“He is sleeping in his father’s museum. You’re going to suffocate him.”
“Not suffocate. Elucidate. Illuminate. You remember I spent my own childhood trapped in a bedroom, but my mind was able to roam free.”
Luckily, Raksmey, unlike the youthful Jean-Baptiste, was not bound by illness and could flee the confines of his bedroom. Though unusually small, he overcame the sickness that marked his birth and grew into a bright-eyed, curious toddler. As soon as he gained bipedal mobility, he could not be corralled for long. There were many times that Eugenia or Jean-Baptiste turned their back only to find that Raksmey had run outside, deep into the gardens. And soon they had no choice but to let him run.
Jean-Baptiste’s black notebooks began to gather on the shelf in his study, at the rate of two per month, which later became three and then four. Either there was more to look for or Jean-Baptiste was learning how to look.
Tofte-Jebsen includes a sample of his observations:
— RR’s eyes are a light shade of brown, like almond paste. Seem to be lighter than when he was born. As far as I can tell, both are the same color, though the outer ring of his right iris is darker, giving the illusion of a protruding pupil.
— RR’s hair is almost jet black, natural counterclockwise swirl, splotch of lighter hair on the back/left side of his head, about 4 cm down from crown. present since birth.
— food preference (at 1 year) rice w/ pork, bananas, and jackfruit. will refuse water spinach, bok choy, and most greens. (I don’t blame him.)
— a mole. nape of the neck, recent. possibly where the needle went in?
— always sneezes in twos, half-second interval between. never three, like me.
— birthmark on left ankle, just above the talus bone, in the shape of a longtail boat w/ square sail. simple. beautiful.
— RR can wink his left eye, but not his right, seems to happen more frequently when tired.
— his first word is not a word: a salute, as in “hello” in sign language, which he performs when E. walks into room. she returns the sign, cups hand to face, then rocks, “my lovely son.” he giggles. for him, gestures are words, words are gestures. (131)
At two years, Jean-Baptiste took his son’s measurements with a tailor’s tape:
1. Length: 78cm tall.
2. Weight: 10.3kg.
3. Left pinkie: 2.75cm.
4. Right pinkie: 2.7cm.
5. Penis: 2.1cm.
6. Circumference of head: 53cm.
This last measurement Jean-Baptiste found particularly interesting, for it was slightly above average, which was quite incredible, considering the diminutive size of the boy’s body.
“It’s a good thing. We must put the entire universe inside of it,” Jean-Baptiste said to his mother. “Lemaître says it’s expanding.”
“His head or the universe?” Eugenia signed.
“The mind is the last frontier, Mother.”
“How about we leave his head alone?” she signed. In her language, the sign for head, a sweeping of the pointer finger around the face that ended at the temple, was very similar to the sign for dream, except that the circle moved away from the head, ending with the fingers pointing toward the heavens. Her gesture fell somewhere between the two, an ambiguity that Jean-Baptiste did not ask her to resolve.
“I cannot stop,” he signed. “This is like asking a man to stop breathing.”
Raksmey became trilingual and bimodaclass="underline" Jean-Baptiste instructed Suong and Tien to address Raksmey in Khmer, while he spoke in French and occasionally English to the child, and Eugenia communicated with him exclusively through sign. By 2.5 years, Raksmey already had a working vocabulary of four hundred fifty words in French, one hundred words in English, at least three hundred signs, and sixty words in Khmer, though this was only an estimate, given that Suong and Tien were less than exact with their observational notes and exit interviews. Raksmey put what he knew to good use: he was already utilizing sophisticated, multi-morphemic constructions (“Tien go to work, he cut the tree when it cold”). Jean-Baptiste noticed that Raksmey had developed a subtle stutter when speaking in French, such that when he would stumble on a word, he would often introduce Eugenia’s sign language to talk around it.
Throughout Raksmey’s fourth year, Jean-Baptiste began to engage him in a series of science experiments usually done only in primary and secondary schools — measuring the point of vaporization, testing Hooke’s law with springs, mapping electrical fields using a voltmeter. In the half hour before lunch, they would go out into the forest and Jean-Baptiste would drill Raksmey on various species of plants in the garden. Together they would do drawings of leaf structure and take rubbings from the bark. Raksmey was left-handed, though Jean-Baptiste purposefully trained him to use both hands during his writing and experiments. He continuously used advanced-level vocabulary around the child and noticed a 15 percent retention and reuse of new terms within a week of their introduction. Soon Raksmey began acquiring vocabulary at an exponential rate, beginning with five to ten words per week and quickly advancing to twenty to twenty-five words per week by year’s end.
Eugenia, at first disapproving of Jean-Baptiste’s neurotic methods, eventually acquiesced. “Thus, they settled into their de facto roles,” writes Tofte-Jebsen. “He became the instructor of the mind, while she became the silent nurturer of the heart” (140).
“You can’t hear sounds?” Raksmey asked her once. It was a watershed, duly recorded in Jean-Baptiste’s notebook. Evidence of a theory of mind: he understood his grandmother as a being unto herself, one who operated under a different set of rules.
Fig. 4.6. “Sign for Machine”
From Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 149
“No,” she signed. “That’s why I have you.” Thereafter, she and Raksmey played a game in which she asked him, “What do you hear now?” and he would tell her, in sign and spoken words and also movement, like a little play.
“There are machines in the rubber house,” he said, signing the word for machine—interlocked fingers, palms turned to the chest. “They sound like. .” And then he danced up and down with his arms in the air and shook his head back and forth, blubbering air out through his lips.
“Thank you,” she signed, laughing. “I understand now.”
When he was not working with his father or explaining the world of sound to his grandmother, he spent much of his time alone. He had trouble relating to children his own age, and most were not sure how to approach him. He looked like them, but he was clearly not one of them.
One day Raksmey came home crying.
“What is it?” said Jean-Baptiste. “Are you injured?”
“He’s not injured,” Eugenia signed. She got down on one knee. “What did they say?”
Raksmey wiped his eyes. “Prak called me barang.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Jean-Baptiste said as he noted this in his book. “Do you know what this means?”