Lucky Child

by Loung Ung

  lucky child

  a daughter of cambodia reunites

  with the sister she left behind

  LOUNG UNG

  Dedication

  To the Khmer people—for theirs are not only the voices of war, but

  testimonies of love, family, beauty, humor, strength, and courage.

  To Ma and Pa, you are my angels. To my sisters Keav and Geak, I will forever remember you. To my brothers Meng, Khouy, Kim, and sister Chou, thank you for inspiring me to live my life with dignity and grace. My deep gratitude to my sister-in-law Eang Tan, who nurtured and raised me, and to Huy-Eng, Morm, and Pheng; thank you for a lovely and amazing new generation of Ungs.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  The Ung Family Tree

  part one WORLDS APART

  1 Welcome to America June 10, 1980

  2 Chou June 1980

  3 Minnie Mouse and Gunfire July 1980

  4 War in Peace August 1980

  5 “Hungry, Hungry Hippos” September 1980

  6 Amah’s Reunion September 1980

  7 Square Vanilla Journal September 1980

  8 Restless Spirit October 1980

  9 Ghosts in Costume and Snow October 1980

  10 A Child Is Lost November 1980

  11 The First American Ung December 1980

  part two DIVIDED WE STAND

  12 Totally Awesome U.S.A. March 1983

  13 A Box from America August 1983

  14 The Killing Fields in My Living Room June 1984

  15 Living Their Last Wind April 1985

  16 Sex Ed September 1985

  Photographic Insert

  17 Betrothed October 1985

  18 Sweet Sixteen April 1986

  19 A Peasant Princess July 1986

  20 Write What You Know November 1986

  part three RECONNECTING IN CAMBODIA

  21 Flying Solo June 1989

  22 A Motherless Mother December 1990

  23 No Suzy Wong January 1991

  24 Eldest Brother Returns June 1991

  25 Seeing Monkey May 1992

  26 Khouy’s Town 1993

  27 Ma’s Daughters May 1995

  Epilogue: Lucky Child Returns December 2003

  Resources and Suggested Reading

  Acknowledgments

  Photographic Insert

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Praise for Lucky Child

  Books by Loung Ung

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  From 1975 to 1979—through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labor—the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country’s population. Among the victims were my parents, two sisters, and many other relatives. First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (HarperCollins Publishers, 2000) tells the story of survival, my own and my family’s. First was born out of my need to tell the world about the Cambodian genocide.

  As a child I did not know about the Khmer Rouge, nor did I care anything about them. I was born in 1970 to an upper-middle-class Chinese-Cambodian family in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Until the age of five, my life revolved around my six siblings, school, fried crickets, chicken fights, and talking back to my parents. When Pol Pot’s communist Khmer Rouge stormed into the city on April 17, 1975, my charmed life came to an end. On that day, Cambodia became a prison and all its citizens prisoners.

  Along with millions of other Cambodians, my family was forced to evacuate the city, leaving behind our home and all our belongings. For three years, eight months, and twenty-one days, we were made to live in villages more akin to labor camps, where every day was a Monday and every Monday was a workday, no matter if you were six or sixty. Inside our prison, our former life—religion, school, music, clocks, radio, movies, and TV—was banned. Rules and laws were enacted to control our travels, friendships, and relationships, familial or otherwise. The Khmer Rouge dictated how we could dress, speak, live, work, sleep, and eat.

  From dawn until dusk, we dug trenches, built dams, and grew crops. As our stomachs ballooned from hunger, the Khmer Rouge soldiers with their guns guarded the fields to prevent us from stealing. No matter how hard we worked, we were never rationed enough food to eat. We were always hungry and on the verge of starvation. To survive we ate anything that was edible, and many things that should never have been eaten. We ate rotten leaves, and fruits fallen on the ground to the roots we dug up. Rats, turtles, and snakes caught in our traps were not wasted as we ate their brains, tails, hides, and blood. If we had free time, we spent it roaming the fields hunting for grasshoppers, beetles, and crickets.

  The Khmer Rouge government, or Angkar, sought to create a pure utopian agrarian society and to achieve this they believed they had to eliminate threats and traitors, real, perceived, or imagined. So the Angkar sent their soldiers out to hunt down former teachers, doctors, lawyers, architects, civil servants, politicians, police officers, singers, actors, and other leaders and had them executed en masse. Then they sent more soldiers out, and this time they gathered the wives and children of these traitors. With my father being a former high-ranking military officer, we knew we were not going to remain safe for long.

  When the soldiers came for my father, I had already lost my fourteen-year-old sister, Keav, to food poisoning. As my father walked into the sunset with the soldiers, I did not pray for the gods to spare his life, to help him escape, or even to return him to me. I prayed only that his death be quick and painless. I was seven years old. Knowing that we were in danger, my mother sent us away to live in a children’s work camp. By the time the soldiers came for her and my four-year-old sister, Geak, I was done with praying and plunged deep into my rage and hate.

  At the age of eight, I was an orphan so lost, hurt, and full of rage that I was pulled out of the children’s work camp and placed in a child-soldier’s training camp. While children in other parts of the world went to school to learn and make friends, I was taught to hate and hurt. While others played hide-and-seek with their friends, I was counting under my breath—waiting for the bombs to hit our shelter. The shrapnel from one bomb pierced my girlfriend Pithy’s head. I had to brush bits of her brains off my sleeve and shut down my emotions to survive. Even when the bombs were quiet, there were still dangers lurking in the fields, trees, and bushes. I was lucky to escape them all—from poisonous snakes, diseases, land mines, bullets, to an attempted rape by a Vietnamese soldier. As I struggled to survive on my own, I asked the gods why no one cared.

  In First They Killed My Father, my war story ended in 1979 with the Vietnamese penetrating Cambodia and defeating the Khmer Rouge army. Slowly afterward, my four surviving siblings and I were reunited, and shortly after that we made our ways back to the village where our family and relatives still lived. Then in 1980, in search of a better future for our family, my brother Meng and his wife, Eang, decided to make the dangerous journey out of Cambodia to Thailand. Sadly, Meng could borrow enough gold to take only one of his siblings with him—and he chose me because I was the youngest.

  When it was time to leave, my extended family stood in the middle of our red dusty village to say their goodbyes. My sister Chou and I held hands in silence. I was ten and she was twelve. Though we were still children, our war-torn hearts were grown and bonded over the deaths of our parents and our sisters. Kindred spirits, we were each other’s best friend, protector, and provider.

  As Meng pedaled me away on his bicycle, breaking Chou’s hold of my hand, I turned my back to her. I knew she would not leave until we were out of her sight. My last image of Bat Deng was o
f Chou, her lips quivering and her face crumpled as tears streamed down her cheeks. Her face stayed with me all through the trip to my new world. I swore I would return in five years to see her.

  Meng, my sister-in-law Eang, and I left behind Chou and my brothers Kim and Khouy for Vietnam where we joined the thousands of other boat people being smuggled into Thailand. After six months in a refugee camp, we were eventually resettled in Vermont through the sponsorship of the Holy Family Church in Essex Junction.

  It would be fifteen years before I would be reunited with my sister again in 1995. Fifteen years of her living in a squalid village with no electricity or running water. Fifteen years of me in the United States living the American dream. It is my obsession with these fifteen years that has taken me back to Cambodia over twenty times.

  In the years since our first reunion, Chou and I have spent many hours talking and sharing our lives with each other. As we continued to share our joys and sorrows, we decided to write our stories so that future generations of Ungs will know of our love and bonds. As the author, I have had to translate Chou’s Khmer and Chinese words to tell her story in English. Admittedly, this involved interpreting not just her words, but often their meanings as well. As I was not there to witness Chou’s life, this book is my best attempt to piece together her story from our numerous conversations, interviews with family members and neighbors, and our many literal and emotional walks down the memory lanes of our childhoods. The challenges of writing our separate lives into book form were made even more difficult because our memories of events and time wax and wane with each passing moon. In America, I was helped by the many date books, journals, diaries, homework assignments, clocks, calendars, and the sources that I kept to mark the passages of my life. In the village, Chou did not possess such items. Instead, time for her flows from one day to another, from one harvest season to the next, distinguished only by the rising sun, fallen stars, and the birth of a new generation of Ungs. And thus I was left with having to give the best “guesstimate” to the time and events that marked her life. Though inaccuracies in dates and time may exist in this book, the events that touched our lives and people who have healed our hearts are true. Here are our stories: mine as I remember it and Chou’s as she told it to me.

  Lucky Child begins where First They Killed My Father left off and follows both my life in America and Chou’s in Cambodia. In telling our stories, Lucky Child brings us back to the caring people who went out of their way to find us and to extend a helping hand. Whether it was a kind word spoken to me as a child or a morsel of food that sustained Chou for one more day. It has been a pleasure for me to reconnect with many of the people in this book. However, to protect their privacy, I have taken the liberty to change their names, except for those who chose for me not to. I am thankful to all of them, for all of their efforts and encouragement gave Chou and me the chance not only to survive the war but to thrive in peace.

  The Ung Family Tree

  part one worlds apart

  1 welcome to america

  June 10, 1980

  My excitement is so strong, I feel like there are bugs crawling around in my pants, making me squirm in my seat. We are flying across the ocean to resettle in our new home in America, after having spent two months living in a houseboat in Vietnam and five months in a refugee camp in Thailand.

  “We must make a good impression, Loung, so comb your hair and clean your face,” Eang orders me as the plane’s engine drones out her voice. “We don’t want to look as if we’ve just gotten off the boat.” Her face looms in front of me, her nails working furiously in their attempts to pick crusty sleepy seeds out of the corners of my eyes.

  “Stop, you’re pulling out my eyelashes! I’ll clean my own face before you blind me.” I take the wet rag from Eang’s hand.

  I quickly wipe my face and wet the cruds on my lids before gently removing them. Then I turn the rag over to the clean side and smooth down my hair as Eang looks on disapprovingly. Ignoring her scowl, I ball up the rag, run it over my front teeth, and scrub hard. When I’m finished, I wrap the rag around my pointing finger, put it in my mouth, and proceed to scrape food residue off my back teeth.

  “All finished and clean,” I chime innocently.

  “I do have a toothbrush for you in my bag.” Her annoyance is barely contained in her voice.

  “There just wasn’t time … and you said you wanted me clean.”

  “Humph.”

  Eang has been my sister-in-law for a year and generally I don’t mind her; but I just can’t stand it when she tells me what to do. Unfortunately for me, Eang likes to tell me what to do a lot so we end up fighting all the time. Like two monkeys, we make so much noise when we fight that my brother Meng has to step in and tell us to shut up. After he intervenes, I usually stomp off somewhere by myself to sulk over how unfair it is that he takes her side. From my hiding place, I listen as she continues to argue with him about how they need to raise me with discipline and show me who has the upper hand or I’ll grow up wrong. At first, I didn’t understand what she meant by “wrong” and imagined I would grow up crooked or twisted like some old tree trunk. I pictured my arms and legs all gnarly, with giant sharp claws replacing my fingers and toes. I imagined chasing after Eang and other people I didn’t like, my claws snapping at their behinds.

  But no, that would be too much fun, and besides, Eang is bent on raising me “right.” To create a “right” Loung, Eang tells Meng, they will have to kick out the tomboy and teach me the manners of a proper young lady—which means no talking back to adults, fighting, screaming, running around, eating with my mouth open, playing in skirts, talking to boys, laughing out loud, dancing for no reason, sitting Buddha-style, sleeping with my legs splayed apart, and the list goes on and on. And then there is the other list of what a proper girl is supposed to do, which includes sitting quietly, cooking, cleaning, sewing, and babysitting—all of which I have absolutely no interest in doing.

  I admit I wouldn’t fight Eang so hard if she followed her own list. At twenty-four, Eang is one year older than Meng. This little fact caused quite a stir when they married a year ago in our village in Cambodia. It also doesn’t help that Eang is very loud and outspoken. Even at my age, I’d noticed that many unmarried women in the village would act like little fluttering yellow chicks, quiet, soft, furry, and cute. But once married, they’d become fierce mother hens, squawking and squeaking about with their wings spread out and their beaks pecking, especially when marking their territory or protecting their children. Eang, with her loudness and strong opinions, was unlike any unmarried woman I’d ever spied on. The other villagers gossiped that Meng should marry a young wife who could give him many sons. At her advanced age, Eang was already thought of as a spinster and too old for Meng, a well-educated and handsome man from a respected family. But neither one cared too much for what the villagers said and allowed our aunts and uncles to arrange their marriage. Meng needed a wife to help him care for his siblings and Eang needed a husband to help her survive the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge war, Cambodia’s poverty, and increasing banditries. And even though they got married because of those needs, I do think they love each other. Like the two sides of the ying and yang symbol, together they form a nice circle. Whereas Meng is normally reserved and quiet, Eang makes him laugh and talk. And when Eang gets too emotional and crazy, Meng calms and steadies her.

  “Thank you for the rag,” I smile sweetly, handing it back to Eang.

  “Did you see what she did, Meng?” Eang crunches her face in disgust as she rolls up the wet rag and puts it in her bag. On my other side, Meng is quiet as he pulls a white shirt from a clear plastic bag and hands it over to his wife. The shirt gleams in Eang’s hands, crisp and new. When Meng found out we were coming to America, he took all the money we had and bought us all new white shirts. He wanted us to enter America looking fresh and unused despite our scraggy hair and thin limbs. Eang kept the shirts in a plastic bag so they would stay fresh and unwrinkled for thi
s very special occasion.

  At twenty-three, Meng wears a somber expression that makes him look many years older. The Meng I remember from before the war was gentle, with a ready smile and an easygoing manner. This new Meng seems to have left his sense of humor in Cambodia when we waved goodbye to Chou, Kim, and Khouy nine months ago. Now, only deep sighs escape his lips. At the refugee camp, there were many times when I was in our hut, lost in my world of words and picture books, when suddenly I would hear this long intake of breath, followed by a rushing exhale. I knew then that Meng was hovering somewhere nearby, and I would turn to find him looking at me with his long face and sagging shoulders.

  When I ask Meng why we had to leave our family behind, he sighs and tells me I’m too young to understand. My face burns red by his put-offs. I may be too young to understand many things but I am old enough to miss Khouy’s voice threatening to kick anyone’s bottom who dares mess with his family. No matter how far we leave them behind, I still miss Chou’s hand clasped warmly in mine, and Kim’s fingers scratching his ribs in manic imitation of a monkey, kung fu style. I am young but sometimes, when I would float alone in the ocean near the refugee camp, I’d feel old and tired. I’d sink to the bottom of the ocean, staring up at Ma, Geak, and Keav’s faces shimmering on the water’s surface. Other times, as I bobbed up and down, I’d imagine my tears being carried by the waves into the deep sea. In the middle of the ocean, my tears would transform into anger and hate, and the ocean would return them to me, crashing them against the rocky shoreline with vengeance.

  At night at the refugee camp, I would gaze at the full moon and try to bring forth Pa’s face. I’d whisper his name into the wind and see him as he was before the war, when his face was still round and his eyes flashed brightly like the stars. With my arms around myself, I’d dream of Pa holding me, his body full and soft and healthy. I’d imagine his fingers caressing my hair and cheeks, his touch as gentle as the breeze. But before long, Pa’s face would wither away until he was only a skeleton of his former moon-self