A Seed of Survival
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
—ECCLESIASTES 3:1
I wake, confused. It’s still dark. My past has haunted me again. Memory has taken me back in my dreams, a hapless passenger, even though I’m no longer in Cambodia. In my nightmares I am trying to keep a childhood promise that I made to the spirit of my mother, who came to me in my sleep twenty years ago. A promise made in another dream which I must honor.
In this dream, I am crying out to God to help me find Map, my three-year-old brother. Enemies are infiltrating the United States. I hear a voice cry out. I can’t distinguish words, only human fear. America is being invaded? This can’t be happening. I fled to America to escape war. Now where do I go? My questions are shattered by the familiar sound of gunfire, a hollow boom, the distant chatter of artillery that still sends terror pulsing through my veins. The sounds are of Cambodia, but the landscape is of the Pacific Northwest. The guns speak from somewhere I can’t see, beyond a grove of pine trees in the shadow of a mountain. The world has become a landscape of light and shadow. Around me, a human river flows crazily out of control. People are running everywhere. A sobbing woman carries a bundle of clothes and a child, slowed by the weight of her own terror. I am stiff in fear and shock. In the blur of faces around me, there are no Americans, only Cambodians.
I am carried along by the crowd, and yet I’m alone, without my family. Where is Map, my baby brother? My heart races and my head moves like a windshield wiper, looking for him. I can’t find him. The sound of gunfire obliterates the human noise around me. It’s getting closer and louder. My sobs accelerate, and I begin to gasp for air. My lungs are screaming, my insides crying out in unison with my mind. I can no longer run and drop to the ground. I scream with all my might: No, my promise! I can’t lose another brother! God, help me.
It has been twelve years since I came to America. From here, I look back upon a childhood consumed by war. I could recognize the sounds of war at the age of four, when the spillover from the Vietnam conflict forced my family from the home my parents had spent their life savings to build in the affluent Takeo province in southern Cambodia. By the age of ten, I was forced to work in child labor camps, among thousands of children separated from parents and siblings by a system of social slavery instituted by the Khmer Rouge in their bizarre quest to create a utopian society.
Family ties were suddenly a thing of suspicion. Control was everything. Social ties, even casual conversations, were a threat. Angka, the organization, suddenly became your mother, your father, your God. But Angka was a tyrannical master. To question anything—whom you could greet, whom you could marry, what words you could use to address relatives, what work you did—meant that you were an enemy to your new “parent.” That was Angka’s rule. To disobey meant the kang prawattasas, the wheel of history,* would run over you. That’s what they told us as we cast our eyes downward under the weight of their threats.
Unlike so many of the children I worked with in muddy rice fields and irrigation canals, unlike many in my own family, I outran the wheel of history. I survived starvation, disease, forced labor, and refugee camps. I survived a world of violence and despair.
I survived.
Since 1981 my new home has been mostly in Oregon, as verdant as the land I left, but different. The coconut and papaya groves, the mango trees that grew in front of my childhood home, have been replaced by mountains dense with pine and fir, timber-flanked valleys, and cold, clear streams. From dramatic coastal cliffs to lacy spigots of waterfalls that feed the Columbia River Gorge, the sites, scenes, and sounds of this place have become my image of America. Now, strangely, it has also become the landscape of my nightmares.
In Cambodia the term for childbirth is chhlong tonlé. Literally translated, it means “to cross a large river,” to weather the storm. Looking back, I have crossed the river on my own, without my mother. I have started a new life in a new country. I have learned a new language and lived in a new culture. I have been reincarnated with a new body, but with an old soul. It lives symbiotically inside me.
In many ways I occupy a world of blurred boundaries. Since the fall of 1989, I have been involved as a researcher on the Khmer Adolescent Project, a federally funded study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among 240 Cambodian youths who endured four years of war in Cambodia.
The need for this research was initially prompted by the observations made by Dan Dickason, an ESL (English as a second language) teacher at Cleveland High School in Portland, Oregon. In the early 1980s, Cleveland High School had experienced an influx of young immigrant Cambodians. In these students Dickason saw something unfamiliar. Once, on a trip to a high school teacher’s home, a young Cambodian girl was digging in the ground and unearthed a bone. She began to unravel, screaming and running about. Slowly other Cambodian students began to share their stories. One shared stories about cannibalism. Another described how the Khmer Rouge had cut people open to eat their livers. At the time, little was known about the horrors of Cambodia. Dickason himself was in denial until he saw footage on the CBS News in May 1983 showing a mountain of human skulls in Cambodia. Then he began to pay attention. The next day he called Dr. David Kinzie, director of the Indochinese Psychiatric Program at Oregon Health Sciences University.
I was one of the Cambodian students at Cleveland High School. When three psychiatrists, Dr. William Sack, Dr. David Kinzie, and Dr. Richard Angell, came to our school to interview us, I asked them why they were so interested, what was their goal? What did they know about Cambodia that I didn’t? I told my cousin and a friend of my fear of talking to them, my fear that I could not be strong about the past. That I would cry in front of strangers. Even in our relocated Cambodian communities, the past was something we had tried to leave on the road behind us.
Most of our scars were well hidden, set aside in our battle for academic success. Out of forty students at Cleveland High School who had lived under Pol Pot, half were diagnosed with PTSD, and half suffered from some form of depression. It seemed curious. Many were motivated students and some were on the honor roll. At the time, it all sounded abstract to me.
Four years later, Dr. William Sack received a grant for over $1 million from the National Institute of Mental Health to expand the research. I was approached at that time to help interpret and to interview subjects. In two weeks I suddenly had to master a brand-new vocabulary including terms like “schizophrenia,” “cyclothymia,” and “dysthymia.” Harder still, I had to learn to ask questions that triggered memories. At twenty-four, I had no idea what I was getting into. Like soldiers going into battle, I didn’t know what outcome to expect. Maybe it was better that way.
My first hint came at the end of our training. The staff had gathered to watch documentary films about Cambodia, including part of the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields. After a few minutes, I stormed out. I remember taking refuge in the women’s rest room, leaning against the wall and weeping. For the first time in years, I had allowed myself to feel the pain of the past that was buried in my soul.
How familiar everything was: the fields of broken flesh; legs, arms gushing blood; corpses covered with buzzing flies; and the sweet stench of decaying flesh. I didn’t need to watch this to have a better understanding of what Cambodian subjects had endured. I had lived through it myself. All I needed to do was to close my eyes and the memories came back.
And so began my dual life. As a researcher, my job was to be a cultural voyeur. I was to use my knowledge of Cambodian customs, culture, and my own wartime experiences to establish a common ground with other refugees. In theory, they would be more comfortable talking to someone who knew what they had endured. It was a strange role for me. In conducting psychiatric interviews, I was both the insider, who knew their trauma, and the outsider, the dispassionate, clinical researcher. There I sat, efficiently recording details that jogged so many of my own harsh memories. Unlike during my training experience, I couldn’t run away and take sanctuary in a rest room. I couldn’t stop listening when subjects’ and their parents’ or guardians’ distressing stories awakened my emotions. My job was to listen, to record answers, and continue to ask questions, pressing until some of these people broke down as they confronted things that had been successfully repressed.
A memory of this time returns to me. Sitting in Room C in Gaines Hall, I am interviewing a woman, the mother of a subject. In the interest of reliability, I interview her about her daughter’s experience as well as her own. The woman weeps when asked about her family’s separation. She studies the tabletop as if the answers were projected there like a movie. While sitting only a few feet across from me, she is distant. For her, as for many subjects and their parents, this was the first time since leaving Cambodia that she could turn and face the brutality she had left behind.
Were you ever tortured by Khmer Rouge soldiers? Did you ever witness others being killed during this time? Did you ever see corpses during this time? Did you ever lose your mother or father during the Pol Pot time? Did you lose any siblings during this time? Did you ever witness the executions of family members? Did you suffer from not having enough to eat so you looked thin, had swollen legs, or a puffy stomach? Were you ever forced to do things by the Khmer Rouge soldiers against your will?…
These questions are sharp triggers. As soon as they leave my mouth, I too search for answers. I watch as suffering is released through the ragged sounds of sobbing. It is all I can do to offer Kleenex while I fight back my own tears. There is recognition. The woman’s red, flooded eyes look briefly into mine—a directness unusual in Cambodia. She apologizes for interrupting the interview, a mark of Cambodian courtesy that survived the years of brutality. I am always amazed that some bit of humanity outlived Angka and is more powerful than the wheel of history.
Often the subjects meet with me in medical offices, but sometimes I am invited into their homes. I am braced for their reactions when I call them to arrange for interviews or when I’m about to interview them. Sometimes they’re angry or paranoid. I try to fight it with familiarity. “Oh, I’m Sam’s cousin,” I tell them. “You know Sam?” Sometimes they are open, surprised that I’m interested enough to ask, referring me to other families, unwilling to let our conversation end. Sometimes they are suspicious. In 1990 Cambodia still remains home to political unrest. Pockets of the Khmer Rouge still fight. And we refugees were well aware of their deceptions. Orwell’s words aptly describe the Khmer Rouge: “Big Brother is watching you.” Even on the streets of Portland I look over my shoulder. And here I am on these survivors’ doorstep, asking them to reveal difficult memories. The Khmer Rouge are a continent away, and yet they are not. Psychologically, they are parasites, like tapeworms that slumber within you, living passively until something stirs them to life. I was asking these subjects to wake those parasites.
The woman is crying so hard that the interview stops. In the past she had made up stories when her daughter asked “Where’s Pa?” She could never bring herself to say that the child’s father had been executed by the Khmer Rouge. “He went away, he’ll be back soon,” she would say. All that was left of her husband was pain, which was only compounded by the questions posed by her daughter and, now, me. I assure her that in the long run, talking about it will help. Pain was simply reality.
I am reminded of the Buddhist doctrine Mean ruup mean tok, which means “With a body comes suffering.” I heard a monk say these words once and immediately thought them overly grim. But to survive Pol Pot is to accept this doctrine as readily as you might accept the change of the seasons, the death of winter and the rebirth of spring.
After a few hours of interviews, I am exhausted. My fingers work, recording hellish images in exquisite detail. The memory of crude executions—seeing a pregnant woman beaten to death with a metal spade. Makeshift hospitals filled with feces; flies and rats hungry for food, human corpses, anything—everything. The memory of bodies swollen with edema. Cheeks and temples sunken with starvation. As I note it all, my body and soul are drained. Inside these four walls I am flung back to Cambodia. A door separates me from safety. I step out into the sunshine, the rolling green campus of the Oregon Health Sciences University. I squint to get my bearings. I have escaped from Cambodia again.
Another day, another interview, another horrific reality. This time it’s an account of the massacre of Cambodian refugees pushed over a mountain precipice. Thai soldiers gathered up hundreds of Cambodian refugees in 1979 and told them that they would be taken to a camp and given aid. Yet the Thai were devils in disguise. At gunpoint, they forced refugees to run down the precipice facing Cambodia. Run they did. There before their eyes rolled their children, wives, husbands, and the elderly. A carpet of bodies tumbled down the precipice as they ran, like pebbles in a rock slide. They had been shot, the subject recounts. The story paralleled a Cambodian parable: “In water one faces a crocodile, and when on land, one faces a tiger.” People were caught between two devils: the Khmer Rouge and the Thai soldiers.
I dutifully record the carnage, yet my mind doesn’t want to accept it. But this same inhumanity was also documented by a journalist in the Washington Post. I had never heard of it. How strange, I thought, to find a history lesson about my own homeland here in America. Stranger still to realize what might have been in my own life.
In the end, I know only that war is inevitable in the world as long as leaders such as Pol Pot are empowered by their kind—and as long as those who can make a difference by doing good deeds choose to look the other way. Under those conditions, more human lives will be lost, and many more children will be parentless. The cost of war is a lifelong legacy borne by children.
And I know this: As a survivor, I want to be worthy of the suffering that I endured as a child. I don’t want to let that pain count for nothing, nor do I want others to endure it. This may be our greatest test: to recognize the weight of war on children. If thousands upon thousands of children will suffer and are suffering right now in the world, we must be prepared to help them. But it’s folly to look at the future without an eye to the past.
The little girl within me often cries out to the adult to help and make a difference. I feel obligated to help my boss, Dr. Sack, and our colleagues understand the Cambodian children who have suffered war trauma. It’s my hope that our research will make significant contributions to knowledge about the clinical and social needs of Cambodian refugees and perhaps the needs of other refugees who have suffered or will suffer a similar fate.
I also like to think that telling my story and assisting the PTSD studies are my way of avenging the Khmer Rouge. It is also my way of opposing governments that have inflicted pain and suffering on innocent children, whose trust has been exploited time and time again throughout history: during the Khmer Rouge era, the Nazi era, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and, more recently, amid the ethnic aggression and bloodshed in Bosnia and Rwanda.
Throughout a childhood dominated by war, I learned to survive. In a country faced with drastic changes, the core of my soul was determined to never let the horrific situations take away the better part of me. I mentally resisted forces I could only recognize as evil by being a human recorder, quietly observing my surroundings, making mental notes of the things around me. There would come a day to share them, giving my voice to children who can’t speak for themselves. Giving voice, as well, to my deceased parents, sisters, brothers, and extended family members, and to those whose remains are in unmarked mass graves scattered throughout Cambodia, the once-gentle land.
As a child, I believed in the power of magic. I remember sitting enthralled in our living room watching a Cambodian movie set in the Himalayas. The hero was journeying to find a wise, bearded man who knew an incantation that could save the innocents from the murderous villains of the jungle. Simple, powerful words would make robbers disappear, abolish evil forces. Palms pressed together and raised in front of the chest with eyes closed, the characters murmured in soft recitation. Immediately things were set right. So easy, I thought. I just have to make it to the Himalayas. It was obviously a place where magic dwelled.
My father knew magic. I was convinced of this. I felt him work his magic when the heavy fingers of asthma clutched my lungs. I would sit up and gasp for air, but everything was stuck. Quickly my father would open his drawer of French medicine, grab a vial and a syringe. Then the magic worked, as it always did. It was as amazing to me as the wise man of the Himalayas—one minute I was taking my last breath, the next minute I was running off to play.
Sitting before my computer, I feel the long-ago magic of my childhood, now memory’s shadow. The war crushed my innocent belief in magic as neatly and efficiently as you might smash a cricket beneath your heel. At first I tried to hide inside the magic. It was a refuge against the surreal realities of war. My friends and I would pretend we had the power to raise the dead. I would talk to imaginary friends in the orchard behind our house. The guava, katot, and teap barang trees and the pond behind my home became the jungle I would have to pass through to get to the Himalayas.
For a time I thought the growing fears of the Viet Cong invasion into Cambodia in the late sixties were an abstraction, an illusion.
Time would tell me otherwise.
Time would take away the magic. And time would give it back.
Tonight the light from my computer screen reflects dull blue on my face. I feel my body and soul recovering from stress, from weeks of intense studies leading up to the MCAT, the all-day Medical College Admissions Test. Yet I feel a gnawing need to resume my writing. At first I felt it was my responsibility as a survivor. But now writing has also become my trek to the Himalayas, my search to recapture the long-lost magic in my life. This time I’m trying to use the power of words to caution the world, and in the process to heal myself. And even with an intellectual hangover from the toughest academic test I’ve ever taken, I’m searching for the words, the incantation, to make things right in my soul.
My heart keeps me writing despite the hour. Pushing hard has become my addiction. At first it was a lesson of necessity, my only means of surviving the Khmer Rouge regime, of outrunning the wheel of history. Being raised by educated and open-minded parents, I had advantages. I was never forced to live up to the sexist expectations of traditional Cambodian culture—a fact that would become important to my survival.
As a child trying to endure the Khmer Rouge regime, I had many questions about the strange world that had overtaken my homeland. At twelve years of age, during the Khmer Rouge regime, I asked my oldest sister, Chea, a question in the hope of understanding our pain and the loss of those I loved. Her answer became the seed of my survival, planted by a sister whom I idolized.
“Chea, how come good doesn’t win over evil? Why did the Khmer Rouge win if they are bad people?”
Chea answered: “—jchan baan chea preah chnae baan chea mea,” which means “Loss will be God’s, victory will be the devil’s.” When good appears to lose, it is an opportunity for one to be patient, and become like God. “But not very long, p’yoon srey [younger sister],” she explained, and referred to a Cambodian proverb about what happens when good and evil are thrown together into the river of life. Good is symbolized by klok, a type of squash, and evil by armbaeg, shards of broken glass. “The good will win over the evil. Now, klok sinks, and broken glass floats. But armbaeg will not float long. Soon klok will float instead, and then the good will prevail.” Chea’s eyes pierced me with an expression that reinforced her words. “P’yoon, wait and see. It will happen.”
At age twenty-two, in 1978, Chea died of a prolonged fever and deprivation, three months before the Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia that drove the Khmer Rouge to the border. At thirteen, unable to help save her, I was angry at myself for not having Pa’s medical knowledge, for not having learned from him. As if talking to Chea’s spirit—as her wrapped-up body was being carried away to be buried in the woods—I said in my mind: Chea, if I survive I will study medicine. I want to help people because I couldn’t help you. If I die, I will learn medicine in my next life. That vow helped me cope with my own helplessness and pain, but I never knew how it would later affect my own life in America.
In 1982, when I began high school in Portland, Oregon, my desire to study medicine was rekindled. After finishing my undergraduate studies at the University of Oregon in 1991, I was determined to become a medical doctor. It has been thirteen years since Chea’s death, and I wanted to fulfill my promise to her spirit and to take up where Pa had left off.
In preparing for the MCAT, I had tried to shelve my memories, deliberately shoving them aside to make room for chemistry and physiology. Yet they had a way of sneaking back. Studying how the body uses carbohydrates, fat, and protein for energy would remind me of the edema that was rampant in wartime villages. The lack of salt in our diets became lethal, robbing our bodies of the ability to produce energy. In Cambodia we had a term for vitamin A deficiencies—a condition we called “blind chicken.” At night, my eyes wouldn’t work. With no real medicine available, the cure was a folk remedy: catch water in a banana leaf or lotus leaf and throw it into the eyes of the afflicted. Listening in the classroom and looking back, these weren’t abstract lessons.
The sight of someone dressed entirely in black would also trigger a memory—the uniforms of the Khmer Rouge. And for a moment it could paralyze me as if I was under a spell. Watching a documentary on Ethiopia showing children lining up for rations would jolt me back to the muddy fields, to a time when I was as frail and exhausted as those African waifs, existing only for food. Memories seep back to me in ways I hadn’t imagined. A stay in Hawaii stirred a sensory memory—moist, green smells, blossoming mango trees, dangling clusters of coconuts, the dance of palm trees at the airport, the humid breeze. The senses awakened the long-forgotten.
There are times when I’ve denied my own memories, when I’ve neglected the little girl in me. There would always be time to grieve, I told myself. I pushed down memories in pursuit of important things. Education. Medical school. I wanted to make a difference in the world, to do good deeds, fulfill a child’s wish. There would be a time for memories, but I never anticipated it, never sought it out. There would be a time.
As I sit in the eerie glow of my computer screen summoning up the past, I know that it is time. I invite the memories back in, apprehensive but hungry for them. In trying to understand my drive to tell others what was scorched in my mind, I recognize my fortitude and ambition, which are rooted in the people who gave me life—my parents.