Survival in the Killing Fields (2 page)

Stealing the rice mill was not a rational idea. It was not like stealing food, where the benefits balanced the risks. Owning the rice mill wouldn’t keep me from starvation. At most, it
would allow me to remove the husks from stolen rice a little faster than with a mortar and pestle. And the risks were higher than stealing food. The shed was next to the common kitchen, and the
kitchen was guarded by soldiers night and day.

To me, stealing the mill was a test: It was a test of my abilities as a thief, and a challenge to the miserable life I had been living. It was a way of finding out whether the gods wanted me to
live or die.

Each time I went near the common kitchen I watched the shed without appearing to watch it. Very slyly. But there were always soldiers around.

Eventually I concluded that the only chance lay in trying to steal the mill when the area was full of people.

A few evenings a week the village leader held political indoctrination meetings that everyone had to attend. Like most Khmer Rouge, the leader had taken a new name to show that he had a new
revolutionary identity. He called himself Mao, probably in imitation of China’s Mao Tse-tung. He was an uneducated man who wore the standard black pajama uniform of the Khmer Rouge.

During the next meeting that Mao held near the common kitchen, I sat at the edge of the crowd with my back against the shed. The walls of the shed were made of a stiff, woven material, like
rattan. The evening had turned to black, starry darkness. No moon yet.

Mao opened the meeting with the usual slogans. The rest of us got wearily to our feet and obediently shouted the slogans back to him, pounding our fists against our chests, and raising them in
straight-arm salutes. ‘Long live the Cambodian revolution!’ he shouted. ‘Long live the Cambodian revolution!’ we yelled back, though we didn’t mean it. He said it
twice more and we repeated it for him, and then he started with the next set of slogans.

When he was done we sat down and he began telling us how lucky we were to be living under such a regime, where everyone was equal and where meals were served to us every day. How lucky we were
to be struggling together to build a modern and powerful nation.

The truth was that under the communists the country was much worse off than it had ever been during my lifetime. We had no electricity. No clocks or automobiles. No modern medicines. No schools.
No religious worship. Very little food. And we lived in constant fear of the soldiers.

He went on with his speech, reciting phrases he had learned like a parrot from his superiors. Every speech was almost exactly the same. The crowd sighed and settled down.

It was time.

‘Lord Buddha,’ I prayed silently, ‘please forgive me. I do not steal to get rich. I share with others. Please protect my life once again.’

I leaned forward, pulling the wall of the shed with me. The bottom of the wall overlapped the floor of the shed but was not fastened to it. I pulled myself backward and up into the narrow gap
between the wall and the floor and into the even blacker darkness of the interior of the shed.

‘Our workers, peasants and revolutionary soldiers,’ Mao was saying, ‘have launched an offensive to build up the economy! We are struggling with nature to become masters of our
fate! All our cooperatives are waging an offensive, working with great revolutionary zeal for the sake of a spectacular great leap forward!’

Groping around on the floor I found a round, heavy object, heavier than expected. Fumbling, pulling at anything that stuck out, I broke the mill down into its parts, two heavy grindstones plus
the casing and crank.

‘. . . they are now resolved to launch another relentless offensive . . .’ Mao’s voice droned on.

Pushing against the bottom of the wall, I managed to squeeze out the same way I had come in.

‘. . . and on to victory!’ Mao bellowed.

In front of me, the silhouettes of heads and shoulders facing dutifully in Mao’s direction. To the side, an irrigation ditch, part of a network of canals. With a grindstone under each arm
and the crank in my waistband, I settled into the water. Go slowly, I told myself. Do not make a ripple. Do not make a sound. Going slow is much better than going fast.

The speech, interrupted by mandatory clapping, grew fainter. Only my nose and eyes were above water, like a crocodile; my feet pushed on the mud underneath. The stars shone in the sky and again
in their reflections on the surface of the water. But a glow had appeared on the horizon. The moon was about to rise. Time to hurry. Time to speed up before it was too late.

Climbing out of the ditch, I walked as fast as I could to the fertilizer shed where I worked during the day and hid the mill under a manure pile. I ran to my hut, changed into dry clothes and
ran back toward the kitchen, where once again slogans were being shouted and repeated loudly by the crowd. Then long applause. Too late – the speech was over.

In the moonlight, soldiers had come to inspect the spot where I had been sitting, beside the shed. Curious civilians peered around, some of them calling my name. When I ran up, out of breath,
Mao called me to the front and demanded to know where I had been.

Walking toward him, I let my back and shoulders sag. My eyes lowered in deference and my mouth formed a silly apologetic smile.

‘Sorry, comrade,’ I told him meekly, ‘my stomach was upset and I dirtied myself.’ I patted the seat of my trousers in case my meaning wasn’t clear. ‘I just
went home to change my clothes.’

Raucous laughter came from the crowd, even the soldiers. Everyone knew what it was like to have intestinal problems. Everybody did, because of our unsanitary living conditions. Even Mao, a man
of more than average cruelty, began to grin. He waved me off, like a parent who is amused by the wrongdoings of a child.

I walked back to the storage shed and sat with my back against it, as before.

I ground rice in the rice mill later that night.

And the next night I led my gang out to steal again.

On a very different night, six and a half years later, I was sitting in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. I wore a tuxedo. On my feet were shiny patent leather
shoes. On the stage a woman announcer read, Haing S. Ngor, pronouncing it
Heng S. Nor,
which is as close to the correct pronunciation as foreigners usually get.

Since leaving Cambodia, my life had changed as completely and as dramatically as it is possible to imagine. I had come to America as a refugee. With no experience in theatre or film, I had been
hired to play a fellow Cambodian named Dith Pran in a film called
The Killing Fields.
I was aware of mistakes in my performance, just as I was aware of making many mistakes in my real life.
Yet I had been nominated, along with several other experienced professional actors, for an Academy Award.

But then, I thought, what is so special about acting in the movies? It is a matter of taking on a new identity and convincing others of it. Convincing others, perhaps, the way I had convinced
Mao the Khmer Rouge village chief. Waiting for the envelope to be opened and the winner announced, I was excited, but my heart was at peace. Whatever happened, I could accept. Because I knew that
my best performances were over before I left Cambodia. And the prize there was much greater.

My earliest memory is standing at the back door of my parents’ house and gazing at the rice fields. The fields fascinated me. Low earthen dikes divided them into a
pattern like irregular chequerboards, with paddies instead of squares, and trees rising here and there where dykes met.

It was a sight that changed with the seasons. By January, partway through the dry season, the fields were covered in brown stubble. By about April or May when light rains fell, a few paddies
were planted as seed beds, turning a delicate green. When the rainy season itself brought its heavy storms, teams of men and women transplanted the seedlings to the rest of the paddies. Over the
rainy months, the rice plants grew thick and green and lush, and the dykes were hidden from sight until around August, when the rains stopped, and the plants gradually began to turn golden. The
farmers went out and harvested, leaving only dry stubble behind. They threshed the stalks, milled the grains and sold the rice to families like mine.

We ate the rice gladly, and we always set some aside for the monks, who came to our house every morning with their alms bowls. The monks wore robes, yellow or orange or even brown if they had
made the dyes themselves from tree bark. Their heads and eyebrows were shaved. They were calm and silent, speaking not a word as they walked from one house to the next in a single-file line.

Those are my first memories, the rice fields changing with the seasons and the monks coming to our house each morning. And that is how I would like to remember Cambodia, quiet and beautiful and
at peace.

But in fact the first entire incident I remember was not so peaceful. I was about three years old. The year was probably 1950. My mother sent my older brother and me into the rice fields to get
water from a pond. It was the dry season. Soldiers from the village garrison fished at the pond with their shirts and shoes off. We filled the pail. My older brother took one end of a pole on his
shoulder and I took the other on mine and we put the pail between us. We were returning to the house, two little barefoot boys carrying a single pail, when we heard a sharp
bang!
behind us,
near the pond. Then we heard another
bang!
and the soldiers shouting. My mother appeared at the door. I had never seen that expression on her face before.

‘
Come here
, children! Put the pail down! Drop it right now!
Hurry!
’ she said. We set the pail down and trotted obediently toward her. She ran out of the house anyway,
grabbed us by the wrists and dragged us in. There was more shooting behind us, and our neighbours were yelling.

The next thing I knew, my brother and I were in the hole under the big low wooden table that served as my parents’ bed. It was dark and cool in there, with sandbags on the sides – my
parents had known there was going to be trouble. Some of my other brothers and sisters were already under there, and more came tumbling in, a half-dozen wiggling children. Then my mother came in
and finally my father, who had run from the market and was breathing hard, his face wet with perspiration.

We heard a shot nearby, then more shots right outside our house. Something crashed, and glass broke on the tabletop above us, while my mother clutched us tighter and prayed and my father cursed.
We children tried to make ourselves even smaller in our hole in the floor under the table.

Then after a while there wasn’t any more shooting. We heard voices outside. Someone called my father by his name. He climbed out. A few minutes later the rest of us got out. There was
broken glass on the floor and holes in the wall above the front door. Outside there was a big crowd, and more people running up to it on the street and everyone was talking at the same time:

‘No, the rest got away. Nobody else killed . . .’

‘The soldiers got back to the garrison and fired down from the watchtower . . .’

‘He used this tree for cover. So many bullet holes in the trunk of the tree, huh? Even in the doorway of the Ngor house . . .’

I pushed my way through the legs of the crowd. I had to see for myself. By the tree in front of our house, in the centre of the crowd, a man lay face down in blood. Next to him was a single-shot
carbine. Other children had wormed their way in with me, some of them with younger brothers or sisters hoisted on their hips.

We looked on, wide-eyed.

The dead guerrilla was sturdily built, with a strong back and thick legs. His bare feet were wide and calloused, like a farmer’s. His skin was dark brown. Tattoos covered his arms and
shoulders. He wore a pair of torn short trousers. Around his waist were a
krama –
the Cambodian all-purpose scarf – and some strings hung with Buddha amulets and prayer beads. He
had no shirt. He was not from the towns or cities. He was a man of the earth, from the countryside. From the very heart of peaceful Cambodia. And he had rebelled.

Now, many years later, grown up and living far away, I think: Yes, there was trouble even then. Maybe not revolution but a deep, hidden discontent.

To outsiders, and often even to ourselves, Cambodia looked peaceful enough. The farmers bound to their planting cycles. Fishermen living on their boats, and their naked brown children jumping in
and out of the water. The robed monks, barefoot, walking with deliberate slowness on their morning rounds. Buddhist temples in every village, the graceful, multilayered roofs rising above the
trees. The wide boulevards and the flowering trees of our national capital, Phnom Penh. All that beauty and serenity was visible to the eye. But inside, hidden from sight the entire time, was
kum. Kum
is a Cambodian word for a particularly Cambodian mentality of revenge – to be precise, a long-standing grudge leading to revenge much more damaging than the original injury.
If I hit you with my fist and you wait five years and then shoot me in the back one dark night, that is
kum.
Or if a government official steals a peasant’s chickens and the peasant
uses it as an excuse to attack a government garrison, like the one in my village, that is
kum.
Cambodians know all about
kum.
It is the infection that grows on our national soul.

But the fighting had been so small-scale back then, before the other countries got involved, that the damage was limited. When those few ragged guerrillas attacked the garrison in my village, it
was only news for those of us who lived there. Nobody else cared. The attack might have been reported in the Phnom Penh newspapers, but not outside the country. It was only a minor incident in an
inconclusive, low-level civil war. Wars like this are always going on in different parts of the world. And those in the outside world know little about them.

Cambodia: it is just a name to most people. Someplace far away where something terrible happened, and few can remember exactly what. Mention Pol Pot or the Khmer Rouge and people start to
remember. Or bombs dropping and genocide or even a film called
The Killing Fields.
But all that came later.