Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  Before the revolution, most Cambodians felt a strong loyalty to their home villages. Even those who moved away to a big city like Phnom Penh continued to identify with the place of their birth, which inevitably had an accent all its own, different even from the accent of the next village over. Samrong Yong was home. It was an extension of my family. To see it destroyed was almost like seeing my own family dead. I tried to keep my grief hidden from Huoy and her mother so they wouldn’t be saddened, but they must have known what I felt.

  From Samrong Yong we went to Chambak, the next town. There was nothing left of it except staircases rising into empty air.

  An hour’s walk beyond Chambak we came to another checkpoint, manned by young, barefoot Khmer Rouge. For the first time they asked me my profession. I said I had been a taxicab driver in Phnom Penh. Then they asked Huoy if she had worked for the Lon Nol government. Huoy lost her presence of mind and I broke in, saying that she used to sell vegetables in the market and that her mother used to take care of our baby. Huoy, hesitating, added in a small voice, ‘Yes, I was a vegetable seller. My husband was a taxi driver. What he says is true.’

  The soldiers searched the cart again. They didn’t find the rest of the medical instruments, which I had hidden underneath the cart by the axle, but they did find some of the other reference books. They took the books and threw them violently on the road. ‘No more capitalistic books now!’ they shouted. ‘Capitalistic books are Lon Nol-style, and Lon Nol betrayed the nation! Why do you have foreign books? Are you CIA? No more foreign books under Angka!’

  I gave them the usual story about finding the books on the road, but they didn’t listen.

  ‘Angka says no more travelling!’ the soldiers said crossly. ‘Wherever you think you’re going, whatever village you are trying to reach, it will be the same as the villages around here. They are all destroyed. So you have to stop here and go to work.’

  ‘No, please,’ I begged. ‘We have a newborn child. We got separated from it in Phnom Penh, and my sister took it to Kampot. Please, comrade, the baby has no milk! She needs her mother!’

  ‘Angka only says once!’ the soldier thundered. ‘No more travelling! No is no! If I chose to let you go, I would let you go, but no is no!’

  We sat sadly by the side of the road as the soldiers checked families arriving at the checkpoint after us. The soldiers gave them the same treatment, the interrogations, the confiscation of their goods, the raised voices and the angry, suspicious glares. It was depressing. It was a mentality I had seen many times before, and not just under the Khmer Rouge. It was typical of uneducated Asians who were used to obeying orders from those above and giving orders to those below. There was no place in their minds for reasoning with equals. For them, even listening to us would mean deferring to us, and they could not do this without losing face.

  They sent us off on a side road with the other families and with two soldiers as escorts. The dirt road quickly degenerated into a sandy oxcart path, uneven and twisting. I strained to push the cycle and the trailer through the sand and then it became easier and I looked back and saw Huoy pushing too. She was tired and sweaty, and there was a wild look in her eyes that told me she had taken a psychological beating and was on the edge of breaking down. I asked her to let me push by myself, but she said no, she wanted to help. I told her again in a firm voice not to worry, to let me push alone. Eventually she let go of the Vespa and walked with her mother, who was tired and afraid too.

  The soldiers led us to a small village on the edge of the jungle. The houses were on stilts in the rural style and had not been damaged in the war. The inhabitants were moultan chah – ‘old’ people or ‘base’ people – meaning that they had consented to Khmer Rouge rule while the civil war was still being fought. Their early decision not to oppose the Khmer Rouge put them in a middle category of revolutionary society, below the Khmer Rouge themselves but above people like Huoy and me, who were moultan thmai, or ‘new’ people, and at the bottom. The midlevel status of the ‘old’ people enabled them to stay in their homes, without having to evacuate. The ‘old’ people of this village showed us traditional Cambodian hospitality and were very kind to us. They brought us palm-tree sugar cakes to eat, and they listened with sympathy to my tale of wanting to get to Kampot to reunite with our baby. But they didn’t have enough influence with the Khmer Rouge to enable us to leave.

  In the morning Huoy and I were ordered to go to work, along with the other ‘new’ people. Leaving Ma behind in our camping spot, under another house on stilts, we walked for about an hour to a mountain called Phnom Chiso. It was a place of boulders, bare rock outcroppings, scrubby brush and trees whose leaves had fallen off in the heat of the dry season. One part of the mountain was a rock quarry. I knew it well, for my father had often driven there to get loads of gravel for his truck when I was a child, and sometimes I had gone along for the ride.

  The supervisor issued us ordinary-size hammers, took us to piles of fist-size rocks and told us to break the rocks down into gravel size. The gravel was going to be used as ballast on railroad tracks, he said.

  We began. Chips flew off the rock when we hit it, and I told Huoy to wrap her krama around her face so it covered everything but her eyes. I did the same, and I had the additional protection of my glasses. We found that the rocks had a grain running in one direction and there was a knack to hitting them to make them split. We hammered rocks all morning and tried to avoid hitting our free hands or our faces with flying chips. There was no shade on the mountain and it was very hot.

  In the early afternoon they gave us our first meal of the day, a bowl of salted rice porridge, or rice that has been boiled into a sort of mushy cereal. There was nothing else in it, no meat or vegetables to give it flavour. ‘Angka is poor, so you must sacrifice for your nation,’ the supervisor explained apologetically. ‘We are starting to rebuild the nation, to make it rich. We just got free from the hands of the capitalist oppressors.’

  I looked at my hands. At my capitalist hands. Blisters had erupted across my palms and on my fingers. Huoy’s blisters were even worse. As a schoolteacher, she had never held a heavier tool than a piece of chalk. She was not used to physical labour. All morning long while she broke rocks she had been crying quietly, not just because of the hard work but because our entire universe had been turned upside down. She was a soft, shy, maternal woman, and she wanted nothing more than to have babies and stay home and run a clean, well-ordered household. And that’s what I wanted for her.

  We went back to work, squatting on the mountainside in the afternoon heat, hitting the rocks with our hammers. When we built up a pile of gravel I hauled it in a basket to a nearby truck. As a boy I had waited in trucks just like that while other men broke the rocks and brought them over. Back then I had taken those men for granted, but now that I was in their place I remembered them with new respect. I knew now how hard it was to break rocks for a living.

  At the end of the afternoon we walked back to the village of the ‘old’ people. Dinner was a bowl of rice and some soup with vegetables and bits of fish, not enough to replace the energy we had used, but better than lunch. We settled back to massage our blisters and rest our tired bodies, thinking that the day was over. Then a soldier came up and told us, ‘Angka invites you to a bonn.’

  Bonn is an ancient religious word meaning a celebration or ceremony at a temple. I asked the soldier for time to bathe and change clothes and prepare food to bring to the monks. He told us to come as we were. Huoy and I obeyed rather reluctantly, because we were dusty and dirty. He led us to a clearing in the forest and turned us over to a mit neary, a female comrade, who was about eighteen years old. She took us down a path farther into the forest to another clearing where about twenty other ‘new’ people were sitting. We sat down with them in front of a big clump of bamboo.

  Like the others of her kind, the mit neary made no attempt to look feminine or attractive. As she faced us in the fading light I saw a young woman who aspired to con
form. If she had ambition, it was to obey Angka with perfect zeal. Her appearance was standard, her tunic buttoned to her neck, her hair cut short and parted in the middle with the sides tucked behind her ears. She had that same contemptuous expression toward us ‘new’ people as most of her comrades.

  She addressed us in a harsh voice, without any opening remarks or pleasantries:

  ‘Angka won the war,’ she began. ‘Not by negotiation. Not by sompeah’ – she gestured scornfully with her palms together – ‘to the Lon Nol government, or to the US government, or to the other capitalists. We won by fighting!

  ‘At the beginning we had only empty hands,’ she declared. ‘We had no rifles, no ammunition. Then we got slingshots. Bows and arrows. Crossbows. Wooden traps. Knives and hatchets. We used hoes and sticks. And we fought until we won against the capitalists! We were not afraid of the American government or the other big powers!’

  What kind of folk tale is this? I wondered. They had AK-47s. They bought heavy weapons from corrupt generals of the Lon Nol regime.

  The mit neary raised her fists and shouted, ‘We were like an ant that bit an elephant! The US government looked down on the small ant and laughed! But then the big elephant died from our poisonous bite! We are not afraid of elephants! Or anyone else!’

  A mosquito whined in my ear and settled on my cheek. I slapped it.

  I had never heard anything as ridiculous as an elephant dying from an ant bite.

  ‘We have won the revolution but the war still goes on!’ she said. ‘Now we are in a new phase of struggle. We warn you that it will not be easy. We must maintain a mentality of struggling against all obstacles. If Angka says to break rocks, break rocks. If Angka says to dig canals, you must dig canals. If Angka says to farm, you must farm. Struggle against the elements! When there are obstacles, smash them. Only in this way can we liberate the country and liberate the people!’

  In the brief silence that followed, I nudged Huoy and she leaned close. I whispered to her, ‘When do we go to the bonn?’

  Huoy whispered back, ‘Be quiet.’

  The mit neary went on:

  ‘Don’t think back. Don’t think about houses, or big cars, or eating noodles, or watching television, or ordering servants around. That age is over. The capitalists destroyed the country. Right now, our economy is underdeveloped and we must build it up. You must maintain a revolutionary attitude, and you must keep your mind on the guiding principles, the ‘Three Mountains.’ They are:

  ‘ “Attain independence-sovereignty.” That is the first principle.

  ‘ “Rely on our own strength.” That is the second.

  ‘And “Take destiny in our hands.” Those are the “Three Mountains.” ’

  By then it was totally dark and mosquitoes were everywhere. I rubbed my hands over my ankles and arms and neck to protect myself. The mit neary talked on and on about the development of the economy and how we would all have to sacrifice. She used the same jargon over and over again about starting with an empty hand and struggling with the elements, and about the ant that killed the elephant, in case we didn’t understand the first time.

  It was a long evening.

  When we got back to the village, at about midnight, there was no water to wash with. I felt unclean.

  ‘Sweet,’ I said to Huoy, half-jokingly, ‘we have just taken the first step on the road to hell. We have gone to a bonn where all they talk about is war and economics.’

  For another few days, Huoy and I went off to break rocks in the mornings and we went to the so-called bonns at night. But I had already begun to plan our escape. From the beams of the house above us hung a bamboo shoulderboard. I found some braided cord in a neighbour’s yard and stole it. I made friends with the one dog of the village, patting him on the head and stroking his fur. On the fifth day, when the supervisor told us that Huoy’s mother would have to begin working, I made the decision to leave. Ma wasn’t strong enough to work with us in the quarry. And if she went off to work with us someone would be certain to search our luggage and discover the truth about our pasts.

  That night, long after everyone else in the village was asleep, we packed our essential belongings into two giant bundles to hang from the ends of the shoulderboard and into smaller bundles for the women to carry. With regret, I decided to leave the Vespa and the trailer behind.

  We crept out of the house in total darkness. I went off to calm the dog, who growled but didn’t bark, while Huoy and her mother went on ahead. When they were out of hearing I shouldered the heavy load and hurried after them. I came to a fork in the road but didn’t see them. I whispered, ‘Sweet! Sweet! Where are you?’ The two women, who had taken the wrong fork, reappeared and we set off in the right direction. When we walked beyond the trees of the village and into the open rice fields we found ourselves in bright moonlight. The moon, which was nearly full, was over our shoulders, distinctly illuminating the chequerboard pattern of the dykes in the rice fields.

  We cut across the fields. In the distance, at an angle, the headlights of truck convoys bobbed along National Route 2. Directly in front of us was a dark island of trees: another village. We detoured far around it. The dogs of the village heard us, and barked in the stillness of the night, and continued barking until we were on the other side of the village and far away.

  Near National Route 2 we took a break, resting in the tall grass. The muscles on top of my shoulders were sore from carrying the heavy loads. Still, I was encouraged. I knew where we were and where the checkpoints were likely to be. The women were tired but did not complain. They trusted me to lead them. And they cared about me. Huoy’s mother wrapped my shoulder-board in cloth, to cushion it, and we went on.

  We walked through Chambak on the road, and then through the flat wasteland of Samrong Yong. The young Khmer Rouge who had stood sentry at the main intersection was nowhere in sight. As dawn approached we hid in the ruins of a temple outside the village. Huoy rubbed my shoulders, which were red and badly swollen on both sides.

  We rested only an hour, then began walking again, up the deserted highway and then across the fields and through the forest. My shoulders hurt so much that I had to stop every few hundred yards to rest and shift the load to the other shoulder. Huoy gave me cold water compresses with her krama to soothe the pain. She was upset and it worried me that she was upset, but she kept herself under control.

  We walked on and off and rested in the fields. The next morning we got to Tonle Batí, and who should we see by the ornate village gate but my father and the rest of my family and the jeep. Much had happened since I had seen them last. We had camped on the ruins of the old family home. We had tried and then abandoned our plan to leave the country by ship, because of all the checkpoints. We had begun forced labour, attended bonns and escaped from the village of the ‘old’ people. It seemed like a lifetime, but we had only been apart from my family for a little over a week.

  12

  The Crocodile Loses Its Lake

  The ancient town of Tonle Batí lies alongside a long, thin lake of the same name. Within Cambodia, the town is famous for its temple or wat, a marvellous example of its kind. A reflecting pond with lotus plants and goldfish surrounds the wat on three sides, and on the fourth a grand stairway leads up to the entrance, with railings in the curving shape of nagas, or holy seven-headed serpents; the nagas have their hoods spread and mouths open wide to frighten off evildoers and protect those who worship inside. Next to the wat is the sala or hall, open on the sides, with pillars supporting a multilevel roof. Nearby stand temple outbuildings, some of them dating back to the ancient empire at Angkor seven centuries ago and made of reddish stone blocks with sculptures carved in deep relief. In one of those Angkorian buildings sits a huge, bronze Buddha figure, recently but exquisitely made. It was the statue my father brought back from Thailand on his truck when I was a boy.

  The temple had the same importance to us that a large cathedral or abbey would have had in the Middle Ages in France. Parents sent
their sons to the temple to learn to read and write, and to become monks temporarily in the rite of passage to manhood. The monks in turn went out in the community every morning collecting alms. In both religious and secular matters, the temple had been the centre of Tonle Batí for more generations than anyone could remember. But by the time my family and I arrived there, in mid-May 1975, the Khmer Rouge had forced the monks out of the wat, stripped them of their saffron robes and made them change into black pajamas. They said that by accepting alms the monks were parasites living off the labour of others. Or, as a mit neary explained to us, ‘The monks use other people’s noses to breathe. It is Angka’s rule: Breathe by your own nose.

  Buddhism was the old religion we were supposed to discard, and Angka was the new ‘religion’ we were supposed to accept. As the rainy season began – normally the time when youths from the surrounding villages would shave their heads and join the monkhood – soldiers entered the empty wat and began removing the Buddha statues. Rolling the larger statues end over end, they threw them over the side, dumped them on the ground with heads and hands severed from the bodies, or threw them into the reflecting pond. But they could destroy only the outward signs of our religion, not the beliefs within. And even then, as I noticed with bitter satisfaction, there was one statue they did not destroy. It was the bronze Buddha, still gleaming inside the small Angkorian outbuilding. It had taken all my father’s ingenuity to manoeuvre the heavy statue inside the narrow stone entrance. The Khmer Rouge couldn’t figure how to get it out, much less smash it. They didn’t have the intelligence, or the tools.

  In Tonle Batí the Khmer Rouge made us go to bonns, or brainwashing sessions, the same as in the village Huoy and I had just come from. They were always at night and usually in some mosquito-infested clearing in the forest. One evening, however, the Khmer Rouge leaders held a special bonn in the sala or hall next to the temple itself. We in the audience sat on the cool, smooth wooden floor. Soldiers had rigged a loudspeaker system powered by truck batteries. Standing near the microphone were cadre with the usual black cotton trousers and shirts, plus red headbands and red kramas tied like sashes around their waists. Outside, a light rain fell. One of the costumed men stepped to the microphone and spoke.