditional ways, Soneoulay worried about how he would fare once he left his family behind.

"I have been taking care of my father since I was 6," she said. "There were times when I wanted to kill myself because I worried, when he gets to heaven, who will meet him? Who will help him get around?

"Who will translate?"

The best Lao speaker among her five siblings, Soneoulay, 28, grew up as the primary link between her parents, Soulideth and Phouvong, and the English-speaking world. She paid every bill, negotiated with every boss, translated every teacher conference and decoded every doctor appointment.

Like a growing group of children in Anchorage's immigrant communities, Soneoulay occupies a position of responsibility in her family that's at once an expression of love and source of resentment.

"I see the pain on my mother's face; I see how frustrating it is," Soneoulay said. "She calls me on my cell phone and says, 'Here, explain, he doesn't understand me.' I'm like, 'Here we go again.' "

Young interpreters become like cultural parents to their parents -- protecting them, advocating for them, educating them, comforting them, taking on their burdens.

In October, Soneoulay gave her father the news that he had terminal stomach cancer. When he died in January, she made his funeral arrangements and wrote his obituary in a language many of his friends cannot read. In May, she accompanied her mother to Laos, where relatives gathered by candlelight to receive his ashes in a field outside his childhood village.

Some nights Soneoulay still curls up with her mother on an inflatable mattress set up on the spot where his bed used to be in the living room.

"There are no words in our language to say, 'I love you,' " Soneoulay's younger sister, Sousy, 23, explained. "In our family, you show your love by doing."

TRANSLATION AS SHIELD

Soneoulay first remembers translating in elementary school, when her parents took her to a Fresno, Calif., Social Security office.

"After that, as soon as I was able to read, my mom was like, 'Here, read this letter from the welfare office,' " she said. "That forced me to continue learning my language."

Soneoulay doesn't translate word for word. She filters and summarizes information, shielding her mother from small headaches like confusing paperwork and rude salespeople.

"I absorb how people look at my mom, how they view her. I don't want my mom to be viewed like that," she said.

Many times, she asked her parents why they didn't learn English.

" 'How could we?' " she recalled them telling her. " 'Two jobs for both of us. On top of that, we have children.' "

One of the hardest parts about translating is that some concepts aren't easy to communicate across cultures. When her father was ill, members of the Lao community filed through the living room regularly to sip bottled water on a woven mat near the bed, play cards and speculate. For many months, no one, including her mother, could grasp that the cancer was terminal.

Perhaps the tumor had come because he needed to travel to Laos to pay respects to his dead mother, they suggested. When he became bloated and doctors wanted to take fluid from his gut, people balked. Why, they asked, would you remove fluids from the body? Don't they give him strength? Soneoulay never stopped explaining.

Cultural differences between parents and children cut both ways, Soneoulay said. Her father's desire to follow tradition and have his ashes delivered to his childhood village comforts her mother but leaves her brothers and sisters nowhere to grieve, she said.

"They don't have a grave site to go see," she said. "I feel for them. I also feel for my mother."

Soneoulay's life, like her vocabulary and her dreams, runs along two tracks. During the day, she is a college-educated American woman, earning a master's degree in social work, and working part time at the Catholic Social Services Refugee Assistance Program. She chats on her cell phone with her fiance. She scouts sales at Old Navy. She stresses over her career.

In the evening, when she pulls her car up to her mother's house, she goes inside and exchanges her trousers for a sarong. When her father was alive, wherever he sat, she would sit below him. If he was on the couch, she sat on the floor. No one in the house would eat until he brought the food to his mouth first.

Soneoulay feels mixed about her role. Being the family translator has given her a sense of self-sufficiency and purpose while also burdening her with near-constant anxiety.

In America, children grow up and become increasingly independent from their parents, she explained. In Laos, a child is most accomplished if she helps her elders. Soneoulay is torn about which approach is better.

"Am I going to put this much pressure on my children? I don't know," she said. "I want them to take care of themselves. I can take care of myself."

Relying on her children to translate can be frustrating, Phouvong said.

"Of course it's hard. I am holding my breath and wondering if my children are interpreting right," she said, speaking through her daughter.

Taking care of parents, like the paying of a dowry for a marriage, is part of what's expected in Lao-American culture, she explained.

"I want payback for all the milk from my breasts," she said, laughing.

HINTS OF TERRIBLE HISTORY

Like many people who don't speak English well, Soulideth and Phouvong navigated the work world by choosing jobs that didn't require too much conversation.

Soulideth worked as a driver for a company that provides seismic data to oil companies. Phouvong works as a janitor at Ted Stevens International Airport and H2Oasis water park.

"I think all minorities are hard workers. They work lower- end jobs and they work really hard," Sousy Soneoulay said. "For a lot of people, janitorial is the only thing you can do when you don't speak English. You say, 'Clean,' they clean."

Soneoulay looks at the callouses on her mother's hands and feels the tug of duty. The story of her parents' sacrifices is never far from her thoughts.

Soulideth and Phouvong fled communist persecution in Laos after the Vietnam War. Like Soneoulay has protected them from the unpleasant details of American life, they didn't share details about the Thai refugee camp where Soneoulay was born. In her only baby picture, she sits on Soulideth's hip and he holds a sign with a refugee number for immigration. The camp is blurred behind her.

"Mom just says, 'They did bad things to our bodies,' " Soneoulay said. "She says, 'We didn't have a lot to eat. Only rice.' "

Though Soulideth and Phouvong didn't talk about the camp, the children have noticed clues about what their parents endured there. Soulideth's head was misshapen. Two bullet scars puckered his torso. An index finger had been shaved off at the knuckle.

When she thinks about what her parents have been through, Soneoulay regrets times she resented helping them.

"What all was my dad really asking for?" she said. "I feel bad. Really, it wasn't all that much."

A STRONG SPIRIT

When her father was dying, Soneoulay couldn't turn off what she calls her "American brain." So many of the rituals were new to her, and she couldn't help viewing them as an outsider.

They packed his work-issue polo shirt and slacks in his overnight bag. A monk from the Lao Temple in Mountain View covered his body with a clean sheet and peeled it back again to help release his spirit. Soneoulay's sister, Alice, put a coin on his tongue as soon as he stopped breathing, so he would be blessed with abundance.

When Lao babies are born, parents look for familiar marks that might indicate that the spirit of a dead family member has been reborn in them.

Soneoulay has a mole on her eyelid and another on her chin that match her father's mother's face. Phouvong said while Soulideth was dying that his mother's spirit had helped make his eldest daughter strong.

"Do I worry about the future?" Phouvong said from a pallet she'd made next to Soulideth's bed. "No, I don't worry about the future, because I think my daughter will carry it on."

"Thanks, Mom," Soneoulay said. Then she added quietly in English: "That's a lot of pressure."

Daily News reporter Julia O'Malley can be reached at jomalley@adn.com or 257-4325.