“It’s the ocean, mummy,” whispers my almost-three-year-old son, Davy, his eyes wide with awe. Pressing his little hands against the plane window, he surveys the vast waters of the Tonle Sap, pointing out tiny specks of fishing boats that in his imagination are whales and dolphins. It’s an easy mistake: even from thousands of meters in the air, Southeast Asia’s biggest freshwater lake really does resemble the sea. You can hardly see its shores.
That bird’s-eye view of the Tonle Sap is a familiar and welcome sight for my Cambodian husband, Thea, and me. It marks the approach to Siem Reap, the small northwestern Cambodian city on the doorstep of the ancient Khmer capital of Angkor. We visited Siem Reap often in the 2010s while living between Phnom Penh and Singapore; it’s also where we got married. Our last visit was in 2019, just a few months before Covid-19 closed down the world. We had already moved back to my hometown of Melbourne by then, and I’d just found out I was pregnant: a tiny human the size of a blueberry growing inside of me. I have distinct memories from that time, mapping out in my mind all the trips our new child would take in his first (and airfare free!) years of life: regular visits to Singapore, where his two step-sisters, Socheata and Sodawin, live; journeys to see extended family in Cambodia. I envisaged his early, innate connection to his father’s Khmer heritage: the rich culture; the vibrant food; all the sounds and smells. But I couldn’t have imagined that those plans would suddenly be put on hold.
For many of us, the pandemic did something strange to our sense of time. Covid-19 confined me and Thea and newborn Davy to our house for months on end. We rode out six rolling wide. Devastatingly, it separated us
