Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  I remember one patient above all others, a dehydrated twelve-year-old girl with falciparum malaria. She was an orphan, black staring eyes in a flesh-covered skeleton. A Western doctor had taken her history and her blood, and the lab was running the tests on her. She was lying on the bed without focusing. She had rejected her food. There was nobody around her. I sat on the bed and picked her up in my arms. She was nearly weightless. I talked to her in Khmer and got her to swallow a few spoonsful of food. She was conscious, though not by much, and I knew she was listening. Then her head jerked back with a spastic gasp of air and it jerked back six or seven more times and then after one last deep breath her head sagged to one side with her eyes half open.

  I could hardly work the rest of that day. The girl’s death was too close, too personal. She had lived under the same regime, seen the same clouds in the same sky. She had lost her family and I had lost mine. When she died I was holding her in my arms, the same way I had held Huoy.

  Around me were dying Cambodians, Western doctors working hard to save them and cheerful little children peering through the split-bamboo walls, calling out, ‘Okay, bye-bye.’

  By December 1979 the World Food Programme, UNICEF and other organizations were delivering large amounts of rice along the border. Some of it never reached the refugees. The Khmer Rouge took what they could, and so did the Khmer Serei warlords, who sometimes sold the rice they stole back to the UN so it could be distributed a second or third time. But even with the stealing there was more food on the border than before, partly because of international aid and partly because of the black-market traders. Each morning a stream of Thais headed for the border carrying everything from live chickens to vegetables to soft drinks to soap, radios and bicycles. The refugees produced bits of gold they had kept hidden for years, and deals were made. By this time, also, the border camps had better medical care than in the months before.

  In Khao-I-Dang itself the medical crisis eased. The patients who were strong enough to survive their first few days in the hospital generally recovered. They regained alertness, filled out in body size, started to talk again. They got better quickly because they were physically tough – they had to be, to come this far – and because of Western-style medicine, which had far better healing properties than the ‘rabbit turds’ and other herbal medicines of the Khmer Rouge era.

  Western aid poured into Khao-I-Dang. The original bamboo shed where I worked became the adult medicine ward, run by the American Refugee Committee (ARC), of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Bamboo-and-thatch wards sprang up on both sides of a street, specializing in paediatrics, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, feeding and rehabilitation and so on, each one run by a different foreign voluntary agency. Thirty-seven of these agencies, most of them from the United States, France or Germany, ran programmes in Khao-I-Dang. Ironically they had come in response to photographs and television footage taken in the Sakeo camp of starving Khmer Rouge. But I was glad they were there, and they surprised me with their energy and their good hearts. I had never seen people who worked with such determination and who got so much done. Public-health workers, teachers, journalists, administrators, immigration officers, politicians – the Westerners kept coming and coming.

  And the Cambodians kept flowing into the camp. They cut trees down for firewood until the hillside was bare. They built shacks with bamboo and thatch and palm-leaf panels and the blue plastic tarps. The shacks spread along a gridwork of red-clay roads with familiar names, like Angkor and Monivong and Phnom Penh. The population climbed to an official figure of 130,000, though the actual figure was higher. At its peak, Khao-I-Dang was the largest settlement of Cambodians anywhere in the world.

  At night the camp was unsafe. There were revenge killings, robberies and rapes. Thai villagers came over the fence at night to sell goods, and Thai soldiers fired at those who wouldn’t give them bonjour. Under the dirt floors of the shacks were storage holes and tunnels. Most of the families in camp had something or someone to hide.

  During the day, when the Westerners were there, the camp had a better character. It was a place for life to begin again, for bargaining at the market, for praying at the temple. Because of the chance of resettling abroad, most of Cambodia’s old middle class and elite showed up in Khao-I-Dang. People who hadn’t seen each other since the fall of Phnom Penh met in the red-clay streets and asked each other how they had survived. The camp was like a city. Besides hospitals it had schools, workshops, soccer fields, quasi-legal markets, cafes, tailor shops, a temple and a tracing centre where people went to look at notices and photographs of missing relatives.

  Finding our families – that was the most important goal. For us ‘family’ had come to include cousins so remote that the exact connection had been forgotten or had never even existed. A relative on my father’s side, an older woman whom I had always called ‘Aunt,’ flew from France to Thailand to bring money to her daughters, who were refugees in Khao-I-Dang. She could not get a pass to visit the camp and I became her messenger. A few months later another of her daughters, who also lived overseas, came to see me. She gave me money too, some for her sisters, some for myself.

  With the money I hired a young man to take a letter from me to my brother Hok in Battambang. Hok, his wife and his baby walked into Khao-I-Dang while it was still legal. Then I sent a message to my other brother, Hong Srun, in Phnom Penh. Hong Srun had heard of the Thai massacre at Preah Vihear and decided not to come, but the word spread, and more cousins showed up on the border.

  By this time, about March 1980, the Thai government had ended its open-door policy. Refugees could not just walk into Khao-I-Dang from the border anymore. A bearded American doctor who worked for one of the relief agencies decided to help me. A driver took us to the border. We loaded my cousins into the van, made them lie down and pretend to be sick, put bandages on them and rigged up IV bags. At the Khao-I-Dang gate the guard just waved us through. The Western doctors did most of the smuggling of this type, because the Thai guards deferred to them.

  I worked at the ARC adult medicine ward all day, seven days a week. At first it was hard for me to understand the Americans’ English. I also found that my techniques of treatment were not always the same as theirs. In Cambodia, for example, we had used much higher doses of antibiotics on our patients than the Americans did. Gradually, however, over the weeks and months, my confidence returned. The American doctors were both friendly and skilfull. We saw a lot of oedema or kwashiorkor cases at first, and after that malaria and tuberculosis, fungus infections and occasional cases of leprosy. We got overflow cases from surgical recovery, and we did some minor surgery ourselves. Besides me, the Cambodian staff included another doctor, a couple of medical students and some unusually talented young nurses and translators.

  At the end of the afternoon I was the only Cambodian to climb into the van with the Americans. Twenty-one of us lived together in a rented house on a dirt lane near the Shell gasoline station in Aranyaprathet. Following the Asian custom, we left our shoes and sandals on the stairs to the upper floor. But on the porch that had been converted into a dormitory men and women slept on mattresses next to each other and thought nothing of it, which Asians would never do. In the tiny bedrooms of the house there were some very noisy night-time romances going on, which was also un-Asian; because Asians are afraid of losing face, we are much more discreet.

  In the evening, before going to sleep, I watched the gecko lizards scuttle up the walls and perch upside down on the ceiling, without blinking, next to the fluorescent lights. Automatically I calculated what I would have to do to catch them. And then I thought, No, I can let you survive now. Things have changed. No more killing. No more hunting wild animals. It is a time to live and let live.

  The others on the ARC team were very kind. When I tried to tell my story they listened, even though it was painful for them and even though my English wasn’t good. They invited me to all the Westerners’ parties on Saturday nights and I danced to loud rock music. I even danced
with the ARC leader, a redheaded woman who drove in from Bangkok every week, whose name was Susan Walker. Dancing Western-style was energetic and sweaty, the opposite of the Cambodian romvong. I liked it. In Cambodia I had always been more active than my friends, the first to get angry, the first to laugh, the last to leave the athletic fields. Now I had found a culture that was up to my speed. It was good to know these Westerners and to be working with them as a colleague.

  But I was not happy. When I was tired, and we were tired every evening from work, it was hard to communicate. I stopped trying to keep up with their rapid English and let my thoughts drift off. I always thought about the past.

  In truth, my depression was returning. I had come to Thailand in May 1979. As May and June and July of 1980 went by I heard no news about going to America. Balam and Ngim were there already. My brother Hok went there. The Americans I had known when I first came to Khao-I-Dang had left, and their places were taken by new volunteers. Even some of these had left. Everyone was going except for me. There was some problem with my immigration file at JVA, but nobody explained to me what it was.

  I was lonely. I met a young Thai woman of Cambodian descent who lived in Aranyaprathet. She had a round face and a light complexion. In profile she looked exactly like Huoy. She seemed to like me a lot. We talked about getting married. Then she saw the chain with the locket of Huoy around my neck and she asked me to take it off. I explained that I was showing my respect to Huoy for saving my life, but the woman became suspicious. She said she was sure Huoy was still alive inside Cambodia. She accused me of wanting her as a second wife. And her family looked down on me because I was a refugee. So nothing ever came of it.

  It was time to say, Okay, bye-bye. But by August 1980 it seemed that I would never leave Thailand. To me, and to hundreds of thousands less fortunate than me, Thailand had become a jail. We couldn’t go forward and we couldn’t go back. We were only a few miles from Cambodia; at night we could hear the rifle fire as factions of Khmer Serei attacked one another and the boom of artillery as the Vietnamese attacked the Khmer Rouge. In Khao-I-Dang security was tight. The fences were guarded. There were no trees left inside the camp and very little shade. It was a harsh, dusty place except when it rained, and then the red dust turned into mud. The terror was over, but our minds had not healed.

  38

  To America

  It was John Crowley who rescued me. I went into the JVA to talk to The Tiger’s replacement – by that time actually the replacement’s replacement – and got nowhere. There were still problems with my case, though what they were was not explained to me. No, I wouldn’t be going to the United States anytime soon. I walked angrily upstairs to John Crowley’s office. John Crowley wasn’t the boss of the JVA, but he ranked somewhere near the top.

  He looked up from his desk. ‘Well, well. Ngor Haing Samnang. What can I do for you?’ He always used my official name – I had added the ‘Samnang’ when I got to Thailand, and it appeared in all my files.

  ‘I vant to go America, John.’

  He flipped through some papers, ran his finger down a calendar. ‘The next flight is August sixteenth. That’s in four days. Go back to Aranyaprathet, pack your stuff and go. You ready?’

  ‘No. Next month I go. I haff too much to do. I haff many tings to buy.’

  He looked at me with a faint smile. ‘We have a lot of stores in the United States, you know. Don’t worry about the shopping.’

  ‘No, no, no. Too expensive in United States. Too, too expensive. I buy tings here.’ I didn’t tell him the real reason, which had nothing to do with shopping. Cambodians living overseas were sending money to me to bring to their relatives in the refugee camps. It was illegal for me to bring money into the camps, but I felt an obligation to do it, and I had to find someone else to take my place.

  We bargained for time and agreed that I would go on the flight the following week, on August 23. I thanked him, he shook my hand and wished me luck. I went to the Trocadero Hotel to get my paycheck from Susan Walker, the ARC leader. Susan was like John. She had never tried to patronize me and I had always respected her for that. She had always treated me like a fellow human being, and we had a good-hearted farewell.

  Then I went out and bought everything I didn’t think I would be able to find in the United States, like seeds for Asian vegetables, rubber shower sandals and a radio. (As it turned out, the same model radio was much cheaper in the United States, shower sandals were easy to buy and I never did get around to planting the vegetable seeds.) While in Bangkok I visited my benefactors, General Chana and Uncle Lo, to thank them for what they had done. Then I returned to Aranyaprathet to attend a party given in my honour in Khao-I-Dang. The ARC medical team was there, and so were many refugee friends, and there was music and dancing and happiness and some crying too.

  The next night I went to a Westerners’ party. There was an outdoor showing of an American film starring John Wayne as a cowboy who rode his horse through the desert and killed a lot of people. It was the first movie I had seen about America, and I asked one of my ARC medical colleagues, Dr Dale Fanney, if America was really like that, with so much violence and shooting. Dale kept a straight face and said I would see for myself when I got to the United States.

  From Aranyaprathet I went back to Bangkok and ran into John Crowley at the US embassy. He sighed and shook his head. By then it was about August 28. I had missed my flight.

  ‘Ngor Haing Samnang, you give me a headache.’

  ‘I sorry, John.’

  From then on everything was in a crazy rush. I never did get my predeparture medical inspection. Day after day my name had been announced over the loudspeakers in the Lumpini transit centre, and my friends had been cursing me. They all wanted to be in my place, leaving for America, and I hadn’t even bothered to show up for my medical appointment. Of course I wanted to leave for America, but on my own terms.

  On August 30, 1980, I finally left. Like everyone else, I had a white plastic handbag with the logo of ICEM (the International Committee for European Migration), the agency that ran the flights. Inside the handbag were my documents, including a photograph of me holding a card with my T-number, or transit number, which was 33144, like a prison convict holding his identification number for the authorities.

  It was not my first plane flight. During the Lon Nol regime I flew several times on DC-3s. Some of the other Cambodian, Vietnamese and Laotians refugees had also flown on military or commercial flights before the communist takeover. But for most of the refugees this was the first time inside an airplane. We were on a seven-hundred-seat Boeing 747 chartered from Flying Tiger Airlines. We filled every seat. Row after row, aisle after aisle, nothing showing over the seat tops but black Asian hair.

  As soon as the plane took off from the runway, the airsickness began. Lots of noisy vomiting, sometimes in the airsickness bags, sometimes not. The children rushed to the side of the plane to look out the window, old women began praying in loud voices and H’mong babies squatted in the aisles and peed. One old Cambodian lady told everyone in a loud voice not to touch the seat-reclining buttons in the armrests in case it caused the plane to fall into the ocean.

  I was the doctor on the flight and also the one who translated information into Khmer about fastening the seat belts, not smoking and using the emergency air supply. Someone else did the translating for Vietnamese and Lao. I got on the loudspeaker several times to remind the Cambodians how to use the lavatories. I told them not to be afraid. When they got inside the lavatories they should lock the door, because that would also turn the lights on. When they were finished with the toilet they should use the flushing handle. My advice didn’t do much good. Some of the Cambodians were so rural that they had never seen flush toilets before. I could see the confusion on their faces. They were afraid to ask questions, afraid to touch anything on the plane in case it broke and they would be blamed for it. But they were also afraid to disgrace themselves for soiling their clothes. Slowly, inevitably, as the
hours passed and as their bladders filled, they edged nervously toward the lavatories. Inside, I am sure, most of them squatted in darkness with their feet on the toilet seat in Asian style.

  The airline made one concession to us, and that was serving rice with all the meals. The stewardesses rolled their carts down the aisles and gave each of us a choice of chicken with rice or beef with rice. I peeled the foil off the food tray and looked at my meal, the chicken in one divider, the rice in another. There was something suspicious on top of the rice. I smelled it dubiously, tried a bit of it and didn’t eat any more. It was the first time I had tasted cheese sauce in my life. Cheese is practically unknown in Asia. People in the seats around me remarked that the rice wasn’t very good. We were all worried about the food in America if this was what it was going to be like.

  We made a refueling stop at Hong Kong, then headed across the Pacific for Honolulu. In the cabin, dark except for the overhead rows of little lights, we stayed awake and thought about America, the country that could build huge jets but couldn’t do something as simple as cook good rice. We sat in the darkness and listened to the quiet whooshing sound of the plane and the noise made by the refugees. Children cried and adults were throwing up, and the old ladies were still praying.

  In the daytime we had a long stopover in Honolulu. The second night began while we were en route to San Francisco. We were wondering how far away the continental United States could possibly be.