Survival in the Killing Fields (30 page)

Yin said impatiently, ‘If Samnang doesn’t know how to build a good house, I will show him.’ With that, she picked up an axe, handed me another axe and took off at a fast
stride. I glanced at Youen, who nodded his permission, and followed her.

I followed her on a path through some rice fields and into the forest. She had enormous, muscular calves and wide, splayed-out feet, and it was all I could do to keep up with her. Finally we
reached a dense grove of trees on a hillside and stopped. To give herself maximum freedom of movement, she stood with her legs apart, took the hem at the front of her sarong and twisted it around
and around, brought the twisted cloth through her legs and up, and then tucked it into her beltline at the back of her waist. This way her sarong was like a pair of shorts, revealing her stocky
thighs. Yin swung her axe. She felled a tree and I felled another one, but it took me longer. She watched me critically as I finished chopping the tree down and then we carried the tree trunks back
to the village. Every few minutes I had to stop to put my log down, but Yin strolled on without changing pace, her log on her shoulder, a half-smoked cigarette tucked behind her ear.

We went again the next day, collecting timber to use for the house. She began to talk in her gruff voice as she walked ahead on the pathway. ‘You eat and eat until there’s nothing
left,’ she said. ‘You will have no seed to plant next year.’ I kept quiet, afraid that Huoy and I had offended her by eating our rice so greedily. Then I realized that she was
talking about ‘new’ people in general and indirectly criticizing the regime.

Yin had watched the relocation march from Phum Chhleav. ‘I saw you people walking past here to the front lines. Never seen so many sick people before. Never,’ she grumbled.
‘Don’t know what things are coming to. Before, when you worked you got money. You could take your money to the market and buy medicines. Cure yourself. But not now. No markets.
Can’t buy anything. No money either. New government doesn’t even have money.’

She turned around as if with an afterthought, swinging the log on her shoulder as if it were weightless, and looked at me with narrowed eyes. I was panting hard.

‘Never seen anything like this watery rice they feed you people. Hardly any rice in it at all. People like you get weak and skinny. You’re not good for much when you’re weak.
Not good for much at all.’ I looked down at my body and had to agree with her. My shirt was open in front and all my ribs were showing.

‘Yes,’ I said humbly, ‘it is true that there has not always been enough to eat. But Angka says we have to sacrifice until we build up the nation.’

Yin looked at me as if I were a fool, and spat vigorously to the side. ‘Used to grow more rice around here,’ she said. ‘Much more. Now, people living here don’t work as
hard as they used to. No reason why they should. Can’t plant what they want. Can’t eat when they want. So they grow less. Problem is, there’s a lot more people to eat it now. Like
you and your wife.’

‘Auntie Yin,’ I said, using the polite prerevolutionary form of address, ‘I apologize for the food my wife and I eat. We do not mean to be a burden.’

‘Not your fault, son. Angka runs things around here. Angka owns all the fields. Owns everything. I planted mango trees – I’ve got to ask Angka for permission to pick the
mangoes. Never seen a government like this one.’

Yin continued down the path, shaking her head. ‘Never seen a government like this one,’ she repeated, and spat again.

I hurried after, smiling to myself. Her sceptical grumbling was full of common sense. Yin could live in her house without going to the front lines. She didn’t go hungry. But she still
didn’t like the revolution, and I found comfort in that.

When Yin and I had cut enough wood for the house frame, we gathered reeds that had been growing on the edges of the rice fields and made thatch by sewing bundles of reeds together. Soon we had
the house finished, a sturdy, waterproof, one-room affair. It wasn’t beautiful, but it was far better than the hut in Phum Chhleav and better than my first hut in Tonle Batí. Huoy and
I moved in, buried my medical books and other secret possessions under the dirt floor and spread the white plastic mat on top.

With the house, we became members of Youen’s community. But I sensed that our situation was not permanent. From time to time emaciated stragglers from the mass relocation marches came
wandering through the landscape, as sick as anybody who had been in Phum Chhleav. And all around Youen’s hamlet the Khmer Rouge were busy. Every day, messengers on bicycles and motorcycles
drove by, coming from or going to the headquarters in Phum Phnom. The leaders went past us on horseback and jeep, on their inspection tours. The Khmer Rouge had big plans. They were mobilizing the
whole countryside.

All too soon, the day came that I had dreaded. Youen assembled everyone from the nearby houses, and announced, ‘Angka needs all childless couples to go to the front lines.’

The news was like a body blow. Huoy and I thought we had an understanding with Youen. We had become his servants. We had worked for him. He was supposed to protect us.

Youen said the two of us and another couple would be going. ‘Better get ready,’ Youen told me. ‘They say you should have a hammock, a hoe, some rope and some baskets for
hauling dirt. You won’t need anything else.’

I felt betrayed. ‘How can I go to the front lines?’ I told him. ‘I don’t have any of the equipment. It’s ridiculous. I won’t go.’

Youen hadn’t expected me to talk back to him, and he was slow to react. ‘Well, maybe Angka can supply you with what you need at the front lines,’ he said.

‘No. I need the equipment here,’ I said. Indirectly, I was both resisting the order and challenging his authority. Besides, I knew that Youen had a son who was married but childless.
He hadn’t made his son go. He had protected Huoy and me for a short while, but when the pressure was on, he got rid of us.

Youen raised his voice and spoke to everyone. ‘This is Angka’s rule, not my rule. Everyone who must go, must go!’

Yin came up to me and stood with her back to her brother so he couldn’t hear. ‘Son, we have no choice,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want to push you out. I wish you
could stay. You and your wife are nice people. But really, you must obey. If you don’t obey, it will mean trouble for everyone.

I knew that she was right. Yin was a smart, good-hearted woman, and my respect for her was great. But I argued until Youen gave me two old hemp rice sacks to make a hammock with, and one hoe and
a rope. Then I asked him for another hoe and the baskets, not because I thought he was going to agree but because I was stalling for time. Huoy was in our house getting our secret possessions from
the hole in the dirt floor. By the time she came out of the house with our luggage, the
bonheur
between Youen and me was gone. I didn’t care.

Huoy and I and the other couple got ready to walk. An escort of soldiers with rifles had come in to show us the way. The soldiers motioned to us to start. We began to walk slowly down a path to
the south, to rejoin Angka’s experiment of social reorganization.

We walked for less than an hour. We were still in sight of the big mountain ridge behind the Phnom Tippeday train station, but on its back side, out of sight of the wat on the
plateau. Though I had no way of knowing it, this was the area where we would remain for the next three years. None of the places we had already been in this part of the country – from the
railway station at Phnom Tippeday, to Phum Chhleav where I had pulled the plough, to Phum Phnom where the Khmer Rouge had their headquarters – or where we would go, among the transient labour
camps of the front lines, was more than a few hours’ walk apart. Our new universe was about ten miles square.

The soldiers took us to a hillock where the front lines ‘cooperative’, as it was called, had its field kitchen, warehouses and administrative quarters. We were given the rest of the
tools we needed and sent off to another wooded hillock, where we would sleep.

With her quick, expert fingers Huoy sewed a double hammock out of the rice sacks. We rigged the hammock between two trees and strung the mosquito net overhead to protect us from the mosquitoes,
gnats and flies. We were part of a section of about two hundred young married ‘new’ people, some with children, most without. Between two and three thousand other ‘new’
people camped out on neighbouring hillocks in the dry rice fields.

The main task of our cooperative was digging canals for irrigation and water control. Every week or so, as work on the canals progressed, the location of the cooperative was moved. Every day we
dug as long as there was light to see by, and usually long after. At night we attended political meetings. I had never worked so hard in my life, nor slept and eaten so little. We had no days off,
no holidays, no celebrations.

It was here on the front lines that I truly understood, for the first time, the Khmer Rouge’s far-reaching plan for the reorganization of Cambodian society. They had led us to it in
stages, first with the evacuation of the cities, then with the gradual tightening of their rules, then with the second and third exoduses where necessary. In February 1976, on the front lines, they
were trying out their revolutionary theories in purest form.

The key concept for the new society, as we were told all the time in propaganda sessions, was ‘independence-sovereignty’. One word made out of two, independence-sovereignty. For
Democratic Kampuchea, this meant being absolutely free of other countries – free of their aid and even of their cultural influence. We Khmers would make it on our own. By reorganizing and
harnessing the energy of our people and by eliminating everything that distracted from our work, we would become an advanced, developed nation almost overnight. And that rapid development, or
‘great leap forward’, as it was called, required our ‘correct revolutionary understanding’ of many other concepts and terms. For us it was almost like learning a new
language.

For example, there was the concept of ‘struggle’. I had been hearing about ‘struggle’ ever since the takeover in Phnom Penh, but it was only on the front lines that I
fully understood how it fit in with the rest of the ideology. ‘Struggle’ was military talk, like ‘front lines’. It reflected the idea that the nation was still at war. On
the front lines we didn’t just work, we ‘struggled’, or else ‘launched offensives’. We were to ‘struggle to cultivate rice fields vigorously’,
‘struggle to dig canals with great courage’, ‘struggle to clear the forest’, and even ‘struggle to solve the manure problem’. We were to ‘launch an
offensive to plant strategic crop’, and ‘launch an offensive to perform duty with revolutionary zeal’.

The goal of this struggling and launching of offensives was ‘victory’, or ‘mastery’. We were going to achieve ‘victory over the elements’. We would become
‘master of the rice paddies and fields and forests’, ‘master of the earth and water’, ‘master of the canals’, ‘master of the flood problem’.

To become masters, to achieve the ‘great leap forward’, we had to sacrifice. That meant working hard without complaining, no matter what the obstacles. No complaining, even though we
worked eighteen- or twenty-hour days, with only thin rice gruel to eat. They wanted us to be single-minded work fanatics, never slowing our pace. They wanted us to be revolutionary zealots. As a
song on the Khmer Rouge radio put it, ‘We are not afraid of the night, the day, the winds, the storms and rain and sickness. We gladly sacrifice for Angka to show support for the
revolution.’

We had to sacrifice everything from the old regime, including material possessions. ‘Get rid of all the Western goods you still have with you,’ a cadre told us. ‘Because if you
keep those things your minds will still be on the old times and you will not be able to work hard. Discard the makeup, the fancy clothing, the books, the gold. You do not need them. Get rid of your
cooking pots and utensils too. If you cannot discard these things, you are the enemy. You will still be serving capitalism, and not serving the community. You do not need any property
now.’

They abolished private property. Everything belonged to Angka now. Luckily, the Khmer Rouge code kept the soldiers from searching our bodies for property, because that was where Huoy and I kept
our gold and where all the ‘new’ people hid their valuables. And they never found my medical books and instruments because I buried them underground. But they went through our luggage.
Missing, when we came back from work, were some of Huoy’s silk blouses and
sampots,
some of her brassieres, her makeup kit, most of her mother’s clothes and our cooking pots,
except for the teapot, which we were allowed to keep.

They had already abolished religion – disrobed the monks, destroyed the Buddha statues. On the front lines they abolished the family too. They wanted us to renounce personal attachments of
any kind, because those relationships interfered with our devotion to Angka. Children had to leave their parents, the elderly had to leave their sons and daughters, and if work assignments required
it, husbands and wives had to split up too. From Angka’s point of view this was ‘liberation’, because it freed us from the time of caring for others and gave us more time to work.
To maximize working time they abolished individual meals too. Everyone ate meals in the common kitchen.

‘How lucky you are!’ Chev, the front lines leader, exclaimed to us in an evening meeting. ‘You come back from work and the rice is already cooked for you! You have no cares, no
worries. Your children are taken care of. Your parents are taken care of. Everybody is happy! Everything is provided to you by Angka. The young people don’t even have to go to school! Under
Angka, the ‘school’ is the farm. The ‘fountain pen’ is the plough. The ‘paper’ is the land. You can ‘write’ all you want. Anytime. Everything is
free. No money for tuition. You don’t need to pay for anything now.

‘How lucky you are!’ he said. ‘Under the regime of the arch-fascist, arch-imperialist, arch-feudalist Lon Nol, you were oppressed! You never knew any happiness! You were not
masters of your country then! You were slaves! Everywhere was corruption! The greedy merchants and the fascist military took over the land! Now under the glorious reign of Angka you are masters of
your own destiny. You are masters of the water and the land. The entire people, united in solidarity, join in building the country. Life is much better now. There is no more corruption. No more
gambling or prostitution. You are learning from the peasants and workers, who are the source of all useful knowledge. Only the peasants and workers possess it. The monks don’t possess it. The
only wise man is the one who knows how to grow rice.’