Survival in the Killing Fields (70 page)

At the time I wasn’t ready to write my own book about Cambodia. There were plenty of other topics to write about, from the CIA’s clandestine war in nearby Laos
(eventually the subject of a book of mine) to the archaeological ruins at Angkor (another book) and various assignments for magazines. But freelance journalism was as frustrating back then as it is
today, because of the highly selective interest of faraway editors; because of the low pay; and because the magazine article format was too short for my liking.

When
The Killing Fields
film came out in 1984, I was back in the States. Surprisingly, perhaps, I didn’t connect the actor playing the part of Dith Pran in the film
with the doctor I had met in 1980. But several months later, after Susan Walker told me that Haing Ngor had been one of her employees at Khao-I-Dang, I began to wonder whether the co-star of the
film could be the same traumatized man I remembered from Aranyaprathet.

After the Academy Awards, a literary agent called to invite me to meet Haing Ngor in Manhattan, on the 25th floor of a skyscraper with a spectacular view of Central Park. Haing
looked uncomfortable in these surroundings. Discovering that we had stayed in the same house in Thailand and knew some of the same people helped him agree to this project.

We spent about a year discussing his story, at his apartment in LA, at my home in Massachusetts, and in a trip to the Thai-Cambodian border. It was always fascinating. He had never
learned to speak English particularly well. His accent was thick, and his grammar and vocabulary were limited in comparison to his obvious intelligence and his phenomenal ability to remember
events. Whenever he got stuck trying to explain himself, he would switch to French, which he spoke much more fluently than I did. And if I didn’t understand his French, he stood up and acted
out the scenes, playing the part of the different people involved. One way or another, he always got his meaning across.

Successful collaborations are greater than the sum of their parts. I had been looking for a way to write a book about the refugees of south-east Asia. Haing had been looking for
someone to help him tell his own story as a vehicle for telling the larger story of his country. We became energized by working together and obsessed with getting the details right. On our trip to
Thailand, we waded out into the paddies to transplant rice; threshed and winnowed harvested rice; and foraged for edible foods in the forest. We looked through Ponchaud’s book and other
sources to find Khmer Rouge speeches and slogans that matched his memories.

Haing was honest and outspoken in this book, as he was in life. To many of his countrymen, Haing Ngor seemed uncouth for speaking his mind and allowing himself to show anger; but
that same ferocity helped him transcend Cambodian culture and connect with people from around the world.

I was very fond of Haing. He was talented, courageous, flawed, and hot-tempered. He could also be cunning, devious, and exasperating, but generally he admitted his mistakes and he
knew the difference between wrong and right. After much reflection, I have decided that the best way to pay tribute to him is to be truthful about his later years. It is what he would have
wanted.

*  *  *

Haing Ngor never found peace in his later life.

He was like his country: scarred, and incapable of fully healing.

Haing’s friends – and he made and discarded many sets of friends – were always suggesting ways for him to become happier or more successful. They wanted him to
marry and settle down, volunteer more time to human rights causes, take accent-removal classes to improve his marketability as an actor, and so on. And he would go out on a few dates with an
especially worthwhile woman, or accept some speaking engagements, or take a few classes, and then move on to something else that caught his attention.

He lived as though he had attention deficit disorder, though nobody could ever figure out whether his restlessness came from early childhood or from the traumas he endured under the
Khmer Rouge regime.

‘He was impossible,’ one of his best friends told me, the fondness mixed with aggravation. ‘He was tormented,’ said another. There are psychological terms
like post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt that apply to Haing Ngor, but they did not do justice to his complex nature.

He never returned to practising medicine. He got enough acting work to make a good living without having to get recertified as a doctor, or having to show up at an office job for
regular hours. This suited him, because he liked the variety of going off on movie shoots, but the absence of a steady professional life didn’t help his personal life.

He was deeply conflicted about women. On the one hand he usually wore the heavy gold locket with the photo of Huoy under his shirt, a talisman of his loyalty to her memory. On the
other hand he had dozens of love affairs. Married and unmarried Cambodian women competed for his attention, and he sought them out. Some of them cared about him deeply and could have changed his
life for the better if he had let them. Others were attracted because he was a celebrity or because they were after his money. He enjoyed the flirting and intrigue, but he left many women
disappointed and their boyfriends or husbands furious at him without creating lasting security in his own life.

In the early 1990s, a few years after the original publication of this book, the political situation in Cambodia began to change for the better. With the fall of the Soviet empire,
the Vietnamese communists lost their financial backing and withdrew from their neighbours Laos and Cambodia. In Cambodia a new political leader emerged, Hun Sen, of the Cambodian People’s
Party or CPP. Hun Sen was no Buddha. He had lost an eye in combat while a battalion commander for the Khmer Rouge, and he left the Khmer Rouge just ahead of a purge. Still, the outside world judged
him better than most of the other politicians, and with a lot of machinations Cambodia was reinvented as a constitutional monarchy, with Sihanouk as the ceremonial head of state and eventually with
Hun Sen as the prime minister and sole day-today ruler.

As the country became more accessible to the outside world, a news media expedition was organized, inevitably billed as a ‘Return to the Killing Fields’. At the centre
of this media circus was Diane Sawyer of ABC News (who arrived in Phnom Penh clutching a copy of this book, with page corners turned down and many passages underlined), and her calm and congenial
field producer Neal Shapiro, who later became the head of NBC News. Sydney Schanberg was there for
The New York Times
; and I was there for the magazine of the
Sunday Times
of London.
There were Cambodian and American human rights spokes-people with us, and the stars were to be Haing and Dith Pran.

The trip was a disappointment. Haing demanded to be put up in a different hotel from everybody else, and was late for all his interviews. Dith Pran (whom I like personally)
didn’t behave much better. Haing was evasive about returning to Huoy’s grave site, or about going to see Pen Tip, who was in Phnom Penh. There were trips to Tuol Sleng (the Khmer Rouge
extermination centre on the outskirts of Phnom Penh), to Angkor Wat, and to mass grave sites; and there were meetings to discuss human rights issues, at which Haing spoke loudly and unconvincingly
and sometimes got his facts wrong.

In hindsight, it was clear that Haing was under tremendous strain and anxiety during his initial return to Cambodia. He was caught in a crossfire of Cambodian relationships and
expectations that were more important to him than his status as a spokesman to the west. Gradually, it has also become clear that even western journalists like me who ought to know better came to
this story with unconscious expectations. Somehow the presence of television cameras made us expect that Haing and Pran would have cathartic encounters with the piles of skulls at mass grave sites,
as if they were actors in a scripted docudrama and we journalists were there to record their tears, everybody playing their preassigned roles. Haing wasn’t buying into that, but he was too
evasive to tell anybody whatever it was that he was going through. He was too busy being his own difficult self to be a bridge between Western and Cambodian cultures.

After that trip, I only saw Haing a few times. Through mutual friends I heard that he returned to Cambodia more often as the Hun Sen regime opened its doors and a gold rush of crony
capitalism began. Rumours about Haing’s business and personal life started circulating and they were not favourable. Cambodian gossip can be vicious, and political disagreements can be the
hidden reason behind personal attacks. Haing supported the CPP because he felt it had the best chance of preventing the Khmer Rouge returning to power. Some of the most malicious gossip came from
backers of the other political factions, the KPNLF and FUNCINPEC. For both political and personal reasons, Haing was becoming controversial among his countrymen. He was speaking his mind and not
caring much what anybody thought.

During this period he made good on some of his promises to Huoy. He held a Buddhist ceremony for her in Phnom Penh and he built a little memorial shrine to her in his home village,
Samrong Yong. To the best of my knowledge, he did not make the pilgrimage to her burial site under the leaning
sdao
tree to recover her bones and then re-inter them in a
stupa
in the
ruined
wat
on the hillside above. It may have been too dangerous for him to travel south-west of Battambang at that time.

There were two bright spots in his life. The first was The Dr Haing S. Ngor Foundation, which he organized with the help of Jack Ong, a Chinese-American actor and minister he met in
Sri Lanka, on the set of a film called
The Iron Triangle
. Under Jack Ong’s steady management, Haing started giving talks to Amnesty International chapters, and to schools in southern
California. He always told young people to remember their heritage, to stay in school, and not to join gangs. In Cambodia, the foundation opened an orphanage in Phnom Penh, built a schoolhouse in
Samrong Yong, and donated medical and humanitarian supplies. Haing found the charitable work deeply satisfying.

The other bright spot in Haing Ngor’s life in the early and mid-1990s was his reunion with family members, especially his niece Ngim or Sophia. When Sophia left their shared
apartment in LA she went to New York. She got herself into SUNY, the State University of New York. After eighteen months of not speaking to each other, they reconciled; and Haing was so glad to
have Sophia back in his life that he gave her his Oscar award trophy, his most treasured possession after his gold locket with the picture of Huoy. Sophia continued with her college studies,
graduated, and met a young lawyer named Adam Demetri. When Adam respectfully asked Haing for Sophia’s hand in marriage, Haing said yes. The Demetris were like a daughter and son-in-law to
him, and his times with them were among the most calm, the most settled, he’d had since before the Khmer Rouge takeover.

The rest of his family relations were more volatile. Haing was the third son in his family. The fourth son, Ngor Hong Srun, changed his name during the Khmer Rouge years, as many
Cambodians did. Under his new name, Chan Sarun, he became chief of the forestry and wildlife department in Cambodia’s Hun Sen regime. Haing Ngor and Chan Sarun didn’t advertise their
family connection, and many otherwise well-informed Cambodians were unaware of it.

In about 1991, Haing Ngor and a friend bought a lumber mill. There was a lot of construction in Cambodia then, and the mill was a good investment, except that from the beginning it
required payments of
bonjour
. For most Cambodians, of course,
bonjour
is just part of doing business, but Haing had always disliked making payments to corrupt officials or policemen
and it was too late for him to change his beliefs. Inevitably, this brought him into conflict with his brother, the chief of the forestry department.

The details of their disagreements are unclear to me, but in general political terms the deforestation of Cambodia under the Hun Sen regime has been dramatic. The disappearance of
vast tracts of jungle, the smuggling of prime hardwoods abroad, the involvement of Thai and Indonesian criminal figures, and the enrichment of some (but not all) Cambodian officials became such a
hot issue that the World Bank and other institutions threatened to cut off aid to the Hun Sen regime unless there were reforms in forest management. According to a London-based organization, Global
Witness:

In response to the international pressure, Hun Sen himself promised forestry reforms. Chan Sarun lost his job, and Global Witness was appointed to monitor compliance. But the
fundamental reforms were never made. In 2003, the letter cancelling Global Witness’ monitoring contract was signed by none other than Chan Sarun, who had reappeared with a promotion to the
cabinet-level position of Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing.

This brief sketch of Chan Sarun’s story may seem tangential to Haing Ngor’s story. The point is that Haing found himself in a politically as well as personally
uncomfortable situation. He had returned to his country after helping reveal to the world the agony Cambodia had gone through during the Khmer Rouge regime. He had returned as a well-to-do
celebrity, believing that he was part of the solution, part of the rebuilding effort, only to find that he and his family were part of the problem. In the new Cambodia, the violence and fanaticism
of the Khmer Rouge had gone, but systematic
bonjour
had returned. Among the wealthy elite, almost everybody was complicit to one degree or another through their families or people they knew
and loved.