When they first entered Phnom Penh, the Vietnamese found a series of shop-houses containing strange items. One shop was filled entirely with left shoes. Another one contained thousands of right shoes, stacked to the ceiling. A store crammed with refrigerators. Another of half-smashed televisions. A building filled with chairs, a building of tables. There was a house of cooking pots. Year Zero museums of archaic modern technology. The only ambassadors of the modern world allowed entry into Pol Pot’s Cambodia were the Kalashnikov and the electric wire around the fence of Tuol Sleng prison.
The air exhaled silence.
‘There is nothing for us here,’ his mother sighed.
They had found their old house, but they noticed a pair of blue shorts and a frayed shirt hanging over the balcony to dry. Some other family had already settled in their factory.
So they returned to Siem Reap, living in a communal house with many other families.
In the town, his brother’s little girl Hue, who was now three, stood gaping at an ice seller. With his bare hands the street vendor pressed ice shavings tightly into a sphere around a centre of sweet red beans. He handed the cold ball to Kiv, who crouched down and placed it at his daughter’s lips, to give her a suck. They all watched the face of this child, born during the days of slavery. Less than a year ago she was crouching on the ground digging up small spring onions and popping them in her mouth. A baby eating raw spring onions. They all waited to see the first signs of recognition of this small joy that they had lost for four years, and which they had thought was lost to them forever.
But the first thing she said was, ‘Wah! It’s so hot!’
He couldn’t stop laughing.
The coldest thing in their world would be scorching to someone who did not know what it was like to taste cool. The sunrise they expected to see on her face was actually a fire-burn.
In Siem Reap, Kiv, who was always the innovator of the family, started up a gold-smithing trade. With nothing but a small mallet he made rings. Whenever they obtained a bit of gold, they melted it into tiny pellets. Kiv would flatten these pellets and make a hole in the centre, like a donut. Then he would use his little hammer to tap out a ring. It was slow work, shaping an amorphous gold donut into a wedding band. Every day he and his brother hawked around this jewellery in exchange for rice. A ring would be exchanged for five or six tins of rice. The more rice they earned, the more they could exchange for more gold. There were no scales, so Kiv made a set, with weighing plates made of condensed-milk-tin lids. The Vietnamese soldiers watched their burgeoning trade with quiet amusement. Sometimes they even came to exchange something, but they never came to snatch anything away.
*
After two months, Kiv made a decision. ‘We have to go to Vietnam,’ he said. ‘We can’t do this forever.’ He said that he would go with his wife and daughters, and if things went well, they would send someone to bring over the rest of the family. He would leave his son Wei in the care of his mother, brother and sister. Kiv swapped some gold for a bike, and hid the remaining gold in its hollowed-out handlebars. There was no time for teary goodbyes. Kiv and his family set out when it became dark, he wheeling his bike with one hand and carrying Hue with the other, while Suhong carried their remaining bags and held the hand of Huong, their older daughter.
Kuan remembered the time Kiv came crying to him because they had caught Suhong bartering rice and locked her up in a hut by herself, to be executed. That evening, his brother had wrapped his ration of rice in banana leaves and stood beneath the thatched hut, the house of straw with pitch-patch light entering through its seams during the day. He poked the package through the floor, until he felt his wife’s tug. Her last supper.
Kuan had watched his older brother and learnt about keeping a family alive, about how to condense your world to the smallest possible unit so that you could keep it safe. In the end Kiv’s wife was spared. There was no reason why. A woman’s life was subject to the whim of sixteen-year-old boys. There was a nine-year-old girl they tethered to a tree. They told her that they were going to kill her the next day. She had to pass the night with that certainty like a rusted spoon scraping at the inside of her stomach. They killed her the next day.
He thought about the scraps of his family. Him with his bad eye. His sister Kieu, whom they called Blackie because she was so dark from the sun. And his mother, keeping her adult children alive. He remembered the afternoon of his mother’s birthday in the killing fields, when he had felt the whoosh of wings above him. He watched a bird fly past and dunk itself into the rice paddy like a falling sickle. It emerged with something in its mouth, which it dropped a few seconds later while soaring away. He walked over to the paddy and saw the splashing. A fish! He pulled it out and smacked it against the ground and hid it in his shirt, close to his chest. They would be able to celebrate his mother’s birthday.
At the end of his twenties, his world, once so peopled with attachments, was down to this ragged walking cluster, a cluster he vowed to love and protect till the end of his days. And yet he wanted something more. He knew, without a doubt, that he wanted a family of his own.
Soon, true to his word, Kiv’s guides arrived for them. He had sent two Chinese men who had lived in Vietnam, Dang Hai and Guang Hwei. When his mother heard the names, she declared it a blessing from Buddha. Back in Cambodia before Year Zero, she had once gone to a Buddhist shrine to get her fortune told and was given a small rhyming-couplet poem of four lines, with those very same characters.
Dang Hai gave Kuan a cigarette to smoke, ‘like a Vietnamese, so no one will be suspicious of you’. When they left, he was standing in the back of an old Chinese military truck with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, looking backwards at a country he knew he never wanted to see again.