Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  An hour passed before I knew it. Huoy’s mother invited me to stay for dinner. With classes to teach that evening, the answer had to be no, but she asked me to come back when I could, and I accepted for a few evenings later. On my way out Huoy reminded me about the anatomical drawings, which I had forgotten about completely.

  When I came back I was struck once again by how simple and yet how pleasant the apartment was. There were fresh flowers on the dining table and orchids in a vase next to the statue of Buddha. Huoy’s mother, whom I politely called ‘Older Aunt,’ was even more shy than her daughter. She excused herself so that we two young people could eat together. She served stir-fried beef with ginger, snow peas with water chestnuts and several other dishes to go with the rice. After dinner Huoy and I practised copying drawings from an anatomy textbook. We didn’t flirt. That is, there was nothing we said or did that we couldn’t have claimed was perfectly innocent, if we had needed to. But we established an unspoken understanding.

  I came back the next evening, and the next evening and the next. Before long I was a regular presence in their apartment. It was the most natural thing, and yet it surprised me. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before. My previous relationships with girls were the kind best not described in public. My friendships with men were based on sports, jokes and quarrels. I was a raw young man. Yet here were two very shy and gentle women who put me on my best behaviour.

  It was hard to understand. I was hotheaded and stubborn, the kind of person who never changed his mind once he got in an argument, even if he was wrong.

  Perhaps the explanation lies in a game that children play in Cambodia; it is played around the world. The two opposing children make their hands into the shape of scissors, paper or rock and show the shapes at the same time to see who wins. Scissors defeats paper, rock defeats scissors and paper defeats rock. I was a tough guy, a rock. My father was another rock. Two rocks cannot defeat each other. My father and I were always battling and neither of us could win. But these two women were soft. They wrapped and cushioned me until hitting had no effect. The rock could not hurt anyone. Sometimes life is like that child’s game. Sometimes soft and gentle people win.

  It took me months to work up the courage for the next stage, which was inviting the two of them to a movie. When I finally asked, Huoy’s mother excused herself and sent Huoy and me off together. Huoy’s mother was a widow. A burglar had killed her husband shortly after Huoy was born. Easily frightened and withdrawn from society, she had sheltered Huoy, her only child, but now that Huoy was a young woman her mother wanted her to see something of the world.

  Huoy and I had tea in the cafe on the ground floor of her building. We strolled through the smooth evening air down the boulevard to the Angkor Theatre. We saw a sentimental love story filmed in Chinese with a Khmer sound track dubbed in. I didn’t touch her.

  We had begun our romance. We moved slowly, with exquisite and agonizing decorum. Both of us were shy. If we had anything important to say, we didn’t say it. We sent messages by allowing our glances to linger, and by sprinkling our conversations with clues for the other person to interpret for hidden significance.

  In Cambodia romance is always like that. In our traditional romvong dance, men and women move around each other without touching, gracefully waving their hands in the air to the music. Men and women don’t demonstrate their affection in public. Even if Huoy and I saw one another every day, we couldn’t have held hands on her street without shocking her neighbours and giving rise to sensational gossip.

  Most Asian societies are chaste and prudish in their public behaviour. The women don’t provoke men as much as they do in the West. In Phnom Penh the women wore blouses with ruffles on the front; they weren’t trying to show off their breasts. But they could dress modestly and still be attractive. A sarong, wrapped around the waist and covering the legs down to the ankles, or a sampot, which is a fancier version of a sarong, shows how a woman is built. Huoy wore a sampot most days. I was a normal, healthy young male. I couldn’t help sneaking glances at her, imagining what she looked like underneath.

  Of course, other men watched Huoy too, and that was the problem. When she walked along the sidewalk by herself, calmly and slowly in the afternoon heat, there was something about her that would have made any sane man want to walk up to her and start a conversation. I began to watch her, from far away, just in case.

  I discovered that Huoy did not talk to any other man regularly; she dropped her eyes and found a polite but determined way to walk on alone. But I was young and impatient and I needed to know what was in her heart. I was also tired of behaving well. So perhaps six months after going to her apartment for the first time, we had our first quarrel. I accused her of walking home with another man, even though she hadn’t. I itemized the details of his appearance, the colour of his shirt and trousers, his glasses. Huoy said it wasn’t true but I said I knew it was. ‘Is he your boyfriend, or what?’ I said sarcastically. ‘If he is, congratulations. He is very handsome. If you get married to him, it will be very good. Congratulations.’

  Huoy began crying. She had grown up without the teasing and arguing of brothers and sisters, and she had no defenses against the kind of game I was playing. She was very soft. Tears came to her eyes quicker than anyone I have ever known.

  I said, ‘Okay, tonight I have to go teach a class, so I won’t be back.’ I stayed away that evening and the two following.

  On the third day Huoy went to the hospital to see me. She arrived at nine in the morning. I was polite to her but let her know by my expression that I was angry and jealous. I let her wait. At ten I summoned her to my tiny office. She was crying again.

  ‘My mother has invited you to the house tonight,’ said Huoy. ‘She wonders why you haven’t come the last few nights.’ It was Cambodian style to be indirect like that, using other people’s causes to advance our own.

  I answered, ‘Why aren’t you in class today?’ Huoy was still taking university classes to get her teaching degree.

  ‘I skipped classes today because I wanted to talk to you. Why weren’t you at my house?’

  ‘I wanted to go but I was busy. You know, with the patients and all the work at the hospital and the lectures. Please excuse me, I have a lot to do.’

  Huoy held up her hand as if taking an oath. ‘Believe me. I have no boyfriend.’

  I said, ‘I believe it.’

  ‘If you believe it why don’t you go to my house? Come tonight. Don’t let my mother be sad.’

  When I went to her apartment that night the food was ready on the table. Huoy gave me a hurt smile. I pretended that everything was normal. When Huoy’s mother asked me why I had stayed away, I said I had been busy. She pretended to believe me but she gave me a wise, sidelong look.

  She left the two of us to eat together and went into the kitchen as usual. Huoy and I sat down and began to eat. I kept my eyes on the food, not meeting Huoy’s gaze.

  We had rice with the usual side dishes. As always, excellent home-style Cambodian cooking.

  Halfway through the meal, Huoy said, ‘Sweet, are you still angry at me?’

  I helped myself to another piece of fish and put it on my plate next to the rice.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Then please, look at me.’

  ‘I know what you look like.’ I was still looking at the plate.

  ‘Don’t hurt me,’ she said. I still looked down at the plate.

  Startled, I felt the touch of her fingers on my cheek. I glanced at her arm reaching across the table and then into her enormous brown eyes. ‘No, I wouldn’t hurt you,’ I said nervously. ‘I just asked you – ‘

  ‘Hush,’ she said, and the gaze that answered mine held a depth of sadness and wisdom that I had never seen in anyone before. ‘Don’t bring back bad memories.’

  I reached over to stroke her hair.

  Huoy had shown she cared for me. The rock had tried to work loose, but the paper wrapped it even tighter than before.
/>
  She went to her classes, I went to medical school and we saw each other in the evenings. We were heading on converging courses, ones that in normal times would bring us eventually to marriage. Engrossed in our daily lives, we could not imagine that an event was about to happen that would set off a chain reaction, push Cambodia into tragedy and affect us to the core of our beings.

  In early March 1970 Cambodia was still an island of peace. Politically it was neutral. But all around it was war, or the equipment of war. To the east and southeast was South Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese and the Americans were mired in a struggle that neither seemed able to win. To the north was Laos, mountainous and landlocked, where the communists and royalists waged a smaller war backed by the same outside powers. To the west and northwest was Thailand, where the Americans based B-52s and other warplanes. In the middle of all this was Cambodia, a small country, roughly the size of the state of Washington or one third the size of France.

  By Western standards Cambodia was poor and primitive. Most of our people were peasants living off the land. We waited passively for the rains to fill up our rice paddies. We caught tiny fish and foraged for wild foods. Even our wealthiest class, made up of merchants and corrupt government officials in Phnom Penh, wasn’t really rich. For all its charm, for all its flower beds and wide boulevards, Phnom Penh was a quiet place where not much happened beyond the morning bustle in the markets and the long lunchtime siestas. And yet how lucky we were, compared to our neighbours! Cambodia was at peace. Nobody had to live in ‘strategic hamlets’ surrounded by barbed wire. We could live where we wanted and do what we wanted. Few were oppressed, beyond the level of oppression and corruption normal for Asian societies. Life ran on in its age-old patterns. In the midmorning, the monks made their silent rounds collecting alms. In the middle of the day, the farmers came in from their fields to rest in the shade under their houses, and old women chewed betel nut and wove their own cloth on looms. At night the villages resounded with the music of homemade instruments and drums.

  To me and the people I knew, the war seemed far away. Never mind that the South Vietnamese border was only a few hours’ drive from Phnom Penh. We were used to that. Never mind that the Vietnamese communists had a network of hidden roads, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, along the Cambodia-South Vietnam border. We were vaguely aware of it, but our press didn’t remind us of it often. We had had no idea at all that communist supplies were arriving in the ocean port of Sihanoukville, that the Americans had been sending Special Forces teams across the South Vietnamese border or that US B-52s had been dropping bombs in Cambodia for nearly a year. Nobody told us that. Most Cambodians were like me. We were from villages. Our horizons were bounded by rice fields and trees.

  We had been at peace because of one man, Norodom Sihanouk. The French appointed him king when he was a schoolboy, expecting that he would be easy to control, but Sihanouk outmanoeuvred them, just as he outmanoeuvred everyone else. After negotiating our independence in 1953, by hinting at revolution if France refused, Sihanouk abdicated as king and ran for election. He won by a huge margin and continued to be the country’s leader. Domestically he kept the support of the dark-skinned ethnic Khmers, who made up the majority of the population, by appealing to their racial pride and by telling everyone over and over how lucky we were to be Cambodians, descendants of the ancient empire at Angkor. But he also protected the rights of the light-skinned minorities, the ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese. In foreign policy he played the communist powers against the Western powers, accepting aid from all of them until 1965, when he cut ties with the United States after what he felt was an insult to his pride. He leaned to the left after that, but officially he kept Cambodia neutral and nonaligned. The American government didn’t like him because he wouldn’t let US troops come openly into Cambodia to fight the North Vietnamese.

  In Cambodia, Sihanouk was immensely popular. We barely noticed his faults, like allowing corruption to go unpunished, and keeping incompetent people in the government. Few of us were educated enough to care. When he spoke to us in his loud, high-pitched voice, shouting and gesturing wildly, eyes bulging with excitement, we listened with respect.

  Sihanouk loved drama of every kind. He made movies starring himself. He supported the Royal Ballet; the ballerinas were his concubines. He held huge rallies near his palace, where he heard the complaints of the common people, then called the guilty government officials in and scolded them on the spot. And every year he held a ceremony at the place where the Mekong and the Tonle Sap rivers join and then separate again. At the precise moment when the current reversed and the water began to flow uphill toward Tonle Sap lake, he blessed the waters, which made the water’s reversal seem like something he had caused magically (though, of course, the moon’s tidal pull on the rainy-season floods made it happen). Foreigners called him ‘Prince’ Sihanouk, because he had officially abdicated, but we still called him ‘King.’ Many peasants believed he was a god.

  The trouble began on March 11, 1970, when Sihanouk was out of the country and the press was playing up the North Vietnamese sanctuaries along the eastern border. I was attending a lecture when the protest march started. When I caught up to it later, rioting was under way. Young lycée students were throwing papers, filing cabinets, desks and chairs out of the second floor of the North Vietnamese embassy. They tossed bundles of currency on the street below. They lowered the North Vietnamese flag from its flagpole and burned it. They did the same at the embassy of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, or Viet Cong, which was located nearby. ‘Vietnamese stay out of Cambodia!’ the students shouted. ‘Don’t invade Cambodia again!’

  The riot had less to do with contemporary politics than with an old, old racial grudge against the Vietnamese. Cambodia and Vietnam had fought many wars over the centuries. We Cambodians remembered our defeats and waited for revenge – even those of us who were not ‘pure’ Khmer but a mixture of Chinese and Khmer. We all knew the legend of the cooking stones. According to the legend, Vietnamese soldiers took three Cambodians captive long ago and buried them alive up to their necks with just their heads sticking out of the ground. Then the Vietnamese made a fire between the heads and set a kettle on top of the heads as cookstones. Whether this had actually happened or not, most Cambodians believed it as fact. And in this riot, the resentment against Vietnamese of all kinds, communist and noncommunist, from the North and from the South, and even against Cambodians of Vietnamese descent, got rolled into one.

  The riot put Phnom Penh in an uproar. Here was the capital of a supposedly neutral country attacking the embassies of its neighbours. Sihanouk cabled from Paris to try to stop it. He knew what people like me didn’t – that the rioters, for all their deep feelings, had been manipulated by hidden organizers like puppets on strings. But in his absence officials of his government continued to push the North Vietnamese. The two highest-ranking officials were Sihanouk’s royal rival, Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak, and General Lon Nol, who was prime minister and also minister of defence and minister of information. Lon Nol was a dark-skinned man who liked his troops to call him ‘Black Papa’. He was proud of being Khmer, and he hated the Vietnamese as much as the rioters themselves. He gave the Vietnamese communists three days to leave their sanctuaries along the border.

  Of course, the North Vietnamese didn’t leave. If they could fight successfully against a superpower like the United States, why should they obey a government with a tiny military like Cambodia’s? In Phnom Penh the excitement and uncertainty rose. The airport closed. Armoured cars and tanks took up positions on the streets. On March 17 there was a big rally and parade. I was in it, carrying a sign, shouting for the Vietnamese to go home. Everybody on the street was anti-Vietnamese and pro-Sihanouk. We all felt the same – students, journalists, police, army. What we had forgotten was that Sihanouk himself had carefully balanced the Vietnamese communists and the Western powers to keep Cambodia neutral. He had also protected ethnic Vietnamese-Cambodians from pers
ecution.

  At lunch the following day I was having my usual bowl of sour-and-spicy noodle soup. My friend Sam Kwil, a journalist for one of the newspapers, and I were chatting when there was an announcement on the radio: The National Assembly had passed a vote of no confidence against Sihanouk.

  Suddenly the food wasn’t tasty anymore.

  I looked around the restaurant. Everybody was staring with disbelief at the radio. Overthrow Sihanouk? Impossible! I took the radio from its stand and brought it to my table and turned up the volume. We waited. Then the announcement was repeated, and the hope that we had heard wrong disappeared.

  Sirik Matak and Lon Nol were behind the coup. They had the support of only a tiny minority, the Phnom Penh elite, which couldn’t become as rich as it wanted because Sihanouk and his family controlled all the top jobs. My journalist friend Sam Kwil, who was very well informed, told me that Sirik Matak and Lon Nol probably had help from the CIA. He said that Lon Nol wasn’t smart enough to use racism against the Vietnamese as a way to destabilize the country, and then use the instability as the excuse for a coup. I agreed. But nobody has ever proved that the CIA was involved.

  In a short time a new government emerged, with Lon Nol as its chief of state. Soon the government-owned television and radio station and the newspapers that were friendly to it accused Sihanouk of corruption and other crimes. But the attempt to discredit Sihanouk didn’t stop there. Back in Samrong Yong, my sister Chhay Thao’s husband, a teacher, took me to see a pigsty. There, partially buried under manure, was a statue of Sihanouk, its head severed from its body.

  My brother-in-law said the same thing had happened to the statue of Sihanouk in the neighbouring town of Chambak. He had helped topple it himself.

  ‘We got orders to destroy it,’ he explained. ‘I didn’t want to, but the orders came from high up. From very high up. We had to obey.’