Survival in the Killing Fields (5 page)

‘You have solved the problem of the government foresters, I notice.’ On the form listing the number of logs that my father’s trucks carried was a figure far lower than the
actual one.

‘“Bonjour, mon ami
,” ’ my brother said sarcastically, quoting one of the few French phrases he knew.
Bonjour
had two meanings. Literally it was a greeting
like ‘hello’, but the French practice of shaking hands offered a chance to pass folded money from one palm to another. In Cambodian slang,
bonjour
meant graft. My brother said,
‘The forester does not have his Mercedes yet, but every time I see him he wears more gold.’

I read through the receipts and the taxation forms. How boring. What a waste of time. After I filled in the forms they would lie unread, tied up in bundles with string, in offices whose clerks
moved in slow motion under slowly rotating ceiling fans. Government regulations had little effect on businesses like ours. The officials did not make their living from their salaries. They made it
from bribes. It was an age-old system: those in power took from those who weren’t. As long as the officials did not take too much, there was no protest. But it made me angry just the same.
For most of the week I lived in a world of idealistic students. We were young and believed in progress and honesty and change. We were also Buddhist, and the tradition of
bonjour
conflicted
with an even deeper and older tradition of moral behaviour.

I said, ‘If the government lowered its taxes it would be easier to pay the full amount. Then nobody would have to cheat.’

‘You think so?’ said my brother. ‘The government loves to tax and tax. That’s the problem. Look,’ he said, pointing at a map of Cambodia. ‘There’s a new
military checkpoint here and another one here.
Bonjour
and
bonjour.
Worse, the soldiers just bought motorcycles. This week they started going after the logging truck with their
motorcycles, after the driver had already stopped at the checkpoints. The soldiers wanted more money.’ Impatiently, he returned to the table and flicked his fingers across his abacus. The
wooden beads made a rapid clacking sound.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t give it to them,’ I said, reading through the forms.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, the logging truck is new and powerful. Tell the driver to pay at the checkpoints but to head the soldiers off when they come after him on motorcycles. If the motorcycles try to pass
him on the left, he veers to the left. If they try to pass him on the right, he veers to the right. They’ll never stop him.’

‘I think that’s a terrible idea,’ said my brother gloomily. ‘Come, fill out these papers so we can finish here and go back to Samrong Yong.’ At the end of work on
Saturdays we always returned to our native village, which was still our family’s home.

I went back to work with a sigh.

A week passed. The next Saturday morning I rode my bicycle into the mill yard again. The logging truck was there, dust coating the cab and a load of logs stacked on the back. So were several
unmarked automobiles belonging to the judicial police. The policemen had gotten out of the cars with pistols in their holsters. They had knocked at the office door. My father was just opening the
door.

One of the policemen said loudly that the logging truck hadn’t stopped on the road when the soldiers tried to pull it over. He paused for effect before telling my father the reason.
‘Your driver was afraid to stop because he was carrying communist literature. You have been distributing pamphlets for the North Vietnamese!’

In 1954, after a fierce war, France withdrew from its former colony Vietnam, which split into two countries, a communist North Vietnam with its capital at Hanoi, and a noncommunist South Vietnam
with its capital at Saigon. In the early 1960s, the North Vietnamese began trying to take over the South militarily. The Americans sent in troops to protect South Vietnam, and later more and more
troops, and by 1968 war was again at its height. Officially Cambodia was neutral, but neutrality was difficult to keep because the war was next door and many Cambodian officials were dishonest.

The police were very clever. Instead of being defensive about collecting illegal bribes, they accused my family of committing crimes against the state. The charge was hard to disprove even
though it wasn’t true. My father’s logging sites were near the Cambodia-South Vietnam border. The North Vietnamese communists had supply routes through the area. And communist
sympathizers occasionally distributed their literature to the common people. I even knew a communist myself. The judicial police had arrested my ex-teacher Chea Huon for subversive activities. I
had visited him in jail. But until then I hadn’t known he was communist. I didn’t have any communist sympathies and neither did my father or brother. They were businessmen. All they
cared about was making money.

The police interrogated my father and then Pheng Huor. My father saw me standing around, watching and listening. He told me to go away. I answered that I wanted to stay around to watch in case
the police planted communist pamphlets and pretended to find them.

A policeman overheard me. ‘So you think we are trying to trick you, eh?’ he said. He took me outside and threw me into one of the police cars. They put my brother in another car and
the truck driver in a third so we couldn’t talk to each other and agree on a story. By then they were going through the mill and through my father’s house, scattering equipment and
upending furniture.

The police drove the three of us to their headquarters in Phnom Penh. They put us in separate cells. Then they began to beat me to try to get me to ‘confess’.

I should explain that Cambodian society has a minor tradition of torture. In the early 1950s, when my father was kidnapped, the government soldiers tied him to a ladder, feet up and head down,
and poured anchovy sauce into his nostrils. It was extremely unpleasant for my father, but he didn’t suffer any permanent harm. In Phnom Penh, in the late 1960s, the police put my hand in a
vice and kept tightening it as they questioned me, but they didn’t actually try to crush my hand. When the vice didn’t work, because I wouldn’t admit to anything, they put me in a
rice sack and hit me with sticks, but not very hard. As usual, the real reason for the torture was to raise the asking price for my release.

On the third evening, my parents bought my way out. The truck driver had already ‘confessed’ to distributing the communist leaflets. To get my older brother out they had retained a
prominent lawyer friend of Sihanouk’s. Day after day, my father went to the lawyer to pressure for my brother’s release. Eventually the lawyer, whose name was Penn Nouth, managed to get
an audience with Sihanouk, and Sihanouk, who had no part in the scheme, issued a proclamation that my family was innocent. In this way my brother obtained his freedom.

My father was discouraged. He had paid Penn Nouth 1.2 million riels, which was then worth about $85,700 US. Presumably Penn Nouth had kept some of the money for himself and spread the rest
around to various officials, including the secret police and Sihanouk’s hangers-on. Sihanouk himself was not especially corrupt, but he did very little to stop corruption and seldom punished
those who were caught. So we could not expect justice from the government.

But at least the family was together again. After my brother and I were released, Papa wanted more than ever to have us living and working together as a unit. He told me gruffly that I ought to
get married and come home. It would be better, he said, if I worked full time for the family business.

I answered carefully. ‘Papa,’ I said, ‘I don’t have much expertise in business. Perhaps it would be better if I had more schooling first.’

I didn’t tell him my real thoughts. I hated business. I didn’t like taking orders from bosses or giving orders to employees. Above all, I didn’t want to have to bribe
government officials all my life. If you gave them enough they just wanted more. If you didn’t give them enough they put you in jail and beat you.

The eyebrows arched on my father’s plump face. ‘You want to stay in school?’ he asked incredulously. He didn’t say what he thought either, but I knew. Papa thought the
longer students stay in school, the greater fools they become. And in a way he was right. I’d suggested that the truck driver speed past soldiers to avoid paying a few riels, and look what it
had cost us.

I told my father that I’d like to study medicine at the university.

‘What? Seven more years before you can make any money?’ He turned away, unwilling to look in my direction. ‘You expect me to pay for you to study while the rest of us are
working?’

He sent me off and we did not discuss it anymore. I felt terrible. Somehow things were always going wrong and I was always getting the blame. And yet of all eight children in the family, except
perhaps for my sister Chhay Thao, who was very religious, I was the one with the best intentions. Of five sons, I was the one who cared most about living honestly, not cheating anybody, and not
being cheated in return. I had never stolen anything up to that point, unlike Pheng Huor.

My mother talked to my father and got him to bend his views, against his instinct. Over the next few years my father gave Pheng Huor money to give to me for school. It was never as much as I
needed. Even so, Pheng Huor, my rival, gave it to me reluctantly, like a rich man giving a gift to a peasant who does not really deserve it.

So I continued to live in Phnom Penh, where I had gone to lycée. It was a city of wide boulevards, overlooking the juncture of the Mekong River and the Tonle Sap River,
which came together like a letter ‘X’ and separated again on their slow, lazy course toward South Vietnam and the South China Sea.
³
During the
dry season the rivers shrunk to narrow channels at the bottom of their banks. In the wet season the water level rose and grew, until at the peak of the floods the water from the Mekong reversed
course and actually flowed
up
the Tonle Sap River, filling the basin of the nation’s great freshwater lake, Tonle Sap.

I lived in a temple compound, under a monk’s quarters built on stilts. There was something rootless about the arrangement, but it cost me little and I liked it. Everything about it struck
me as natural and appropriate, from the discipline of sweeping the courtyards, to the sight of the monk’s robes hanging on clotheslines in a dozen different shades of yellow and orange, to
the wat itself, with its multicoloured tile roofs and the curving golden ornaments protruding from the peaks like storks’ necks. Most of all I loved the freedom, because the monks let me
alone. Indirectly, with only an occasional word of advice, they helped me learn calmness. With my temper under better control it was easier to study.

I passed my exam the second time around and entered the medical programme at the national university. The first year was premedical, with courses in biology, physics, chemistry and other basic
sciences. The next year was the beginning of medical school itself, six years of clinical work, lectures and labs. All the classes were in French. The curriculum followed the French model, with one
important difference: Because of the shortage of doctors in Cambodia, we medical students were allowed to practise before we got our degrees. So within a few years I would be able to get a
part-time medical job to support myself. The only problem was getting enough money in the meantime.

I decided to teach. By then I had a thorough grasp of the subjects on the various exams. I became a remedial science teacher at several lycées, squeezing the class time into my busy
schedule, racing through the quiet avenues on my bicycle.

I also became a tutor at private homes. A friend of mine from lycée, a girl named Kam Sunary, had two younger sisters who were having trouble with their studies. She arranged for me to
teach them.

I arrived at the Kam residence, across an alley from a large temple called Wat Langka, and parked my bicycle. It was early evening. The house was set back from the street, behind a fenced
enclosure holding several small dogs. Over the decades the house had settled unevenly on its foundations. The red-tile roof had become weathered and discoloured. No
bonjour
here.

Mr Kam, a low-paid veterinarian in the government service, came to the door. I greeted him respectfully and he showed me to a small room down a side corridor. There was a blackboard on one wall.
The two younger Kam girls were sitting at a table. At another table was another girl, a cousin, who had come to Phnom Penh from her home in Kampot Province.

I stepped to the blackboard and without any of the usual courtesies began asking the girls why they were having trouble with their exams. I paced back and forth, trying to discover how much or
little they knew, asking one question after another. I had to be impartial and correct with them – the door to the hallway was open, and everything we said could be heard throughout the
house. But I also didn’t want to be excessively polite as Cambodians often are, hiding excuses behind the mask of politeness, allowing failure for the sake of keeping face.

The girls didn’t know much about the sciences. The Kam sisters, in particular, hadn’t grasped the concept of chemical valences. So I stepped to the blackboard, drew a table of the
elements, and began explaining how chemicals combine. Three evenings a week it went like this, reviewing basic concepts, steadily making progress. I began looking forward to these sessions more
than to my other classes. There was always a glass of tea waiting when I arrived, placed there by the cousin from Kampot. Her name was Chang My Huoy: Chang, her family name; ‘My’
meaning beautiful; and ‘Huoy’ meaning flower in Teochiew, the Chinese dialect most widely spoken in Cambodia, the same dialect spoken by my family.

Once I started teaching those girls I couldn’t change my behaviour. I was strict with them. They were polite to me. They called me
luk,
a form of address with a meaning like
‘sir’ or the French
monsieur.
All the same, while lecturing them I sometimes felt self-conscious, like a man who accidentally sees his reflection in a mirror as he is walking
down the street. Not much to look at, I thought. Acne scars on my face. Glasses. Sneakers. Unfashionable haircut. I looked like what I was, an unpolished bachelor who lived in a temple.