Survival in the Killing Fields

by Haing Ngor

  For me the only good part of the New York opening was finally being able to meet the real Sydney Schanberg and Dith Pran. The real Sydney was shorter than Sam Waterston. He had greying hair, a grey beard and enormous round eyes. I liked him right away, and Dith Pran too. Pran was shorter than me. He was gentle and peaceful, not hyperactive like me. He was working as a photographer at The New York Times, where Sydney was working too. Pran and I spoke in English first, out of courtesy to the others, and then switched to Khmer as soon as we could. We had a lot to talk about.

  I asked him what the Khmer Rouge had done to him in real life, because I knew the movie script had changed some of the details. He said he had been caught for stealing rice. Khmer Rouge soldiers beat him. They were planning to send him away for execution but the village chief stopped them and arranged for him to be sent to re-education classes, where he later ‘confessed’ his crimes to save his life. During those years his wife and children were safely in the United States, but of course he never heard from them, and he lost most of the rest of his family to executions and starvation. After the Vietnamese invaded he became mayor of a small town for a while to help the people. But the Vietnamese discovered he had an ‘unclean’ political background from working with the American press. It got dangerous for him, and he escaped to Thailand, arriving in October 1979.

  Pran and I agreed, in all seriousness, that we would have liked the movie to show more violence, to reflect what had really happened in Cambodia. Then we started joking about who had the worse time. He said he had eaten mice, snails and lizard. ‘You had lizard?’ I said. ‘Very tasty. That’s like T-bone steak here. The best meal I ever ate was termites and red ant eggs.’ He said he was sorry, he had never eaten insects like that. In fact my experiences were worse than his under the Khmer Rouge, but it didn’t matter. Meeting him was almost like discovering a twin. I knew we would be friends for life.

  Then came the London opening, in January. Sydney Schanberg, Sam Waterston, Dith Pran and I were all there, dressed in tuxedoes. The Duchess of Kent sat across the aisle from me, wearing diamond and pearl jewellery. For the first time I had a chance to see the complete film with all the scenes in order. When the film began the audience was still chattering and whispering. There was laughter when John Malkovich, playing the wild photographer Al Rockoff, explained that the ice bandage on his forehead to help his hangover was made from a sanitary napkin. Then as the horror of the civil war sunk in, the laughter subsided and the audience grew quieter and quieter.

  At the scene of the American withdrawal, when my wife left on a helicopter, I began to cry. I cannot explain it. Maybe it was seeing it on a big screen for the first time, the size and the fullness of it. Maybe because it was like losing Huoy.

  A lady in the seat behind me handed me tissues.

  I cried again at the French embassy scene, seeing myself leave the Western journalists to go out into the countryside.

  I couldn’t control myself. The tears came rolling out and the lady kept giving me tissues. I cried when the Khmer Rouge put a plastic bag over a prisoner’s head. I cried when I sucked the blood of an ox and when I fell into the mass grave of bones while trying to make my escape.

  I cried at the ending when Sydney and Pran, or Sam and I, were reunited in a refugee camp in Thailand. The ending was filmed in Khao-I-Dang, right in front of the ARC ward, where I had worked as a doctor.

  But I wasn’t the only one crying. So was the Duchess of Kent. When the final credits came on the screen, the people in the audience sat numbly in their seats, some of them still dabbing at their eyes. When the lights came on, Sydney, Pran, Sam and I were introduced. The audience gave us a standing ovation and long, long applause.

  The Western media began running stories about The Killing Fields. Until that time relatively few people knew what had happened in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years – intellectuals and Asia experts had, maybe, but not the general public. The film put the story of those years in terms that everybody could understand, because it was a story about the friendship between two men.

  To my surprise, much of the media’s attention focused on me. Through the movie I had become a sort of symbol for Cambodia and its suffering. Or rather Pran and I became a symbol together, because people were always confusing our names. That I was a refugee who had never acted before made the film more newsworthy than if an experienced actor had played the Dith Pran part.

  I kept going back to my job as a counsellor at the Chinatown Service Centre. By now my role in the movie was no secret. I kept having to leave to be interviewed, to travel and even to accept awards. First I won a Golden Globe award for best supporting actor. Then in March 19851 went to London again to accept two British Academy Awards, for Most Outstanding Newcomer and Best Actor.

  Sophia came along on that trip to London. She was an excellent student, with a straight-A average. She was very smart, just like her mother and father, but she had grown up too fast for my liking. She hadn’t liked her straight black Asian hair, so she had it permed. She had often seemed restless and unhappy at home in Los Angeles. I didn’t know why. Maybe it was because she was a teenager, or maybe because it was difficult for her to have me away so much. Maybe it was also difficult because I was traditional and Cambodian in my thinking. I was strict with her, just as my father had been strict with me. It was the only way I knew to raise children. But she seemed happy to be travelling, to see new sights.

  We came home from London. We had moved from our one-room apartment in the alleyway to a two-bedroom apartment upstairs in the same building complex, with a view overlooking the skyscrapers of downtown LA. Our living room was already cluttered with trophies and certificates. I put the British Academy Awards on the table and didn’t think much about them.

  From everything the people at Warner Brothers told me, the American Academy Awards mattered most. The Oscars, they called them. I had been nominated in the category of Best Supporting Actor, but my reaction was to downplay the chance of winning. One of the other nominees was John Malkovich, for his role in the movie Places in the Heart. I knew how good John was. I had watched scenes from The Killing Fields over and over again in the editing room, and each time I saw some small perfect detail in his performance that I had not noticed before. Besides, I was still upset at Roland Joffé for not letting me meet Dith Pran before filming started. If I had, I could have changed my performance to be more like Dith Pran.

  Two days before the Oscar awards, television crews showed up at the Chinatown Service Centre and at my apartment. They began following me around with their cameras. I wondered if they were following John Malkovich too. I missed John and his dirty jokes. Nobody else had ever made me laugh as much as he had.

  The day of the Oscars I called my supervisor at work and asked permission to take the day off. I was too restless to work. I told Sophia to take a holiday from school too. TV crews waited outside the apartment. They followed me when I went to rent my tuxedo and filmed it for the news. I wondered what was so special about somebody trying on a tuxedo.

  When I got home there were three long black limousines parked on the street outside. Dith Pran had arrived in one, Pat Golden in another and Ed Crane from Warner Brothers Publicity in the third. They all came into my apartment. Everybody in the neighbourhood, which was predominantly Asian and lower middle class, had turned out to stare at the limousines and the TV crews.

  Pat Golden, Ed Crane, Sophia and I got into one of the limos to ride to the ceremony together. My neighbours waved me off and wished me well. The Oscars were being held in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which was not far away. The traffic was bumper to bumper. It took an hour to get there. We could have walked there faster from my apartment. I felt like walking, to get rid of my energy.

  By the time we got past the camera teams and the police lines the ceremony had started and the first awards had already been handed out. Inside the auditorium sat rows and rows of dazzling women and well-dressed men. The usher took Sophia and me to some emp
ty seats in the second row on the far left side of the stage. It seemed like only a few minutes later that a very short woman named Linda Hunt came onstage to present the award for Best Supporting Actor. She had won an award the year before, for her role in the movie The Year of Living Dangerously.

  She said, ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The five actors we’re about to celebrate have each taken different paths. I know that none of them thinks of this evening as their final goal. The goal, if any, lies in the work and in a private sense of challenge and achievement. To be chosen the best for a piece of work is a welcome prize, and to know that you have done it in the way that is best for you is every way as sweet.’ She read off the names of the nominees. When she came to my name the television cameras panned around the audience but couldn’t find me because the usher had taken us to the wrong seats. On the television monitors, a picture of me from The Killing Fields appeared.

  I looked down the row of seats and saw Sam Waterston near the centre aisle. I cannot remember what went through my mind except for being glad that Sam was there. He had helped me a lot. I was extremely nervous.

  ‘And the winner is . . .

  . . . Haing S. Ngor of The Killing Fields!’

  I walked past Sam and pumped his hand and tried to get him to come up on the stage with me, but he motioned me on. When I got on the stage my mind went blank. I was holding the trophy in my hand and standing at the lectern. The stage lights and TV cameras were on me, but I couldn’t think what to say. I had practised a speech in the limousine but couldn’t remember a word of it.

  ‘This is unbelievable,’ I said finally, and then it came back to me. ‘But so is my entire life. I vish to thank all members of Motion Picture Academy for this great honour. I thank David Puttnam, Roland Joffé for giving me this chance to act for the first time in The Killing Fields. And I share this award to my friend Sam Waterston, Dith Pran, Sydney Schanberg and also Pat Golden, director of casting – lady who found me for this role.’

  There was laughter and applause from the audience, laughter because of my accent and grammatical mistakes, applause because I wasn’t going to let them stop me. ‘And I thank’ – more laughter and applause – ‘and I thank Warner Brothers for helping me tell my story to the world, let the world know what happened in my country. And I thank God-Buddha that tonight I am even here. Sank you. Sank you very much.’

  The audience was on its feet clapping and shouting, and a few were wiping their tears. I lifted the trophy over my head. There are no words to describe it. I felt as if I were floating in the air. My feet were off the ground.

  I walked off the stage and the usher guided me to where I should have been, in the same row on the opposite side of the stage. Another usher was escorting Sophia there too. In front of us, in the first row, was John Malkovich. He looked at me with his sly grin.

  ‘Ach anh neh,’ he said, pointing at the trophy. ‘Rar boh anh teh.’

  Sophia’s head snapped around and her jaw dropped open. I was sure I hadn’t heard him right, so I smiled back at John and edged into my seat. It was good to see him.

  ‘Ach anh neh. Rar boh anh teh,’ he repeated, still grinning, still pointing at the Oscar. This time it sunk in. When we were in Thailand I had taught John how to curse in Khmer.

  He had just told me, ‘Kiss my ass. It’s mine.’

  42

  Kama

  Until my name was announced and I went up on stage, I did not think I would win the Oscar. A man who had never acted before, who had just moved to the United States, who could not yet speak English fluently – the odds were too much against it. Even Hollywood movies do not have endings so unlikely. Nobody would believe them if they did.

  But it had happened. I had won against the odds. I had the trophy to prove it, a tall, heavy, gold-plated figure of a man with a featureless and enigmatic face.

  Or rather, I had won again. In the country of the real killing fields the odds against me had been worse.

  When the miracles pile up one after the next it is hard not to think about kama.

  Sometimes people are chosen to fulfill a mission they are unaware of. They are instruments of destiny, serving a purpose larger than themselves. So it had been for me. The gods had known everything in advance and I had known nothing. They had planned for me to suffer, planned for me to serve, planned for me to be rewarded. It was kama. Without knowing it, I fulfilled their mission. I had helped tell the story of Cambodia to the outside world.

  The morning after the Academy Awards I came into the Chinatown Service Centre at 8.00 a.m. as usual, turned right, walked to the end of the hall into the Indochinese Unit’s office, and sat at my little cubicle under the fluorescent lights. I didn’t get much work done. Everyone wanted to touch the trophy. Journalists and TV crews crowded into the room, the phone kept ringing and the day was lost to interviews and congratulations.

  In the following weeks I didn’t get much work done either. There were appearances on network television shows, more interviews, trips to the Far East and to Europe to promote the film. Dith Pran and I went to the White House to meet President Reagan. Life was crazy-busy. In June 1985 I took another leave of absence from the Chinatown Service Centre. This time when the leave was up I didn’t go back.

  I have a new job now, as a spokesman for Cambodians and as an organizer of aid to refugees. Much of my time is spent travelling, making speeches, taking part in conferences and talking with people in and out of government. In Los Angeles I work with the Khmer Humanitarian Organization, which helps Cambodians in refugee camps and in the United States, and with another organization called United Khmer Humanitarianism and Peace, which supports a makeshift temple in a house and is trying to build a real temple in traditional Cambodian style. Several times a year I go to the Thai-Cambodian border, where I am helping start a medical training centre. There, in a bamboo-and-thatch building, the staff and I will teach public health skills to villagers who are going back inside Cambodia to resettle.

  Like me, my friend Dith Pran makes public appearances and works with organizations that help Cambodians. He and I are close friends. We do whatever we can to help heal Cambodia’s wounds. There are many of us, volunteering, speaking out, working at all levels, and there is a kinship between us because we all have lived through the same terrible events.

  I am sometimes asked what winning the Oscar means to me. To me personally it means being able to admit that my acting in The Killing Fields was good. It means opening my heart and letting the praise flow in after shutting it out for so long. The recognition was sweet. I do not deny it anymore.

  To me professionally, as a spokesman, the Oscar opens doors. Until the film came out the tragedy in Cambodia was not well known thoughout the world. Because of the film and the Oscar I am able to go and talk to almost anyone. Dith Pran can too. Many Cambodians have discovered open doors. This is good, that people listen to us now and become more aware of our country and our problems. Nobody listened before.

  And, of course, the Oscar opens doors for me as an actor. It has brought me other acting roles, and not just in Hollywood. Between the time of the Academy Awards and the writing of this book I have played in two Chinese-language movies filmed in Asia, a French-language documentary about Cambodia, an advertisement for a pharmaceutical company, episodes of Hotel and Miami Vice, a miniseries called In Love and War and a pilot for a TV programme.

  I enjoy acting. It gives me an opportunity to use my natural gifts. It allows me to meet new people and explore many different locations. But acting is only a means to an end. It gives me the money and the free time to do my real job, which is helping Cambodians. In the future, perhaps I will make my living some other way. I have not given up my dream of working again as a doctor.

  Whatever happens, I am not worried about my future. I have always survived. I still drive my 1980 VW. I still wear the clothes that Uncle Lo had made for me when I was living in Lumpini. I live in the same apartment I lived in before I won the award. I will
probably move somewhere else, but there is no hurry. Whether I go on with acting, or become a doctor again, or return to my old job at the Chinatown Service Centre is not terribly important.

  What is more important than what I do, or what Dith Pran does, or what any Cambodian does, is the fate of the country we came from. Cambodia is now called the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Heng Samrin, the former Khmer Rouge commander, is still the puppet leader. The hand inside the puppet is still Vietnamese. Vietnamese ‘advisers’ give the orders, and 150,000 well-armed Vietnamese troops make sure the orders are carried out.

  Quietly and without formal announcements the Vietnamese have colonized Cambodia. They take huge amounts of fish from Tonle Sap, our inland sea, and truck it to Vietnam. They take our rubber and rice and other natural resources. They encourage Vietnamese nationals and Cambodians of Vietnamese descent to settle throughout Cambodia. Vietnamese men take Khmer women to be their wives, whether the women want it or not. Vietnamese crimes against Cambodians go unpunished. In the schools there is little study of Cambodian culture. Vietnamese and Russian languages are taught, and the brightest students are sent off to Hanoi or to Moscow for higher education.

  Though the Vietnamese do not tie people up and throw them into mass graves, the way the Khmer Rouge did, their system of ‘justice’ has much in common with that of the Khmer Rouge. They arrest people for making remarks against the regime, for listening to unauthorized radio broadcasts and for marrying without permission. They do not give the prisoners hearings or trials. The prisons are filthy and excrement-filled. Torture is common. The interrogators beat their victims, whip them with chains and rubber hoses, attach electrodes to their skin and suffocate them with plastic bags. I know this from refugee accounts, but you do not have to take my word for it. You can read it in the reports of Amnesty International.

  The Vietnamese use forced labour, not to build canals and dams like the Khmer Rouge, but to cut roadside trees to deprive anti- government guerrillas of ambush cover. The new war slaves clear land, build barriers and lay mines, particularly near the Thai border. In the labour camps malaria is widespread, and so is loss of legs from accidentally stepping on mines. Amputees are a common sight.