Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  On the second morning we saw the California coastline and a lot of houses close together and tiny-looking cars on the roads and then we landed at San Francisco. We stood in line for a long time to get our I-94 forms from immigration, which we put carefully in our white ICEM bags with all the other forms we were carrying. Then we obediently got onto the most modern buses I had ever seen. When the driver pulled a handle to open the front door, the back door opened too; when he closed the front door, the back door closed the same way. I sat in the front seat to watch. We drove up the freeway, across the Bay Bridge, along more freeway on the other side. It didn’t look anything like the John Wayne cowboy movie. There were streets, houses and cars beyond number, but nobody was riding horses and nobody was on foot. I thought: How do people meet and talk if they don’t see each other in the streets? How can I find a job in a place like this?

  They took us to a former military base up in the hills to recover from the flight. Cambodians who had arrived a few months before were there to serve us Cambodian food and answer our questions. I asked how to make a telephone call, and a man volunteered to make a call for me when he left because there weren’t any telephones nearby. I asked him to call my cousin Try Thong to come get me. Try Thong lived in a place called Los Angeles. I was scheduled to go to Ohio, and wherever that was I knew I didn’t want to go there.

  The man who had offered to call didn’t come back the next day. I paced back and forth like a caged animal. I didn’t know where I was and didn’t like being at the mercy of other people. I had helped rescue Try Thong’s sisters and their children from the Thai-Cambodian border and sneak them into Khao-I-Dang. It seemed reasonable to expect that Try Thong could rescue me.

  On my third morning in America my name and T-number were called on the loudspeaker system and I got on a bus that took me back to the San Francisco airport. At the airport terminal someone told me to sit and wait for somebody else who would show me where to go. I sat down with my two large suitcases and a heavy cardboard box full of medical books. Twenty minutes later a young curly-haired Cambodian working for my sponsoring organization, US Catholic Charities (USCC), appeared and told me to follow him. He didn’t use the courteous words that are normal when talking to an older person in Khmer. He started down a long corridor.

  ‘Luk,’ I called after him anxiously. ‘Please wait. I have to take my luggage in relays.’

  ‘All right, but hurry up,’ he said. I ran after him with one suitcase, came back for the next, then the box of books. By the time I caught up to the first suitcase he was nowhere in sight.

  My own countryman had abandoned me. Like the guides who had abandoned us on the way to the Thai-Cambodian border.

  I had no idea where I was, or what flight I was supposed to take.

  I waited.

  A lady at a ticket counter nearby saw me sitting alone and discouraged and asked, ‘Where are you going?’

  I said, ‘I don’t know. I a refugee.’ I walked over to the counter and showed her my papers, my I-94 form, my photograph and T-number from Lumpini. This was to prove I was legally in America, so she wouldn’t make me leave. She stared at my papers and didn’t know what to make of them.

  ‘Who’s taking care of you?’ she asked me finally.

  I said, ‘Cambodia guy. My plane is a ten-thirty plane.’

  She started making phone calls to see what plane I was supposed to be on. Another lady came over and I showed her my papers too.

  She studied them.

  ‘Your plane’s already left,’ she decided.

  The women called USCC, which had an office somewhere in the airport. I waited nervously for another hour and then someone from USCC showed up. We walked down one long corridor and then the next and the next and finally into the office. Some other refugees were there speaking Vietnamese. Then the young Cambodian with the curly hair appeared.

  ‘Where did you go?’ he asked ‘I waited for you.’

  I gave him an angry look.

  ‘Luk,’ I replied sarcastically in Khmer, ‘don’t ask me where I am going. Ask yourself where you are going. Do you know what you are doing, little boy? Don’t forget, if there were no refugees, you would not have a job here. And your job is to help refugees.’

  The Vietnamese were trying to get me to calm down, but I was just getting started. I pointed my finger at the young man and shook it right in his face.

  ‘I told you I had a lot of things to carry, but you didn’t offer to help me!’ I shouted. ‘You were supposed to take care of me. It was an easy little job, but you couldn’t even do it. You pretend you’re so important that you can’t even be bothered! You’ve got to remember something, motherfucker: I know nothing here. I’m like an animal from the jungle. I’m a refugee. You have an obligation to help me. You’re Cambodian and I’m Cambodian. We’re from the same place. You should have helped me, but you didn’t. That’s why the country fell, because of stupid, arrogant people like you who only think about themselves!’

  I was just getting started, but the American boss showed up. He invited me into his private office to talk. I didn’t have the vocabulary to tell him everything in English that I’d told the young man in Khmer. But he got the general idea.

  At eleven-thirty that evening I landed in the airport at Columbus, Ohio. My friend and co-sponsor Hay Peng Sy met me there. I knew him when he was a pilot for Lon Nol and then got to know him better in Lumpini. He had come to the United States ahead of me and had gotten a job in Columbus as a caseworker for USCC, which is why USCC was my institutional co-sponsor. Following the Western custom, Hay Peng Sy had changed his name to Peng Sy Hay, with his family name last. Similarly, my name was changed from Ngor Haing Samnang to Haing Samnang Ngor.

  We went to his house. The next day we went to the USCC office to do paperwork and then went out to look for apartments. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t want to repay his kindness with ingratitude, but I had no intention of renting an apartment in Columbus. The place I wanted to be was called Los Angeles. I didn’t know where Los Angeles was. I didn’t know whether it was a state or a city, whether it was big or small, on the seacoast or in the mountains, hot or cold, or whether a lot of Cambodians lived there or only a few. All I knew was that my niece Ngim was there, Balam was there and so was my other cousin Try Thong. That was all I needed to know.

  I hung around Columbus for a few days, watching the programmes on a black-and-white TV. It was hard to understand what the TV characters were saying because they spoke too fast. I took a short trip on a Greyhound bus to South Bend, Indiana, to visit some Cambodian friends, then returned to Columbus.

  I had left Thailand with about twelve hundred dollars, my savings from working as a refugee camp doctor. The money was already slipping away, with gifts and with the trip to Indiana. For three hundred dollars of my remaining money I bought a plane ticket to Los Angeles. My second cousin Try Thong picked me up at the LA airport. He had left Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge takeover and had been in the United States since then. He was quite Americanized: instead of reversing the order of his names, he had changed his name to Phillip Thong. He was a smart fellow, younger than me, and he was doing well for himself as an accountant.

  From Phillip’s house I called my cousin Balam. Balam and I had drifted apart when I was working in Khao-I-Dang, but I had counted on staying with him until I found a place of my own. I was disappointed. Balam said there wasn’t enough room in his apartment for me. He explained that there was a maximum-occupancy rule. His landlord didn’t want more than four people living in a two-bedroom apartment, and there were already more than that, with Ngim. I thought: Whatever the landlord is like, he isn’t Khmer Rouge. If we break the rules he isn’t going to kill us. But I kept my mouth shut and stayed the night with Phillip Thong.

  The next day I went over to Balam’s apartment, outside LA’s Chinatown. Balam helped me find and rent a tiny room around the corner in the same apartment complex. It was a ten-by-fifteen-foot room with a kitchen in an
outlying alcove and a small bathroom. The main room had two sets of louvred windows beside the door and a view of the trash cans across the alley.

  The deposit was $150, the first month’s rent another $150. There was already a sofa-bed, which Ngim would use. Balam and I went out to buy a bed for me, a table and some other furnishings for a total of about $350. Ngim and I moved in that night. There was no food in the refrigerator. I had $4 left to my name.

  39

  Starting Over

  In America it never occurred to me that my life was in any danger or that there was any risk of starvation. I wasn’t worried about having only four dollars.

  Sure enough, the morning after Ngim and I moved into our tiny apartment two Cambodians appeared at our door. The woman had been my patient in Thailand; she brought her husband, whom I had not met before. These two good-hearted people took us out to eat and showed me around LA. With money they loaned, I bought food and rice from a store in Chinatown. I bought bowls, pots and chopsticks from a flea market.

  No doubt about it: we were going to get by.

  Now that we had a place to live and a supply of food the next question was deciding how to make a living. I wanted to practise medicine, but to get a US medical licence I would first have to pass an English-language proficiency exam and then probably go back to medical school for refresher courses before taking the boards. I was willing to do that, but it didn’t solve the problem of supporting Ngim and myself in the meantime. I could have gone on welfare, which would have paid $214 a month plus some extra for Ngim, but that didn’t seem worth it. I decided to postpone medical school and get a job.

  My first job was as a night security guard for a company outside of Chinatown. While looking for something better I took English as a Second Language (ESL) classes at Evans Community College, just a few blocks away. English is not a logical language, and I have always found it difficult. ‘Rice’ rhymes with ‘ice’ but not with ‘police.’ The ‘gh’ in the word ‘thought’ is silent, but in the word ‘rough,’ ‘gh’ sounds like ‘f.’ How is anybody supposed to understand the rules?

  Slang made English even more mysterious. I used to wonder what it meant when an American shook my hand and said, ‘You bet.’ Did he want to make a bet with me? Had I committed myself to making a bet without knowing it when I shook his hand? Should I have kept my mouth shut? I could make myself understood in English, but I knew I was never going to feel completely comfortable. It was much easier for Ngim, who was in elementary school, because she was younger. She could already speak English almost as well as an American.

  In November 1980 I became a caseworker for the Chinatown Service Centre, which was within walking distance of my apartment. My office, called the Indochinese Unit, provided a free job-placement service to refugees. About half our clients were Vietnamese, a third or more Cambodian and the rest Laotian. Usually my clients and I could find a language in common. If Khmer or Teochiew didn’t work, we tried French or Mandarin or English or even Thai. Generally we could exchange basic ideas, with the help of my co-workers if necessary.

  Being a caseworker was satisfying. It didn’t have the status or the money of being a doctor, but it allowed me to help refugees, which was what I wanted. I translated between my clients and their landlords. I filled out welfare application forms, enrolled children in public schools, arranged for adults to attend ESL classes, explained telephone bills and inquired about relatives in the refugee camps of Thailand. As I gained experience I was asked to buy a car. In my new Volkswagen I drove my clients to the hospitals, to the welfare office, to job interviews all over LA.

  Jobs were the main focus. As refugees we had to start over at the bottom and take whatever was available. I got my clients jobs as dishwashers, waitresses and waiters, cooks, cleaners, landscaping workers, common labourers, assembly line workers in electronics factories, zip code sorters, baby-sitters and piecework sewers. A few of the more educated ones were hired as secretaries and bank tellers. The average job paid only $4.00 to $4.50 an hour, but the starting pay wasn’t as important as getting established and then moving up.

  At that time there were six to seven thousand Cambodians in and around Chinatown and about the same number of Vietnamese. The Vietnamese adapted quite well and generally moved up the career ladders much more quickly than the Cambodians, who were shy and passive. Often when I set up job interviews the Cambodians didn’t even show. They were afraid they would lose face because they didn’t speak good English. They were afraid to take risks. They were unhappy in their personal lives. In Cambodian households, arguments, excessive drinking, wife-abuse and divorce were all common.

  It was clear that there was a massive mental health problem among Cambodian refugees. I understood it because I had had my share of mental problems too. We had all been traumatized by our experiences. We had all lost parents or brothers or children. Many of us had horrible dreams, night after night. We felt isolated and depressed and unable to trust anyone. What made it worse was that we were in a culture totally unlike our own.

  In Cambodia a way of life had evolved over many hundreds of years. It was much simpler than America, and that was part of its beauty. In Cambodia we didn’t have welfare or Social Security. We didn’t have day-care centres or old-age homes or psychiatrists. We didn’t need them. All we needed were our families and the monks. Most households had three generations living together. The grandparents helped raise their grandchildren. The adults in the middle put the food on the table. When there were problems and arguments the monks helped take care of them. The monks helped teach the children proper behaviour and taught them how to read and write in temple schools. They also took in orphans and old people with nowhere else to go. In exchange for conducting religious ceremonies and everything else they did, we gave the monks alms, and we sent our teenage boys to them to become monks for at least a short time. The system was not perfect, but it worked. Everybody had enough to eat. Cambodian society was stable. For generation after generation we followed our customs, until in 1975 the communists put an end to our way of life. We lost everything – our families, our monks, our villages, our land, all our possessions. Everything. When we came to the United States we couldn’t put our old lives back together. We didn’t even have the pieces.

  In Thailand a smart Cambodian could figure out some of the words on a street sign and understand part of a Thai conversation because the language and alphabet were similar. In the United States the language was totally different. Not being able to read the street signs, talk to the people or even understand the TV programmes left the average Cambodian isolated, which made the depression worse.

  There were no real temples to go to. There was a makeshift temple inside an ordinary house in a run-down section of Long Beach, southwest of LA, where a lot of Cambodians lived. There was a Thai temple with traditional architecture and Thai monks. But for most Cambodians these temples were beyond walking distance. We had to drive to go anyplace, and we had to organize trips on the weekends, when those who had cars were free.

  Almost everything was different about America. Men who used to be wealthy merchants and officers in the Lon Nol regime stayed on welfare. They didn’t want to lose face among their friends by taking low-status jobs like driving taxis or working in warehouses. Men who had been brave in combat became timid, afraid of the blacks and Hispanics on the streets. They went into supermarkets and only saw what was not as good as Cambodia, that the vegetables were not as fresh, that there were few tropical fruits, that there was no bargaining over prices. They noticed that much of American daily life is impersonal. Shopping. Driving on the freeways. Watching TV. They found they could go for days at a time without talking to anybody.

  I missed Cambodia too. The food and the bargaining and the market gossip. Praying in the temples and walking along the boulevards in the warm, quiet evenings. Most of all I missed Huoy. But I saw many good things about America. It was much cleaner than Cambodia. There weren’t as many flies. The tap water was safe t
o drink. People were more educated. Ngim liked America too. She was getting excellent grades in school. Her classmates couldn’t pronounce her name easily, so we chose a new name, ‘Sophia.’ It is Western but also Eastern, a name that came to Cambodian culture through Sanskrit.

  I had a job, a car, a niece I was raising as a daughter. Life was very comfortable. I never had to worry about chhlop spying on me, or soldiers tying me up and taking me away. When I woke up in the morning, I felt no terror. I knew for sure that I would live through the day and through the week and for many years ahead.

  Once, as I was driving along in my VW and stopped at a light, I saw a dog being walked on a leash. The owner stopped to pat the dog, the dog wagged its tail and I remembered what I told Huoy about dogs in America living better than people on the front lines. It was true: dogs did live better. America was a prosperous place. Then the light changed to green and I drove off to my next appointment, amazed at my good fortune.

  By March 1982 I had lived in America for a year and a half. I spent most of my time with fellow Cambodians. Through my work I helped refugees adjust to their new lives, and indirectly this helped them recover from the trauma of their old lives. But we didn’t talk much about what had happened under the Khmer Rouge. We kept our memories bottled up inside.

  One day in March two acquaintances of mine dropped by the Chinatown Service Centre to see me. They were Sisowath Sourirath, of the minor branch of the Cambodian royal family, and Jean Fernandez, the younger brother of a general in the Lon Nol regime. We were all getting by, but none of us had regained the status or the wealth we had had in Cambodia. Jean Fernandez was selling life insurance. Sisowath was working for the Catholic Welfare Bureau in Long Beach. He had helped me fill out an application to buy a set of encyclopedias, but the encyclopedia company had turned me down because my credit wasn’t good enough. When Sisowath and Jean came in that day they said they were applying for something else now, for roles in a Hollywood film about Cambodia. They said I had to apply. I told them no thanks.