Alive in the Killing Fields

by Nawuth Keat

  “Van Lan,” I yelled. “I’m hurt!”

  He stopped and came to me.

  “I’ll make a bandage,” he said. He pulled the shirt off his back and wrapped it around my wound.

  “I know you can keep going,” he said. “You have to.”

  As I walked, my leg swelled. I yanked a small branch from a tree and pulled the twigs and leaves off it. Even using that as a crutch, I still could barely move ahead. But somehow, I did.

  We walked by day, we walked by night. We rested in short stops, but kept going as much of the time as we could. When we did sleep, we had no choice but to lie down on the ground. When I woke up, I still felt tired. Even the chickens needed breaks. We carried them upside down, and their feet swelled. If they did not walk right side up every now and then, they would die.

  A single person could have traveled much more quickly than our family did. We had eaten such poor diets for so long, we were all weak. Hackly and Chanty could not go fast because they were so small. We were all exhausted, but our fear kept us moving.

  It was hard to find water. One time we came across a pond, but the water was so muddy it wasn’t drinkable. We needed water to cook our rice. Van Lan boiled the water to purify it, but the amount of water was so small in comparison to the dirt that as soon as the water boiled, all that was left was dirt. We walked for many days before we finally came to a good-sized pond of clean water. Alongside it, we saw neat rows of coconut palms and mango trees. There were no houses in sight. The Khmer Rouge must have destroyed the buildings of a small village, and only the trees remained. I was exhausted, and my feet were burned and sore from the hot sand. I was glad that we stayed there for a few days to regain our strength. We ate fruit from the trees, I fished, we cooked rice, and we felt better. Then Van Lan said. “It’s time to move ahead again. Let’s go.”

  We met other people trying to escape, too. One man told us that he’d heard the Khmer Rouge caught a group not far away from us. They were all killed.

  After three weeks, our zigzagging route brought us closer to Battambang, which we knew the Vietnamese controlled. Van Lan hoped his parents would find their way there, too. Finally, after about a month of walking, we got to the outskirts of Battambang. We were totally worn out. Van Lan asked everyone we met on the road, “Do you know my parents? Have you seen them?” No one had, but we continued into the city.

  The first night in Battambang, we were so tired and weak that we just lay down and slept on a sidewalk. The next day, Van Lan met someone who knew his family. He said that they were living in a house by the train station. Van Lan found them. It was a reunion not of joy and celebration, but of exhausted relief. For a short time, Van Lan, Chantha, Vibol, my brothers, and I moved in with Van Lan’s parents, sisters, brothers, and their children in a house that had a roof and walls. What a change from sleeping in a primitive hut, or on the ground with no protection at all! I began to feel like a human being again. I was reminded that life might be more than endless work, endless hunger, and endless fear.

  Many of the houses in Battambang had been abandoned. People like us who escaped from the Khmer Rouge looked for an empty house that suited them, and then they moved into it. The house my family found was fairly close to Van Lan’s parents’. It needed two new windows, the sink had to be replaced, and the front step had cracked. We made the repairs, and then put a new lock on the door to show that the place was now occupied. That house provided the best living conditions I had experienced for years. It had a flush toilet and, sometimes, even electricity.

  “We are free of the Khmer Rouge at last!” I dared to whisper. At least that’s what I thought.

  Chapter Nine

  IN THE CITY

  “People here walk so slowly,” I said to Ang, Van Lan’s nephew whom I’d just met. “This is amazing!”

  “Why?” he said.

  “In the countryside, the Khmer Rouge made everybody hurry. They made us rush from field to field, or they pushed us as fast as they could to make us go away from the advancing Vietnamese.”

  Here in Battambang, people were relaxed. They chatted calmly as they strolled the streets. Vendors sold ice that people bought to keep their food cool. I had not seen ice for more than three years. When Chantha asked me to get ice for her, Ang came with me. We were a lot alike. He was just my age. Like me, he was short and skinny. And like me, he was eager to have a friend and to re-learn how to have fun.

  After we took the ice to my house, we wanted to go back out and explore more of the neighborhood. We were curious, but one place that we were not allowed to go was the downtown area. Vietnamese soldiers had roped it off to prevent Cambodian people from entering. I think the soldiers grabbed all the valuables, like televisions and radios, and held them there until they could take them to Vietnam.

  In the Khmer Rouge-controlled countryside, there was not enough food. But in Battambang, there was plenty of food—that is, for people who had money to buy it. Like many other families who had escaped the Khmer Rouge, we wanted to work, but how could we find jobs? The city was filled with people like us, and we had no way to make a living. Van Lan had an idea. He thought we might be able to make and sell incense to Buddhists, who used it when they prayed. Incense is made from powder. How could we get some?

  A few blocks from our house, Vietnamese soldiers were living in a factory that had once been used to produce incense. When I walked by one day, I noticed bags of powder leaning up against the back wall of the building.

  I told Ang about them. “Do you want to come with me to try to get some of those bags?”

  “You bet,” he said.

  Hackly and Chanty overheard my question, and they begged to come too. I said okay.

  When we got there, we saw soldiers talking and smoking cigarettes by the front door.

  “Follow me,” I said. I led Ang and my brothers around the side of the building, hoping the soldiers wouldn’t notice us.

  At the back door, I whispered, “I’m going to open the door as quietly as I can. Follow me in. Grab as many bags of powder as you can, and don’t make any noise.”

  We all sneaked quietly through the back door. The bags of powder were just where I had seen them before, lined up along the back wall away from the soldiers’ cots. We each grabbed a bag in both hands. I held the back door open, and one by one we sneaked out of the factory.

  At that point, Ang started running. My brothers and I took off too. That’s when the soldiers spotted us. They fired their guns, but they aimed way high in the air. They didn’t really want to hurt us. They had no use for the powder, so they didn’t care if we took it. As we ran, the bags got jostled, spilling clumps of yellow stuff on the ground, on our hands, on our feet, on our clothes. By the time we got back to my house, we were out of breath from running. Panting, we stared at each other. We were covered with powdery yellow splotches. We looked ridiculous! We laughed and laughed. I had almost forgotten what it was like to think something was funny. I laughed some more.

  We put all the powder that hadn’t spilled into two full bags. Later that day, I handed the bags to Van Lan. I said, “The Vietnamese shot at us, but they missed on purpose.”

  “Good job,” he said. “But we don’t want you to be shot at. This is enough incense powder.”

  I’m not sure what Van Lan did with the powder. As for me, I still wanted to explore, but I knew I should be more careful. I would go into vacant buildings, not ones with soldiers living in them. A couple of days later, Ang and I came across a building with a sign that said “Theater.” The place looked abandoned.

  “Should we go inside?” Ang said.

  “Sure, nobody’s here,” I said. I had never seen the inside of a theater before. We cautiously entered through the front door and saw that the building was almost empty. It seemed like lots of people had done the same thing we were doing, taking anything that might help them survive. Then I spotted a small doorway.

  “Let’s look,” I said.

  I opened it slowly, and
we found ourselves in a dark, little room. It was filled with shelves, each lined with large, round metal containers about two feet across and two inches tall. I wondered what strange things they could be.

  I lifted one off the shelf and set it on the floor. Ang helped me pull off the lid, and inside was a metal spool holding a long roll of shiny, see-through material of some kind.

  “That’s a movie,” said Ang.

  We pulled it out and unrolled a few feet of it. It was made of pliable plastic, and it had designs in squares pictured on it. Little square-shaped holes lined each edge.

  I had no idea the holes were for holding the film onto a projector. If a projector had ever been there, it was long gone. The room was empty except for the rows of canisters. For Ang and me, it was a treasure chest of toys. I held the film up to the light and saw pictures on it, each one almost the same as the next. I slid it between my fingers and saw the scenes slowly change.

  “This is a moving picture!” I said.

  “Let’s really make it move,” said Ang.

  He pulled the film, foot by foot, from the canister. Then he flung his arm out, and the movie became a curly streamer.

  “Let’s get up high where we can really let a streamer fly,” I said.

  We each grabbed a canister and went outside. We spotted a stairway on the back of the building and climbed it to the roof. We sat down and opened our canisters, and then we unwound the film. It was really, really long. As we pulled the film out, it zigged and zagged and curled and seemed alive. I stood up and ran around the roof, holding the film like a kite behind me.

  “Over the edge,” I yelled.

  We whipped our wrists, and the streamers careened from the roof to the lot below. We wiggled our hands and the film danced, twirling from our perch down to the ground.

  “Mine’s a vine!” Ang said.

  “Mine’s a snake!” I said.

  We shook the film, laughing and yelling. Nobody who watched those movies in the theater could have enjoyed them more than we did that afternoon.

  But having fun on one afternoon could not make me forget the reality of my family’s situation. We were all torn apart. We did not know where my oldest sister Chanya was, or what might have happened to her. Was she still in Pursat? And what about Lee? As a student, he had been living with her. Where was he now? Then one day Chanya appeared in Battambang looking for us. I saw her riding a bicycle. I recognized her right away, but she was not the same sister I remembered. When the Khmer Rouge took over Pursat, Lee disappeared. We think they tortured and killed him because he was a student. They also killed Chanya’s husband because he was a police officer. Their son died of disease. She suffered an emotional breakdown. When we asked her questions, she barely responded. Speechless with grief for all she had lost, her wits gone, she had somehow managed to find us, but she could barely function. She moved in with us, but the sister I knew had disappeared forever, her mind and spirit broken.

  To survive in the city, we needed to find a consistent way to make money. The Vietnamese allowed Cambodians to ride on the Vietnamese soldiers’ supply trains for free, as long as they stayed on the roof. Bunna and I rode the train to areas in the countryside that the Khmer Rouge no longer controlled. There, we bought clothing from peasants who made it. Bunna and I sat on the roof of the trains and carried the clothing to Phnom Penh. We sold it there at a profit, and then we brought our earnings back to the family in Battambang. But our business was risky.

  Sometimes the Khmer Rouge in the jungle shot at the passing train. When wounded or killed people fell off, the Khmer Rouge took whatever they were carrying. During one ambush, bullets landed all around me, one bouncing off the roof between me and the person crouching next to me. Nothing but luck saved me from getting hit. Van Lan told me the danger was too great, and he told us to stop going. The next week, dozens of people were killed doing just what Bunna and I had done.

  My younger brothers and I found a way to earn a little money without riding the train. We made a cart and pushed it into the countryside. With Ang, we picked vegetables and cut sugarcane that had been planted when the Khmer Rouge controlled the area. The Vietnamese had forced the Khmer Rouge out, and now the food was ready to be harvested. Nobody was taking care of the land anymore. The Khmer Rouge had burned down villages and destroyed any system of property ownership. Ripe food in the fields was available for anyone who made the trip to get it—and who was able to avoid the land mines the departing Khmer Rouge had set up. They didn’t want “the enemy” to have the food. Next to rice fields and storage barns, they dug holes and put explosives in them. They covered the holes with bamboo and leaves. Unsuspecting people would step on a booby trap, fall into it, and be blown apart.

  We picked the vegetables and stayed away from most of the rice barns. We loaded our cart with produce, and then we took turns pushing it back to Battambang. We walked for days. At night, we slept on the ground under the trees. At some intersections, residents left pots of water for travelers to use. One afternoon I saw an old man seated near one of the pots. He asked me questions about where we were going and how old we were. Then he asked to look at our hands. He was a palm reader.

  Ang, my brothers, and I each held out our hands for him to study. He said to each of my brothers, “You will stay here in Cambodia.” He said to Ang, “Your future is not clear to me. It is a mystery yet to unfold.” Then he looked at my palm and said, “Your future is very far away from here. You will tell people about what the Khmer Rouge have done to us.”

  I had no idea where “far away” might be, but I didn’t pay much attention anyway. I did not believe in palm reading.

  Chapter Ten

  WALKING

  “Mop, we want to talk with you,” said Van Lan one evening. In a lull between rainstorms, I was playing outside with my younger brothers in front of the house.

  I came in and sat down. Chantha was there, too, holding Vibol. He was on the verge of falling asleep.

  Van Lan said to me, “Chantha and I want better lives than we can have here. We want more for Vibol, too—and for you.”

  My heart started pounding. I could tell from his tone of voice that something big was going to happen. I had overheard Chantha and him talking about their frustrations. “There are no opportunities here,” Van Lan had said. “What good is our education if there is no work, and the country has no money to rebuild itself?”

  Chantha had said, “What kind of future can we give to Vibol? He’s only a toddler now, but there will be no school for him, no justice, no future. He won’t have a chance.”

  Then Van Lans aid to me, “Chanthaand I are determined to escape. There is nothing here for us. Anything of value that the Khmer Rouge did not ruin, the Vietnamese have taken. Would you like to come with us?”

  “How can we do it?” I asked.

  “We’ll use our brains. During these last few months in Battambang, we’ve worked enough here and there to get a little money. We are strong now, and we can walk as much as we need to. We think you can too. You are brave and you are smart.”

  I looked down, embarrassed by his generous words.

  He said, “We have seen that if you need something, you figure out how to get it. You don’t wait for people to tell you what to do or how to do it. You come up with your own ideas. This decision is up to you, Mop. It won’t be easy. Although the Vietnamese control the cities and most of the countryside, there are still pockets of Khmer Rouge. And that’s not all. The Vietnamese may try to prevent us from leaving, too. They don’t want the world to know that we’re not happy under their control. Do you want to think about it?”

  There was so much to think about, I could hardly think at all. I looked at Chantha. She was still holding Vibol, who had fallen asleep. She stared at me with an anxious expression on her gentle face. At that moment, she looked a lot like Mom.

  “Yes, I want to come with you,” I said. “What about Bunna and Chanya?”

  Chantha said, “Compared to you, Bunna is tim
id. Van Lan has asked him to help carry Vibol to the border. He has agreed to do it, but he does not want to risk trying an escape. Chanya wants to stay here.”

  “What about Hackly and Chanty?” I asked her.

  “The more people we try to take, the more difficult the trip will be. Van Lan’s family wants Hackly and Chanty to stay with them, and I think that is for the best,” said Chantha. “And Chanya will be with them, too.”

  Van Lan said, “We will walk to Thailand, whose name means ‘Land of the Free.’ Do you know what ‘freedom’ means? We will have the chance to live every day without fear of the Khmer Rouge. We will be able to find work that we choose and that is worth doing. We will not be hungry. Vibol will have the opportunity to get an education, and to have a future. You will, too.”

  I had heard fantastic stories about Thailand, but I didn’t even know where it was.

  “Is it true that there are a lot of luxuries in Thailand—fine food like canned tuna, sodas, and cooking oil?”

  “I can’t make any promises,” said Van Lan. “We will go to one of the Thai refugee camps supported by the United Nations. From there, people move to countries that invite them to come. We think we can get a sponsor who will help us go to France.”

  We had so few belongings, it didn’t take long to get ready to leave. The hardest part was saying goodbye to Ang and to my younger brothers. I told Ang, “Someday we’ll meet again, and when we do, we will be in a place where we are free.”

  “We will not say goodbye. It’s ‘see you later,’” said Ang.

  Hackly and Chanty did not really understand what our going to Thailand meant. I didn’t fully understand what it meant, either. Van Lan told them the truth, as simply as he could: “We are going away for now, but we are always one family.” Van Lan’s family treated my brothers like their own children. They would be safe and loved until they were old enough to make choices about their futures.