Survival in the Killing Fields (29 page)

What made it worse, what made it more appalling was that somehow it was ordinary. You put one foot in front of the other and you kept on walking. You heard the cries of the weak but you
didn’t pay much attention, because you were concentrating on yourself and your own survival. We had all seen death before. In the exodus from Phum Chhleav, the atrocious had become
normal.

No one took count, but my guess is that of the seventy-eight hundred who walked in to Phum Chhleav, a little over half walked out, and some of those were dying on the way. Those who lay down and
didn’t get up had plenty of company, for scattered along the railroad track were corpses from the previous days and weeks. What happened to the corpses is what always happens in a tropical
climate. Their skin had swollen, turned purple-black and burst through their clothes. Most of them had one leg or one arm raised stiffly in the air. They stank badly. Their eyes were half open.
Flies clustered around the mouths and anuses and eyes. For them I felt sorrow more than revulsion. It was not the dead’s fault that they were lying there. It was the Khmer Rouge’s fault
for causing the deaths, and the relatives’ fault for not burying the dead. And that made me angry.

How fast man changes! How fast he sheds his outer humanity and becomes the animal inside! In the old days – only six months before – nobody abandoned the dead. It was part of our
religious tradition that if we didn’t cremate or bury the bodies, and if we didn’t pray, the souls would wander around lost. They would be unable to go to heaven, or to be reborn. Now
everything had changed – not just our burial customs but also all our beliefs and behaviour. We had no more monks and no religious services. We had no more family obligations. Children left
their parents to die, wives abandoned their husbands and the strongest kept on moving. The Khmer Rouge had taken away everything that held our culture together, and this was the result: a parade of
the selfish and the dying. Society was falling apart.

My own family was falling apart too. Of my father’s eight children, only three of his sons were still with him, and I was barely on speaking terms with the other two and their wives. My
brothers had done nothing for me when I was sick. They had been willing to abandon me to die. Huoy and I kept my parents in sight as we trudged along the railroad track, but we didn’t walk
together.

In the late afternoon we all made it to the railroad station at Phnom Tippeday. There the Khmer Rouge gave us two cans of rice apiece, enough for a couple of undersized meals. We trudged on,
following the crowd along the road to the south.

We went through a village called Phum Phnom – literally translated, ‘village of the mountain.’ It lay at the base of the mountain ridge that dominated the western skyline. It
was empty except for some Khmer Rouge soldiers and those of us ‘new’ people who were passing through. Near the old town hall, which the Khmer Rouge had taken for their regional
headquarters, the road split in three directions. We took the left fork, following the other stragglers from Phum Chhleav.

That night we camped on a hillock in the rice fields – my parents, my brothers and Huoy and I. A Chinese family shared the hillock with us. The night was noisy with frogs and crickets and
the treetops stirring in the wind. I couldn’t sleep. I got up several times to sit in front of the fire, feeling its warmth, rubbing my hands, watching the flames. Huoy, who was worried about
my health, kept asking me to come back next to her and sleep. Finally I did. In the morning we discovered that the Chinese man on the other side of me had died. In the dark nobody had noticed.

With this, something inside me snapped. It was too much to accept – the death march, the hunger, the uncertainty of going to another unknown destination. I brought Huoy and the rest of my
family to a shady spot on the side of the road and asked them to stay there. Then I went off, exploring, without any clear idea of what I was going to do.

The first person I ran into was Pen Tip. Pen Tip had practised medicine in Phum Chhleav, though he was not a doctor. Even then there had been something familiar about him, and
I had searched my brain for the reason. Finally I placed him: around 1972, at the hospital in Phnom Penh where I had gone for my radiology rotation as a medical student, Pen Tip had been a
radiological assistant, positioning patients for the X-ray camera. He was a tiny man, less than five feet tall, sure of himself and quite clever. We knew each other by sight, but this was our first
conversation.

Pen Tip told me in a self-satisfied way that he had gotten permission to stay in a hamlet nearby. He said it was better to stay there, close to the railroad, than to move even farther into the
countryside. Anything was better, he declared, than going to the front lines.

‘I was thinking the same thing,’ I said. Whatever the front lines were, I didn’t want to go to them. ‘Besides, in the mountains to the south there is sure to be more
malaria.’

‘I agree, Doctor,’ he said.

‘Don’t call me “Doctor,” ’ I said. ‘But thank you for the advice.’

I left Pen Tip and wandered off. The next person I talked to was an ‘old’ person who turned out to be originally from Chambak, just down the road from my home village, Samrong Yong.
Because I came from a village near hers, she was very kind to me. She took me to see a man whom she thought might take me in. His name was Youen. He was an ‘old’ person and section
leader of another hamlet nearby.

Youen was a dark-skinned man with short, wavy hair and broken teeth. He wore only black culottes cinched around his waist with a cracked leather belt. As we talked, he took out a pouch with
locally grown tobacco and soft, brown flexible pieces of banana leaf inside. He sprinkled tobacco on a rectangular piece of banana leaf and rolled it into a cigarette, with one end slightly larger
than the other. He flattened it between his fingers and lit the larger end with a lighter.

I told him my name was ‘Samnang’ (a common nickname whose literal meaning is ‘lucky’). My wife was ‘Bopha’ (which means ‘flower’ in Khmer, just as
‘Huoy’ means ‘flower’ in Teochiew Chinese). I said I had been a taxicab driver in Phnom Penh. I came from a humble background. ‘Bopha’ and I wanted to work for
him. We would do anything he asked if we could stay there. We wanted to serve him and in this way serve Angka. If he let us stay there it would save our lives.

‘Tell me more about your background,’ he said.

I explained how I had lived in Samrong Yong all my life, just a simple man of the countryside, until the war drove me into Phnom Penh. My wife and I had been poor under the Lon Nol regime,
barely able to find enough to eat. ‘Bopha’ had sold vegetables in the market, but corrupt officials took everything she earned.

Apparently he believed that Huoy and I came from a proper class background, because he agreed to let us stay under his care. I thanked him effusively and went back to find Huoy and my
parents.

I was happy. Here was a little backwater, outside of the main current of hunger and revolution. Here we could stay and get enough to eat. Youen would protect us. I told my parents they probably
could get a place with him too, if they came along.

My father and my brothers exchanged knowing glances.

I had pointedly invited my parents to join Huoy and me, but not my brothers and their wives and children. On the surface, my reason was practical: we could not all hide with Youen; as a group we
would be too conspicuous. But the underlying reason was my anger at my brothers. Had they helped me? Only my father had visited when I was sick. We were all family, but my strongest obligation was
to my parents, to the top of the hierarchy. Toward my brothers I felt little; toward my sisters-in-law, nothing. Neither of them had been nice to me or to Huoy.

We talked it over, my father and my brothers and I. Papa agreed that he and my mother would go with Huoy and me.

But fate had not finished playing its hand. The Khmer Rouge had finally realized that they were losing too many workers on the exodus. They sent oxcarts to help the survivors along. My brother
Pheng Huor got one of the oxcarts and put his family inside.

My parents were standing beside me with their luggage. Pheng Huor and his wife, two daughters and son drew slowly away with a great creaking of the oxcart’s wooden axle. Then Pheng
Huor’s three-year-old son looked back, saw his grandfather there and began to cry.

It was too much for my old father. The little boy was his favourite in the entire family, the only son of his favourite son.

‘Wait! Wait!’ Papa shouted. Pheng Huor stopped the oxcart. Without another word, my father and mother ran to the oxcart with their luggage, leaving Huoy and me behind.

Youen, the chief of the hamlet outside Phum Phnom, was not a man of much ability. He knew how to farm, he knew how to obey orders, but he was not particularly clever or strong.
Still, he had agreed to protect Huoy and me, and as long as he did that he would have our loyalty.

His hamlet was full of ‘old’ people. Not much had changed there since prewar times, though the chaos of the revolution was all around. A short walk away, in Phum Phnom, was the Khmer
Rouge regional headquarters. In another direction lay Phum Chhleav, a place we were glad to leave behind; and somewhere off in a third direction were the mysterious ‘front lines,’ which
Huoy and I were trying hard to avoid.

In exchange for Youen’s patronage, Huoy and I became his servants. We worked at his house, and at the houses of his sister and his daughter nearby. Huoy helped with the cooking and
housework. I swept the yards, filled the water jars and took the oxen out to graze on the stubble of the harvested rice fields. Whenever I walked past anyone in Youen’s family I bent over to
keep my head lower than theirs. Even if they were sitting down, I tried to stay lower than them. In Cambodia this is the normal deference shown by servants to their masters.

It was amazing, really, what had happened to us. In Phnom Penh, as a doctor, I never would have stooped before an illiterate farmer like Youen. He would have lowered himself in front of me. Now
everything was reversed. I offered him water with my eyes downcast, the cup held in both hands. I called him
puk,
which means ‘father’. As far as Youen and his family were
concerned, I was Samnang, the ex-taxi driver. Bopha was my wife. Those were our identities. Huoy and I kept to our roles night and day, except when we were alone together, and even then we
whispered, so nobody would discover our true backgrounds.

The strange thing was that Huoy and I were happy. We were like people who had fallen from a cliff and landed on a ledge halfway down. We got used to the ledge and didn’t complain about
being lower than before – we were glad enough that we hadn’t fallen all the way to the bottom. Life wasn’t too bad. We didn’t have to work very hard. And our health had
gotten better, because we had enough rice.

When we first moved in with Youen, he gave us a few cans of rice from his personal supply. Soon he put our names on the ration list, the first step in making us permanent members of his
community.

He sent me to a Khmer Rouge depot to get a rice ration. I came staggering back with a 25-kilogram bag of paddy rice on my shoulder and a jubilant smile on my face. Imagine getting so much food
from the Khmer Rouge! Imagine knowing that we had enough food for weeks ahead!

Each grain of paddy rice is covered by a tough brown husk with raised ridges. The husks are inedible, so they have to be removed. Youen’s sister, whose name was Yin, lent me a
hand-operated rice mill. I poured the paddy rice into the mill and turned the crank around and around, grinding the rice between the two flat stones. Out came a mixture of white rice and empty
husks, plus some broken bits and pieces.

Next, Huoy poured the mixture of rice and husks on a large flat basket and began tossing the grain up in the air and catching it again. She had never tried it before, but it was really quite
easy. The white rice landed back in the basket but the lighter husks or chaff floated away in the breeze.

The rice was edible now, but some of the grains were still covered with a brown layer of bran. Yin showed us how to polish the rice in an old wooden device in Youen’s yard. The polisher
was like a large-scale mortar and pestle, except that the pestle that struck the rice grains was attached to a foot-operated lever.

This was the old-fashioned way of processing rice in the countryside, milling it, winnowing it and finally polishing it. It was all new to Huoy, who like most city people always bought white
rice in the market. But once we had polished the rice she was in her element. She put rice and water in a pot and rubbed the rice between her palms to release the dust and the impurities. She
reached in with her fingers to pick out the bits of husk and other impurities that floated to the top. Then she drained the water from the pot, added fresh water to the level of the rice and a
little higher, checked the level with her forefinger to make sure, covered the pot and put it on the fire to boil. Once the water had reached a full boil, she pulled wood from the fire to reduce
the heat until the water was simmering quietly. Then she let it cook covered and without stirring until all the water had boiled off and evenly spaced steam holes appeared in the surface of the
rice.

It was perfect – the grains separate and fragrant-smelling, not too wet or dry. Before eating, Huoy took three sticks of incense from our luggage and lit them, to honour her mother. She
prayed aloud, waving the incense in her palms three times in Chinese fashion. ‘Mother, we have good food now,’ she said. ‘We are thinking of you, and we miss you. You eat
first.’

After the offering we began our meal. We had nothing to serve with our rice and didn’t care. We just ate and ate and ate. We ate so much it hurt, and we were still happy.

After we were on the ration list, Youen’s sister Yin suggested that we take the next step toward permanent residence, which was building a house. She, Youen and I were
standing in Youen’s yard, next to the tree that Huoy and I had been sleeping under at night. I didn’t say anything, because it wasn’t my place to, and studied Yin discreetly. She
was a remarkable woman – divorced, in her forties, a gruff-voiced cigarette smoker with thick, muscular arms like a man’s. She was physically stronger than Youen, smarter than him and
more of a natural leader. Her brother scratched his head as the idea of my building a house slowly sank in.