Survival in the Killing Fields (3 page)

Cambodia is a part of Indochina, which in turn is part of the landmass of Southeast Asia. ‘Indo-china’ because a couple of countries to the west lies India, which gave Cambodia its
religion and alphabet; and a couple of countries to the north is China, which gave Cambodia its merchant class, including my father’s side of the family. For many years the region was known
as French Indochina, because France colonized Cambodia and the neighbouring countries of Laos and Vietnam beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The guerrillas who came to my village were trying
to get rid of French rule. And in Vietnam at the same time as this shoot-out, Ho Chi Minh and his communists were also trying to force the French to leave, with a rebellion on a much larger
scale.

Vietnam has usually overshadowed Cambodia in world news, because the wars there are larger, and because Western countries have gotten directly involved in the fighting. So more people know about
Vietnam than Cambodia. But I have never liked having to explain that Cambodia is next to Vietnam, or even near India and China. To me, Cambodia means something very special. It was the name of the
country around my village. And like all children, I believed my village was the centre of the world.

The village was called Samrong Yong. It was a sleepy crossroads on the highway south of Phnom Penh, with houses one row deep and rice fields and forests beyond. After the shooting incident, my
parents moved us children out of the village to a friend’s house in the countryside, where they thought we would be safer. Every afternoon my parents came to the house and spent the night
with us, and every morning they went back to the village to do business at their dry-goods store. Until one afternoon Papa didn’t come back.

The guerrilla rebels kidnapped my father. My mother collected money for his release. After she paid them, they set my father free but took her prisoner instead, so then Papa had to raise ransom
money for her. When they were both free, corrupt soldiers of the other side – Cambodian officers of the French-backed government – arrested my father and put him in jail. They accused
him of working for the guerrillas. After all, he had been seen leaving Samrong Yong every afternoon to visit them. Of course, the soldiers were using this as an excuse for getting ransom money.

I was sent to stay in Phnom Penh. While I was there, the rebels and the military took turns kidnapping my father again. My father hated paying ransom, but there was nothing he could do. He had
nobody to protect him. Like nearly all merchants, he was Chinese-looking, with pale-coloured skin and narrow eyes. This made him an easy target. Most other Cambodians were of the Khmer race, with
round eyes and dark brown skin, or else were of mixed racial descent.

When I finally came back to the village, the rice fields looked the same. The monks still made their rounds in the morning. But every afternoon, a new militia of young men and women marched
around the village with machetes and wooden rifles. They were always out of step, and never looked like a real army, but they had the strong support of the people. The whole village was tired of
the corrupt soldiers of the French-backed government, and tired of the corrupt guerrillas too. The man who had helped organize the militias, our young king, Norodom Sihanouk, felt the same.
Sihanouk was trying to get the French to leave the country. He wanted the guerrillas to leave too, because some of them were communists allied with Ho Chi Minh. Sihanouk didn’t want the
country ruled either by a Western power like France or by communists. He wanted Cambodia to be independent and neutral. In the Buddhist tradition, he wanted the middle way.

Because of all the ransom payments my father was very poor. He sent me to a Chinese school with my older brother, Pheng Huor, but soon he took me out because he couldn’t afford the tuition
for both of us. I didn’t mind. Pheng Huor was smarter than me. He could take an abacus, the Chinese calculator with rows of wooden beads, flick the beads around with the tip of his finger and
get the answer to a problem in seconds, while I would still be trying to remember what each bead stood for. Pheng Huor had always helped my father after school. I had always helped my mother. My
mother was darker in colour, like me, partway between a Chinese and a dark rural Cambodian.

While my father rebuilt his business and my brother studied at school, my mother and I went off on daily bartering trips in the countryside to get the family’s food. I carried a long piece
of bamboo across my shoulders with a hook at each end. From one hook hung a basket with fresh pastries cooked by my hardworking father, and from the other hung another basket with peanuts, dried
fish, salt, soy sauce, and anything else we thought we could trade. At sunrise we were off, on foot. The baskets bobbed up and down from my shoulderboard and I adjusted my stride to fit the rhythm.
My mother wrapped her krama, or scarf, around her head and placed a basket on top, steadying it with one hand.

We walked away from National Route 2, the paved highway that passed through our village, onto oxcart trails and footpaths. Soon we were out of earshot of the automobile traffic and into an
entirely different world of fields and forests. We walked through open rice fields to shady villages, where thatched-roof houses built on tall stilts stood among tamarind, mango, banana and palm
trees. The villagers were ethnic Khmer, friendly, dark-skinned people who had mastered the art of living off the land without working very hard. Each house had its garden surrounded by a reed
fence, with vegetables and tobacco growing inside. Chickens clucked and pecked at the dirt, and roosters crowed at all hours. Mostly we bartered for rice, because we could get it more cheaply from
these villagers than we could in Samrong Yong.

We walked all day, and I became strong and healthy. On the way home, I foraged for lotus plants, whose roots and seeds are tasty in soups; for water convolvulus, which is something like spinach;
and for
sdao
tree leaves, rather bitter-tasting, as many of the rural foods are. Whenever we passed through woods, my mother wrapped a few grains of rice in a leaf and placed it on the
ground as a gift to the local spirits.

When I was about eight years old I was allowed to go out to barter on my own, without my mother. My favourite village was in a grove of sugar palm trees, which have tall, slender, curving trunks
and fan-like fronds on top. Every morning the men scampered up the sugar palms to gather nectar from the flowers. They boiled the nectar in vats for many hours to make a crude brown sugar that
tastes like molasses. They sold the palm sugar in the market, or traded it to me.

They also made an alcoholic drink that was slightly bubbly and tasted like beer. They made their best-quality beer right up in the palm trees. One morning when I walked into their village the
men waved at me from the treetops. ‘Hey, boy! Hey! Ngor Haing!
¹
Come up here! We’ve got something for you!’ I climbed up the bamboo
ladder. At the top, on a platform connecting several nearby trees, the men were sitting with loose, happy grins and glazed eyes. They were drinking fresh palm beer. I tried some. It was delicious.
I drank more. The hours passed. We were laughing and joking up there in the tree until I realized that I had to get down and didn’t have any control over my arms or legs. The ground looked
far away and small, like the earth under an airplane. They had to carry me down. No more bartering for me that day. I was too busy weaving around on the footpaths and falling over. When I got home
my mother scolded me and my father gave me a stern, angry look. He said I would never amount to anything if I spent time with the wrong people.

I disagreed with my father. The country people had always been nice to me. But I was very stubborn then; if my father said I was wrong about anything, automatically I felt I was right, without
even considering what he said. That was my personality: If I hit my head against a wall accidentally, I would butt it again, to see if I could make the wall hurt.

Medically speaking, I was hyperactive as a child. I had a short attention span and far too much energy. I liked sports. I loved fighting. My gang, from the western side of the village, was
always getting in fights with the gang from the eastern side of the village. If the eastern gang came at me when I was alone, I took my baskets off the hooks, waited calmly and got ready to swing
my shoulderboard at their shins. I wasn’t afraid. My fighting and playing displeased my father, who worked every day without a break and who expected me to stay home and help his business.
But the more he scolded me the more I stayed outside.

It became difficult to meet my father’s gaze. My oldest or number-one brother, who was slow-minded, worked for my father all day long as an ordinary labourer, as faithful as a water
buffalo. My number-two brother, Pheng Huor, the smart one, was already keeping my father’s accounts. I was the number-three brother, with two more younger brothers behind me and three sisters
too. I wanted to help the family, but I didn’t want to work all the time. It was too much fun to play.

When I was about ten, matters came to a head. The government of Thailand, Cambodia’s neighbour to the west, gave a large sculpture of Buddha to a monk in a town near my village, called
Tonle Batí. The monk was very old and eminent, the equivalent of a bishop. The sculpture was to go inside a stone building made around AD 1200, in the period of an ancient Cambodian
civilization known as Angkor. But before installing the statue, my father and the monk had to drive to Thailand to get it.

They set off together in Papa’s old black and brown Ford truck, north from the village on National Route 2 to Phnom Penh and then in a northwesterly direction around the huge lake known as
Tonle Sap and toward the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet. The roads were terrible. The truck kept breaking down. My father was irritated but he had to pretend to be calm, because of the monk.
When they finally got the statue, it turned out to be unusually large and handsome. Once they re-entered Cambodia with it in the back of the truck they had to stop in every small town along the way
to give a parade. The townspeople gave money, to make merit for themselves, to improve their chances of being reborn into a better life. The money paid for the truck repairs and for the gasoline.
Papa, who was an impatient man, couldn’t hurry things up.

In my father’s absence my mother ran the store. I got in more fights than ever.

The morning before Papa returned, a box with a dozen packs of imported playing cards was missing from the locked cupboard above my parents’ bed. The cards would have made a nice profit for
the family if they had been sold. My mother came to me and asked whether I had taken them. I told her truthfully that I hadn’t. But my mother was suspicious. Of all the children I was the
only one who got in trouble regularly.

She got right to the point. ‘If you stole it and sold it, just say so,’ she said. ‘If I know you are telling me the truth, I won’t tell your father, and he won’t
beat you.’

There was nothing I could say to her. Papa beat us occasionally, as all Chinese fathers did. But he didn’t hurt us much.

That day I kept close watch on my older brother Pheng Huor. When he saw I was looking in his direction he lifted his gaze and looked back at me blankly. Whoever had stolen the cards had been a
member of the family. But even if my brother had stolen the cards, which seemed likely, I couldn’t prove it.

The following day Papa drove up to the house in his Ford truck. He was tired and irritated from having to behave so well.

My mother told him about the theft. He came angrily toward me. Perhaps he felt that this was the sort of thing that went on when he was away and that he needed to restore his authority.

He led me out back of the house and tied me hand and foot to a big piece of lumber. Then he hit me on the shoulders with a wooden slat. He beat me for an hour. When he was tired he went into the
house, and then after a while he came out again with the slat in his hand. My mother stood in the doorway with a pitying look in her face, but she didn’t ask him to stop.

I don’t know when he stopped beating me, because I lost consciousness. When I came to, my feet and hands were still tied to the lumber, but I had rolled over on my side. The sunlight was
coming in at a low angle over the rice fields. It was late afternoon. My mother and my favourite sister, Chhay Thao, had come out of the house. They untied me, and they asked me what they could
do.

I lay on the ground without moving. They stood over me. Gradually I collected my thoughts.

‘
You
didn’t trust me,’ I said slowly. ‘You treated me like an enemy of the family. So don’t bother helping me.’

My mother knelt next to me.

‘Your will is still strong, eh?’ she said gently.

They helped me upstairs and led me to my bed. I slept. But that evening I woke up puzzled and angry. What had I done to deserve a beating like that? I loved sports. I loved to get out of the
house and play as often as I could. And yes, I got in fights with other boys. If that made me bad, if they were going to beat me for that, they could go ahead. That was their right. But I
hadn’t stolen anything. I didn’t need any money. There was nothing I wanted enough to steal from my family. If they didn’t trust me, how could I live with them under the same
roof? How could I accept their authority?

Early the next morning I ran away.

My first stop was Samrong Yong’s open-air market. It took up one corner of the village’s only road intersection, across from the garrison of French-backed troops
and their tall stone watchtower.

The market was the centre of village commerce and gossip. Women thronged the aisles, bargaining, pinching the neat piles of fresh vegetables and fruits, peering critically at the basins of live,
wiggling fish. Vendors sold grilled chicken and rice confections wrapped in banana leaves. At restaurant stalls, customers sat down to order bowls of soup prepared to their liking. I couldn’t
buy anything, though. No money. I talked with people I knew and kept an eye out for my family.