by Haing Ngor
From that point on, I was hers.
5
The City of Bonjour
As the Khmer Rouge grew in strength, they began to take the place of the North Vietnamese communists in fighting the right-wing Lon Nol regime. In late 1972 a Khmer Rouge force captured the area south of Samrong Yong. The guerrillas spent the day in nearby forests and at night came into the village itself.
I drove to Samrong Yong one morning to get my parents out. My parents packed their suitcases. In the early afternoon, before the Khmer Rouge emerged from the woods, we drove out of there fast and didn’t stop until we got to my father’s other house, near his lumber mill in the town of Takhmau. This was nearer to Phnom Penh and within the area that the government troops still controlled.
But my father was still attached to the house in Samrong Yong. He had built it with his hard-earned money and he really didn’t want to leave. For several weeks he made daytime trips from the lumber mill to the village and back again, emptying the house of furniture and possessions. Then his luck ran out. The guerrillas moved into the village during the daytime and he was trapped.
My father was determined to leave on his own terms. He packed two big suitcases with the rest of the valuables and waited for his chance. Then the Lon Nol army counterattacked. An artillery shell fell out of the sky, hit a big tree right outside the house and blew it into splinters. My father grabbed a mosquito net, a blanket and a pillow, climbed on a bicycle and went out the back door. He pedalled south, away from the artillery, farther into communist-controlled territory, leaving the suitcases behind.
The next day, when I was at school, villagers from Samrong Yong arriving in Phnom Penh told my brother Pheng Huor what had happened. Without waiting for me, my brother got on a motorcycle and drove to the village, which had become a temporary no-man’s-land, belonging neither to one army nor the other. He heard that my father had gone to Chambak, and when he got to Chambak he heard my father had gone farther south.
My brother finally found my father, and they began the trip back. They stayed off the paved roads to avoid enemy patrols. They pushed the bike along sandy trails through the woods and drove it on oxcart trails through the rice fields. When they got back to Phnom Penh four days later, we heard the news that a government T-28 plane had dropped a bomb on our house, destroying it totally. But we didn’t go back to see.
Papa had already suffered losses in one civil war, in the early 1950s, when the guerrillas and government soldiers took turns kidnapping him. Now in the early 1970s, in the second civil war, which was being fought on a much larger scale because of the outside powers sending in weapons to help Cambodians kill each other, he lost his house and nearly lost his life. He still had the lumber mill, but the end of his business career was in sight. A trip from the mill to Phnom Penh that used to take half an hour now took half a day because of all the soldiers collecting bribes at checkpoints. When he shipped lumber to important politicians or military officers, he did not dare ask for payment. He bribed the local mayor, chief of police and army commander just so they wouldn’t shut him down.
Bonjour had always been part of doing business in Cambodia, but it had never existed on this level before. It had grown with the war. Part of the reason was the man at the top, Lon Nol himself. Unlike Sihanouk, who had involved himself in the daily life of the nation, Lon Nol stayed in his office. He seemed to have very little idea what was happening in the countryside or even nearby in Phnom Penh. In 1971 a stroke paralysed his right side, confining him even more. When he walked, his right arm shook spastically and his right leg shot out stiffly in a goose step. His speech was slurred, and those who watched him closely, like my journalist friend Sam Kwil, believed his thinking was impaired too.
Lon Nol did nothing to stop the corruption. He didn’t seem to realize that the bonjour and the war were connected – that officers who were interested only in bribes wouldn’t fight. He had no real strategy for fighting the communists. He just stayed in his office, making vague, mystical plans for restoring Cambodia to the greatness of its times in the ancient empire at Angkor. He consulted astrologers. He sponsored an organization called the Khmer-Mon Institute, which tried to prove that the dark-skinned Khmer race was superior to the light-skinned peoples like the Chinese and Vietnamese. In Phnom Penh, which was racially mixed and Western-oriented, his ideas were treated like an embarrassing joke. We didn’t realize how dangerous he was. Under his regime, racial prejudice against Chinese-Cambodians flared up, and his troops massacred thousands of ethnic-Vietnamese Cambodians.
Even after his fellow coup leaders deserted him and he lost the confidence of the people, the United States continued to support Lon Nol. The Americans gave him the money and weapons to fight with, and since they didn’t seem to care what he did with them, Lon Nol cared even less. His generals sold weapons to the enemy. They put extra names, or ‘phantom soldiers’, on their payrolls, and kept the extra pay. They built huge villas for their own use, while their men in the field went hungry for lack of rice. The generals didn’t really want to win the war, just keep it going, so they could make as much money as possible before taking the last plane out.
Cambodia was no longer an island of peace. It was a nation at war with itself.
I told my father that he should sell the mill and leave Cambodia. He and my mother could live anywhere they wanted, with enough money to last them the rest of their lives.
My father said no. He liked living in Cambodia. Instead, he suggested I leave. He even offered to send me to France to finish my medical education, at his expense.
This was a change – my father offering to support me through school. But I said no thanks. I told them that even if the communists took over, they wouldn’t harm doctors. Not a chance. The Khmer Rouge were communists, but they were also Cambodians. Cambodians wouldn’t hurt each other without reason. That’s what I believed, and that’s what my friends were saying too.
For my father and me and people like us, Cambodia was home, the only place we had ever lived in. We didn’t want to leave. The outside world was unknown. It seemed a greater risk to go abroad than to stay and wait for the war to end. And even though we didn’t like the Lon Nol regime, we were doing well under it. For it was one of the strange things about the war that the worse things got out in the countryside, the better life became in Phnom Penh. Not for the refugees, living on the outskirts of the city in shantytowns that grew by the week. Not for the common soldiers, going barefoot because their officers sold their boots on the black market. Not for the rural people, conscripted into one army or the other. But for the nouveaux riches and the elite, life was luxurious. The war brought a bubble of prosperity to Phnom Penh the likes of which we had never seen. We had never had so many parties, nightclubs, Mercedes, and servants before.
I myself became rich during the Lon Nol regime. My wealth grew out of an argument in my family – out of another battle, so to speak, in my family’s ongoing civil war.
After Samrong Yong fell to the Khmer Rouge, my father decided to live in Phnom Penh. At first he and my mother stayed with my brother Pheng Huor, who had married a businesswoman named Lon Nay Chhun. Pheng Huor and Nay Chhun had three children, including a little boy whom my father loved more than anyone in the world. My father had always dreamed of having grandsons to keep him company in his old age.
My father, in fact, seemed to care more about his grandson than the boy’s mother did. She liked going to the lumber mill with my brother, counting the money and bossing the employees more than she liked staying home and raising her children.
One day when my father asked her to stay home to take care of her children, Nay Chhun did an extraordinary thing: she pushed him with her hand. My father, who was unsteady on his feet, fell over backward and cut himself on a barbed-wire fence.
In Cambodian society, it is bad manners to talk back to a father or father-in-law. To push him physically is almost unthinkable. It was as bad-mannered, in its way, as it was for Lon Nol to overthrow
Sihanouk several years earlier. And like the coup against Sihanouk, my sister-in-law’s pushing of my father set a long chain of events into motion.
I took Papa to the hospital and then brought him back to my bachelor apartment. Nay Chhun’s parents showed up to apologize and later Nay Chhun herself. I shut the door in their faces. In the evening, my brother came. He stood in the doorway with the same wide face and calm, grave manner as my father.
I told my brother that if he wanted to help Papa he could come in. But he would have to make a choice: he could be loyal to his father or his wife, but not both.
My brother was silent for a moment, listening. I thought he was at least going to apologize for what Nay Chhun had done.
But all he said was, ‘I have come to bring Papa back.’
‘So your wife can finish killing him?’ I said. ‘I just came back from putting fifteen stitches in him at the hospital.’
My brother turned quietly and went away.
Inside, my father was lying on the couch, pale and old and tired. I could no longer hold back my jealousy and dislike of my brother. ‘Which of your sons is treating you well, now, Father?’ I said. ‘After all these years, do you know which son really tries to help you and which son has the heart of stone?’
‘I know, I know,’ my father muttered. ‘But it is best not to speak about such things.’
‘You know now, Father, but it is too late. Do you remember when you beat me as a small child, when you thought I stole the box of playing cards? Do you know who really stole them? Do you know who has been stealing from you ever since you bought the lumber mill?’
My father turned his face to the wall. He knew.
Pheng Huor’s and Nay Chhun’s fall from grace gave me an opportunity to do something I had long wanted, and that was to expose my brother’s embezzling from the lumber mill.
I called a meeting of the senior family members, including uncles and cousins. They were all in Phnom Penh because of the war. They all showed up for the meeting and my father and my brother did too. I read them the list of my father’s properties that my brother had put in his own name: five big gasoline delivery trucks, two buses, a Land-Rover and another house near the lumber mill that my father rented to tenants. As I spoke I held the deeds for these properties right in my hand. How much cash my brother skimmed from the lumber mill wasn’t clear, I said, because my brother still had the books.
Next I raised the subject of my father’s estate. The inheritance was going to be large. Because I was making a living as a doctor, I didn’t need a share of it. Those who did, I said, were our younger brothers and sisters. If their shares were guaranteed, Pheng Huor could have my share. He had done more for the mill’s success than anybody except than my father himself. He could have my share if he signed all the stolen assets back to Father.
I looked around the room at my relatives. They were nodding their heads in approval. I was betting on my brother’s greed to get him to admit that he had done wrong. But I underestimated Pheng Huor.
Asked why he had put the assets in his own name, he replied calmly, ‘I worked hard. I deserved them. And I needed to have something for my sons and daughters in case anything happened to me.’
‘Did you think about other people who have sons and daughters?’ I said sarcastically.
My brother folded his hands and shrugged. ‘Another reason was the government laws,’ he said. ‘Papa is Chinese, but he refused to carry a Chinese identity card. There were certain kinds of contracts that it was easier for me to sign.’
‘That’s not true and you know it,’ I said. ‘I helped you do the paperwork. There are very few businesses the government does not allow Chinese to go into, with or without an identity card. We may have racial problems in this country, but they have not gone that far.’
‘This is not a good time to talk about business affairs,’ said my brother. ‘I think we should just be glad that I was able to rescue Papa from the communists. Maybe he would not be alive today if not for me.’
Try as we could, none of us could get my brother to admit that he had done anything wrong. Each time he managed to turn the questions aside. He would not agree to sign the ownership of the gasoline trucks and the other assets back over to Papa. He ignored my suggestion that he get my part of the inheritance.
The meeting ended unresolved. My father didn’t say a word. He didn’t know what to do. His daughter-in-law had insulted him by pushing him over. His son had stolen from him. But perhaps he felt it was better to have a son steal from him than anyone else.
A month later my father called his own meeting. All his children were there, except for Pheng Huor, who was his number-two son, and the number-one son, the slow-minded one, who had argued with my father and left the family. There were six of his sons and daughters in the room, all grown, and all married except for me. On a plate were twelve crumpled pieces of paper. We each chose two. Written on the inside of each piece of paper was the licence number for a twenty-five-hundred-gallon gasoline delivery truck. The trucks were ours now. So were the delivery contracts, the business connections and the employees. My father had begun giving out the inheritance.
Delivering gasoline turned out to be an easy way of making money. We ran our trucks in cooperation with each other, Pheng Huor included. Before long, I took my profits from fuel, added them to my savings from the part-time medical jobs and bought into the ownership of the obstetrical clinic where I worked. Tacitly, Pheng Huor and I made our peace. I respected him for his ability as a businessman. He respected me for speaking out against him. He never cheated me and we never quarrelled again.
I was able to run the fuel business, work two medical jobs and go to medical school because of Huoy. She had her own job, as a schoolteacher, but she kept my accounts and watched over my employees. We both worked very hard. She had to overcome her shyness to give orders to employees. She got frustrated adding long columns of numbers together when she was tired. But all in all she was better at business than me. I continued to be the hotheaded one, losing my temper when government officials asked for bribes. She calmed me down and told me when we had to pay and when we could get out of it.
Together, Huoy and I made far more money than we had ever dreamed of. We began eating in restaurants every night. I bought a Mercedes. I bought Huoy French dresses, gold bracelets, diamond earrings. I paid the rent for her apartment, which was only right, since we were going to get married. Our only worry was that we didn’t know when the wedding was going to be.
Papa had nothing against Huoy, but according to his beliefs a prospective daughter-in-law had to prove her worth. So Huoy and I sacrificed our long lunch hours together to try to change Papa’s mind. At noon every day Huoy went over to my parents’ house to make desserts for their lunch. If my father wasn’t feeling well, Huoy rubbed his neck or the small of his back.
My father just ate the pastries, accepted the back rubs and ignored Huoy. He had many servants. Huoy was just one more. He also had many relatives who had come to Phnom Penh and were trying to ingratiate themselves. Papa was a rich man, and everyone wanted something from him.
From all over Cambodia, from the towns and the far countryside, people were flooding into Phnom Penh. The original population of six or seven hundred thousand had doubled, and it was on its way to doubling again. The newcomers built huts of corrugated sheet metal or cardboard or thatch. They begged on the streets or took work as servants or labourers at absurdly low wages. If they had relatives in Phnom Penh they moved in, five or ten to a room, or else borrowed money. My father had dozens of relatives show up at the door. His brothers and sisters came from the town where they were born, Tonle Batí, not far from Samrong Yong.
The most persistent visitor was his half sister Kim. She asked my father for a loan so she could set up a new business. My father gave her the money readily. It was the duty of family members to support one another, especially in these times. It also gave my father face to be the one the others relied on.
&n
bsp; Aunt Kim could smell money – she was friendlier to my mother than to my sisters, and friendlier to my sisters than to Huoy, all in a neat gradation. But she couldn’t be too rude to Huoy because she wanted medical help from me.
I obliged Aunt Kim as much as I could, for the same reasons as my father. I treated her husband for tuberculosis. I also treated their son Haing Seng for minor illnesses. Haing Seng looked up to me. He called me ‘brother’. He told me over and over again how much he appreciated what I was doing.
With the money from my father, Aunt Kim bought military fatigues and T-shirts and sold them in the market. There were hundreds of market stalls like hers with US-made supplies openly for sale: canned food rations, mosquito repellent, mosquito nets, hammocks, cots, knives, ammunition pouches, ammunition clips for M-16 rifles, knapsacks, helmets and fatigues. The olive-green colour was everywhere. Barefoot soldiers looked wistfully at the new boots for sale but didn’t have the money to buy them. The only thing not for sale in the open-air markets was weapons, because the officers had already sold them to the communists.
Aunt Kim was not satisfied with the living she made from her market stall. She asked me to supply her with government rice. With most of the countryside in the hands of the communists, rice was scarce, so the US government shipped in rice from Korea. Employees of the government, including part-time military doctors like me, could get two twenty-five-kilo bags a month at a price far below its market value. I had never used my ration, because I didn’t think it was honest to take rice at a cheap price when I could afford to buy it at a full price from merchants. But Kim pressured me. She pointed out that everybody else was selling government rice in the market. Reluctantly, I gave in. I got two bags for seven thousand riels each and sold them to her at cost. She sold them for fifteen thousand riels each, more than doubling her money.
In Phnom Penh, prices had risen astronomically because of shortages and because of the cost of paying bribes to officials. People used every imaginable angle to make money. When my gasoline trucks made deliveries there was always a shallow puddle of gas left in the bottom of the tank. The drivers siphoned it into wine bottles, mixed it with kerosene, which was cheaper than gas but made engines sputter, and sold it on the street. Fuel vendors like them were on the streets at all hours, waving their bottles, trying to make a living. Teachers became taxi drivers. Doctors, nurses and orderlies were absent from their jobs, working for private clinics or selling medicines stolen from pharmacies. Military officers who needed real, live men instead of ‘phantom soldiers’ sent trucks and troops to wait outside movie theatres in the evening. When the films were over, young men leaving the theatres were thrown into the trucks and driven away, unless they had the money to bribe their way out.