Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  They tried to get me interested in the film, but I really wasn’t listening. Clients were walking into the office and I had to help them find jobs. My clients were real people with real problems, and I didn’t have time for daydreams.

  But rumours of the film swept through the Cambodian communities in LA and Long Beach. Everybody had heard about it. A lot of people dreamed about being in a Hollywood movie, and many had applied. For them, I think, that was the real America, the money and the opportunity they’d wanted to believe in back in the refugee camps. I knew how their minds worked. Everybody who applied for a part in the movie secretly thought he was going to be a star and get rich overnight. They wanted to forget about the other America – working in a regular job to pay for rent and food and gasoline while never getting ahead, or only getting ahead slowly.

  I didn’t want anything to do with movies. In Cambodia acting had been a low-paid profession without any particular status. I had been a doctor. I had owned a Mercedes and part of a medical clinic. Maybe I wasn’t a doctor now, and maybe I wasn’t wealthy, but everybody knew that I used to be. There was no need for me to stoop to a low-class job like acting.

  Some Cambodians who lived in Oxnard, up the coast from LA, invited me to a wedding party. I really didn’t want to go. It was an hour and twenty minutes each way on the freeway, plus the money for gas. It rained the whole way up there, the windshield wipers of my Volkswagen slapping back and forth. When I walked in the door, Jean Fernandez and other friends greeted me. Most of the wedding guests were Cambodian. The most obvious exception was a black American woman who said her name was Pat Golden. She was from the movie studio. She asked me to sit for a photograph and give her my name and phone number. But a live band was playing and the guests were dancing the romvong, gracefully and slowly waving their hands to the music. It had been a long time since I had danced the romvong and I told her no.

  She didn’t let me get away. Every time I left the dance floor she came up to me. She had already taken Jean Fernandez’s picture. She had taken nearly everyone’s picture. An old man who was drunk pushed me forward and told me to go ahead, it wasn’t going to cost me anything.

  I told Pat Golden I had come there to have fun and I hoped she wouldn’t bother me.

  ‘Keep cool,’ she said, patting me on the shoulder. She wore casual clothes, blue jeans and a white shirt, but she looked well dressed in them. She had a low, husky voice and a gap between her front teeth and a very strong, confident character. She said there were no forms to fill out. All she wanted to do was take my picture and get my phone number.

  I told her, ‘Okay. I let you take pictures if you give me vun for a souvenir.’

  The living room was crowded and she had me stand in the hallway, outside the bathroom door. She asked me to take my glasses off. She pressed the button on the Polaroid, and the flash went off and a shiny piece of paper ejected from the front of the camera. She took another picture, gave me one, and I stared at it to see what would develop. It just looked like me without my glasses. Not a handsome guy, not young, not a movie-star type.

  Two weeks passed, then a month, then two months and three months without a word from her.

  In the fourth month she called me on the telephone. She wanted to set up an interview about forty miles away from where I lived. I told her yes without meaning it. My friends had told me that she had asked other Cambodians too. They drove in from San Diego, Santa Ana, LA and Long Beach for the interview. But not me.

  The next morning Pat Golden called me at the office and asked me why I didn’t come. I told her sorry, I was busy. There was a pause and I decided to be more honest. I said I didn’t want to go because I didn’t think I’d get the job. She said, ‘We haven’t made any decisions yet. Please come.’ She was very persistent.

  She wanted to interview me that night in Long Beach, twenty-five miles away. ‘Is five o’clock okay?’ she said. I said, ‘No, I work in office hours.’ ‘Six?’ she said. ‘No,’ I said, ‘the freeway to Long Beach is too crowded then. How about seven?’

  I got there at eight. She was waiting. I said I was sorry, that I had been busy. She didn’t reproach me. She was conciliatory and polite – just like a Cambodian. She was a very smart woman and she knew something about our culture. She knew if she got angry at me I would use it as an excuse to leave.

  Other Cambodians were there ahead of me. Pat Golden interviewed Long Boret’s daughter – Long Boret was Lon Nol’s prime minister at the time of the Khmer Rouge takeover – and finally called me in.

  She said, ‘Okay, Haing, if you were with some Americans and you had to convince the Khmer Rouge that the people you were with were not Americans, how would you do it?’

  I improvised a scene for her.

  After it was over, she said, ‘Thanks. I’ll let you know in a week.’

  I said, ‘I don’t believe you. If you say one week, maybe a month and a half.’

  ‘No, this time I’m serious,’ she said. And a week later she called me in for a second interview. This time it was in a studio in Burbank.

  Then there was a third interview, also in the Burbank studio. At each interview there were fewer Cambodians than before.

  A young bearded Englishman was at the fourth interview. He was Roland Joffé, the director of the film. Roland Joffé asked me about my story – how long I had lived under the Khmer Rouge, what happened when I was captured, how I got to the refugee camps in Thailand. I talked for an hour. He watched me with intense blue eyes and listened carefully.

  Roland Joffé was at the fifth interview. This time he had a video camera for the screen test. He set up a hypothetical situation: a Cambodian doctor was very fond of an American nurse. The night before, the radio had announced that all foreigners had to leave Cambodia. How would the doctor tell the nurse she had to leave Cambodia to save her own life?

  Pat Golden played the American lady.

  I played the Cambodian doctor.

  Roland Joffé changed the situation. The American lady believed the Khmer Rouge wouldn’t hurt her, because she was foreign, but that they would almost certainly kill me. How would I explain to her that Cambodia was my country, that I would stay no matter what?

  I acted the part to Pat Golden.

  Roland Joffé brought the camera in closer and closer but it didn’t make me nervous. I knew if I really put myself in the situation and believed what I was saying to Pat Golden, the camera didn’t matter.

  ‘Now,’ Roland Joffé said to me, ‘you have taken the American woman to the airport, to see her off. What are your last words before she goes away?’

  ‘You haf to leave right now,’ I told Pat Golden. ‘You haf to listen me. Situation now very hard. You foreign people. Khmer Rouge don’t like you. For me no problem. I’m Cambodian people.’ I wept on her shoulder and wiped my eyes and told her over and over again that she had to go and I would miss her.

  When I finished they said thank you very much.

  In interview six I went in front of the camera again. Roland set up another scene with Pat Golden playing my Cambodian wife. I had to tell her to leave because the Khmer Rouge were going to kill everybody. I broke down and cried again, only this time it was hard to stop.

  As soon as I finished one scene Roland Joffé had me do another. All of the scenes were sad, except for the last one. In this one I was a doctor. A patient of mine was about to die. I operated on him, tried my best and against the odds the operation was successful. What did I do when I learned the good news? What did I say?

  I acted it out for him.

  Joffé said he would let me know, but he didn’t know when that might be.

  I went back to work and tried not to think about the screen tests. Seven thousand Cambodians had applied for jobs in the movie.

  Three more months passed before Pat called again, from New York. She wanted to know what kind of passport or visa I was holding. I said it was a resident alien card, with my photo and thumbprint. She asked whether it would cause a probl
em if I had to go to Thailand with the company. No problem for me, no problem for my niece either.

  She called back a few weeks later. What was I getting paid at the Chinatown Service Centre? Four hundred dollars a week, I said. She said, how about if she gave me eight hundred dollars a week?

  No problem, I said.

  She called again with detailed questions about my visa and said, ‘How about a thousand dollars a week?’

  ‘Don’t worry about the money,’ I said. ‘Give me what you want. I just want the job.’

  And it was true. I had changed my mind. If I could be in the film, I decided, in any capacity, I could help tell the story of Cambodia. And that was important because it was a story nobody really knew. Most Americans didn’t even know where Cambodia was. They had heard of Vietnam, but not Cambodia. Even in LA, non-Cambodian Asians didn’t know what had happened under the Khmer Rouge regime. If we told them they just nodded their heads and pretended to believe us so we wouldn’t lose face.

  And really, the reason I hadn’t wanted the job earlier didn’t have anything to do with losing face, or with not being offered a part, or with looking foolish in front of the camera. I hadn’t wanted to bring back the suffering. There were too many reminders already.

  Ever since coming to the United States I’d had nightmares. If I thought too much in the daytime about what had happened, I had dreams that night. Huoy died in my arms over and over and over. I saw my father tied to the tree and trying to tell me something, but afraid to speak.

  It didn’t take much to set off my nightmares – the sound of water dripping from the faucet was enough. It put me back in prison, looking up at water dripping from a hole in a bucket.

  Almost every night I woke suddenly and sat up to make the dreams fade. Outside the louvred windows the streetlights were shining on the hard pavement of the alley and reflecting off the metal and glass of parked cars. In LA there was always a background noise of traffic on distant streets and maybe a siren or honking horns. I felt more alienated than ever, and not sure how much better America was than what I had left behind, because I hadn’t really left it behind, and I couldn’t enjoy the best of America. So I decided to go back to the refugee camps and confront my past. To try to get rid of my nightmares.

  Before we left for Thailand all the Cambodians who had been chosen for the film got together for a party. Pat Golden was there. All the other Cambodians knew what part they were playing, but when I asked Pat she just told me not to worry, I wasn’t going to have to learn anything by heart. It sounded to me as though my part was pretty small. The other Cambodians began teasing me and saying that I had the co-starring role, but I just laughed and told them not to believe it.

  When I got to Thailand I was given a script, but still nobody told me what part was mine. Then when Roland Joffé called a rehearsal I found that I was going to play Dith Pran.

  ‘Oh my god,’ I said to myself, slapping my hand to my forehead. ‘How big I am.’

  40

  The Killing Fields

  ‘This is a story of war and friendship, of the anguish of a ruined country and of one man’s will to live.’ So began a 1980 article in The New York Times Magazine. The author was Sydney Schanberg, the Times’s correspondent in Cambodia during the Lon Nol years.

  Schanberg wrote about the relationship between himself and his Cambodian assistant Dith Pran. They were not equals. Schanberg was the boss. By nature he was angry and unsatisfied, always demanding more of people around him. However, he did not speak Khmer or know much about Cambodian culture. He needed Dith Pran to be his eyes and ears and nose. He depended on Pran when they ran into obstacles to their reporting or when they got into situations that threatened their lives. Pran, in turn, depended on Schanberg for guidance. The two men were very different, but they liked each other and they were close.

  During the communist takeover Pran saved Schanberg and some other Western journalists from execution by the Khmer Rouge. With the communists in control of the city, all the Westerners and a few Cambodians including Pran retreated to the French embassy. Pran was forced to leave the safety of the embassy and join the rest of the Cambodians out in the countryside, while the Westerners were allowed to leave for Thailand and freedom. For almost four years, while the Khmer Rouge controlled the country, Schanberg heard nothing of Dith Pran. He felt terribly guilty: Pran had saved his life, but he, Schanberg, hadn’t been able to save Pran. Finally the Vietnamese invaded, Pran escaped from Cambodia and the two men met again in a Thai refugee camp.

  The article moved the hearts and the conscience of people who hadn’t known much about Cambodia or who hadn’t thought about the revolution there in human terms. Out of the magazine article grew the movie The Killing Fields. The movie’s producer was an Englishman, David Puttnam, who had made Chariots of Fire and other films. The director was another Englishman, Roland Joffé, whose background was in theatre and in film documentaries. The lead actors were two Americans, Sam Waterston as Sydney Schanberg, John Malkovich as the cynical photographer Al Rockoff . . . and me, a Cambodian, as Dith Pran.

  Studying the script I made a surprising discovery. I was Dith Pran. This is not to say that our stories were identical. Pran was a journalist; I was a doctor. He worked with Westerners; I worked with Cambodians. His wife and children left Phnom Penh on a helicopter before the fall; Huoy and my family stayed. When he lived in the countryside, Pran was beaten by the Khmer Rouge; but he never went to prison and never suffered as much as I did.

  But the differences were much less important than the similarities. I was him and he was me because we were Cambodian men of about the same age and because we had been under the hammer of the same terrible events: the civil war, then the revolution, then the foreign occupation and finally pouring into the refugee camps and going to America. Surviving the Khmer Rouge years was the most important fact of our lives, the very centre of our identities. And we had both survived without quite knowing why.

  Turning the pages of the screenplay I marvelled at our life paths, which ran parallel and sometimes crossed. Dith Pran had seen the senseless, barbaric civil war. As a journalist he’d gone to some of the same briefings and battlefields as my friend Sam Kwil. He’d seen the bonjour and the deteriorating conditions in the hospitals, the wounded patients piled on the floors. In the screenplay he and Sydney Schanberg visited Preah Keth Melea Hospital. In real life I had treated patients in Prea Keth Melea before the fall. Pen Tip was on the radiology staff there.

  Both Dith Pran and I had an opportunity to leave Phnom Penh on the American helicopters. We didn’t go because we didn’t know what the Khmer Rouge were really like. Pran went into the French embassy with the foreigners; I drove past the French embassy on my Vespa on my trip back into Phnom Penh and saw the foreigners on the lawn.

  In the countryside Dith Pran and I were rice farmers, like all the other ‘new’ people. We both pulled ploughs by hand, planted and harvested rice, dug canals and built earthen dams. We ate bowls of watery rice and gathered wild foods. We lived with the daily terror. When the Vietnamese invaded, we both escaped to Thailand through the minefields. Of the more than half a million Cambodians on the border, Dith Pran and I were two of the very luckiest. I had Chana to give me my freedom and Uncle Lo to give me money and clothes. Dith Pran had Sydney Schanberg.

  But I had never met Dith Pran. I asked Roland Joffé how Pran walked and spoke and what his facial expressions were like. I asked him to introduce us. It seemed to me that playing the Dith Pran part meant imitating the real man as much as possible.

  Roland was evasive. ‘Haing, don’t worry what he looks like or how he would have done things,’ he advised. ‘Just be yourself.’ Roland encouraged the idea that Dith Pran and I were the same person on the inside. And I never did meet Dith Pran until the filming was over.

  Roland knew that I had never acted before. He didn’t try to make acting seem difficult or mysterious. He made it as easy for me as possible.

  He sent a tall, bearded A
merican to the Bangkok airport to meet me. The American was very friendly and polite. He said his name was Sam Waterston. A few days later, with the help of John Crowley, who was pleased and surprised to see me, Sam and I got our passes to visit the Thai-Cambodian border. Roland assigned Sam to write newspaper stories about the border, just like a real journalist. Since I spoke Khmer and reasonably good Thai, I was Sam’s translator and guide. Roland was re-creating a relationship like the real Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran.

  Sam and I drove along the road to Aranyaprathet. In three years little had changed. I showed him my favourite market stalls and restaurants and the ARC house where I had lived. We drove south of Aran to a Khmer Rouge border camp that had been attacked by Vietnamese a few days before. Cadre followed us wherever we went, never letting us out of their sight. Nothing had changed about the Khmer Rouge – the disdain on their faces, the atmosphere of menace, the thatched-roof houses with no walls.

  I translated for Sam while he interviewed Khmer Rouge officers and wrote their answers in his notebook. Sam asked them if they had enough food, if their families were with them and so on. The Khmer Rouge kept telling Sam that all they wanted was to go back into Cambodia to fight the Vietnamese.

  Throughout the interview I kept a detached, neutral presence, at least on the outside. While Sam asked the questions and took notes, I stayed as calm as a monk. Inside, my emotions were different. I thought of grabbing the cadre by their shirts and shouting, ‘Fools! You want to fight the Vietnamese? Look around you at the consequences of your fighting – at the orphans, the handicapped, the civilians with no homes!’ I thought of grabbing a rifle and spraying them with bullets. But I didn’t do anything like that, and I kept my emotions hidden.