Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  ‘The very coldest,’ I repeated. ‘Two bottles.’

  He opened the bottles and we lifted them to our lips.

  After a few swallows I had to stop, the liquid was so cold. I could feel it going down my throat, cold and refreshing, all the way to my stomach. There was energy in my limbs. I felt revitalized, exhilarated. I took a deep breath and lifted the bottle to my mouth again.

  The Pepsi was like a drug. It made me stronger. Maybe it was the sugar and caffeine pouring into my malnourished body, but I think it was something else. To me, Pepsi meant that we had finally made it to the West.

  I finished the bottle and licked my lips.

  ‘Brother,’ I said, ‘it’s very, very tasty, isn’t it?’ Balam nodded but didn’t say anything. He was too busy drinking. ‘Two more!’ I shouted at the vendor.

  He poured the Pepsi into plastic bags for us this time, and put in plenty of ice. He put a straw in the mouth of each plastic bag, then tied them off with a rubber band, to make a carrying loop. I gave him twenty more baht.

  I sipped at the straw. ‘How good!’ I exclaimed. ‘Like real, real, Pepsi-Cola!’

  Before the revolution there had been Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola and other soft drinks in Phnom Penh. I took them all for granted. I hadn’t really liked any of them much.

  But this was different. Nothing had ever tasted this good before. And nothing has ever tasted that good since.

  I kept murmuring ‘How tasty’ as I walked back to the camp with my cousin. And, actually, I wanted more.

  35

  The Locket

  Cambodia has two traditional enemies: Vietnam to the east and Thailand (formerly Siam) to the west. Over the centuries we have had wars and border disputes with both of them.

  At the bottom of our differences is race. ‘Pure’ Khmers have dark brown skins. Vietnamese and Thais have pale yellow skins. To most Asians, including our neighbours, the lighter the skin colour, the higher the status. They look down on Cambodians for having darker skins than themselves. Cambodians, who are shy by nature, sometimes outwardly appear to accept a lower status while inwardly resenting it.

  Speaking different languages and belonging to competing nations have added to the friction. So does having long memories. Every Cambodian schoolchild knows that a Siamese invasion caused the downfall of the ancient Cambodian empire at Angkor. Every Cambodian knows the legend of the Vietnamese who used Cambodians’ heads for cooking stones.

  But of our two neighbours, we dislike the Thais less. Culturally we have much in common with them. We practise the same kind of Buddhism, called the ‘Lesser Vehicle’; our Buddha sculptures, temples and religious services are almost exactly the same. Most Vietnamese practise the ‘Greater Vehicle’ of Buddhism, whose temples, Buddha sculptures and services are noticeably different. The Khmer and Thai languages have many similar words, but Khmer and Vietnamese have few that are similar. The rural people of both Cambodia and Thailand build their houses on stilts, but the Vietnamese build on the ground.

  The result is that Cambodians and Thais have mixed feelings for each other. Sometimes we are hostile, sometimes we are friendly, and most of the time we are a combination of both.

  On the Thai-Cambodian border, in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime, the Thais were of mixed minds to us. Kindhearted Thai civilians brought gifts of clothing and food to refugees. (When they gave clothing to Ngim, I had to teach her how to put her palms together in the sompeah to give them proper thanks – she had forgotten her manners in the dark Khmer Rouge years.) But other Thais continued to rape, rob and terrorize the border camps. The Thai government was just as contradictory. It allowed international agencies to come to our aid, but on a few occasions its military treated us brutally. We never knew what to expect.

  Sitting in the Nong Chan border camp, malnourished, dressed in rags, Balam and I searched our brains for the names of people who could help us. One of them was a Thai gentleman named Chana Samuthawanija, who had been ambassador to Phnom Penh during the Lon Nol regime. Balam had then been a wealthy airline owner and a man of high social standing, and he had gotten to know Chana socially. Balam recalled that Chana spoke Khmer but didn’t read it, so I wrote a letter for Balam in French. We sent it off with a lot of other letters and appeals and soon forgot about it.

  A few weeks later, in June 1979, our names were called over a loudspeaker system. We went to see what it was about and found that a vehicle was waiting to take the entire family group to Bangkok, Thailand’s capital. Bewildered, we got in and were driven several hours to the Lumpini transit centre, a former army barracks with long, warehouse-like buildings, in Bangkok. Nobody explained to us what we were doing in Lumpini or why we had been taken there.

  Nor did we know how close we had come to tragedy at Nong Chan. The day after we left it, 110 buses drove in, part of an unannounced programme staged by the Thai military. Buses came to the other border settlements too. More than 45,000 Cambodians climbed in, believing they were being taken to different refugee camps where the conditions were better. Instead, the buses took them around the northern slope of the Dangrek Mountains to another part of the Thai-Cambodian border near an ancient temple, called Preah Vihear. There, with rifles and whips, Thai soldiers forced the refugees down a steep cliff and back onto Cambodian soil. At the bottom of the cliff was a minefield. Hundreds died in the mine explosions, thousands of dehydration and disease in the following days. Of the survivors, some headed back across Cambodia for the border camps where they had been before – to be robbed and raped by Thais again on the way.

  Balam and I didn’t hear anything about the Preah Vihear incident until later. At the time, we were looking around the Lumpini centre and trying to figure out what was going on. It was a confusing place, with many languages being spoken at the same time. In addition to the Cambodian refugees there were also Vietnamese and Laotians, including hilltribe people from Laos. I stared in disbelief at the women of the Laotian hilltribes. They wore strange headdresses and nursed their babies at enormous breasts. When they wanted to urinate they just squatted in full sight of everybody, lifted up their dresses and peed on the ground.

  From time to time lists of names were read over the loudspeaker system, and people rushed forward with their luggage to begin their trips to Western countries like America and France. I was sitting with my back to a wall, wearing a sarong, watching the goings-on. Ngim had washed my trousers, the only pair I had left after the border thieves. I kept an eye on my trousers as they were drying, so nobody would steal them. Toward midmorning there was a big commotion with police whistles and the gate opening and the guards saluting. A few minutes later the loudspeakers called out Balam’s name and mine.

  ‘Cousin, we are lucky!’ I exclaimed to Balam. ‘Today we are going to the United States. Ngim, please hand me my trousers.’

  ‘Praise the gods,’ Balam said, raising his eyes to the sky. ‘They have guided us out of hell and they are leading us to good fortune.’

  When we were fully dressed, Balam and I pushed our way through the crowd to the loudspeaker announcer. There Balam recognized a well-dressed man with a round face and a benign, wise expression. ‘It’s Ambassador Chana,’ Balam whispered. All around Chana, men and women were bowing and sompeahing. We joined them. At last we realized who had been responsible for getting us away from the border and bringing us here.

  ‘No, please, get up,’ Chana was saying in Khmer to the people who were bowing. He was not fluent in the language, but we had no trouble understanding him. Then he looked in our direction and began talking to us.

  ‘Balam, doctor, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You are alive. Don’t think too much about the past. You have survived. The past is over. I will take care of you. If you need anything, just ask.’

  Chana was almost in tears. His old friend Balam was a wreck of a man, skinny, dressed in rags, his hair prematurely grey. He looked at me and saw another wreck. He turned to his wife, who stood next to him, and said something in Thai. She reache
d into her purse and pulled out two stacks of money several inches thick. She gave one to Balam, the other to me. We accepted the money with our heads bowed.

  Then we did some fast talking.

  ‘Ambassador,’ I said, after Balam and I had come to agreement, ‘you have a very good heart. You brought us from the border and now you have helped us again by giving us money. We thank you both very, very much.’ I paused to see if he followed me. He did.

  ‘You have already given us the ultimate gift,’ I continued. ‘You have saved our lives. We accept your gift of money, but we wish to give it back to you. It is too much for us. We wish you to have it, so you will have savings for your old age.’

  Chana sincerely meant for us to take the money and he tried to press it on us, but we resisted, and finally his wife accepted it back. There was a deep and unspoken meaning to the exchange, and everyone there understood it. Balam and I still had our dignity. We initially accepted the money to give Chana face, then returned it to keep face ourselves and to show our respect for him.

  As it turned out, Chana had been in Peking talking to Sihanouk when our letter arrived. When Chana looked at it upon his return, he was mystified – he didn’t read French any more than he read Khmer, and he had to get the letter translated. But he was well aware of the desperate circumstances Cambodians were in, and he was probably more sympathetic to Cambodian refugees than anyone at his level of government. A few days after coming to see us, Chana, who was not only a diplomat but a major general in the Thai national police, sent passes to Balam and me. The passes allowed us to leave and enter Lumpini whenever we liked. But I didn’t use mine.

  I was still depressed. Black clouds closed in, blocking out the sun. I didn’t want to talk to the other refugees, or explore Bangkok. All I could think of was my family and Huoy.

  I remembered something Huoy told me during the Lon Nol regime. She said I should sell the gasoline trucks, buy an airplane ticket out of Cambodia and go wherever I wanted. That was just like Huoy. She didn’t even ask me take her along. She told me to leave the country for my sake. She wanted what was best for me.

  If I had listened to Huoy and left the country before the Khmer Rouge takeover, and taken her along, she would have been alive today. We would have been living happily together as man and wife. If I had listened to her, and if I had shown more leadership, I could have saved my entire family. But I hadn’t, and they died.

  If only I had listened.

  Besides Ngim and my cousin Balam, I had one other relative in Lumpini. He had a Chinese name, Lo Sun-main. We were not related by blood – he was actually my brother Hok’s brother-in-law – but we had been friends in Phnom Penh, and now that there were so few of us alive we felt a strong kinship. Sun-main saw that I was depressed. He tried to keep my spirits up. He talked with me and brought me food. He said the food came from a rich uncle of his who lived in Bangkok.

  He kept trying to get me to meet this uncle, but I resisted. My excuse was that I had nothing but rags to wear. And it was true that my hair was in my eyes, my spiky beard was an inch long, and I didn’t want to lose face by meeting strangers looking that way. But my real reason was that I wanted to remain in my misery and punish myself for my failures.

  Finally the uncle, Lo Pai-boon, came to visit Lumpini. He was about fifty years old, with thin hair combed straight back. His wife was plump and wore her hair long. They brought food and fruit to me – to this doctor-relative they had been hearing about. When they saw me they broke into tears. They bribed the gate guards and drove me home in their car.

  Uncle Lo had emigrated from Cambodia to Thailand as a child. He had worked hard, as overseas Chinese usually do, and he was now the owner of a large textile shop. He couldn’t remember much of the Khmer language. I didn’t speak much Thai. But we both knew the Chinese Teochiew dialect, and we had no trouble communicating. It was irrelevant that I was a Cambodian national and he was a Thai. Our backgrounds were close enough to connect us like a bridge.

  While I was sitting in his house in my torn clothes, he summoned a tailor, who came in and measured me from head to foot. When the tailor left, the neighbours started coming in with gifts and Uncle Lo introduced me as a close relative and a doctor. In a few hours the tailor returned with five pairs of trousers and five shirts, freshly made. Uncle Lo and his wife took me to a shoe store, and then food shopping. From there they took me to the best Chinese restaurant in Bangkok. He and his wife sat on either side of me, heaping food on my plate. It was the most delicious meal I had eaten in more than four years.

  Before he drove me back to Lumpini, Uncle Lo gave me 3,000 baht, which was then worth $150 US. And he wasn’t done. He invited me back a second time, gave me prescription eyeglasses and more clothes and more money, and did the same for Balam.

  With these two great gifts from Thai men – my full freedom from Ambassador Chana, and the clothes and money from Lo Pai-boon – I began to come out of my depression. But there was one more thing I needed to do before regaining self-respect.

  I took the ID card photograph of Huoy from my luggage. I put all the money from Uncle Lo in my pocket, and I showed the pass Chana had written to the guards at the Lumpini gate.

  In Bangkok’s Chinatown district, I had Huoy’s picture photographically copied onto a small heart-shaped piece of porcelain, then hand-coloured. I took the porcelain to a goldsmith and ordered a gold locket to fit. When the locket was done, I hung it around my neck on a chain.

  The locket was a talisman. Its heavy, reassuring weight was always there, under my shirt, over my heart. I truly believed that Huoy would guide and protect me as long as I wore it. I never took it off. She was with me, day and night.

  I began to feel better. Something like a normal human being. My grieving wasn’t over; and at night my dreams took me back to prison to be tortured again and again and again. But most days my mind was clear. I began to pay more attention to this remarkable place, Lumpini transit centre, whose occupants had all escaped from communist regimes.

  Camped next to me on mats was a Vietnamese family of ethnic Chinese background. Speaking in Mandarin Chinese, the lovely young daughter told me how her family had escaped Vietnam by boat. It was a dramatic story: hundreds of people crowded into small boats, storms approaching, waves breaking over the sides, everybody frantically bailing – and then Thai pirates. She didn’t say much about the pirates except that they robbed the refugees of gold, but I knew what had happened to her by what she didn’t say and by watching her expression. It made me glad that I hadn’t sailed from Kampot to Thailand with Huoy.

  There were also Chinese-speaking Laotians, merchants from the lowland towns and cities. They said that when the Pathet Lao communists took power in 1975, the soldiers and the high-ranking officials from the old regime were sent to ‘re-education’ camps in the countryside. There they were forced to work long hours and sit through boring propaganda meetings. It was like the front lines in Cambodia except that far fewer died, because the Pathet Lao communists were not as cruel and not as fanatical. But the Pathet Lao attempt to reorganize the countryside into collectives was no more successful than the Khmer Rouge attempt, and most of the educated people and many of the peasants decided to leave. They crossed the Mekong River to Thailand, some of them swimming at night, others hiring boats or bribing officials to let them leave in broad daylight.

  Unlike the lowlanders, the Laotian hilltribes didn’t speak any of the languages I did, so I never got their story directly. But I learned that the men had been guerrillas for a CIA-backed army that fought in the mountains of Laos against the North Vietnamese. Their war didn’t end with the takeover in 1975. The Vietnamese kept attacking. The hilltribes fought back as long as their supplies held out, then left when there was no other choice. The men were sturdy and tough, with black baggy trousers that went down to the middle of their shins. Their children were dirty and usually had snot running out of their noses. They were from different tribes, the H’mong and Yao and others. Some of the
women wore headdresses with coins jangling, while others wore cloth wrapped around their heads like turbans, and necklaces made of silver.

  With the Vietnamese and Cambodians and Laotians, the lowlanders and highlanders, the city people and rural people, the French-speaking intellectuals and the peasants who had never worn shoes in their lives, Lumpini was like Indochina in miniature. The teenagers were always fighting, just like the adults in their home countries, and the Vietnamese teenagers were the most aggressive of all. Speaking different languages, belonging to different races and cultures, we didn’t think of ourselves as ‘Indochinese’ or as ‘Indochinese refugees’. Besides suffering under communism, we had little in common.

  But it was an interesting place. I started working as a volunteer in the medical clinic with a Vietnamese doctor, a very nice man who was a refugee like me. Speaking in French, we agreed that the Vietnamese were in the best physical shape of the refugees, the Cambodians in the worst shape, and that the most serious health problem in Lumpini was mental depression. No matter where the refugees came from, most were traumatized from the loss of their families and their ways of life.

  Working in the clinic, I began to make a lot of friends. Even the Thai guards started coming to see me for their medical problems, usually venereal disease. The guards liked me. They said I could leave or enter Lumpini anytime I wanted, with or without a pass. So finally I did.

  The streets of Bangkok were jammed with buses, cars, trucks and three-wheeled samlor taxis whose noisy diesel engines gave off clouds of greasy exhaust. Motorcycles swooped and darted through the traffic with suicidal daring. Water taxis roared through an old network of canals, and ferries travelled back and forth across the Chao Phraya River. It was not a clean city. The air was smoggy and the water in the canals was black and disgusting. But I liked Bangkok. It was exciting and energetic. Everywhere there were high-rise buildings and skyscrapers and overpasses. The noise of traffic and construction came from all directions, at all hours of the day and night. I had never seen so many televisions, radios, refrigerators, restaurants, bars and soccer fields. The people were well dressed. Their standard of living was high.