Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  ‘I think that’s a terrible idea,’ said my brother gloomily. ‘Come, fill out these papers so we can finish here and go back to Samrong Yong.’ At the end of work on Saturdays we always returned to our native village, which was still our family’s home.

  I went back to work with a sigh.

  A week passed. The next Saturday morning I rode my bicycle into the mill yard again. The logging truck was there, dust coating the cab and a load of logs stacked on the back. So were several unmarked automobiles belonging to the judicial police. The policemen had gotten out of the cars with pistols in their holsters. They had knocked at the office door. My father was just opening the door.

  One of the policemen said loudly that the logging truck hadn’t stopped on the road when the soldiers tried to pull it over. He paused for effect before telling my father the reason. ‘Your driver was afraid to stop because he was carrying communist literature. You have been distributing pamphlets for the North Vietnamese!’

  In 1954, after a fierce war, France withdrew from its former colony Vietnam, which split into two countries, a communist North Vietnam with its capital at Hanoi, and a noncommunist South Vietnam with its capital at Saigon. In the early 1960s, the North Vietnamese began trying to take over the South militarily. The Americans sent in troops to protect South Vietnam, and later more and more troops, and by 1968 war was again at its height. Officially Cambodia was neutral, but neutrality was difficult to keep because the war was next door and many Cambodian officials were dishonest.

  The police were very clever. Instead of being defensive about collecting illegal bribes, they accused my family of committing crimes against the state. The charge was hard to disprove even though it wasn’t true. My father’s logging sites were near the Cambodia-South Vietnam border. The North Vietnamese communists had supply routes through the area. And communist sympathizers occasionally distributed their literature to the common people. I even knew a communist myself. The judicial police had arrested my ex-teacher Chea Huon for subversive activities. I had visited him in jail. But until then I hadn’t known he was communist. I didn’t have any communist sympathies and neither did my father or brother. They were businessmen. All they cared about was making money.

  The police interrogated my father and then Pheng Huor. My father saw me standing around, watching and listening. He told me to go away. I answered that I wanted to stay around to watch in case the police planted communist pamphlets and pretended to find them.

  A policeman overheard me. ‘So you think we are trying to trick you, eh?’ he said. He took me outside and threw me into one of the police cars. They put my brother in another car and the truck driver in a third so we couldn’t talk to each other and agree on a story. By then they were going through the mill and through my father’s house, scattering equipment and upending furniture.

  The police drove the three of us to their headquarters in Phnom Penh. They put us in separate cells. Then they began to beat me to try to get me to ‘confess’.

  I should explain that Cambodian society has a minor tradition of torture. In the early 1950s, when my father was kidnapped, the government soldiers tied him to a ladder, feet up and head down, and poured anchovy sauce into his nostrils. It was extremely unpleasant for my father, but he didn’t suffer any permanent harm. In Phnom Penh, in the late 1960s, the police put my hand in a vice and kept tightening it as they questioned me, but they didn’t actually try to crush my hand. When the vice didn’t work, because I wouldn’t admit to anything, they put me in a rice sack and hit me with sticks, but not very hard. As usual, the real reason for the torture was to raise the asking price for my release.

  On the third evening, my parents bought my way out. The truck driver had already ‘confessed’ to distributing the communist leaflets. To get my older brother out they had retained a prominent lawyer friend of Sihanouk’s. Day after day, my father went to the lawyer to pressure for my brother’s release. Eventually the lawyer, whose name was Penn Nouth, managed to get an audience with Sihanouk, and Sihanouk, who had no part in the scheme, issued a proclamation that my family was innocent. In this way my brother obtained his freedom.

  My father was discouraged. He had paid Penn Nouth 1.2 million riels, which was then worth about $85,700 US. Presumably Penn Nouth had kept some of the money for himself and spread the rest around to various officials, including the secret police and Sihanouk’s hangers-on. Sihanouk himself was not especially corrupt, but he did very little to stop corruption and seldom punished those who were caught. So we could not expect justice from the government.

  But at least the family was together again. After my brother and I were released, Papa wanted more than ever to have us living and working together as a unit. He told me gruffly that I ought to get married and come home. It would be better, he said, if I worked full time for the family business.

  I answered carefully. ‘Papa,’ I said, ‘I don’t have much expertise in business. Perhaps it would be better if I had more schooling first.’

  I didn’t tell him my real thoughts. I hated business. I didn’t like taking orders from bosses or giving orders to employees. Above all, I didn’t want to have to bribe government officials all my life. If you gave them enough they just wanted more. If you didn’t give them enough they put you in jail and beat you.

  The eyebrows arched on my father’s plump face. ‘You want to stay in school?’ he asked incredulously. He didn’t say what he thought either, but I knew. Papa thought the longer students stay in school, the greater fools they become. And in a way he was right. I’d suggested that the truck driver speed past soldiers to avoid paying a few riels, and look what it had cost us.

  I told my father that I’d like to study medicine at the university.

  ‘What? Seven more years before you can make any money?’ He turned away, unwilling to look in my direction. ‘You expect me to pay for you to study while the rest of us are working?’

  He sent me off and we did not discuss it anymore. I felt terrible. Somehow things were always going wrong and I was always getting the blame. And yet of all eight children in the family, except perhaps for my sister Chhay Thao, who was very religious, I was the one with the best intentions. Of five sons, I was the one who cared most about living honestly, not cheating anybody, and not being cheated in return. I had never stolen anything up to that point, unlike Pheng Huor.

  My mother talked to my father and got him to bend his views, against his instinct. Over the next few years my father gave Pheng Huor money to give to me for school. It was never as much as I needed. Even so, Pheng Huor, my rival, gave it to me reluctantly, like a rich man giving a gift to a peasant who does not really deserve it.

  So I continued to live in Phnom Penh, where I had gone to lycée. It was a city of wide boulevards, overlooking the juncture of the Mekong River and the Tonle Sap River, which came together like a letter ‘X’ and separated again on their slow, lazy course toward South Vietnam and the South China Sea.3 During the dry season the rivers shrunk to narrow channels at the bottom of their banks. In the wet season the water level rose and grew, until at the peak of the floods the water from the Mekong reversed course and actually flowed up the Tonle Sap River, filling the basin of the nation’s great freshwater lake, Tonle Sap.

  I lived in a temple compound, under a monk’s quarters built on stilts. There was something rootless about the arrangement, but it cost me little and I liked it. Everything about it struck me as natural and appropriate, from the discipline of sweeping the courtyards, to the sight of the monk’s robes hanging on clotheslines in a dozen different shades of yellow and orange, to the wat itself, with its multicoloured tile roofs and the curving golden ornaments protruding from the peaks like storks’ necks. Most of all I loved the freedom, because the monks let me alone. Indirectly, with only an occasional word of advice, they helped me learn calmness. With my temper under better control it was easier to study.

  I passed my exam the second time around and entered the medical programme at the
national university. The first year was premedical, with courses in biology, physics, chemistry and other basic sciences. The next year was the beginning of medical school itself, six years of clinical work, lectures and labs. All the classes were in French. The curriculum followed the French model, with one important difference: Because of the shortage of doctors in Cambodia, we medical students were allowed to practise before we got our degrees. So within a few years I would be able to get a part-time medical job to support myself. The only problem was getting enough money in the meantime.

  I decided to teach. By then I had a thorough grasp of the subjects on the various exams. I became a remedial science teacher at several lycées, squeezing the class time into my busy schedule, racing through the quiet avenues on my bicycle.

  I also became a tutor at private homes. A friend of mine from lycée, a girl named Kam Sunary, had two younger sisters who were having trouble with their studies. She arranged for me to teach them.

  I arrived at the Kam residence, across an alley from a large temple called Wat Langka, and parked my bicycle. It was early evening. The house was set back from the street, behind a fenced enclosure holding several small dogs. Over the decades the house had settled unevenly on its foundations. The red-tile roof had become weathered and discoloured. No bonjour here.

  Mr Kam, a low-paid veterinarian in the government service, came to the door. I greeted him respectfully and he showed me to a small room down a side corridor. There was a blackboard on one wall. The two younger Kam girls were sitting at a table. At another table was another girl, a cousin, who had come to Phnom Penh from her home in Kampot Province.

  I stepped to the blackboard and without any of the usual courtesies began asking the girls why they were having trouble with their exams. I paced back and forth, trying to discover how much or little they knew, asking one question after another. I had to be impartial and correct with them – the door to the hallway was open, and everything we said could be heard throughout the house. But I also didn’t want to be excessively polite as Cambodians often are, hiding excuses behind the mask of politeness, allowing failure for the sake of keeping face.

  The girls didn’t know much about the sciences. The Kam sisters, in particular, hadn’t grasped the concept of chemical valences. So I stepped to the blackboard, drew a table of the elements, and began explaining how chemicals combine. Three evenings a week it went like this, reviewing basic concepts, steadily making progress. I began looking forward to these sessions more than to my other classes. There was always a glass of tea waiting when I arrived, placed there by the cousin from Kampot. Her name was Chang My Huoy: Chang, her family name; ‘My’ meaning beautiful; and ‘Huoy’ meaning flower in Teochiew, the Chinese dialect most widely spoken in Cambodia, the same dialect spoken by my family.

  Once I started teaching those girls I couldn’t change my behaviour. I was strict with them. They were polite to me. They called me luk, a form of address with a meaning like ‘sir’ or the French monsieur. All the same, while lecturing them I sometimes felt self-conscious, like a man who accidentally sees his reflection in a mirror as he is walking down the street. Not much to look at, I thought. Acne scars on my face. Glasses. Sneakers. Unfashionable haircut. I looked like what I was, an unpolished bachelor who lived in a temple.

  ‘So if you put carbon, hydrogen and oxygen together to make sugar, how will they combine?’ I heard myself saying. I called on the girls for the answer. One of the Kam girls looked in her notes in confusion. The other had the wrong answer.

  Chang My Huoy raised her eyes directly to me and said in her quiet voice, ‘It would be C12H22011, luk teacher, for sugars like glucose and sucrose.

  ‘Correct,’ I said, ‘though those three elements also combine with others to form an entire class of organic compounds, the carbohydrates. Most edible plants, like cabbages and yams, are composed of carbohydrates along with proteins and minerals. If you burn these vegetables, the same thing happens as when you burn sugar. You drive off the oxygen and hydrogen, and what is left is carbon.’ I found myself babbling on like that without quite knowing why. Who cared about chemistry? I didn’t. They didn’t care either. I wished there were a way to take better advantage of being in a room with three attractive young women. I had learned something about women in Phnom Penh, though probably not enough.

  Of these three in the class, My Huoy was the most conscientious. She was also the most shy. She never said an extra word, but she phrased what she said precisely, while her two cousins whispered and giggled. She wore Chinese-style pajamas. Ordinary house clothes. Her pajamas – Huoy’s, I mean-were white with a tiny pink floral pattern. Though her cousins were pretty, Huoy, with her light, flawless skin and large, round eyes, had something special about her, a grace and gentleness, and something else I couldn’t put a name to, though I tried to, late at night, unable to sleep, in my room under the monk’s quarters. During the break halfway through the class, she asked if I wanted more tea, and at the end of class she brought oranges for all of us from the kitchen, while her cousins chattered. The other girls were no match for her.

  The classes came to an end as the exams approached. Chang My Huoy was going to return to Kampot. After the last class I lingered for a few minutes in the doorway, holding the pay envelope in my hand. The family had treated me well. I wasn’t in a hurry to go. In Phnom Penh, I had nobody to go to.

  At last I pedalled off through the warm, quiet streets. A Honda 90 motorcycle passed me, pulling a trailer with a cargo of firewood, the noise of the sputtering engine gradually trailing off in the distance. There were few cars. I stopped by a roadside vendor, bought a piece of peeled sugar cane and sat down to chew it.

  From a nearby restaurant came the shouting of a high-pitched and unmistakable voice. It was the Royal Father, Sihanouk, giving a speech on the radio. He was a familiar presence. Several times a week he took the microphone of the government radio and talked about whatever was on his mind. Once he started he went on excitedly for hours about the honour and the role of the country.

  Tonight the Royal Father was telling us about the dangers of the war in Vietnam. He said Cambodia mustn’t get caught between the American imperialists and the Vietnamese communists. Cambodia must remain politically neutral, he said, an island of peace and prosperity. An ‘island of peace’ – that’s what he always called it.

  Cambodia was the envy of its neighbours, he went on, a highly advanced country. Famous throughout the world. We Cambodians were too intelligent to get involved in the Vietnam war. We were a superior race, better than the Vietnamese and the Thais. After all, he shouted, we were the descendants of the builders of the mighty Angkor Wat, the most beautiful monument in the ancient world! We were fortunate to live in such a marvellous country, one of the most enlightened and progressive countries in all Asia!

  All of a sudden in the middle of his speech the streetlights went out. The light bulbs inside houses and the strings of coloured bulbs decorating the restaurants went out too, all at the same time. Another power failure. They happened all the time, and we were used to them. Because of the unreliable power, most radios were battery run, and the radio station generated its own electrical supply. So the Royal Father’s voice continued without a break.

  He went on shouting in the darkness, but I stopped paying attention. Soon the dim yellow glow of lanterns and candles appeared in the houses. A sputtering of motors gave way to a steady throb as the large restaurants started their private generators, and their coloured lights shone once again.

  If the Royal Father said Cambodia was an advanced country, I supposed he was right. If he said we were lucky to be Cambodian, he was undoubtedly right about that too. But tonight the issues of national pride seemed remote and unimportant. I hadn’t said an extra word to Chang My Huoy. She hadn’t said an extra word to me. When she wore her hair up, it lay coiled over the nape of her neck. When she let her hair down, it fell thick and soft to her waist.

  We had been teacher and pupil. Very correct.r />
  3

  Romance and Coup

  It was a year before I saw her again, and then only by coincidence. She was walking along the waterfront by the confluence of the rivers with an armful of books. ‘Hello, luk teacher,’ she said shyly, her face lighting up with a smile. I got off my bicycle and walked beside her.

  In her home province, Huoy had passed the exam for which I had tutored her. Then she moved back to Phnom Penh to begin training to become a teacher herself. Just now she was returning from a meeting in the Chadomukh conference hall near the Royal Palace. She said maybe I could help her with an assignment, since I was in medical school. She was supposed to make some drawings of human anatomy to use as teaching aids. I said I would help her. Did she have drawing paper? She said she did, in the apartment she shared with her mother.

  When we got outside her house, I asked if her mother would mind if I came upstairs. Huoy hesitated. For a man to visit a woman in her house, even for the most innocent reason, had implications. She looked away from me for perhaps half a minute, staring across the street. I watched her closely. Finally she said she would introduce me to her mother.

  We climbed up the stairs to the third floor and into their tiny apartment. The mother and daughter had the same light Chinese complexion and large round Khmer eyes. Their surname, Chang, was Chinese. I wondered whether to bow my head to Huoy’s mother in Chinese style or sompeah. I took a chance and raised my palms together in the sompeah. She did the same to me, and I knew they were like me, a mixture of both races and both cultures.

  From a glance at their apartment it was clear they were poor. They had a couple of chairs, a dining table, one bed for both of them and a small side table with a statue of Buddha. That was all their furniture. On the wall hung a photograph of Angkor Wat, the pride of the nation, built in the twelfth century, its enormous stone corncob-like towers rising in the air. Very Cambodian. The apartment was very clean. Not just clean but well cared for and comfortable. We began a peaceful and gentle conversation.