Survival in the Killing Fields (41 page)

For anyone whose mind had been sharpened by education, farming was easy to learn. When another man in my group broke a wooden plough tip, I walked into the forest, chopped a tree down and made a
replacement part. In an hour he was ploughing again. When someone stole the reins for my oxen, probably to eat the leather, a common practice on the front lines, I didn’t get upset. I went
into the forest again, cut vines, quartered them and braided the outer strips. The new reins were as tightly woven and strong as anything the old peasants could make. And I cursed the Khmer Rouge
for saying that anybody could practise medicine. It had taken me seven years of training to get my degree as a doctor. There was no single skill of farming that I couldn’t learn in a day.
What nonsense, to say that only the peasants possessed worthwhile knowledge!

Yet I liked farming. I liked working with the rice plants most of all. When the seedbeds were ploughed and harrowed and a few inches of rainwater covered the soil, we put seed rice (rice with
the husks on, or paddy rice) in pails for a few days to sprout. We took handfuls of sprouts and scattered them into the water, which had been fertilized with manure. A day or two later, narrow,
whitish shoots showed above the water. A few days more and the shoots had turned a pale green, and then a delicate green that is difficult to describe. This was the most critical phase of rice
cultivation. A hard rain could cover the young shoots with water and kill them in a few hours. A lack of rain could deprive them of water and do the same. We stood by the seedbeds with our hoes to
let water in and out of the dykes as needed.

A month after planting, the rice seedlings were a foot high and densely packed together, like a lawn. There is no sight in the world as lovely as a young rice field with the sun shining through.
It is like light shining through stained glass, only more natural, and more refreshing to the eyes. The rice has a clean, fragrant smell. Walk close to it and you can see the clouds and the sky
reflected on the water between the stalks, or the reflection of your own face, until the wind ripples the water surface and stirs the rice shoots in waves.

It was on sunny mornings in the rice fields that I felt happiest. The air was fresh. The scenery was beautiful in every direction. Working in the fields did something to me, like awakening an
ancestral memory. My parents had farmed rice when they were young. I was descended from people who had farmed rice generation after generation, as far back as there had been a human race. It was
almost enough to make me forget what had happened under the Khmer Rouge and forgive them. Almost, but not quite. If only I had time to fish and to gather foods openly, if only they didn’t
kill us, if only men like me had time to make love to our wives and raise our families with dignity and take care of our old parents – if, if, if – I would have accepted my fate, and
become a rice farmer with all my heart and soul.

The most backbreaking part of the cycle was transplanting the rice from the crowded seedbeds to the rest of the fields. Most of the collective was mobilized to help with it. We used an ancient
technique for uprooting the seedlings: standing with our knees bent to take the strain off our backs, we grabbed a few rice shoots at a time with a circular motion. The shoots came up easily and we
put them in our left hands. When our left hands were full we swished the roots around in the water to loosen the mud, lifted our left feet and whacked the roots against the instep to make the mud
and water fly off. Then we stacked the clean, neat bundles of shoots in the water behind us and moved forward. To either side were people doing the same; we were in a long line, making patient
progress across a field.

Then came replanting, another ancient technique. Carrying bunches of shoots in the crooks of our arms, taking care that the roots always stayed wet, we transferred the shoots one at a time to
our right hands and planted them with a swift thumb-and-forefinger motion, first poking a hole in the mud with our thumbs, then lowering the roots into the hole, then tamping the mud around the
stalk with our forefingers. Two plants in a row, then a step forward and one in the next row, then two again, planting in equilateral triangles. Again, I was part of a row of people working its way
slowly across a field. The fields seemed to go on and on without end. It was an extremely ambitious planting programme.

Everything about the front lines was ambitious. There wasn’t much planning or careful follow-through. The canals on which we had worked such agonizing hours were never a success. The rains
had rounded the edges and silted the bottoms. In some places the water surged right over the canals, tore away huge patches of rice plants and carried the plants off with the current. For the
fields that survived, and well over half did, the crews were too small to keep up with the maintenance. We went out there with our hoes, to weed and to regulate the water levels by tearing down or
building up dykes, but we were like tiny human figurines in a vast landscape. Chev threatened us, but we simply couldn’t do it all. Most ‘new’ people didn’t even feel like
trying. Whether we were diligent or not, we knew we would get the same amount of rice at harvest-time. There were no incentives. It was not like the old days, when the peasants worked much less and
planted smaller crops, but ate more because they knew what they were doing and could keep what they produced.

I worked hard to keep my mind sharp, but the others in the crew were sullen and slow and did as little as they could get away with. When there were no guards in sight we caught crabs in the rice
paddies, then sat down and talked about food. The conversations were always the same:

‘Ahhhh . . .’ (a big sigh). It was a man named Som, who had one withered arm and who was our most outspoken critic of the regime. ‘Look at all this rice. We can plant it but we
cannot eat it.’

‘Of course you can eat it,’ I said. ‘Just start chewing on a stalk, the way an ox chews on grass.’

‘Do you remember Phnom Penh?’ said Som. ‘Rice every day? Anytime you wanted it you could step into a restaurant. You could have it with anything you wanted, fried rice, steamed
rice – ’

‘I’d rather have some noodles,’ another man said. ‘Every afternoon, I had noodle soup with curried beef and fish balls. Very spicy and tasty – ’

‘No, fried noodles are better, with ginger and beef – ’

Everybody was talking now.

‘Fish fried with ginger and lemongrass was my wife’s specialty – ’

‘What I wouldn’t give for some fried catfish. Or pork.’

‘. . . or some juicy grilled chicken stuffed with herbs – ’

‘. . . so juicy, so tasty – ’

‘How about fruits?’ said Som. ‘Do you remember papayas? Mangoes? The tiny fried bananas in the market? I used to buy a bag of those every morning – ’

‘. . . so delicious, so good – ’

We sat in the paddies and reminisced, licking our lips while our stomachs rumbled.

‘No, noooooo! Don’t remind me! Enough of this!’ said our group leader. ‘We’ve got to get back to work.’

‘Or cognac with ginseng,’ said Som. ‘I used to drink that before going to a whorehouse. Put my brain to sleep but woke my dick up – ’

‘Be quiet, will you? I don’t have the strength to think about sex. Let me get my belly full of food first.’

‘Back to work, comrades,’ said the group leader. ‘I think I see a guard coming.’

‘. . . fried rice with pork and lots of soy sauce . . .’ Som muttered as he picked up his hoe.

When the rains stopped the rice paddies still held a foot of water. The plants branched and swelled to the sides – ‘pregnant’ was how they were usually
described. They gave off a sweet, fertile smell. As the water in the paddies dried, seed buds appeared and the plants turned a tawny gold.

As the harvest approached, Uncle Seng assigned us to make scarecrows for the paddies and to chase birds away when the scarecrows failed. We were also supposed to guard the fields against
thieves. Naturally, we field workers were the biggest thieves of all. We just had to be careful, because we never knew when
chhlop
might be watching. I ducked down between the rows of rice
plants and stripped the seeds off lower branches. I stored them in whatever container I could find, then went back to pick it up at night-time when nobody could see me.

Finally, in November 1976, the harvest began. Everyone had high expectations. Chev said the regime was going to trade the surplus rice to other countries for tractors and bulldozers, so we could
grow even more rice the next year. We ‘new’ people had hopes of eating bowl after bowl of real rice, the full year around, instead of the thin gruel with a spoonful of rice the common
kitchen served at meals.

Everybody in the collective was mobilized for the harvest. Even Huoy, who worked in the kitchen, came out to the fields and worked beside me in one of those long rows that stretched from one
side of the field to the other and was just one of many rows in sight. We cut hour after hour, placing bundles of rice behind us, which others piled on oxcarts and drove off to the threshing
ground.

As soon as the first rice was threshed, the common kitchen began serving real rice at meals. We weren’t satisfied. The rice was
ours.
We wanted more. We helped ourselves to the rice
in the fields. Smoke rose from quick, furtive fires on every hillock. We used sticks and holes in the ground as makeshift mortars and pestles, milling the husks away, then cooked the rice and ate
it as fast as we could. Little children sat by the fields, pounding sticks into holes, sometimes just imitating the elders in play, but usually with actual rice in the bottom of the holes, milling
the husks from the white inner seeds.

The soldiers tried to stop the stealing. To set an example, they took a four-year-old child who had been milling rice and tied him to a post in front of his parents. They made the parents watch
their little boy without touching him or giving him any food or water until a few days later, when he died of dehydration. But even the horror of that punishment didn’t stop the rest of us
from stealing.

As we cut the stalks in the fields, revolutionary songs blared from the loudspeakers, alternating with news broadcasts from the radio. The news programmes announced the ‘glorious victory
over the elements’ that had resulted in a harvest larger than ever before. ‘Soon we will begin the struggle again to put more fields into production!’ said the announcer, who
started reading a long list of rice tonnage statistics in which Phnom Tippeday was mentioned. ‘The women and men there are very active and working vigorously in the harvest! And they are very
happy, singing in the rice fields and coming home to plenty of rice to eat!’

That was what the Khmer Rouge radio said. But in reality there was no singing. Our faces had become pained and sorrowful. A month after the harvest began, while we were still cutting the fields,
the rations were cut back again. Not to watery rice, but to a loose porridge with five or six spoonsful of rice in each bowl. Next year, Chev promised us, we would get to eat more.

From a distance, with aching hearts, we watched the activity at the threshing grounds. Soldiers poured the rice into large hempen sacks and loaded them onto trucks. The trucks drove off. A few
were unloaded at nearby warehouses under heavy guard. Most drove away and vanished. And by early January 1977, when the harvest was half through, we were eating watery rice again.

The Khmer Rouge always held meetings before the start of new projects to make sure we had the correct revolutionary understanding of our tasks. In January 1977 they called a
mass meeting and gave us half a day off to attend it – a very unusual step for a regime that never gave weekends, vacations or any other relief from the work routine.

On the day of the meeting I collected my ration of watery rice, put it in my field cooking pot and started walking. The paths and roads were crowded with ‘new’ people heading toward
the same destination. Huoy was waiting for me there. We sat down on a hillock, spread her krama over both our heads as a sunshade and took out our food. I brought leaves of water convolvulus and
several aquatic plants called
truoy snor
and
slap chang wa
and
kamping puoy
. Huoy had fixed a traditional dish of crabs ground up with tamarind and peppers. We ate with our
spoons, reaching into the watery rice and then the crabs and the leaves. It was a good rural-style meal under the circumstances, though with real rice it would have been much better.

Around us sat war slaves in ragged clothes, eating watery rice with whatever they had found to add to it. It was the largest gathering I had seen on the front lines – more than ten
thousand people, by my guess. Yet we looked small in comparison to our surroundings. To the east, drab clay flatland stretched for miles, broken by the humps of two hills. To the north, the
mountain ridge rose almost vertically, the ridgeline hiding the old temple, which lay on the far side. To the west, the ridge curved around and southward to a point in front of us, where it was
joined by the start of an earthen dam.

The completed segment of the dam was a slope of orange clay about a hundred feet high and a hundred feet long. When finished, the dam was supposed to connect to the first hill, from there to the
second hill and from there to the big curving mountain ridge, making a reservoir in the shape of a ring.

Huge red flags hung limply from poles on top of the dam segment and on top of the ridge. Armed soldiers walked from one flagpole to the next, keeping a lookout for trouble that would never come
from unarmed people as tired and beaten-down as we were. Where the dam and ridge intersected, a stage had been set up, with more red flags and palm fronds around the dais and on top of the roof. A
jeep was parked off to one side of the stage, and next to the jeep a horse was tethered. A throbbing generator powered the loudspeakers.

On the stage sat Chea Huon, his subordinate Comrade Ik – the old man who rode the horse – and the village chiefs, including Chev and the kindly Uncle Seng. The lesser leaders had
already made their speeches, expressed their allegiance and repeated revolutionary clichés. The master of ceremonies was at the microphone.