“Quiet,” Pa admonishes me. “We don’t want anyone to hear you crying. It is not safe for us to stay here anymore. We have to go and we will ride on a truck to get there.”
“Why do we have to go, Pa?”
“It is no longer safe for us to stay here.”
“Are we walking a long way?”
“No, your uncles talked the chief into arranging for us to be picked up by a Khmer Rouge truck. The truck will take us to Battambang. That is where your grandmother lives.”
“But I do not want to move anymore, Pa.” Pa has no words to soothe me. Biting back my tears, I put on my flip-flops and walk toward Keav’s extended hand. Pa and Ma turn to Uncle Leang and thank him for letting us stay with him. Uncle Leang looks at her, face hanging, eyes blinking rapidly, and blesses Ma for a safe journey. The cousins stand outside the hut to see us off. Their hands dangle lifelessly by their sides as they watch Pa lead us away.
By the time we arrive at the rendezvous area on the roadside, about thirty people have already gathered there. They squat and sit on the gravel road in four family groups. Many have almond-shaped eyes, thin noses, and light skin, which suggests they might also be of Chinese descent. Pure Khmer have curly black hair, flat noses, full lips, and dark chocolate skin. Our fellow travelers do not acknowledge our presence, instead they stare passively at the road. Like us, they carry with them light bundles of clothes and small packages of food. We sit on the gravel road next to them but no words are exchanged. In the dark of night we all wait for the truck. The world around us remains tranquil and asleep; all that can be heard is the chirping of crickets. The moments feel like forever. Then suddenly the glaring headlights of the military truck appear and it stops before us. Pa transfers me from his warm arms onto the hard, cold bed of the truck. I do not want to let go of him. I do not want to ever leave his safe arms.
The ride is bumpy and loud, but the cool dawn air keeps us reasonably comfortable. Ma stares off into the distance while Geak sleeps in her arms. My other siblings are half dozing, half awake while I find safety in Pa’s arms again. Everyone is very quiet as the truck drives on. All morning the truck heads northwest as the sun climbs higher and higher in the sky, and the wind blows away what little protection the clouds have to offer. The truck driver does not have Pa’s driving skills, nor does he care whether those of us in the back bounce and bump into one another. The truck drives all day and stops only in the evening for us to cook our food.
As soon as it stops, everyone jumps off to stretch their weary bodies. Pa lifts me out of the truck and puts me on the ground next to Chou. All around us, people are shaking their legs crazily as if trying to get rid of animals that have crawled up their pant legs. Khouy walks in a circle, swinging his arms very quickly from side to side. He is a martial artist with a black belt in karate. At 5′7″, Khouy is slender and fit. In Phnom Penh, I loved to sit and watch him practice karate. It amazed me that he could kick one leg up above his head and hold the stance for a long time. He could jump high in the air, do many fast kicks, and land safely on his feet all in a few seconds while screaming funny sounds and contorting his face. It always made me laugh. Now, he walks around faster and faster in a circle and his arms are like propellers about to carry him off like a helicopter. He is doing the same movements I’ve seen him do so many times before, but this time his face is not funny and I am not laughing.
After our short rest and meal, we get back on the truck and remain there all through the night. I wake up in Pa’s lap in the morning to see that we have arrived at a “truck stop.” There are people everywhere. Some are cooking breakfast, others are just waking up, and many are still asleep on the side of the road or in the grass. Sitting in the back of the truck, we dare not move until the soldiers instruct us to.
“We are in Pursat province. You are to wait here until the base people come to take you to live in their village,” a soldier tells us and walks away.
“Why did we have to leave last night?” I ask Pa.
“Some of the new arrivals in Krang Truop are from Phnom Penh. Even though they are friends, it is dangerous to live there because they know who I am.”
“Pa, they’re our friends. They wouldn’t tell on us and get us in trouble!”
“Friendship does not matter; they may not have a choice.” Pa is very solemn as he speaks to me. I do not understand what he means but decide not to pursue this line of questioning.
“Are we going to Battambang on these trucks?” I ask quietly.
“No, this is not the route to Battambang. The soldiers have taken us to a different place.”
“Can’t we tell them we have to go to Battambang? That they have taken us to the wrong place?”
“No, we cannot argue with them. We will go wherever they choose to take us.” Pa sounds fatigued as he puts me on the ground. He tells Kim to look after me while he tries to find out when we will be leaving. As he walks away into the crowd of people, I watch until his figure disappears.
Kim tells me that from now on I have to watch out for myself. Not only am I never to talk to anyone about our former lives, but I’m never to trust anyone either. It is best if I just stop talking completely so I won’t unintentionally disclose information about our family. To talk is to bring danger to the family. At five years old, I am beginning to know what loneliness feels like, silent and alone and suspecting that everyone wants to hurt me.
“I am going to go look around,” I tell Kim, bored.
“Don’t go far and don’t talk to anyone. We might have to leave very soon and I don’t want to have to go looking for you.”
I want to obey my brother’s warnings not to go far, but I’m curious. When my family is looking elsewhere I sneak away from under their watchful eyes to explore the “waiting station.” The farther I walk, the more I see of the hundreds of people at the camp. They talk, sit, or sleep anywhere they can. Many tents have wet clothes hanging all over their lines, piles of wood by the crackling fire, and homemade wooden benches. Looking as if they have been waiting for a long time, some lie so motionless I wonder if they are alive. I stop to look at one old woman. Dressed in a brown shirt and maroon sarong, she lies on the ground with her arms at her side and her head propped up by a small bundle. Her eyes are half closed, white hair strewn in all directions, and skin yellow and wrinkled. The young woman next to her spoon-feeds the old woman rice gruel.
“She looks dead to me,” I say to the young woman. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Gram’s half dead, can’t you tell?” she says to me in annoyance.
The longer I stare at her, the more my skin sweats. I have never seen anyone who is half dead before. Ignoring me, the young woman continues to feed her grandmother. One side of her mouth swallows the rice gruel while the other side drools and spits the food back out. I never thought this was possible. I just thought you were either completely dead or alive. I feel sorry for the old woman but am fascinated at the prospect of being caught between the two worlds. My fascination overrides my fear of her.
“Are there any doctors or anyone who can help her?”
“There are no doctors anywhere. Go away! Aren’t your parents looking for you?”
She is right, of course. I hear Ma calling my name and beckoning me to return. Luckily, my family is too busy boarding yet another truck to be angry with me. As Pa lifts me onto the truck, I notice two very thin middle-aged men in loose-fitting black pajama pants and shirts standing next to us. While one writes something on small brown pads of paper with his black pen, the other points at our heads and counts as we climb onto the truck. I find myself a seat where I can watch the countryside. Quickly, four other families clamber onto the truck and fill up the empty space in the middle. Once all the families are on board, the two men take their notes and count again, without smiling or greeting us. After they are finished, they get into the front seats with the truck driver and we begin to move.
The truck rolls away from the waiting area and onto a bumpy narrow roa
d crossing the mountains. The families are quiet and somber, the only sounds come from the branches brushing against the side of the truck and the slush of mud sticking to the tires. After what seems like forever, I become bored with the scenery and climb onto Pa’s lap.
“Pa,” I say quietly, so the others cannot hear us, “the people at the place we just left, why were they there?”
“They are waiting for the base people to come and take them.”
“Take them like they’ve taken us?”
“Yes. The men wearing black clothes are representatives from rural villages. At the waiting area, these representatives are given a list of names and people they are to take back to their villages,” Pa says quietly.
“Those two men, are they our village representatives?”
“Yes.”
“Who are the base people?”
“Shhh … I will tell you later.”
“How come we left there so fast while all the others waited?”
“I bribed someone with one of your Ma’s gold necklaces to put our names on a list so we could leave.” Pa lets out a sigh and is once again quiet. I rest my head on his chest and think how lucky I am to have such a father. I know Pa loves me. Back in Phnom Penh, in the movie theater, I would always demand the seat next to Pa. When a movie got scary, I would grab onto his arm, signaling to him that I was ready to hop on his lap. Pa would then lift me from my chair and plop me on his lap so that his body became my chair, his arms my armrest. It seems so long ago now. He seems so serious and sad, and I wonder if I will ever see my fun Pa again.
anlungthmor
July 1975
I wake up to find that we have stopped and all the families are getting off the truck. The village representatives have a few words with the truck driver before he drives away, leaving us in the middle of nowhere. All around us, green mountain peaks jut into the gray sky. July is the midpoint of the rainy season; the air, though cool, is heavy and humid. Thick, tall trees with wide, green leaves and fat elephant grass surround us. I sit next to Chou and Geak on our small piles of clothes, listening to the sound of shrieking birds while the others stretch their bodies. A few feet away, Pa and the fathers of the four other families who came with us on the truck listen to the representatives as they give out instructions.
“We have to walk from here up to the mountains,” Pa tells us. Pa picks up Geak and carries her on his back. Khouy, Meng, Keav, and Kim gather up our bundles of clothes and follow the representatives as they lead us to a small, hidden trail up the mountain. Chou and I hold Ma’s hand and trail behind the other families. I try to run to be up near Pa in case there are snakes or wild animals who eat young children in the mountains, but pebbles and rocks slow me down by getting in my flip-flops, forcing me to shake them out every few minutes. We hike up the narrow path in silence. By nightfall, we arrive at our destination. The village chief takes all five families to his house and gives us rice and fish for dinner before the adults leave to hear further instructions. Afterward, he leads us to a little hut behind his house that is to be our new home. The hut sits on four wooden legs raised three feet off the ground. Its roof and walls are covered with bamboo leaves and straw.
“This village is called Anlungthmor and we will live here for the time being,” Pa informs us that night. “Depending on when the truck arrives with the supplies, every week or two the chief will ration each family salt, rice, and grains. To supplement these rations, we will grow a vegetable garden in the back of the hut. Remember, do not talk about Phnom Penh. There are Khmer Rouge soldiers patrolling the village, reporting our activities to the Angkar. From now on, we are country folks just like everybody here.”
Our whole family sleeps together lined up like sardines under a big mosquito net in the house. We huddle together to keep warm. On the second night, I become sick and have a terrible fever. My body aches all over and I throw up a lot. I feel hot and cold. I cannot sleep and have no appetite. Ma wraps me up in many layers of blankets, but still I cannot get warm. When I am very hot, I see ghosts and monsters coming to kill me. My heart races, causing searing pains to shoot up my spine and burn my flesh. I am scared of the monsters and run and run to get away, but no matter how fast or how far I run, I can never escape them. When I come to, Ma tells me that Kim and Chou were also sick and had the same nightmares of being tracked down and killed by monsters.
“It’s the mountains and the weather,” Pa tells us. “We will get used to it eventually. We have to watch what we eat. There are no doctors or medicines here, only homemade remedies.” Pa should tell the mosquitoes to watch what they eat for they are the wicked things that make us sick.
We are not the only new people here. Khouy tells us that of the eight hundred people at Anlungthmor, approximately three hundred are new arrivals. But the village population changes every day because the Angkar constantly moves people in and out of the village, which is how we ended up in an empty house. Every day, Pa, Khouy, and Meng wake with the sun to work and when the sun sets come home. They work very hard, some days planting rice and vegetables and cutting lumber, and other days building dams and digging trenches. No matter how hard they work, after the first month there is less and less food to eat. We survive on the fish my brothers catch each day. We can no longer afford to eat plain rice but have to mix it with mushrooms, banana stocks, and other leaves. After a few weeks, even the leaves are becoming scarce. Ma tells us only to pick the old dark green leaves and not the light green ones in our garden. She says that we need the light green leaves to grow, thus giving us more food. When we catch animals, we eat everything—feet, tongue, skin, and the innards.
One day, Kim comes home grinning from ear to ear because he has caught a small wild bird. Ma smiles widely and pats Kim’s head before taking the bird from him. Kim has tied its legs together, but it struggles and tries to peck at Ma’s hand.
“Go fetch a bowl and a knife quickly,” Ma tells Chou. She takes the bird’s wings and crosses them against each other on its back. With its wings secure, Ma instructs Chou to place the bowl under the bird. Holding its body between her knees, Ma takes its head and bends it backward, stretching its neck. As if sensing danger, the bird croaks louder and struggles to get away but to no avail. Ma’s free hand picks up a knife and in one swift moment, the sharp edge slices into the bird’s neck, silencing it. Thick blood spews out from the bird’s open gash and drips into the bowl.
“Catch it all,” Ma says anxiously to Chou. “It’s good blood.” Chou picks up the bowl and brings it close to the wound to catch all the blood. Put it in a cool place in the shade so it will congeal faster; we can make rice soup with it. Tonight we will have a good dinner,” Ma announces, smiling and finally letting go of the bird. Though dead and drained of blood, its body shakes violently in the dirt.
“Poor bird,” I whimper, reaching over to softly pet its feathers. Its blood stains my hands, but I continue to pet it until its trembling body becomes completely still.
Eventually, food becomes so scarce that the village chief sends Meng, Khouy, and the other young men to the top of the mountain to dig for wild potatoes, bamboo shoots, and roots to feed the village. Each week, they leave on Monday and return exhausted on Wednesday or Thursday. On a good week, they come home with many bags of food and the chief rations it out to all the other villagers. There are times when they return with very little and each person is given only one small potato per day.
It is our second month in Anlungthmor and we are amid one of the worst rainfalls ever. It starts every morning and rains throughout the day, stopping briefly only late at night. It rains so hard that my brothers are not able to go up the mountain to dig for potatoes and bamboo. What food we had planted in the garden has been washed away by the rain. To survive, my older siblings shake the trees at night, hoping to find June bugs. The younger kids, because we are closer to the ground, catch frogs and grasshoppers for food. The rain makes the ground soft and muddy. Chou, Kim, and I often slide around in the mud even when
we’re not looking for frogs. With brown mud covering our faces, hair, and clothes, we laugh and roll in the sludge like pigs. Within minutes, the rain pours over us, washing away the dirt and mud. We pull the wings and heads off the bugs we catch and roast them with salt and pepper.
Weeks go by and still it rains. The rain floods the village and the water rises to Pa’s waist, drowning many animals. Pa tells us the flood is why all huts are built on stilts, high off the ground. Cold and hungry, the only food we have to eat are the fish and rabbits that float by. Pa ties a fish net to a long stick to catch them as they pass by in the rushing water beside our hut.
“Pa! Pa! Here comes something!” I scream excitedly one day.
“That’s a good one. It looks like a rabbit.”
“Look Pa, here comes another,” Chou tells him.
Pa extends his hand to catch them with his net. He reaches in and pulls out two rabbits by the heads. The size of big rats, they hang limp and lifeless in his hands, their fur matted to their bodies. He takes the rabbits and places them on a wooden board. Their necks make a small crunching sound as he chops off their heads with his little knife. Kim then pours a bowl of water on the corpses to wash away the blood. Pa cuts open the skin from the neck all the way down to the bottom of the stomach. With that, he grabs the skin from the neck and pulls it off the bodies. Pa then separates the meat from the bones and cuts the flesh into very thin slices to soak in the lime juice that Ma has prepared. Because everything is wet and there’s a foot of water underneath us, we cannot make a fire. Pa feeds us young children slices of the rabbit meat. Though the lime juice cuts the taste a little, I still hate the texture of it. The flesh stretches and pulls in my mouth and it’s hard to chew. My stomach tightens, wanting to throw the food back out. Sucking on a slice of lime, I force the meat to stay down because I know that there is no more food for me if I spit it out.