Survival in the Killing Fields (23 page)

She meant that I had forgotten the place that had nourished me, and now I was in trouble, like a crocodile far away from the water.

‘Are you finished?’ I said. ‘Are you finished cussing me?’

‘What is it to you if I’m finished or not?’

‘You filthy cunt!’ I roared. ‘What is this about a crocodile that has lost its lake? When you came to Phnom Penh my family fed you. We gave you money. I treated your children.
I gave medicine to that miserable husband of yours. I know which crocodile lost her lake!’

My father finally came up to us, breathing hard. ‘Kim, Kim, my whole family is in your hands,’ he pleaded. ‘We are in your world. If you feel you must do something against my
son or my family, we cannot stop you. We are powerless. But do not forget all the good things we did for you.’

Haing Seng returned with three or four of his brothers, and they were all holding sticks and knives. ‘Come on, motherfucker,’ he said, motioning me toward him, ‘let’s
fight.’ I told him to go away. He stood a few yards away, biting his lower lip, his eyes flashing, waving a stick in his hand.

Where were my own brothers when I needed them? They were nowhere in sight.

There was a tug on my arm. It was Huoy. ‘Come on, sweet, come on,’ she said, trying to pull me away.

Her mother took me by the other arm. ‘Don’t fight them,’ she said. ‘If your cousins want the wood, let them take it. No fighting, please.’

Aunt Kim looked contemptuously at Huoy and said something about a ‘taxi girl.’ I lunged forward, but my father blocked my way, and Huoy and her mother grabbed my arms more tightly
and I allowed myself to be restrained. There was a long standoff by my woodpile, trading insults back and forth, until finally Aunt Kim and her sons went away.

By the time the anger had drained out of me, the sun had risen high. It was another hot, humid day, and I was late for work.

‘That’s your sister for you, Papa,’ I said. ‘Feed her, give her money and what does she do? This is her repayment for all your good deeds.’

My father heaved a deep sigh and said, ‘Son, let it pass. Forget about it.’ But there was worry written on his heavy, intelligent face. He was upset at his sister for being
two-faced. Upset at me for endangering the safety of the family. It was bad enough that the Khmer Rouge were threatening to avenge blood with blood. Here were relatives, members of the same clan,
on the edge of shedding each other’s blood.

My father turned away and walked slowly back to the house.

The local Khmer Rouge administration divided Tonle Batí into sections of ‘old’ and ‘new’ people. They put us in a subsection of two hundred
‘new’ people who were ethnic Chinese, even though my family was a mixture of Chinese and Khmer.

Our neighbours were former shopkeepers from Phnom Penh. They had pale skins and straight hair, and like most Chinese they privately looked down on those with darker skins, including the Khmer
Rouge. Twice a day, at lunch and dinner, we stood in line at a common kitchen built near the temple. We each got a bowl full of salted rice porridge, sometimes with bits of vegetables inside. After
eating the meals with a bowl and spoon in Khmer Rouge style, our neighbours went back to their houses and discreetly cooked meals of their own with supplies they had brought from Phnom Penh. They
had real rice – steamed rice – and sometimes salted pork or salted fish. They ate with chopsticks, lifting the bowls to their mouths and shovelling the rice in while making a sucking
noise, and burping afterward to show their appreciation, in traditional Chinese style.

The two hundred of us made up one large work crew. Sometimes we went out in the fields, planting a rice crop, but most days we worked on a canal that was supposed to bring irrigation water to
the fields. We began digging near the lake, hacking rather lazily at the reddish clay with our hoes, filling baskets with dirt and passing them leisurely from the bottom of the canal to the top. We
didn’t work very hard. When there were no soldiers in sight, we didn’t work at all. We just sat down, in the shade if possible, and talked. Our civilian overseer, an ‘old’
person whose way of thinking hadn’t changed with the revolution, sat down and talked with us. He saw no reason why we should work hard in the hot sun, and neither did we. Nobody had, in
traditional Cambodia. During break time, which sometimes lasted half the morning, the Chinese shopkeepers complained, ‘Why should we exert ourselves? There is no reason. They give us the same
amount of food every day, whether we work hard or relax.’ Our foreman shrugged and said he didn’t understand what was going on any more than we did.

The regime’s controls were very loose in this period, when the Khmer Rouge were still consolidating their rule and making their plans for reshaping society. In Tonle Batí, only one
person of each household had to report for work each day. Huoy could work in my place if I needed to do something else, like cut poles for our house. Furthermore, it was easy to fake being sick. On
some days nobody from our household went to work at all.

I used part of my free time to barter in nearby villages of ‘old’ people. It was exactly what I had done as a child. I walked through the same paths through the forest and found that
many of the villagers remembered me, even though it was my first visit to them in almost twenty years. I brought them odds and ends to trade, like the stack of cotton sarongs from my clinic in
Phnom Penh, and the silver betel boxes I had taken later from my apartment. The villagers had rice, vegetables and other goods. In the village where I had gotten drunk on palm beer as a child, I
traded for a sturdy white plastic tarp, knowing that it would be especially useful during the rains.

When I wasn’t trading or gathering wild foods, I worked on building my house. I nailed the poles together for a clumsy frame. My father, the ex-lumber tycoon, made rectangular panels for
the roof and walls by folding palm tree leaf pieces over long slivers of bamboo and sewing the sides together. Papa’s craftsmanship was so much better than mine that it made me feel ashamed.
For all my education in the city, for all my training to be a doctor, there were many practical skills I had never learned.

The finished house was no more than a one-room hut. I made a low platform with a top surface of split bamboo, and laid the white plastic mat on the bamboo for Huoy, her mother and I to sleep on.
The three of us got along very well. Huoy and I treated her mother with respect because she was old, and Ma made herself useful around the house with small chores. Once a week or so, Ma went to the
evening
bonn
in my place, so Huoy and I could have privacy. It was the only good thing about these
bonns,
that because of them Huoy and I could occasionally behave like husband and
wife.

One night when we were all under our large mosquito net together, Huoy between her mother and me, a faint creaking noise came from the pathway outside. Immediately I was wide awake. It was a
bicycle, I decided. Then the creaking stopped and there was a soft knock at the door. I got up to peer through the cracks. It was Neang, the chief of the village.

‘Yes, what do you want?’ I said.

‘Ngor Haing, I know you are a doctor,’ he said. ‘Please help me save my child.’

I was silent. And afraid.

‘I am not a doctor,’ I said at last.

‘Your aunt told me you were a doctor. She said you were a doctor in the military, with the rank of captain. I don’t care what you did before, but now my child has a fever. He’s
very sick. So come save my baby boy. He’s only eleven months old.’

I thought, that bigmouth Kim told the village chief.

‘I was only a student,’ I said through the door. ‘Never a doctor.’

Neang was losing his patience. ‘Everybody here knows you were a doctor. Now come on, and don’t be scared. Angka doesn’t know about your past and I will never tell. Come on.
I’m the leader here. I’ll take care of you.’

‘Please give me a minute.’

I did some quick thinking. Neang had come alone, without soldiers. He had a reputation as a good-natured man. Earlier that day he had asked our work group at the canal site whether any of us had
fever medicines, but nobody had answered. He knew I was a doctor even then, but he hadn’t singled me out in public. He had waited for dark instead.

Huoy sat up in the mosquito net. ‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered. ‘Are they going to take you away?’

‘Don’t worry,’ I whispered back, changing from my sarong into trousers. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

I followed Neang to his home, which was lit with lanterns inside, the light showing through the cracks.

Neang had called on some other medical practitioners before me, and they were standing around the baby. Two of them were traditional rural healers. They were dark-skinned, heavily tattooed and
wore only shorts. They had prepared a green liquid medicine, grinding palm sugar, black pepper and various leaves together in a mixture with unboiled water. They had fed it to the baby with a
spoon. They had also sprinkled what was supposed to be holy water on the baby’s forehead. When I came in they were chanting to drive away the evil spirits.

Two young female Khmer Rouge doctors were also there, in the usual black uniforms and short haircuts. One of them was drawing a white liquid from an ampule marked ‘Thiamine’ into a
syringe.

Oh no, I thought. Please don’t.

The baby was lying on a table, wrapped tightly in blankets. I pulled the covers back to look. A swollen belly. Skin hot to the touch. Occasional tremors in the body. Without lab tests it was
hard to be sure, but my guess was meningitis as a secondary condition brought on by the fever.

‘How can I save my son?’ Neang asked me.

‘Take the blankets away,’ I said. ‘Your son is too hot. You need to cool him down. Moisten a cloth with cold water and pat him with it.’

‘No,’ commanded the
mit neary
with the syringe. ‘The baby has a fever because it is cold. Don’t take the blankets away.’

She was wrong, but I did not want to assert myself. She and her comrade were in charge. The one with the syringe wiped the needle between her fingers and approached the child. I winced. It was
not just a matter of an unsterile needle. Thiamine, or vitamin B
₁
, is sometimes used in Western medicine as an ingredient in multivitamin treatments but only in tiny quantities. It is
never injected alone. The
mit neary
had drawn five cc’s into the syringe. I doubted that she could read the label on the ampule, which was in French, or that she knew that she was
administering an overdose.

She jabbed the needle into the unconscious child and pushed the chamber until all the liquid was inside the little boy’s body.

The traditional healers chanted in a monotone. The Khmer Rouge women waited, sullen and bored. Neang looked at me anxiously, but I kept silent and stayed in the background. The oil lamps cast
our shadows on the wall.

Outside, the crickets chirped and the bullfrogs on the lake made their deep croaking noise.

The child began shaking, not with light tremors but with deep, terrible convulsions. It fell into a coma with its unseeing eyes wide open. It twitched for another five or ten minutes and then it
was dead.

I excused myself and went outside.

I took a deep breath. The chorus of crickets and frogs was louder here. Their sounds came from all directions, filling the night air.

I wanted to scream.

How I hated it all! If I had told Neang that the child shouldn’t get the injection, the Khmer Rouge medics probably would have ignored me. If I insisted, they would have reported me for
interfering, and then I would have been taken to Angka Leu. To them, anything in an ampule was medicine. If a patient died after getting an injection, it was the patient’s fault. What was the
purpose of a revolution like that? I wondered. What was the gain, what was the progress, when a society went from ignorant herbal healers to monkeys like the Khmer Rouge? What about the kind of
knowledge that was taught in medical school? Wasn’t it worth anything? Were we supposed to forget that it existed?

Maybe, I thought, just maybe, if I had been more forceful the child wouldn’t have died. If I had told the medics to stand back, if I had put confidence and authority into my bearing, they
might have obeyed me. Then I could have removed the blankets, cooled the baby down and prevented them from giving the injection. In doing so I would have risked my own life, but I would have saved
the child’s.

I hadn’t done it. I had protected my own life instead.

How I hated it. The country was ruled by the ignorant. Already there were unnecessary deaths. To avoid our own deaths people like me were doing things we knew were wrong. And as we scrambled to
protect ourselves, or sought to gain favour with the new powers, the old relationships were torn apart. Doctors broke their professional oaths. Families argued. People like my aunt became
collaborators, and used their influence with the leaders to satisfy old grudges.

I stood in the dark thinking about the new regime. I had already seen more of it than I wanted. What I did not know was that everything that had happened so far was mild and harmless, compared
with what was still to come.

A week after the death of the village chief’s child, at one of the nightly
bonns,
we were told that Angka had a ‘new direction’ for us. ‘We have
almost finished our projects here,’ a
mit neary
declared, though in fact the canal was barely begun, ‘and soon we will have to begin other projects. You will still be struggling
against the elements to help develop the country, but someplace else.’

This news, that we were going to leave Tonle Batí, was unpopular at first with the ‘new’ people. We had planted crops but not yet harvested them. But later it was announced
that we would be allowed to return to our native villages. We would walk to a collection point, and then trucks would take us to our destinations.

With that the idea of leaving looked much better. What an opportunity! Except for a few families, like Aunt Kim’s, who had been longtime residents of Tonle Batí and who would be
staying, the Khmer Rouge didn’t know where we were from. I revived my plans for going to the seacoast, and from there to Thailand by boat. My parents planned to go to Battambang Province, in
western Cambodia, and from there to Thailand by land. Everybody in my immediate family was ready to leave except for my number-four brother, Hong Srun. I had just helped his wife deliver a baby,
and it was too soon for them to travel.