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arrived in Vancouver, when Lena became my foster mother. We’d sit and watch TV together, The Nature of Things , game shows, movies of the week, anything that might improve my English. But television, with its dizzying pictures and chaotic chatter, with its sudden images of love and violence, disturbed me. I turned instead to the shelves and shelves of books. Even though my reading was slow, painstaking, I worked myway through her collection. She was devoted to biographies – she admired mathematicians Kurt Gödel and Emma Noether and neuroscientists Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Alexander Luria.
    To the surprise of my new mother, I stole these books as frequently as I stole canned food from the cupboards, and I hoarded all the words for myself. In my mind, it was as if these people walked through Lena’s rooms, as if they were family and they were still alive.
    Every weekend, Lena would descend into her office. “Down to the basement,” she would say. “Down to my ballroom.” Lena, an academic, wrote about the history of science. Her world was populated with mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists, with the institutes and the drawing rooms of another era. Todd, my foster father, lived in Nepal and worked for Unicef, and he came home once each year, at Christmas. Some days, my new mother would spend hours sifting through piles of paper, trying to lay hands on a single reference. “Hopeless!” she would say, turning away from me, trying to mask her sadness. “Like trying to find a peanut floating through outer space.”
    From the time I was sixteen years old, I worked in the ballroom, helping Lena organize her documents. Not just papers, she would have said, but thoughts. Her office was a city all its own: towers of research notes, clippings, books, interview transcripts, recordings. I wanted to be of use to her, to repay her somehow. I likedthe idea that I could stand in her place and find my way along the avenues she had built, the knowledge she had accumulated.
    One night, wanting to surprise me, Lena dusted off the projector and sat me down in the living room. The sofa was covered with brown velour, a fabric unfamiliar to me, and I always felt as if I were sitting on an animal. The film spun into life. I gazed up, mesmerized by the world projected onto the white wall. I saw a much younger Lena walking on the beaches of Kep, on the southern coast of Cambodia. The camera closed in on Lena’s bathing cap and her lemon-coloured dress. She and Todd had vacationed there in the 1960s, when Cambodia was at peace, a few years before the fighting had begun. She had never forgotten it, she told me, the heat, the saffron temples, the sea. She and Todd had been newlyweds.
    Night after night, I crept downstairs, thieved the reels, and fed the film into the machine. I sat on the couch staring up, hearing only the ticking of the projector as the reels spun and the tape ran, and this clicking became the wordless sadness of a lost time. I saw the skyline and the light-flecked water, Lena’s legs smooth against the ocean as she dove and dove again. In another reel, the city of Phnom Penh flickered grainily into the room. Todd, holding the camera, turned slowly, taking us in a 360-degree tour of the intersection in front of theCentral Market. Cars glided, cyclos wobbled through the field of vision, and families, clothed in oranges and pinks and browns, turned to stare into the lens. The images came one after the other, now in a place I recognized, and now not. There was no order, no chronology, yet it was so real I could smell it, I could feel the city’s grit on my skin.
    One night, I sat on the edge of Lena’s bed and told her that I wanted a new name, a new existence, and she had stared at me, her eyes wet with tears. I admired those tears, she was not ashamed of them, or frightened by them. Jane. Janie . In the language of the aid world, I was an unaccompanied minor, a separated child, but Lena told me that I was