Alive in the Killing Fields (7 page)

Crossing the border
meant little unless we made it into a refugee camp. Van Lan had talked to other people who had tried to escape, multiple times. They told him they had not been allowed to stay in Thailand. Based on what Van Lan learned from them, he warned us, “If we don’t get to a camp, the Thai border patrol will send us back to Cambodia.” We slept much of the day, resting up before trying to get to a refugee camp under the cover of darkness.

At dusk, we met another group of escapees, and together we hired a guide, someone who made his living helping refugees escape. We came to a paved road that looked deserted, but the guide warned us there might be Thai soldiers in the area. He said, “Some Thai soldiers shoot Cambodian refugees. Some do not.” There was no way to tell whether any particular soldier would be our helper or our killer.

One member of our group crawled slowly to the road to listen for cars. He heard none, so we ran as fast as we could across the road. But where was the refugee camp? Someone climbed a tree and saw a mountain
in the distance. The guide told us the camp stood at its base. We walked all night long, nonstop, until predawn, when we finally got to the camp. It was fenced. Soldiers watched the surrounding area from tall guard towers. The camp was full and officially closed. Our guide explained, “No more refugees can come in, that is, unless they manage to sneak in.”

Before dawn, when it was still fairly dark, our guide said, “At this time, the camp guards might be dozing. But if they are awake, they are probably surveying the distance from the lookout towers.” He advised us, “Run, very quietly, close to the base of the tower. If you’re lucky, they won’t notice you.”

That’s exactly what we did. After we got past the tower, Van Lan gestured to Bunna to climb the camp gate. He was the tallest, and without too much trouble he pulled himself up and over it. Van Lan helped Chantha climb up it, and Bunna raised his arms to help her on the other side. Next, Van Lan lifted Vibol over and lowered him to Bunna. Finally, he gave me a push, and up and over I went, too. Then Van Lan climbed the gate. We had all made it. Within minutes, I collapsed, asleep on the ground. When I awoke in the daylight, I was surrounded by people staring at us. They were hoping to find their family members among us.

The camp police did not send anyone away who had made it into the camp. It was packed with over a thousand people. We didn’t speak Thai, but we understood the camp’s name to be “Khao-I-Dang.”
Because it was so crowded, my family huddled under a makeshift roof that extended from a shack. Most of the camp structures were ramshackle, thrown together quickly, and then jammed with too many people. People were hungry, and they fought over food. We stayed to ourselves most of the time. There was almost nothing to do, and time passed very slowly. We spent hours playing chess. The chess sets had been made by old men in the camp who whittled wood figurines. There were no jobs, no schools, nothing. There was no joy in this “freedom.” Instead, I felt bored and frustrated, waiting and hoping for a sponsor who would allow us to leave the camp. Some people had been waiting for years, and some children knew no other life. My favorite activity was to play with Vibol. He was still learning to talk, and I laughed when he mixed his words up. He was the only one who did not understand our situation.

We heard about other camps that the Thai government used to run but then abandoned. At gunpoint, they made a thousand refugees go back to Cambodia. They forced them in huge groups to move through the mountains and return to the land from which they had suffered so much to escape. Thai soldiers shot old people who could not climb down the steep terrain. Land mines exploded, killing people in the front of the group. People in the back were forced to walk over the dead bodies as the soldiers pushed the group forward. The cruelty of the Thai soldiers shocked the world, and finally the United Nations got involved.
They ran the camp where my family and I stayed.

The rations for Van Lan, Chantha, Vibol, Bunna, and me combined was one chicken every two weeks and one bag of rice for a month. I shouldn’t complain, because it was given to us for free. But it was not enough for five people to live on. If you had money, you could buy food. In Thailand, the people eat a lot of noodles, but we never could afford to buy noodles. We lived on rice. If we were lucky, we had a pinch of salt to put on it. We had no meat or fish, but sometimes we cooked the rice in water flavored with tiny shrimp that the camp officials gave us.

Some people in the camps had really, really rich relatives in the United States. They would receive as much as twenty dollars in the mail. Twenty dollars! That could buy everything! The most money I ever had at one time in the camp was one dollar. I bought food with it.

To earn money, I worked in the children’s center. Twice a day, I helped distribute United Nations food to the youngest kids. I took Vibol with me every day, so he would get enough to eat. I got food for myself, too, and I took some for Chantha, Van Lan, and Bunna. The cook used to keep water in a barrel that had originally contained cooking oil. He gave the water to me. Before I left the center, I slipped an egg, a vegetable, or piece of fruit into it, and then I’d close the lid so no one could see what I’d done.

For the first time in my life, I watched TV. The
camp had electricity, and sometimes people would pay to watch the TV. I tried to look from outside, but I could not afford the twenty cents they charged to enter. Sometimes they showed movies translated into Cambodian, but usually the TV was in Thai, a language I could not understand.

I had no warning at all before Chantha gave me news that would change my life. “Mop,” she said, “I’ve found a way for you to get out of this camp. You can be the first to go to Paris!”

“What? How?” I asked in disbelief.

“I never told you before, but I have some gold. It’s worth one hundred dollars.”

“A hundred dollars? You have that much money?” I asked, again finding this hard to believe.

“I’ve held onto it all these months. Now, I’m using it to buy your freedom,” she said. “Van Lan and I have arranged everything for you.”

She had given the gold to a woman who lived in a shack near ours. In exchange, that woman promised she would say that I was her son. I was to call her “Mom.” She and her children had a sponsor in Paris. Van Lan had a sister in Paris, and he was hoping that she would sponsor them. Chantha tried to reassure me, “You will already be in Paris when we come join you there.”

My stomach felt wrenched. I couldn’t wait to leave the camp, but I couldn’t stand the thought of separating from my family.

Van Lan said, “This is the best plan we can work out.”

“Thank you,” I said, knowing my words were not enough to convey my feelings. I didn’t really even need words. After what we had been through, our understanding went beyond what was said.

I tried to imagine what was going to happen. I had only finished third grade when the Khmer Rouge took over, and I had no idea where Paris was. People in the camp said, “They speak French in Paris, so it’s important to learn it.” For a few months, a local volunteer came to the camp and gave French lessons. I attended and listened hard when I heard people using French, but we did not have any books, and I learned only a few words.

When “Mom,” her daughter, two sons, and I prepared to leave the camp, I was terrified that I would never see my real family again.

“Bon voyage,” said Chantha in French, trying to act happy and lighthearted in saying goodbye.

Van Lan said, “Think about what we’ve survived. This is the final step to true freedom and a future we can make for ourselves. We will see you soon, little brother.”

I was so excited, so scared, so upset, I could barely say anything. I told myself that we had been separated many times, and we had always found each other again. I did my best to believe that this time would be no different. I shook Bunna’s hand, and I gave Vibol a hug. When my eyes filled with tears, I knew it was time to go.

“Mom’s” kids and I were sent to another camp, called
Chunbory. There, all we did was wait to hear whether we had been sponsored. “Mom” had told Chantha that she had a sponsor, but now, that didn’t seem to be the case. Her oldest son, who had lived on his own in Phnom Penh, had already passed through this camp before we got there. He had gone to France, but he was not sponsoring us for some reason I did not understand. Every family was on hold, just like we were. When anybody was notified that they had a sponsor, they were really excited and happy. They were going to get out of the camp! Their lives were going to move forward. Everybody acted happy for a family that got a sponsor, but behind their backs, jealous people complained. “Why do they get to go, and we have to stay?”

People said I looked more like “Mom” than her other children did. I didn’t tell them the truth about my not being related to her at all. As the weeks and months passed, I missed my real family so much. I had no idea what they were doing, whether they had already left for Paris, whether they’d gotten sick and died, or been sent back to Cambodia. When the Khmer Rouge controlled our daily lives, I had learned more than I ever wanted to know about fear, hunger, and surviving on my own. I was used to the ache in my heart for my mother and my father, but I had filled up the emptiness with love for the family members I still had—Chantha, Van Lan, little Vibol, and my brothers.

Now, even though “Mom” said I was her son, I was not part of that family. I was alone.

All I owned was two pairs of shorts, two shirts, and a towel. Our shack was cramped with twenty people crowded together, so another boy and I slept outside. In the rainy season, I was wet all the time. Our only protection was a small piece of plastic. There were no building materials to make better shelter for ourselves. I spent wet sleepless nights shivering, and I was disgusted by the smell of the nearby sewage drain.

At that camp, my U.N. ration was a chicken a week. I would have starved to death if that was all I ate. Thankfully, religion saved me.

Wealthy Buddhists in the camp used to burn incense and make small food offerings to the gods in the evening. I would sneak over and take any food they left. Sometimes it was a banana, an orange, or even a whole chicken. I’d been warned that food left as a religious offering would poison any thief who took it. But I didn’t care, for me that food was not poison. It saved my life.

I no longer believed in God. If there was a god, I knew that he would have had the Khmer Rouge kill me instead of my mother. She had children who needed her, especially our baby sister. My family was Buddhist, but after the Khmer Rouge took over, I stopped believing in any religion. I believed in luck.

From eleven until two o’clock every day, local villagers held an open market next to the camp fence. I had no money, but I hoped to make some at the market. I planned to sell an empty rice bag I had taken and to use the money to buy something nutritious. The bag
was worth about a dime. But the camp guards saw me sneak out of the camp with the bag. They ran after me, and they caught me. With big nightsticks, they beat me so badly I slept for more than a day. My body was black and blue, and my head throbbed. I gave up trying to make money at the market.

After we had been in the camp for many months, and for a reason I didn’t really understand, “Mom” told me we were not going to Paris after all. I was devastated. My real family was going to France. If I did not make it there, how could I reunite with them? “Mom” said we might go to Canada or the United States. Those names had almost no meaning to me. I had no idea how far France was from the United States or Canada. “Mom” chose the United States, where she said someone else had sponsored her. But the waiting continued. We ended up staying in that camp for a year.

Every day seemed the same as the one before it. There was nothing to do. For a few weeks, a young Thai woman who was studying to become a teacher came to the camp and taught us English as best she could. She came every other day. English is hard to learn! I memorized vocabulary like “apple,” “pear,” “chair,” “cat,” “dog,” and “floor,” but I didn’t even learn to say a whole sentence. People with money could pay to watch TV in English, but I didn’t have any money or any way to earn it. If I had had books to read or classes to take, I could have improved.

After being sent to another camp, medical examiners
tested us to see if we were healthy enough to emigrate. We were checked for TB and other contagious diseases. One of the examiners told “Mom,” “Your family cannot leave because your son is sick.” He claimed my scars from the bullet wounds were actually signs of disease.

We felt angry and frustrated, but I could do nothing about my scars. I hated to cause problems. I worried constantly. Other families left, but we were stuck there. For three more months, we waited. “Mom” and her sons were mad. “It’s because of you that we have to wait!” they said. When food was short, I was left out. They hoarded their food and ignored me. But the little sister, Kuntiya, who was about seven years old, felt sorry for me. Sometimes she shared her food as if I were her real brother.

Over the next months, my scars did not change, and finally the doctor was persuaded that my bullet wounds would not hurt anyone else. He signed our papers.

We were moved to another camp, called “Lupini.” I think the facility used to be a jail. The walls were high, there were no windows, and it was even more crowded than the camps where we had been living. We spent two weeks there. Then we got the news: “In two days, you will leave for America.” We were so excited and nervous we could barely function. When a huge vehicle barreled into camp and we were told to get on it, I didn’t know if I could make myself do it. I had never seen anything so big. The mini-vans used as buses around Battambang were tiny compared to this monster bus. But everyone
leaving the camp got on it, and I did too. During the 20-minute drive to the airport, my heart raced.

At last, we were about to journey to the other side of the world.