My stomach growls loudly as I step up to the table. I cannot see into the pot and my mouth salivates at the smell of the rice and fish. I raise my bowl to my eye level to make it easier for the comrade to serve me. I dare not look up at her, afraid she might become angry with me for staring and not give me my food. Eyes focused on my bowl, I see her hand dump some rice in my bowl and drop a whole fish on top of it. Somehow, I manage to whisper “Thank you, comrade” and walk away, praying that I won’t fall and spill my food.
Sitting in the shade underneath a tree, our family eats the food together. Though it is the most food we have eaten in a long time, before nightfall we are all hungry again. Realizing we have to find a way to get more food, Pa somehow arranges for Kim to work at the chief’s house as his errand boy. The next night, Kim comes home with leftovers.
“The chief did not have any work for me to do so he tells me to work for his boys. The chief’s two boys are my age and they like me,” Kim answers. His mouth turns upward in an attempt to smile when we ask how his day went. “They boss me around and I always have to do jobs and errands for them, but look what they gave me! They said that from now on I can take their leftovers home!” We stare unbelieving at the rice and meat Kim displays on the table.
“You did a good job, little monkey,” Ma tells him.
“Their leftovers are a feast! White rice and chicken! Look Pa, there’s even meat left on the chicken!” I yell excitedly, staring at the juicy shreds of meat still clinging to the chicken bones.
“Quiet. We don’t want others to hear us,” Ma cautions me.
Hungrily, my siblings gather around Pa, our bowls in hand. One by one, Pa scoops up some rice and gives us a piece of bone. When it is my turn, he gives me the piece with the most meat on it, the breastbone. I walk over to the corner of the hut and proceed to pick the meat off until finally there is no more. Then I chew on the bones to get the flavor and bone marrow out. That night I go to sleep with a full stomach.
Over the next few weeks, Kim and the chief’s children become fast friends, and they allow Kim to bring us their leftovers every night. It is clear from the red marks on his face, cheeks, and legs that Kim suffers abuses from his new “friends” who spit at him and beat him. However, at ten years old, Kim knows he has to endure their cruelty to help feed his family. Each morning as he walks off to the chief’s house, Ma watches and whispers, “My poor little monkey, my poor little monkey.” In appearance, Kim is beginning to look more and more like a monkey. His black hair is sheared close to his head and thinned from malnutrition, exposing his large forehead. Brown skin stretches over his gaunt face, making his eyes and teeth appear to bulge, too big for his young boy’s face. Though I lower my head as his black-clad figure disappears, I am grateful for the extra food he brings us.
My stomach knots each time I look at Pa’s face as he receives the food from Kim. Pa is now so thin that his face is no longer the shape of a full moon. His soft body is emaciated, making him wince when Geak tries to crawl onto his lap. The round belly that I once loved to wrap my arms around is caved in, showing his rib cage. Yet he always takes the last and smallest portion of the leftovers. He eats the food tentatively, as if forcing each bite down when his heart wants to spit it back out. At times his eyes linger for many minutes on the fresh bruises on Kim’s face, and he swallows even harder, trying to make the food go down. The pain on his face makes me feel such shame, but I am glad for my brother’s sacrifice. Each night, in my dark corner of the hut, filled with shame and with quiet tears, I suck and chew the chicken bones until there is nothing left.
In our new home we have no time to get to know our neighbors, visit other villagers, take walks, or hold conversations with anyone outside the family. Social contact among the new people is almost nonexistent. Everyone keeps to themselves, fearing that if they share personal thoughts or feelings someone will report them to the Angkar. This happens frequently now because turning someone in to the chief can reap rewards and favors such as more food or, in some cases, life over death.
Because of the extra food Kim brings home, for the first few months, life is better for us in our new environment. My parents, my older brothers and sister work in the rice field while we younger kids stay behind to work in the community garden. I miss my family and see them only briefly each night when they return exhausted from working twelve to fourteen hours in the field. Three or four times a week after dinner, the new people sit through an hour or more of meetings. The village is closed off to the outside world and even to other villages. Mail, telephones, radios, newspapers, and televisions are all banned, so the only news we get comes from the chief.
“What was the meeting about tonight, Pa?” I ask, waking up from my sleep when he comes in late that night.
Kissing my forehead, Pa says the meetings are the same as on all the other nights. The chief teaches and explains to the adults the philosophy of the Angkar while all the new people sit and listen. The chief preaches and revers the achievements of the Angkar, the philosophy of the government to build this perfect agrarian society where there are no crimes, no deceit, no trickery, and no Western influence. The Angkar says our new society will produce many thousand kilograms of a rice surplus within two years. Then we’ll eat as much rice as we want. And we will be self-reliant. Only by becoming self-reliant will the country be master of its own fate. The chief says the country will go through some hard times and not have enough to eat as it stops accepting charities from foreign countries. The chief says by all of us working hard to grow rice, we will soon be able to feed the country.
At night, fearing we will be heard, we say only a few quiet words to each other before going to sleep. In the dark, the soldiers patrol the area, listening and looking into the houses. If they hear or even suspect people discussing politics—especially capitalism—the entire family will be gone by morning. The soldiers tell us that the family has gone to a reeducation camp, but we know they have disappeared, never to be seen again.
Day after day we work, seven days a week. Some months, if we have been very productive workers, we are given half a day to rest. In those hours, Ma and us girls wash our clothes in a nearby stream, but without detergent they are not very clean. I look forward to those hours off as our special time together. Of the five hundred or so new people in our village, there are only two or three babies among the families. Although I cannot fully understand her words, I overhear Ma say women are so overworked, underfed, and filled with fear that most cannot become pregnant anymore. Even when they do, many suffer miscarriages. Most newborn babies do not survive more than a couple of days. Pa says there will be a generation of children completely missing from our country. Shaking his head, he looks at Geak. “The first victims are always the children.”
Pa says Geak will not become the Khmer Rough’s next victim because the chief likes him. The chief allows Kim to bring extra food home, and he knows that things are easier for us because of that. Pa works harder and longer than anyone else in the village. Because of his humble upbringing, Pa has many skills and can do anything the chief asks of him. He is a skilled carpenter, builder, and farmer. Pa is always quiet and even seems enthusiastic about the work—a trait which proves to the chief that Pa is an uncorrupted man. He picks Pa to be the leader of the new people, a position that comes with a raise in the food ration.
Though the Angkar says we are all equal in Democratic Kampuchea, we are not. We live and are treated like slaves. In our garden, the Angkar provides us with seeds and we may plant anything we choose, but everything we grow belongs not to us but to the community. The base people eat the berries and vegetables from the community gardens, but the new people are punished if they do. During harvest season the crops from the fields are turned over to the village chief, who then rations the food to the fifty families. As always, no matter how plentiful the crops, there is never enough food for the new people. Stealing food is viewed as a heinous crime and, if caught, offenders risk either getting their fingers cut off
in the public square or being forced to grow a vegetable garden in an area near identified minefields. The Khmer Rouge soldiers planted these landmines to protect the provinces they took over from the Lon Nol army during the revolution. Since the Khmer Rouge planted so many landmines and drew no maps of where these mines are, now many people are injured or killed traversing these areas. People who work in these areas do not come back to the village. If people step on one and their arms or legs blown off, they are no longer of any value to the Angkar. The soldiers then shoot them to finish the job. In the new pure agrarian society, there is no place for disabled people.
The Khmer Rouge government also bans the practice of religion. Kim says the Angkar do not want people worshiping any gods or goddesses that might take away devotion to the Angkar. To ensure that this rule is enforced, the soldiers destroyed Buddhist temples and worshiping sites throughout the country with major destruction done to the area known as Angkor Wat, an ancient religious site important in Kampuchean history.
Covering more than twenty-five miles of temples, Angkor Wat was built by powerful Khmer kings as monuments of self-glorification in the ninth century and completed three hundred years later. In the fifteenth century, Angkor Wat was abandoned to the jungles after an invasion by Siam and forgotten about until French explorers rediscovered it in the nineteenth century. Since then, the battle-scarred temples with their beautiful statues, stone sculptures, and multilayered towers remain one of the seven man-made wonders of the world.
I remember clutching tightly to Pa’s finger as we walked along wide crumbling corridors. The temple walls are decorated with magnificent detailed carvings of people, cows, wagons, daily life, and battle scenes from long ago. Guarding the ancient steps are giant granite lions, tigers, eight-headed snakes, and elephants. Next to them, sandstone gods with eight hands who sit cross-legged on lotus flowers watch over the temple ponds. On the walls beneath the jungle vines, thousands of beautiful apsara goddesses with big round breasts wearing only short wraparound skirts smile at visitors. I reached up and cupped one of the breasts, feeling the cold, rough stone in my palm, and I quickly removed my hand to cover my mouth in a fit of giggles.
Pa led me to a temple area where the trees were so tall that they seemed to reach the heavens. Their twisted trunks, roots, and vines wrapped themselves around the ruins like gigantic boa constrictors, crushing and swallowing the overturned stones. He lifted me over the wobbly steps to the dark mouth of the temple cave. “This is where the gods live,” he said quietly, “and if you call out to them, they will answer.” Anxiously, I wet my lips and yelled, “Chump leap sursdei, dthai pda!” (“Hello, gods!”) Then wrapped my arms around Pa’s leg when the gods answered me: “Dthai pda! Dthai pda! Dthai pda!”
At the temples in this area, Khouy says the soldiers mutilated its animal guards, and either knocked or shot off the stone heads of the gods, riddling the sacred bodies with bullets. After they destroyed the temples, the soldiers roamed the country searching for monks and forced them to convert to the Angkar. Those monks who refused were murdered or made to work in minefields. To escape extermination, many monks grew their hair and went into hiding in the jungle. Others killed themselves in mass suicides. Although these monks maintained and took care of the temples, now they are left to the jungle once again. I wonder where the gods go now that their homes have been destroyed.
labor camps
January 1976
By our third month in Ro Leap, things begin to worsen. The villagers work longer hours with decreased food rations. The soldiers roam our village daily, looking for young, able-bodied men to recruit into their army. If recruited, you must join. If you refuse, you are marked a traitor and could be killed. For this reason, my parents force Khouy to marry Laine, a young girl from a nearby village. Khouy, who is only sixteen, does not want to, but Pa says he must to stay out of the Khmer Rouge army. The Khmer Rouge are less likely to recruit him if they know he has a wife who will give sons to the Angkar. Laine also does not want to marry my brother, but her parents force her to as well. They fear that left alone she might be raped by soldiers and end up like Davi, another young woman in our village.
Davi is the teenage daughter of one of our neighbors. She is about sixteen years old and very pretty. Despite the war and the famine, Davis body continues to grow into that of a young woman. Like all of us, her hair is cut short, but unlike us, her hair is thick and curly and frames her small, oval face nicely. People often comment on her smooth, brown skin, full lips, and particularly her large, round brown eyes with their long lashes.
Davi’s parents never let her go anywhere by herself. Her mother follows her when she goes to collect firewood and guards her when she needs to relieve herself. Her parents are skittish about her, grabbing her arms and pulling her away anytime someone tries to talk to her. Davi is rarely seen without a scarf covering her head or mud on her face to hide her beauty. Yet no matter what they do, her parents cannot protect her from the gaze of the soldiers who patrol the village.
One evening, three soldiers went to the family’s hut and told her parents they needed Davi and another friend to go with them. They said they needed the girls to help them pick corn for a special event. Davi’s mother cried and wrapped her arms around her daughter.
“Take me,” she begged the soldiers. “Davi is a lazy girl. I can work faster and pick more corn in less time than she can.”
“No! We need her!” they retorted sharply. Davi cried harder at their words and clung desperately to her mother.
“Take me,” her father pleaded on his knees. “I can work faster than either one of them.”
“No! Don’t argue with us. We need her and she must perform her duty for the Angkar! She will return in the morning.” Then the soldiers grabbed Davi by her arms and pulled her from her mother’s shaking hug. Davi sobbed loudly, begging them to let her stay with her mother, but the soldiers dragged her on. Her mother fell to her knees, palms together, and pleaded with them not to take her only daughter. The father, still on his knees, lowered his head to the ground, banged his forehead on the dirt, and also pleaded with the soldiers. As the soldiers took her away, Davi turned around many times to see both her parents still on the ground, palms together, praying for her. She looked back until she could see them no more.
The sounds of Davi’s parents’ anguished cries echoed into the night. Why were they doing this to her? In our hut the faces of my family were somber and hopeless. Khouy and Pa sat on either side of Keav, who was contorted and white with fear, wondering what they would do if the soldiers took her. Keav, who is fourteen—the same age as Davi—sat holding her knees to her chest, her eyes misted over, her shoulders heaving visibly. Hearing her sobs, Ma left Geak with Chou, crawled over to Keav, and wrapped her arms around her. Without a word, the rest of us moved to our sleeping spots and tried to go to sleep. Shivering, I crawled over to Chou and grabbed her wet hand and lay on my back, staring at the ceiling. In the black night, we tried to sleep but were kept awake by Davi’s mother, who wailed like a she-wolf who had lost her cub.
True to their word, the soldiers returned Davi to her parents the next morning. But the Davi they returned was not the same one they took away. Davi stood before her parents in front of their hut, hair disheveled, face swollen, shoulders slumped, arms hanging like dead weights. She could not meet the gaze of her parents. Without a word, she walked past them and into the hut. They stepped aside to let her enter and followed her in. Their hut was quiet from then on.
A few days after her abduction, the bruises on her face turned deep purple before they gradually disappeared. The scabs on her arms dried up and became little scars, barely visible. But to Davi, they would always be there. I see Davi sometimes in line at mealtime, but she no longer talks to anyone. Her body walks as if there is no more life in it, and her head is always down. No one speaks about that night and no one ever questioned her about what happened—neither her parents nor the villagers. Whenever I see Davi, I veer away from
her path. If there is a gathering of people, they become quiet when they see Davi.
As the days go on, more and more people begin to treat Davi as if she were invisible. Sometimes, I catch Davi’s eyes watching the villagers at the town square, when she lingers there long after the crowd has departed. Other times, she marches straight into the group of people, as if daring them to say something to her. The gatherers shuffle their feet, cough into their hands, avert their eyes, and walk off in the opposite direction. Often, Keav heads toward Davi only to clench her fists and walk back to us.
The soldiers do not stop with Davi. They come many more nights and take many other girls. Some of the girls are returned in the morning but many are not. Other times, the soldiers come back with the girl and tell her parents they have married. It is her duty, they say, to marry soldiers and bear sons for the Angkar. Many of the girls who are forced to marry soldiers are never heard from again. It is rumored that they suffer greatly at the hands of their “husbands.” The soldiers are often heard saying women have their duty to perform for the Angkar. Their duty is to do what they were made for, to bear children for the Angkar. If they do not fulfill their duty, they are worthless and dispensable. They are good for nothing and might as well die so their food rations can go to those who contribute to rebuilding the country. There is nothing the parents can do to stop the abduction of these young girls because the soldiers are all-powerful. They have the power of judge, jury, police, and army. They have the rifles. Many girls choose to escape from their abductors by committing suicide.