Survival in the Killing Fields (10 page)

One morning I was in my small office in the hospital. Sitting with me was a certain woman patient. We weren’t doing anything. Not yet, anyway. We had just been talking. There was a knock
on the door. I opened it and found Huoy standing there. I wondered how long she had been listening. Huoy smiled sweetly and said she had no classes that day. She thought she would just drop in to
say hello. I introduced Huoy to my lady patient. A sweet feminine conversation ensued. After what seemed to me hours, my lady patient excused herself and left.

‘When are you coming home?’ Huoy asked me, still sweetly.

‘At noon, same as usual.’

I went back to Huoy’s, memorizing my excuses. But when I got there, Huoy didn’t behave as if anything out of the ordinary had happened. If anything, she was even more affectionate
than usual. When we changed out of our city clothes she brought me a silk sarong, treating me like an honoured guest. We relaxed and had a wonderful time. We showered and eventually we ate. We had
the place to ourselves. Huoy’s mother was a tactful old soul, and as usual she was out.

That evening after lectures and work at the clinic I went back to Huoy’s again. She was kinder than ever. Instead of sitting across the table from me at dinner as she normally did, she put
her chair next to me. She had cooked fresh fish, garnishing it with lemon, coriander and other spices. Her mother was off in the kitchen. When my appetite was satisfied I sat back contentedly.

That was then she dug her thumb and forefinger into my thigh. She pulled on the flesh as hard as she could and twisted it. Her frowning face was dark with anger. ‘What were you talking
about with that lady patient this morning?’ she demanded.

I had to laugh. She was far cleverer than I’d thought. ‘Ma!’ I called out to Huoy’s mother, for we were now on familiar terms. ‘Ma, help me!’

Huoy hissed, ‘Quiet! Be quiet!’ She twisted the flesh on my leg even farther.

‘How can I be quiet?’ I said. ‘Look what you’re doing to my leg.’ I was laughing and in pain at the same time.

Ma came in and asked what was happening. Huoy said, ‘Please go away, Mother. It’s none of your business.’

I said, ‘No, Ma, you have to help me. Huoy is hurting me.’

Ma said reproachfully, ‘Huoy, don’t make trouble,’ and went back into the kitchen.

Huoy put her mouth next to my ear and hissed, ‘Tell me about the woman patient this morning. Tell me the truth! Who is she? What is the relationship between the two of you?’

‘Don’t be jealous.’

‘Oh? With ‘treatment’ in your office like that? The two of you in one small room with no nurses around? How were you going to ‘treat’ her?’

‘She’s just a patient. Nothing more.’

‘
You
were lucky this time. I was good to you. I was going to hit her, but I didn’t, to keep your face.’

‘No, no, Huoy, don’t hit my patients. Don’t do that. It’s not good for my practice.’

‘I wanted to ask her, “Why did you come here? Why are you trying to take my man away from me? One woman for one man. Not two for one.” You were just lucky I didn’t start
a fight with her. You were lucky I didn’t kill her!’

‘Yes, Huoy, I was lucky. Now please let go of my leg.’

‘No!’ she shouted. ‘Tell me the truth!
Now!’

‘
Huoy, she was a normal patient. You’re the only one I care about.’

‘Don’t avoid the question!’

‘Ma!’ I yelled.

Her mother’s voice came from the other room, in a tone of warning:

‘
Huoy!’

Huoy tried to clap her free hand over my mouth but I turned my head and she got me on the neck. I yelled out jokingly, ‘Hey, you’re choking me! I’ve got no room to
breathe!’

‘I’m going to call for Sok,’ Huoy said in a quiet, furious whisper. ‘He knows about your girlfriends. Maybe I’m not the only one he drives around for you. Why do I
have to wait until I see your girlfriends with my own eyes? Sok, come here!’

Ma walked across the living room and toward the front door. ‘Huoy, Sok has already gone,’ she said firmly. She went out into the hall for a second. I could hear her tell Sok to
leave.

I got up from the table and walked over to the couch. Huoy came after me, picked up a cushion and began hitting me with it. ‘I’m going to punish you,’ she said. ‘You and
Sok both. He knows your secrets. You and he conspire together.’

‘Ma, help!’ I had my hands over my head for protection, laughing as she hit me again and again.

‘It’s me or nothing! Either me and me only or I’ll fix you so you never have another woman again. I’ll get a knife from the kitchen and fix you right here!’

‘Help!’

‘Huoy, Huoy,’ her mother was saying sadly, shaking her head.

‘Save my life!’

‘Next time I will
kill
the woman if I find her with you again. So I ask you now: Are you going to see her again, or not?’

‘I’ve stopped. Never again. I’m sorry. Now don’t hit me anymore.’

Finally Huoy got tired of hitting me with the cushion. She sat on the sofa, stamping her feet on the floor in frustration, tears in her eyes. She turned to her mother. ‘See! See! He
admitted! Sometimes he doesn’t come back here for lunch because he’s seeing his girlfriends outside.’

I moved next to her on the couch. ‘No, Huoy. I agree with you. I’m a bad boy. I confess. I did wrong. I promise not to do it again.’ I put my arm around her shoulder, trying to
calm her down.

‘That’s enough, Huoy, enough,’ her mother said. But her mother was smiling, just as I was.

Huoy pouted. ‘My own mother, protecting you! She should be protecting me.’

‘Hush, Huoy,’ I said. ‘You’ll disturb the neighbours. We’ll lose face. I confess I did wrong. I’m sorry.’

But inside I was glad. Glad that she was smart enough to wait until evening to accuse me, when I didn’t expect it. Glad that she cared about me so much and that she had such a strong
character.

From that point on, I was hers.

As the Khmer Rouge grew in strength, they began to take the place of the North Vietnamese communists in fighting the right-wing Lon Nol regime. In late 1972 a Khmer Rouge force
captured the area south of Samrong Yong. The guerrillas spent the day in nearby forests and at night came into the village itself.

I drove to Samrong Yong one morning to get my parents out. My parents packed their suitcases. In the early afternoon, before the Khmer Rouge emerged from the woods, we drove out of there fast
and didn’t stop until we got to my father’s other house, near his lumber mill in the town of Takhmau. This was nearer to Phnom Penh and within the area that the government troops still
controlled.

But my father was still attached to the house in Samrong Yong. He had built it with his hard-earned money and he really didn’t want to leave. For several weeks he made daytime trips from
the lumber mill to the village and back again, emptying the house of furniture and possessions. Then his luck ran out. The guerrillas moved into the village during the daytime and he was
trapped.

My father was determined to leave on his own terms. He packed two big suitcases with the rest of the valuables and waited for his chance. Then the Lon Nol army counterattacked. An artillery
shell fell out of the sky, hit a big tree right outside the house and blew it into splinters. My father grabbed a mosquito net, a blanket and a pillow, climbed on a bicycle and went out the back
door. He pedalled south, away from the artillery, farther into communist-controlled territory, leaving the suitcases behind.

The next day, when I was at school, villagers from Samrong Yong arriving in Phnom Penh told my brother Pheng Huor what had happened. Without waiting for me, my brother got on a motorcycle and
drove to the village, which had become a temporary no-man’s-land, belonging neither to one army nor the other. He heard that my father had gone to Chambak, and when he got to Chambak he heard
my father had gone farther south.

My brother finally found my father, and they began the trip back. They stayed off the paved roads to avoid enemy patrols. They pushed the bike along sandy trails through the woods and drove it
on oxcart trails through the rice fields. When they got back to Phnom Penh four days later, we heard the news that a government T-28 plane had dropped a bomb on our house, destroying it totally.
But we didn’t go back to see.

Papa had already suffered losses in one civil war, in the early 1950s, when the guerrillas and government soldiers took turns kidnapping him. Now in the early 1970s, in the second civil war,
which was being fought on a much larger scale because of the outside powers sending in weapons to help Cambodians kill each other, he lost his house and nearly lost his life. He still had the
lumber mill, but the end of his business career was in sight. A trip from the mill to Phnom Penh that used to take half an hour now took half a day because of all the soldiers collecting bribes at
checkpoints. When he shipped lumber to important politicians or military officers, he did not dare ask for payment. He bribed the local mayor, chief of police and army commander just so they
wouldn’t shut him down.

Bonjour
had always been part of doing business in Cambodia, but it had never existed on this level before. It had grown with the war. Part of the reason was the man at the top, Lon Nol
himself. Unlike Sihanouk, who had involved himself in the daily life of the nation, Lon Nol stayed in his office. He seemed to have very little idea what was happening in the countryside or even
nearby in Phnom Penh. In 1971 a stroke paralysed his right side, confining him even more. When he walked, his right arm shook spastically and his right leg shot out stiffly in a goose step. His
speech was slurred, and those who watched him closely, like my journalist friend Sam Kwil, believed his thinking was impaired too.

Lon Nol did nothing to stop the corruption. He didn’t seem to realize that the
bonjour
and the war were connected – that officers who were interested only in bribes
wouldn’t fight. He had no real strategy for fighting the communists. He just stayed in his office, making vague, mystical plans for restoring Cambodia to the greatness of its times in the
ancient empire at Angkor. He consulted astrologers. He sponsored an organization called the Khmer-Mon Institute, which tried to prove that the dark-skinned Khmer race was superior to the
light-skinned peoples like the Chinese and Vietnamese. In Phnom Penh, which was racially mixed and Western-oriented, his ideas were treated like an embarrassing joke. We didn’t realize how
dangerous he was. Under his regime, racial prejudice against Chinese-Cambodians flared up, and his troops massacred thousands of ethnic-Vietnamese Cambodians.

Even after his fellow coup leaders deserted him and he lost the confidence of the people, the United States continued to support Lon Nol. The Americans gave him the money and weapons to fight
with, and since they didn’t seem to care what he did with them, Lon Nol cared even less. His generals sold weapons to the enemy. They put extra names, or ‘phantom soldiers’, on
their payrolls, and kept the extra pay. They built huge villas for their own use, while their men in the field went hungry for lack of rice. The generals didn’t really want to win the war,
just keep it going, so they could make as much money as possible before taking the last plane out.

Cambodia was no longer an island of peace. It was a nation at war with itself.

I told my father that he should sell the mill and leave Cambodia. He and my mother could live anywhere they wanted, with enough money to last them the rest of their lives.

My father said no. He liked living in Cambodia. Instead, he suggested I leave. He even offered to send me to France to finish my medical education, at his expense.

This was a change – my father offering to support me through school. But I said no thanks. I told them that even if the communists took over, they wouldn’t harm doctors. Not a
chance. The Khmer Rouge were communists, but they were also Cambodians. Cambodians wouldn’t hurt each other without reason. That’s what I believed, and that’s what my friends were
saying too.

For my father and me and people like us, Cambodia was home, the only place we had ever lived in. We didn’t want to leave. The outside world was unknown. It seemed a greater risk to go
abroad than to stay and wait for the war to end. And even though we didn’t like the Lon Nol regime, we were doing well under it. For it was one of the strange things about the war that the
worse things got out in the countryside, the better life became in Phnom Penh. Not for the refugees, living on the outskirts of the city in shantytowns that grew by the week. Not for the common
soldiers, going barefoot because their officers sold their boots on the black market. Not for the rural people, conscripted into one army or the other. But for the
nouveaux riches
and the
elite, life was luxurious. The war brought a bubble of prosperity to Phnom Penh the likes of which we had never seen. We had never had so many parties, nightclubs, Mercedes, and servants
before.

I myself became rich during the Lon Nol regime. My wealth grew out of an argument in my family – out of another battle, so to speak, in my family’s ongoing civil
war.

After Samrong Yong fell to the Khmer Rouge, my father decided to live in Phnom Penh. At first he and my mother stayed with my brother Pheng Huor, who had married a businesswoman named Lon Nay
Chhun. Pheng Huor and Nay Chhun had three children, including a little boy whom my father loved more than anyone in the world. My father had always dreamed of having grandsons to keep him company
in his old age.

My father, in fact, seemed to care more about his grandson than the boy’s mother did. She liked going to the lumber mill with my brother, counting the money and bossing the employees more
than she liked staying home and raising her children.

One day when my father asked her to stay home to take care of her children, Nay Chhun did an extraordinary thing: she pushed him with her hand. My father, who was unsteady on his feet, fell over
backward and cut himself on a barbed-wire fence.