Peauladd Huy was born in Phnom Penh. She was eight when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975, the year in which she begins her essay. In 1980, after her parents had been murdered by the regime, she immigrated to the United States with her remaining siblings and other relatives.
On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge troops marched into Phnom Penh. Only five days earlier, the United States had pulled out of Cambodia as part of their overall evacuation of the entire region, including Vietnam. Quickly, the Khmer Rouge victory turned into a nightmare for the people of Cambodia. The same day the Khmer Rouge marched into the city, they started to evacuate it as part of their grand plan to dismantle existing infrastructure, leadership and family relationships—to erase all vestiges of capitalist Cambodia and replace it with a new, Communist government, society and culture. The Khmer Rouge divided citizens into “old people” and “new people.” The “old people” were rural peasants and they represented the ideal communist citizen. The “new people” were urban dwellers and they represented the evils of capitalism.
After resettling the “new people” into the countryside, the Khmer Rouge began its systematic attempt to recreate society based on agricultural production and rural values. The Khmer Rouge cadres required citizens to work twelve-hour days without adequate food or rest. The cadres scorned modern agricultural technologies and modern medicine. Many people grew ill and died; others “disappeared,” that is, they were bludgeoned to death after digging their own graves.
Cambodians were liberated from the Khmer Rouge by Vietnamese troops in January 1979. It is believed that between one and two million Cambodians died during the four- year Khmer Rouge period. About half died of starvation; the other half were murdered.
MID-MORNING SUN pushes through the holes in the canopy of our neighbor’s mango and milk fruit trees. The winds are scarce, the leaves at a standstill. Then, sarong unfurled, Mother’s feet are shuffling left and right. Her shoulders rock side to side and the baby’s almost asleep. Papa and my uncle left for the meeting in Phnom Penh just after the Khmer Rouge took over our city, Battambang, a day ago. I shut my eyes and pretend. The sun is scorching. And I am waiting. The little ones are breathing steadily. I get up to watch the heat bead into little jewels. The sun walks his children, I’ve been told. I’ve never been like other children who do as they are told. Each naptime is like another bitter pill.
EVERYTHING’S ON THE move all the time: the ants are caravanning somewhere else right now. Today, out the window, the leaves are droopy. Everything’s in a haze, like seeing through a smudged magnifying glass. A mass of people on the street is heading towards the countryside. The Khmer Rouge rebels keep telling us the city needs to be resettled; and, in order to do that, the city has to be cleared of people. Then the city will be bombed. Finally, door to door, they empty us out of our homes at gunpoint.
The first few days after Papa was gone, Mother did not say much, except for the koum, koum and koum (don’t, don’t and don’t). It started: koum go out into the street; koum linger in the part of yard close to the street, especially after the rebels swaggered up and down the sidewalk next to our fence; and then, koum go out the door without letting me know, after the rebels came to our door to tell us to leave for the countryside. Inside, koum yell. Koum chase. Koum have too much fun, just when our fun is getting started.
Our living quarters are part of a building used for storing artifacts collected from nearby archaeological sites. Only rare pieces are triaged here. The not-so-rare are kept in Wat Pol Vell, across the river. Sturdier pieces are stored in the rear. Smaller ones are in locked cases close to Papa’s office. The most special get escorted to the museum in Phnom Penh. Our father is in charge of rescuing artifacts, so our home is like living in a mini museum. Relics come and go. And some stay put.
By now, we are probably the only family left on our street, buying our time with food that my older brothers have been hurrying off to the rebels. Still no news from Papa. We can’t leave without him. Just a bit longer, another day, one more night, Mother keeps pleading with the rebels. The outside world is very eerie. It is like our whole world is picked clean of its inhabitants. No cars. No mopeds. No bicycles. The neighbor to the right is gone. The monks behind us in Wat Domrei Sar are all gone. No chanting. Classrooms all empty. No students. No teachers. Everyone is gone. Strangely, with all this emptiness, there is a sense of confinement. We are watching them watching us. There are always at least two black-pajama soldiers waiting under the tree, near the edge of the now-receded Sangker. It is depressingly hot. We are in the dry season. We are cooped up inside, all bothered, each in our own way. Mother shut most of the windows, which ought to be opened for some air. Because they are stained glass, our inside becomes dark and smoggy. Suffocating.
“Look at the dust swimming,” I prompt my younger sisters towards the filtered light by one window. While they are busy, I survey. We need other fun things to keep us going. Unexpectedly, the whole setting is taking on something. Odd. Mystifying. Like they are becoming alive. Watching us. All eyes are following me. As if the artifacts are waking up. More fluid; arms and fingers meandering. Stretching. Reaching out. The apsaras captured in friezes, stone hunk by stone hunk, have subtly shifted somehow. The frigid Yaeks hold naughty smiles, are baring more fangs. All of a sudden, I get the creeps. Chills wash over me. I run off quickly towards my sisters, who are airplaning through the dust.
Each of us has experienced something strange at least once in the short time we’ve lived here. Out-of-the-ordinary occurrences come and go. Once I woke up in the middle of the night hearing women humming, like they were bathing at a running stream. Papa often said, You’ve got to respect something this old.
Nevertheless, nothing scares us for long. In a moment, we’re back. Each time, braver, and daring one another to touch the cold stone relics although we know full well the rules. Rule number one: Do Not Touch. Rule number two: Do Not Disrespect. But Papa is not here, is he now?
“Touch it. Touch it,” I beseech my baby sister, with both of my hands on a thigh of Jayavarman. Feeling dips, curves and mounds on the faces of devatas, we run our grubby hands from stone panel to stone panel. Then walking turns into running and running into chasing. And chasing brings out the worst in us. Shrieking makes echoes, and echoes bring a fluttering sarong. Mother kills all the fun as usual. Other times, away we steal into Papa’s office, into his chair, to be the boss directing his business affairs—talking nonsense on the phone, instructing his personnel, speaking to foreign visitors, shish-shush, shish-shush, spitting on each other to get the message across.
The Khmer Rouge rebels go from door to door. They arrive at ours with their guns. Now we have no choice but to leave our home. When morning comes, after Mother clicks the lock to our front door, we set out, joining the mass exodus to the countryside. It is now the latter part of April. April is the hottest month in Cambodia. And we walk and then are forced to walk. We are on the road for a night and a day and a half before arriving at the farm village which belongs to our neighbor from the city. Huge trees, trunk to trunk, columns up the wide dirt road, which are then flanked by two broad canals. On this dirt road, we walk into the heart of the farm, where the land is taken over by wooden buildings and fruit trees. Lofty mangos, bananas, papayas, sweetsops, jackfruits and coconuts stud the property. We are welcomed in by our neighbor and her extended family. In the largest building, they have a meal for us.
The next morning, I rush out to explore. Meeting up with other kids. Some kids are newly refugee-ed like me and some are just local. By now, all farm activities are in full swing. Rice is being milled by oversized mortar and pestle contraptions. Huge mallets, like oversized hammer heads, powered by the sheer force of young men’s and women’s legs, are lifted up and dropped into huge wooden bowls of rice. The force of the dropped mallet crushes, de-hulks and later debrans the rice, making it edible. At each set-up, the workers grunt as a team before thrusting their feet down onto the thick log fastened to the hammer head to raise it up. Each action is like that of a seesaw. Then, a hard clump rattles the earth. The rice splashes up and crashes against the wood, like freezing rain against a window. Before the tremors from the first clump subside, another clump comes. Together, it is like a big symphony for a giant.
Then the whole world is in chaos at the pig pen. From a distance away, I hear the pigs squeal. And then mud propels into the air like raining rocks as the farmer dumps the food into the troughs. The feeding frenzy scatters the chickens. Some dart nervously, trying to take flight. As I and my newly made friends get closer, the hens puff up their plumes, lower their wings, extend their necks and charge us like a bull to a bull fighter. Then we take off like flies. The cows moo and go on chewing. The water buffalos spurt snot and push their eyes out until the white shows while being pulled into the fields.
In the morning light, the farmer sluggishly scales the sugar palms, with bamboo tubes clanking from his waist, to tap sap from the flowers. Later, a sweet smell of sap simmering to sugar permeates the air, drawing children to the steaming woks like flies to decayed flesh.
In the countryside, at the beginning, life is adventurous, filled with many first-timers. Always some new tasks to learn. Life is tough but rewarding. Any actual schooling is gone, which is a blessing. Instead, we are instructed by the adults with lessons in fetching water and rummaging through vegetation for roots and fruits.
Shortly, the Khmer Rouge district chief in charge of the village tells us and a handful of other families to move to another village. Small bundle by small bundle, we carry our basic belongings to our new place. We land at this second village when the rice clusters are still green, not yet golden. Along with other new refugees, we are still optimistic that the Khmer Rouge people will let us return to our city homes once the rice harvesting is done. Thus, we work earnestly.
This second village is made up mostly of new refugees. Most of us have never built our own shelters before so our makeshift homes offer minimal protection. Palm frond by palm frond, bamboo stalk by bamboo stalk, our brothers rig up a shelter to shield us from the sun, but not from cold nor rain. When it rains, our leafy roof leaks. The rainwater drips—bah-lop, bah-lop—into the catching buckets. When the holes wear bigger, the water comes gushing down, like an opened dam. At night, the whole frame squeaks, crackles and sways as the cold winds howl and whip up the leafy covering. Portions of leaves lift up like a skirt hem catching a gust. And the cold seeps through the nooks and crannies. Doused with chills, we burrow deep into the warmth of nearby bodies. Heads delve under the blankets to trap warm breaths. Mother keeps us warm with fires built beneath the bamboo floor. Smoke rises. And the flame licks the bamboo floor and blackens it.
“Mother, are we going to be roasted like the fish by the morning?” I ask. The cloths we lay on were singed brown on the corners where they slipped too close to the flames. The night’s cold wind burned the fire fast. In the morning, our smoked bodies thwarted mosquitoes and other insect bites.
We are now more than a few months into country life. Refugees (city folks like us) are still being shuffled around from one communal village to the next. People come and go. The departed leave our village with whatever situations we are in at the time. And newcomers bring in new news of the places they’ve just come from or encountered on their journeys here.
So accordingly, by word of mouth, news about others—in this case, about men who’ve found themselves in situations similar to Papa’s and Uncle’s—is relayed to us by a new refugee, a recent escapee, a young man, who is now looking to be reunited with his family. We sit for his words. They are just words, new news we do not want to understand. Disbelieving heads swing like pendulums, shaking out any denials left clotting the flow of our reality. As witnessed by the escapee, several truckloads of men were dumped off in some mountain, north of where we’re now sitting. What do they look like? he is asked. He answers, Important, educated. And some were in their full uniforms. Mother hands him a picture to jar his memory of the faces he saw. He shakes his head slowly, as if weighing out each word like rocks before tossing them over. And then, at the end, he is only able to offer, Sorry, no. He did not see anyone close enough to match the picture. I ran off after the first few rounds. His eyes hold shock, as if he is witnessing the massacre again. His chalky face tells of a man who not many days ago missed barely being shot to death and of a deserter—glad to be alive and sorry for seeing others riddled by bullets. What happened? This is rushed out to bring him back to us. We know he has seen too much. He squeezes his eyes as if to shut it all off and he focuses on us and gasps, They just shot them. All toppled like fallen trees. After this is said, he cries. Not a wailing or a gushing of tears. His eyes become pink and his nose wet. Just a man-sniffle. As he’s wrapping up the story, I glance over to Mother, into her eyes, to be certain that she hasn’t absolutely believed that our father was among the killed. Upon seeing my mother’s eyes are only stung pink by the story, I am assured that my father and uncle are safe. At the closing, Mother expresses regret for those men.
We’re so close that every word is a blur, swirled like halos of pesky flies. When learning news of deaths, it’s the human in us to deny. A million to one or two that Papa and Uncle are dead is too many zeros to wrap our heads around.
Not long after the rice harvest, the cadres scatter everyone in our village and in the neighboring villages, sending us to live and work in different labor camps. By now, we are often too hungry to argue and entirely too frightened—constantly fearing that we too may become one of the nightly disappeared—to challenge their authority. Or for that matter, no one of us is durable enough to be propped up and trashed mercilessly at one of their mandatory meetings. By now, we’ve seen plenty of the Khmer Rouge’s horrific retaliations, ample times enough to ever dare to second guess any of their actions. So, weakened by hunger, our minds and bodies will do whatever and go wherever they demand because we have more than realized we are now virtually captive beings. Bigger boys and girls—like my older siblings—and fathers and mothers are often sent off to clear the jungle for rice lands or to build dams or to carry out any tasks having to do with rice growing. They are gone for months at a time. Many months will go by before we see our mother again. Younger children, like my younger sisters and me, are kept in work camps closer to home base. My younger sister and I, who are in the same camp, take off often when our mother is stationed to work at home. No punishment is more intolerable than not seeing our mother. To be with her is like having all the hurt disappear. No matter what the Khmer Rouge cadres say—again and again, in so many ways—to make us hate our parents, I can never do it.
WHEN YOU’RE A CHILD, it is hard to resist temptation when you’re always hungry. Food is the ultimate reward and punishment. Obey the rules of the regime, you’re given your miserable scraps. Disobey, food is withheld.
Since there is only one meal a day and only after a long day of killing work, it is often too painful to sleep with an empty stomach. If you’re left with a touch of energy, you’re in overdrive with hunger, searching and eating anything you can find. It’s a desperate hunger, a killing hunger, driving many of us to be reckless, especially children who do not know any better. We behave like strays. Some thieves are caught and killed just for a few coconuts or a meager grain of rice. The rice we’d propagated, fed water when the fields dried up, harvested and threshed with our very own hands is suddenly off-limits. Then again, everything is like that with the Khmer Rouge; everything once ours is no longer ours. Children are ferried off to labor camps, some never seen again, killed off by man’s brute force or naturally ravaged by disease. No one is spared, everyone is hurting—except for the ones in charge and their cohorts.
Village by village, people are taken out: the weak ones by nature and the not-so-weak ones carried off for execution, night after night. With the Khmer Rouge, everything is done in the dark. Teachers, students and especially soldiers from the previous government and their families are killed off. People who do not work one hundred percent or more in the fields are killed. Whole families are taken out, down to the aunts and uncles. No one really knows the exact nature of their crimes, but we all know not to question. Instead we know to look stupid, to be as unrefined as possible in our words. To say little. The cruder the better, the more like the base people the better, Mother tells us.
Then that day comes. I am nine and my sisters are seven and three. The seven-year-old and I run away from our work camp for the night, after a long day of preparing beds for potato planting. We feel lucky that they put us in the same work camp. There are four of us at home now. And our world is washed by a sunset on the horizon. Mother is at home before dark. And she is a bit more frazzled today than usual. Maybe it is because she has to come up with extra food to feed two more mouths.
“Look at that tree turning golden,” I whisper quietly to myself.
I wonder where you are. What do you see now, Papa? Can you still see the sunset oranging up the world? Can you see as I see now? I wish you were with us now. I wish you were here to tell them that they cannot take any more bananas off our trees or yams from our garden. I am confounded by this immense beauty, yearning for my father’s guidance: as to where to look; what I should see when the sun is at a certain descent; and how I should feel once the world is trailing with a slight yellow glow. All of this magic is awakening inside me, but I am at a loss without my teacher. I don’t know where to start. I remember telling myself to memorize the different shades of light, shadows and colors so I could relate everything to him later. And this sense of purpose makes me delighted. I have so much to tell him. All of me can’t wait to see him again despite rumors that he is gone forever.
After the overwhelming sunset, the world is now at dusk. That Khmer Rouge is here for our mother. She is needed for a meeting, the cadre says. It is nothing unusual. Mother has been to these nightly meetings at least three times already. The meetings for reeducating the deviant ones, the stray-ers, the impure ones. Essentially, the whole city bunch: the ones who were force-marched to the countryside right after the takeover. We all know this: meetings mean disappearances for other people but never for our mother.
Our mother is too human to be disappeared. She is so much flesh and bone (truthfully, just mostly the bone part). So much breathing. She is the dot that begins and encloses the line. She defines us because she is the only parent we have left.
It’s dark. I don’t want to be scared but I am. My younger sisters are off playing in one corner. Undisturbed. Not scared. They don’t know any better; they are too young. I try not to have bad thoughts because Mother said, Bad thoughts often bring up bad things. I want to be reassured as she is leaving, so I call out to Mother. She looks at me for my first call. On my second, though, she only glances up at the man by her side. I know she is just trying to please him. Then they walk away and disappear into the dark.
My need for my mother to return pushes urgently against my chest as the night deepens into pitch black. Then my breaths panic. Light fades. Doors open and close between two worlds I cannot understand. Images pull away to a blur of gritty gray, like a torn film repeating the same scene over and over. My hope collapses in countless stillbirths; I see his hands choking my mother again and again.
Looking back, everything was in her desperate eyes, like when the Khmer Rouge came for us children. Anxious, afraid of separation, my mother’s face had that familiar expression as if she were the child and I the parent. As if she wanted to tell me what was hurting, though she did not know how. I felt like crying and begging that man not to take her because we needed her to tuck us in later. Then too it felt as if she wanted to give me one more instruction on how to care for my younger sisters: the three-year-old had her rituals, not songs. Mother said, Songs were like singing for our deaths. She liked her back stroked. I knew there was more, but the only words I got were the same as before, though a little fainter, Take care of your sisters. Her pale face. Her frantic eyes. Though my eyes sensed trouble, my child-nature knew that she would work it out. She had many times before.
For the first days, weeks and months after, I wander around looking for my mother. I keep believing that one day I will come upon her in some village or a rice paddy somewhere. After quite some time, after exhausting every possible location, I return to the work camp, but every day I plan to run away after nightfall. Now and then, I forget that she is gone. One evening, I sneak out; halfway home, I remember. I feel so destroyed—crushed that I’ve become such a delusional idiot that I am incapable of remembering even the simplest fact, the fact that my own mother is no longer at home.
Alone and cold. I stand in the open, not caring if I live or die. I find a dip in the ground for shelter. My thin body is in a complete tremor. I wrap both arms around my bony chest to stop the trembling. I bawl and save my warm breaths in my shirt. Drop to the ground. Close my eyes. And wake up seeing one dewdrop hanging on the tip of one wind-beaten blade. I lie there imagining my thirst sweetened as the water washes down my throat. I hear footsteps approaching and I wonder if they’ll pause to see me. Next to the dirt path, in knee-high grass, feet clomp-clomp and fade away. After sunrise, I feel warm and then cold as the sun sits above my head. Then I shiver again as the sun is sliding down. My legs collapse again and again when I attempt to stand up, feeling so woozy that large gulps of air are not enough to clear my head or steady my shake. I feel my ribs pushing out of my chest when I take a big suck of air. My chest aches after each breath. I look down at my chest, at my ribs, to see if there’s any truth to the way I am feeling. Well sure, there is not much meat on me, but bone; I won’t be much to eat. What does that baby taste like? That father must be really desperate to turn his daughter into soup. No, a father cannot eat his baby. It’s a lie. But why are those eyes looking at me so weird?
“Water please. Some water please.” Begging, while voices above me gurgle. Then two strong hands grab me up by my shirt. The Khmer Rouge teen in charge yells out in a piercing voice, You are a bad little girl. After that, I wake up in our communal building with two or three other sick girls while the others are at work. When I get a bit better, they put me back to work.
We little girls, seven, eight and nine, are trudging along in a single file to labor. In front of us, the morning rays peek over the hill. My younger sister is not among the group. My eyes risk a quick look, checking to see how much is left of the steep hill. At the top, I catch the cold morning air rising, like puffs of smoke. The air is scorching cold on my thin fingers and shoeless feet. My whole body is rattling beneath my flimsy black clothes. My jaws are clacking as the cold winds whip my thin body—if it gets any stronger, I’m going to take off. Frail legs wobbling over the cold gravel. Stomach roaring like incoming storms—another diarrhea is forewarned. Tears often make me forget the pain, but not this time. Pain is shooting up my legs. A thousand splinters jabbing in my flesh. The blood has long ago caked—a spoiled mauve color—up my feet and between my toes; my soles are throbbing because the open wounds are now crammed with dirt. My soles were thrashed to stop me from running away. I want my mother. Where have they taken her? Did they kill her right away? Did they put her in prison somewhere?
IN THREE YEARS, eight months, and twenty days, the sadistic Khmer Rouge regime, led by Pol Pot and his cohorts, managed to kill off more than one-fourth of the population. They buried most in mass graves, though not many of us survivors know this yet. But each of us knows that we are now about four years older. I am eleven. My education is still of first grade and part of second. I’ve forgotten how to read and write. I can’t write my own name. I can’t see well at night. Four of my permanent molars are all rotten. I get startled easily. I can’t sleep. Constantly, I am expecting more doom. And I am now the source of all of my older sister’s aggravations. She is trying to be a mother to us. Nobody understands that I don’t want a substitute. I didn’t put in all that hard work for the last four years, cheating death, just for second best. I’m entitled to the real thing. Do you hear me?
According to history, Vietnam invaded Cambodia around Christmas of 1978 and into the early part of 1979; the remaining Khmer Rouge scattered into the jungle. And in the short months before Vietnam invaded, the youngest of our three older brothers had brought all four of the younger girls in our family to live with him in a new village. This village allowed families to exist intact, but each still had to work the fields. I came with my brother first, both of us running away from our work camps. He ran away to save himself from being killed, yet he still risked going back to the camps. Twice he ventured out with a friend to bring back the other three girls, our sisters.
THE FIRST WEEKS after Vietnam invaded and freed us from the Khmer Rouge, I am in the trees a lot, scanning the flight of people going both ways on the main road. It is as if a mass of people suddenly emerged from some hellhole—all still dressed in their miserable black pajamas. People in horrific shape—bare to the bone, teeth rotten or missing, skin gaunt and riddled by all sorts of ailments—dragged by one leg at a time. Those with strength push the dying and the little ones in wooden carts. A few lucky ones have the luxury of travelling on oxcarts. Everyone is out looking for other family members.
Then one day I spot my second older brother from a tree. And now we are a family of two brothers and four sisters, without both parents. Our oldest sibling is not even twenty yet.
“We have to go back to the old village to wait for Papa and Mother,” our brothers decide for us. This decision freaks me out. The old village is a place shrouded with terrible people. And these people know how to torture and they’ve enjoyed every moment of it.
“They killed Mother. They killed Mother there. We can’t go back there.” No one wants to believe me.
“You’re just a child,” one tells me and another adds, “She could be alive, looking for us right now.” Immediately my thoughts hurry off to my poor mother.
It is not unusual at this time that some of us just go completely mad. On the road back to the old village, we all catch glimpses of how deep the damage is, of how much this force of destruction has woven itself into the life of the survived, especially for the older people who had young families at the beginning of the war. Now most of them are left with nothing. Spouses are gone. The men were the most heavily used and abused. Children are gone, because they were too young to survive the hardships. These people are alone, wandering aimlessly. One evening while we are settling down for the night, after our day of walking, we witness a young lady, raging at the top of her lungs, asking where justice is for her. She cries out, “They took everything, my children, my husband. I have nothing. I shall wear nothing.” Her poor brother tries to do what he can to cover her up. And immediately I am gripped with concern for my poor mother: if she is alive and not able to find us, what will her mind be like? Will she too parade her naked self, pounding her chest and tearing out her hair by the fistful?
The first months after we arrive at the old village, we all search around, questioning anybody who is perceived to have had the slightest contact with our mother. Friends and friends of friends are tracked down, but every tongue utters the same words, They probably killed her. Even then, with so many obvious signs that our parents are more likely dead than alive, we still can’t help hoping. I’m up in the trees again, just looking out for them day after day. A bird’s eye view of what is coming in and going out. I want to catch them coming before anybody else. And the only way is up on a tree because I am still so shamefully short. I don’t believe I grew any during those four years under the Khmer Rouge—then again, not many of us did. We come out the same heights as we went into that war.
It is during our inquiries for our mother that other events are related to us. I am told that this and this took place, that who and who were executed and about the ones who fell ill and passed. So many grave things happened to countless people in that short time while we were away from the village. Copious stories in all shades of horror keep spilling out, and hunger is the culprit in all of them. My old surviving friends speak quietly—with some shame weighing down each word, never offering complete details but enough to see the full story—of little girls, how they’d lost themselves for two or three coconuts.
In my head, I keep saying, If that man, the other coconut thief, had not interrupted that night, on the path between the rice fields, I would have been just like them. Another of the lost girls.
This is what happened one night, a few months after they took our mother away. It was now over a year since we had left our city home. And the latter part of the year was filled with a desperate hunger for all of us. Earlier in the day, my second older brother had come home for a visit. We had not seen him for quite some time. By now, he was thin, gray, like a dead body struggling to make a pulse. I was appalled by his grave appearance and he by mine. He cried when he heard Mother had been taken away. Then I asked if he’d brought us any sun-dried rats this time. There are no more. There are no more, he kept repeating, as if for his own sake. They are all eaten, Sister. Then he begged me to steal some coconuts for him before he was due to go back to his labor camp. We were so hungry.
The moon was larger than half. The air was cool. No strong winds. And the land was slightly visible for me to negotiate. I was out trying to steal coconuts when the Khmer Rouge cadre caught me on my way out of the coconut grove.
I was wriggling as best I could muster to be free from his ironclad grip. But it was hopeless because I was so much smaller and weaker. I cried and pled for a second chance, as if those Khmer Rouge cadres had ever believed in second chances. Each time it was like appealing to a rock. Just as he was getting ready to tie me up, I remembered the stories from my other girlfriends. How painful it had been for them. You’d just let it pass through, they said. Better to be alive than to be beaten to death. I was not going to be another victim. I told myself, My life can’t be traded just for a few coconuts. For God’s sake, try. You’re almost ten now. So I initiated, pulling my shirt off, teasing out whatever magic I could for being a girl. His grip on my wrist suddenly went slack. His other hand on me, loose, searched across my chest. He dropped his hand, muttering something, Bony…you’re just a kid.
Believe me, that is what you would have wanted to hear if you were in my shoes at that moment in time. I felt hopeful that finally he got it, that he understood—I was just a child driven by hunger. Finally compassion was coming my way. Then quickly, I realized it was not what I had hoped. I was not to his taste. I felt useless. I remember telling myself, It’s your first time, maybe it’ll get better next time. I didn’t feel desperate, just running out of ideas—tired, and yes, defeated—that I was not clever enough to outwit the soldier. At that moment, just quietly accepting my condition as a captive thing: dark, secluded in the open rice fields, I was now alone with a man with a rifle. Mother, Mother, if you’re truly dead, please help your child out.
Then as if by magic, another coconut thief appeared.
We heard two shots. The cadre leapt up off the ground. Wild-eyed. Both hands on his rifle, scoping out the night. We saw a soldier with the other coconut thief across the field. Then I shook in excitement when he flew off like a bullet after the call for help. But he stopped. He warned.
“Don’t you dare run off.” He bared his teeth at me.
My body was like a wind-up toy gone spastic. I played scared. I nodded my head violently to show him. But once he stopped looking back, I tiptoed closer to the running stream adjacent to the main road. I eased myself off the embankment. In the steam, I stayed hidden in a cluster of tall cattails. It wasn’t long before he returned with another cadre to look for me.
“Come out if you know what’s good for you.” They cackled and then played nice. “We won’t hit you.”
They beat the tall grasses and cattails with long sticks, once brushing the cattail tops just above my head, and every so often shouting out to me, “You know there are leeches in the water. They are going to go up your crevices.”
I stayed where I was, worrying about the leeches and pleading with all the creatures to leave me alone. Before daybreak, they left. And I came out shaking, wet. But alive.
Many times I’ve wondered about the other coconut thief. I hoped his misfortune was not indeed my luck. I wished I knew what’d happened to him. I wondered if he were the same man that talked to me from the other stupa, when, a short while later, I was caught again in another food-stealing incident and locked up.
MY LIFE WAS like that: pardoned by some beings at the last moment, though sometimes they too forgot, as if to teach me to be more careful next time.
After the Vietnamese invasion and after we arrived at the old village, one of the first things we did was to visit the site where our home used to stand. We did not go together. Each visited in his or her own time and kept the moment private. But each of us knew who had been and who hadn’t yet. I waited until one day when I couldn’t shake off my despair.
There was nothing left, like we had never lived there. No palm-leaf woven coverings, no stoop, no dug-out holes holding the beam-posts to prop up a home. Just the coconut palm, trunk scarred up now, carved out footholds ascending the log, lonely, slouched, as if waiting for a strong wind to finger through its fronds. Suddenly, it whistled a song, like some spirits telling me that I was not alone. I thought that it might be my mother. How could it be anything else? Then again, how could it be her if I’d always denied that she was dead? I told myself a song like this had to be other spirits who had taken possession of the poor palm. Besides, would my own mother want me to be scared of her? Not to let them know that I was spooked, I reminded my legs to tread slowly, but they too had a mind of their own. Before I knew it, I was out of breath.
As I walked on the paths, old faces came back though their huts were also long gone. The whole plot of land was abandoned. A few lived on the edge, far out of the way of the dragon. They said the dragon lived beneath where our homes used to be and when it was disturbed, it woke up mad, twirling, belly to back and back to belly, like a snake with its head chopped off. Whatever was perched above its body was bucked off, crumpled like homes assembled over shifting ground. Our hut, the shaman claimed, sat on its tail and that’s why our life was tumbled so much. No hanging around there; I was scared.
From where the dragon’s mouth was supposed to be to its tail, deaths trailed. So many people I once knew were gone-Ta, Yeay, Ohmm, Mingd, Bong, Oynd, gcone-gaa, and Mother were all dead (grandfather, grandmother, older aunts, younger aunts, older friends, younger friends. These terms are used out of respect for people who are not necessarily blood-related.) Slowly stories of what had happened to the disappeared surfaced. Still, we weren’t completely sure of where they were killed and buried. Those early days, after the Vietnamese invasion, we were just trying to survive. Our days were occupied with finding food. It was during our rummaging for food that some of us came upon shallow mounds and bones. We children warned one another not to rummage through this or that area. Some warnings were true and some were just another way of scaring off the others from places where we had found food. Just a way of hoarding food.
The evidence of mass killings slowly became apparent. Still, we weren’t convinced that we had killed so many of our very own, not till years later when the mass graves were uncovered. It took me even longer than others to admit the truth because I didn’t want to face it. Past reflections always brought up nightmares and this horrible fear of sleep, so I had no desire to tread this territory again. My idea was to leave everything alone. Leave it to time to heal. Time heals everything, right? Wrong. It does what it does for the fleshly realm of things, but not emotionally. It only makes me remember more.
The first time I saw those piles of bones was on my computer’s screen many years later. I was so shaken. There’s your missing parents, your aunts and uncles and cousins, I remember muttering to myself. You can stop hoping now. Accept it. Stop fooling yourself. They’re more than dead now.
Around this time, a callous coworker commented, after seeing some documentary on PBS, “Shit, your people killed each other off. Not very smart.” Every word he uttered was true. I was hurt. I felt shock, sadness and shame all at once. That my very own race could be so cruel and subhuman. We shall forever be known as killers of our own.
I didn’t want to face up to my past, but there’s a need to cover those bone piles up, to give shelter and care for them because they’re so helpless. A need to protect one’s own. It would be a display for history’s sake, a display to teach lessons. What lessons they have taught us. Yet the killings still continue. The Bosnian and African killings are beyond horrifying. I have a sense of guilt for not caring enough to come out earlier with my experience. Now look what’s happened. Another generation or two have to go on living as orphans again. Another generation or two who must live a life of withouts.
Now, like any decent parent, I can’t help but ask: Will it ever stop? Will we stop hurting our children? They can feel the pain. Have we forgotten that we, too, were once children? Have the years of growing old numbed us somehow? Have we become like those grown-ups we once swore not to become?
I didn’t know how to show my despair with words. I held on, hoping the years would eat it all up. Then my girls asked for their grandparents. The nightmares resurfaced as if they had every right to come out after so many years of being locked up. They’ve been partying up a storm ever since. It’s the nature of shutting off unpleasant things: eventually the box gets too full. Then too the desire to mold my children into good, caring people is much more important than keeping the nightmares to myself. They’re a part of me. I cannot change what I am. Hopefully, what is me will strengthen my children and possibly two or three others, who in turn will touch two or three—and so on and so on. Maybe in the end, it is not too much to hope that there is a tiny purpose for this suffering, that there’s some small lesson in this Khmer Rouge horror.