Survival in the Killing Fields (22 page)

The ancient town of Tonle Batí lies alongside a long, thin lake of the same name. Within Cambodia, the town is famous for its temple or wat, a marvellous example of its
kind. A reflecting pond with lotus plants and goldfish surrounds the wat on three sides, and on the fourth a grand stairway leads up to the entrance, with railings in the curving shape of
nagas,
or holy seven-headed serpents; the
nagas
have their hoods spread and mouths open wide to frighten off evildoers and protect those who worship inside. Next to the wat is the
sala
or hall, open on the sides, with pillars supporting a multilevel roof. Nearby stand temple outbuildings, some of them dating back to the ancient empire at Angkor seven centuries ago and
made of reddish stone blocks with sculptures carved in deep relief. In one of those Angkorian buildings sits a huge, bronze Buddha figure, recently but exquisitely made. It was the statue my father
brought back from Thailand on his truck when I was a boy.

The temple had the same importance to us that a large cathedral or abbey would have had in the Middle Ages in France. Parents sent their sons to the temple to learn to read and write, and to
become monks temporarily in the rite of passage to manhood. The monks in turn went out in the community every morning collecting alms. In both religious and secular matters, the temple had been the
centre of Tonle Batí for more generations than anyone could remember. But by the time my family and I arrived there, in mid-May 1975, the Khmer Rouge had forced the monks out of the wat,
stripped them of their saffron robes and made them change into black pajamas. They said that by accepting alms the monks were parasites living off the labour of others. Or, as a
mit neary
explained to us, ‘The monks use other people’s noses to breathe. It is Angka’s rule: Breathe by your own nose.

Buddhism was the old religion we were supposed to discard, and Angka was the new ‘religion’ we were supposed to accept. As the rainy season began – normally the time when
youths from the surrounding villages would shave their heads and join the monkhood – soldiers entered the empty wat and began removing the Buddha statues. Rolling the larger statues end over
end, they threw them over the side, dumped them on the ground with heads and hands severed from the bodies, or threw them into the reflecting pond. But they could destroy only the outward signs of
our religion, not the beliefs within. And even then, as I noticed with bitter satisfaction, there was one statue they did not destroy. It was the bronze Buddha, still gleaming inside the small
Angkorian outbuilding. It had taken all my father’s ingenuity to manoeuvre the heavy statue inside the narrow stone entrance. The Khmer Rouge couldn’t figure how to get it out, much
less smash it. They didn’t have the intelligence, or the tools.

In Tonle Batí the Khmer Rouge made us go to
bonns,
or brainwashing sessions, the same as in the village Huoy and I had just come from. They were always at night and usually in some
mosquito-infested clearing in the forest. One evening, however, the Khmer Rouge leaders held a special
bonn
in the
sala
or hall next to the temple itself. We in the audience sat on
the cool, smooth wooden floor. Soldiers had rigged a loudspeaker system powered by truck batteries. Standing near the microphone were cadre with the usual black cotton trousers and shirts, plus red
headbands and red kramas tied like sashes around their waists. Outside, a light rain fell. One of the costumed men stepped to the microphone and spoke.

‘In Democratic Kampuchea, under the glorious rule of Angka,’ he said, ‘we need to think about the future. We don’t need to think about the past. You “new”
people must forget about the prerevolutionary times. Forget about cognac, forget about fashionable clothes and hairstyles. Forget about Mercedes. Those things are useless now. What can you do with
a Mercedes now? You cannot barter for anything with it! You cannot keep rice in a Mercedes, but you can keep rice in a box you make yourself out of palm tree leaf!

‘We don’t need the technology of the capitalists,’ he went on. ‘We don’t need any of it at all. Under our new system, we don’t need to send our young people
to school. Our school is the farm. The land is our paper. The plough is our pen. We will ‘write’ by ploughing. We don’t need to give exams or award certificates. Knowing how to
farm and knowing how to dig canals – those are our certificates,’ he said.

‘We don’t need doctors anymore. They are not necessary. If someone needs to have their intestines removed, I will do it.’ He made a cutting motion with an imaginary knife
across his stomach. ‘It is easy. There is no need to learn how to do it by going to school.

‘We don’t need
any
of the capitalist professions! We don’t need doctors or engineers. We don’t need professors telling us what to do. They were all corrupted. We
just need people who want to work hard on the farm!

‘And yet, comrades,’ he said, looking around at our faces, ‘there are some naysayers and troublemakers who do not show the proper willingness to work hard and sacrifice! Such
people do not have the proper revolutionary mentality! Such people are our enemies! And comrades, some of them are right here in our midst!’

There was an uneasy shifting in the audience. Each of us hoped the speaker was talking about somebody else.

‘These people cling to the old capitalist ways of thinking,’ he said. ‘They cling to the old capitalist fashions! We have some people among us who still wear eyeglasses. And
why
do they
use
eyeglasses? Can’t they see me? If I move to slap your face’ – he swung his open hand – ‘and you flinch, then you can see well enough. So
you don’t need glasses. People wear them to be handsome in the capitalistic style. They wear them because they are vain. We don’t need people like that anymore! People who think they
are handsome are lazy! They are leeches sucking energy from others!’

I took off my glasses and put them in my pocket. Around me, others with glasses did the same. My eyesight wasn’t too bad, just a little nearsighted and astigmatic. I could still recognize
people at a distance, but missed some of the details.

The speaker retreated from the microphone and stepped back into the line of cadre dressed like him, with the red kramas around their waists and the red headbands. A hiss in the loudspeaker
system gave way to tape-recorded music, a strange march with chimes and gongs finishing out the phrases, the same kind of music I had heard in the exodus from Phnom Penh. Definitely music from
Peking, I decided. The cadre began a stylized dance to it, raising their hands and dropping them in unison, as if using hoes. When the second stanza of the music began they changed position and
mimed pulling on the handles of giant wrenches, as if tightening bolts on industrial machinery.

I watched in surprise. I had never seen a dance that glorified farm work and factory labour.

Another speech began, about the development of the economy and how we were all going to have to work hard for Angka and how laziness was our enemy. ‘Angka says, if you work you eat. If you
cannot work you cannot eat. No one can help you.’ The country was going to be self-sufficient in filling all its needs. It was not going to rely on the outside world for anything.

Then the second dance began, with the same sort of alien music. This time the female comrades danced in unison, moving with masculine vigour instead of feminine grace, mimicking rice harvesters
slashing rice stalks with their knives. Then came another propaganda speech, and after that came another dance, one after the next.

At the end of the last dance all the costumed cadre, male and female, formed a single line and shouted ‘BLOOD AVENGES BLOOD!’ at the top of their lungs. Both times when they said the
word ‘blood’ they pounded their chests with their clenched fists, and when they shouted ‘avenges’ they brought their arms out straight like a Nazi salute, except with a
closed fist instead of an open hand.

‘BLOOD AVENGES BLOOD! BLOOD AVENGES BLOOD! BLOOD AVENGES BLOOD!’ the cadre repeated with fierce, determined faces, thumping their fists on their hearts and raising their fists. They
shouted other revolutionary slogans and gave the salutes and finally ended with ‘Long live the Cambodian revolution!’

It was a dramatic performance, and it left us scared. In our language, ‘blood’ has its ordinary meaning, the red liquid in the body, and another meaning of kinship or family. Blood
avenges blood. You kill us, we kill you. We ‘new’ people had been on the other side of the Khmer Rouge in the civil war. Soldiers of the Lon Nol regime, with the help of American
weapons and planes, had killed many tens of thousands of Khmer Rouge in battle. Symbolically, the Khmer Rouge had just announced that they were going to take revenge.

Tonle Batí was my father’s birthplace, and the place where five of his brothers and sisters returned after the fall of Phnom Penh. Papa had been very generous to
them during the Lon Nol years, loaning them large amounts of money that they weren’t really expected to repay. He had given the most to his younger half sister Ngor Pheck Kim, the one who had
opened the business of selling American military supplies. I had helped Aunt Kim too, by giving her children and her tubercular husband free medical treatment and by allowing her to take my
government-subsidized rice supply and sell it for a much higher price on the black market. I had regretted giving her the rice ever since, because I had come to think of her as a grasping, greedy
and unpleasant woman.

In Phnom Penh, Aunt Kim had played up to us and flattered us. In Tonle Batí she played up to a man named Neang, an ‘old’ person who acted as village chief for the Khmer Rouge
regime. True, her friendship with him helped us at first. She got him to give my family a house to stay in until we could build houses of our own.

But Kim made me uneasy. The extended Ngor clan held a meeting with all my uncles, aunts and cousins present, many of whom I didn’t really know. Kim’s husband sat apart from the rest,
sickly and skinny, with his long, drawn-out tubercular cough, the phlegm never clearing from his throat. One of my cousins asked the question that was on all our minds, whether it was possible to
escape from Khmer Rouge rule and go to another country. Almost all of us wanted to leave Cambodia. ‘Oh no, you can’t go,’ Aunt Kim said, pointing right at me. ‘Ngor Haing
here tried to escape, and they caught him. He wanted to sail to Thailand, but he never even got to the seacoast. If they caught him, it is impossible for us.’

Curious faces turned to me. I kept my own expression blank, but inside I was angry. Foolish woman! I didn’t want anyone but my parents and my brothers to know that I had tried to leave the
country. Now all of Tonle Batí would know. And if I couldn’t trust Aunt Kim to keep quiet about my escape attempt, I certainly couldn’t trust her to keep quiet about my being a
doctor. If the Khmer Rouge found out about
that
, it was the end.

Thinking back on it, it seems likely that Aunt Kim resented the favours my father and I had done for her, because accepting the favours put her in a lower position. In her mind she thought she
had repaid the favours, or more than repaid them, by arranging for us to stay in a house on stilts. The new house was similar to our house in Wat Kien Svay Krao, airy and large, with springy
floorboards. My family crowded into it and under it as we had before. Next to it, in a neat row, were plots of empty land that had been assigned to each married couple to build on. Aunt Kim and her
sons had plots in the same row as my father, my brothers and me. A few days a week, we all got time off from our regular work for the Khmer Rouge to build our own houses. We went off into the
forests, my brothers and some of Aunt Kim’s sons and I, chopping down trees and carrying the poles back to Tonle Batí. Each of us made piles of the poles we had cut.

One morning Aunt Kim’s pile of poles was missing. Her son Haing Seng, whom I had befriended in Phnom Penh, came up to the house on stilts and pointed his finger rudely at me. Haing Seng
was furious. He asked if I knew where the poles were. His tone made his question seem like an accusation.

‘Haing Seng,’ I said quietly, ‘do you know who I am? I am the man you used to call “brother.” ’

‘No more “brother” business now,’ said Haing Seng. ‘I want to find out who stole the fucking wood.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘no more “brother” business. No problem. But Haing Seng, don’t cuss at me. Go look at my woodpile if you like.’

We walked to my woodpile about fifty yards away. My pile was bigger than the others because I had cut more trees. He looked at my pile and shoved it over with his foot.

‘What did you do that for?’ I demanded.

‘Ingrate. Stealing after all we’ve done for you.’

Tonle Batí was Haing Seng’s home territory. He thought we should behave as if we were obligated to him, because his mother had found us the house. He thought I should show him
special respect. But it was too late for that. I shouted that he had no ‘race,’ which means that he didn’t know who his mother and father were – that he was a bastard. In
Cambodia this is a deadly accusation.

He stalked back angrily to tell his mother.

I restacked the woodpile. My father had heard the argument from the upper storey of the house and was coming down the steps to see what had happened. But my father was old and slow, and my aunt
got to me first.

She slapped my face twice, hard. ‘Why do you tell my child he has no race? I have race! And I am related to you! So why do you say that?’

I turned to call out to my father, who was huffing and puffing toward us. ‘Papa, you see by your own eyes that she slapped me. I forgive her the first slap because she is your sister. I
forgive her the second slap because she is older than me. So I’ll let her get away with it. But’ – I turned to Aunt Kim – ‘don’t do it again.’

She pointed her finger at me. ‘You came as a stranger to this village!’ she screamed shrilly. ‘If it weren’t for me you wouldn’t have land here. You have totally
forgotten the good things I did for you.’ She spat at my feet and quoted an old Cambodian proverb: ‘ “The crocodile has lost its lake!” ’