When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge Read online

  “Mak is sorry, koon.” Never before has Mak been so helpless. So apologetic.

  This child whom she brought into the world cannot be satisfied. And this raw fact is slowly killing her.

  For the rest of us, it is like listening to the soundtrack of a sad movie that has no end. Lying cuddled beside Mak—my brothers and sisters sharing blankets and our warmth when the cool night wind blows, wriggling through the cracks into our hut—I weep for Vin. Our sniffles become a melody in the night as each of us suffers with him. He is only three, but the revolution ages us all. Already Vin can articulate his need, his desperate need to survive.

  Long into the night, Vin cries as the chilly December wind blows. It beats the leaves of the tall trees behind our hut, creating a chorus of noise akin to Vin’s shuddering. Even beneath a blanket, I’m touched by this invisible wind.

  When the morning comes, Ry gets Vin ready for a trip to the Khmer Rouge hospital, called Peth Preahneth Preah, a name left over from an earlier time, which means “Hospital of the Sight of God.” It is probably three miles from where we live.

  Vin’s pale, shrinking body lies still as Ry wraps him in Mak’s sarong. Sadly he gazes at our mother. Vin’s bloodless lips slowly part. “Mak, I go to the hospital. Soon I’ll feel better, then I’ll come back home. I’ll come soon, Mak.”

  His words and sad eyes suggest a pensive parting. As small as he is, Vin seems to understand, absolving her, comforting her. His empathy in the midst of his own suffering strikes me to the core. Vin is little, yet so curiously wise. Perhaps it is a wisdom born of a young life that has straddled so much—our life before the revolution, the retreat from Phnom Penh, the life of forced labor. Too much living to cram into too few years. A three-year-old in a boxcar. A three-year-old scavenging for food. He has known so much pain that I can’t bear it. I want to drop to the dirt, fall to my knees to beg Buddha to stop his suffering.

  I want so much.

  “Yes, koon proh Mak, go to the hospital and you will get better soon. Then koon comes back to Mak.” Mak chokes up, speaking the ragged words she knows will not come true.

  “‘Koon comes back to Mak,’” Vin says, repeating Mak’s phrase as if it comforts him.

  Weeks go by, and Vin is still in the hospital. His condition worsens, Ry reports to us. She is stationed at the hospital taking care of Vin, a role that would otherwise have fallen to Chea and Ra, who are older than her. But they are gone, having already been taken off to a forced youth labor camp. They left a day after an informant leader, Srouch, came by, ordering them to a meeting. They obeyed immediately, like soldiers called up for combat. Their responsibility to our family is no longer relevant. Through no fault of her own, Mak has lost custody of her children—Angka Leu has appointed itself sole parent. With their departure, Ry steps in, taking upon herself a motherly role.

  Back in Phnom Penh, at age thirteen, she was slim but strong. Her black silky hair fell below her shoulders, cut evenly. She looked cute, I thought, in her blue miniskirt with her white and blue blouse. When she biked to school, her legs pumped her bike pedals like an athlete’s.

  Even then Ry was nursing us, taking care of Chea when she came down with typhoid and a blood condition. Ry was a natural nurse, staying with Chea so Mak could take care of us at home and Pa could work. Though Ra was older, she feared the dead spirits in hospitals. Unlike Ra, Ry wasn’t scared of sickness. Ra was better off staying at home, helping Mak with cleaning, cooking, and grocery shopping.

  At fifteen, mature for her age, Ry takes on the caregiving task again. Just as she used to care for Chea, she now stays days and nights with Vin. She works in the hospital, a hall that used to be part of a temple. The floor is dirt, patients lie on slim metal cots. Others are scattered on blankets or plastic sheeting on the floor. It has the atmosphere of a field hospital, scarcely an aisle to walk through. Vin is luckier—because of the crowding, he has been moved to an annex, a nearby building with a wooden floor. He is allotted a narrow space a few scant feet from the nearest patients. Medical scrubs are replaced by the eternal Khmer Rouge uniform—black shirt and pants, a simple scarf. If these hospital “authorities” have a medical education, it isn’t apparent. The only treatment readily dispensed is “rabbit dung,” the term adopted for crude “pills” made from bark and honey. Sometimes people request the “rabbit dung” just for the honey alone, something to fill their empty stomachs. It seems that food, simple nutrition, would cure much suffering here.

  Like a mother, Ry feeds Vin his meager food ration. Since there is no one else to administer care, she bathes him, dresses him. She gives him comfort and warmth, cuddling close to him at night. But as hard as she works, he is empty. Every day he cries for Mak, begging Ry to ask Mak to come and see him. Ry passes along the plea, imploring Mak until Mak cries, “Don’t torture, Mak, koon. I can’t walk to the hospital. Mak would if Mak could.”

  She speaks the painful truth. Mak’s face and entire body have swollen up, inflated by the fluid building up inside her. Her face is an ugly mask of what it once was, as pale as pigskin with puffy jowls. Her eyes squint out from this fleshy landscape, cloudy and dull. No one knows why this is, what is making our limbs so heavy. My mother has a theory. “We don’t have salt,” she says, shrugging. Before long, she has company. In time, we all get it—the new people. At first it seems like bad fortune, a curse on the most recent arrivals. It takes a while for us to associate this condition with our own starvation. The word is hamm, swollen (edematous). I too am swollen. My legs. My arms. My face. Suddenly, a simple task like walking feels like slogging through mud. Like Mak and me, Avy and Map also swell up like inflatable dolls, their faces tight and stretched, their legs fat beyond their years. The skin between Avy’s toes scares me—so taut and transparent, it looks as if it will surely burst. Still, she is stronger than me, able to walk to retrieve water. I feel helpless, ashamed, weak by comparison. My strong little sister surprises me.

  Around us we watch the drama unfold. Sickness touches so many huts. Even the ill-tempered “Grandma Two Kilo” is humbled, her tongue temporarily silenced by the sickness, which robs her of the last delicacy of her fading beauty.

  One day Ry returns from the hospital to report that Vin is dying. As soon as she spits out the words, she convulses, doubled over with grief.

  “Mak, Vin begs for you to see him. He wants to see you one more time.”

  “Mak can’t go, koon. Mak can hardly walk to get water to drink and cook. Mak cannot walk that far.” Her words are slow, without hope or animation. She is beaten down by her own body.

  “But Vin is dying, Mak! He asks for you, he misses you.…” Ry breaks down.

  “Koon, did you hear what Mak said? Mak wants to go see your brother, but Mak just can’t walk that far.” She is too weak to argue. Ry must understand this. And yet the roles are oddly reversed. Ry is like the mother, ordering her child to obey. Mak must be there. Doesn’t she understand? Her voice rises again, desperate.

  “What should I tell him when he asks for you again? What do I do, Mak?”

  “Tell your baby brother that Mak cannot walk that far yet. When Mak can walk, Mak will see him.” Her answer is a long sigh.

  “But he’s dying…” Ry wails.

  “Mak knows, koon. Tell your brother what Mak said.” Her words are slow and steady. Despite what she feels in her heart, her voice never reflects the hysteria of this moment. She is simply too sick to care. Sitting on the floor, her hands clutching a knee, Mak begins shuddering.

  “Mak.” Map reaches out as Mak releases her grief. It is as if she has swallowed her tears and her screams, letting only thin threads of it bubble up. Her cries are like jagged glass, and we look on in silence. Suddenly Map wails—his cries breaking her own internal spell of sadness. She looks up as if doused with a pan of cold water. Awakened.

  “Don’t cry, koon proh Mak. Mak stop crying, stop crying.” Mak comforts Map, holding him in her arms.

  Avy’s tears rush out to join them, strea
ming down her pale, puffy cheeks. With the swelling, she looks like a crying statue. The tears are there, but the swelling has masked her expression. Her ragged sobs join the chorus, adding to Map’s, Mak’s, and mine. It is too much for Ry to take. She walks away. Her weeping trails down the alley between the huts until it is a faint echo in the distance. She returns to Vin at the hospital, bringing with her a sad message. I imagine him lying on the floor of the hospital. A three-year-old’s heartbroken cries when Ry tells him Mak can’t come. In my mind, I cry out to Buddha to help Vin: Preah, please help my baby brother. Please don’t let him die—he’s only a baby. Please let him live so he can see Mak one more time. Only one more time, Preah.…

  I recall Vin’s expression of hope and the words he and Mak exchanged before Ry took him to the hospital: “Mak, I go to the hospital. Soon I’ll feel better. I’ll come back home. I’ll come soon, Mak.…” “Yes, koon proh Mak, go to the hospital and you’ll get better soon. Then koon comes back to Mak.”

  “‘Koon comes back to Mak.’” A hollow game of make-believe. A gentle parting. A promise that cannot be kept.

  Vin dies in the hospital from an illness that is curable. But the world is brutal, indifferent. Drawn and dehydrated, his lifeless body lies naked on the wooden hospital floor—a skeleton of a little boy. When Ry wakes next to him, she leans over and shakes him, begging for a weak answer. There is none. Soon after his death, Ry removes his red knit shirt. Even in her grief, she must think about survival, saving the shirt for Map. It is necessary, a desperate act. His last rite. Her final image of him is of a small, still body wrapped in a burlap bag, carried away by two hospital workers. They never speak to her, these custodians of death.

  Vin is buried at the edge of a hill called Phnom Preahneth Preah, the Sight of God. It is an impersonal burial in an unmarked grave. None of us are there to mourn. No relatives gather, no monks pray. When Ry brings home this news, no one cries. Not even Mak. To weep is to acknowledge what we can’t accept. Our minds are already saturated with sorrow. Our silence is our last defense.

  Mak is numb. Like the sun surrendering to an eternal eclipse, she simply shuts off. I study my mother now, and it is hard to imagine the happy bride, the rebellious student, the determined mother full of gentle smiles and silent sacrifice. There are no rewards in our life. To be alive and walking every day, to live through another day, is its own reward in this horrible world. Already Mak looks old beyond her years. Numbed by suffering, deadened by the death all around us. Too feeble to care.

  She can’t even walk less than a mile to see to her dying mother, Yiey Srem, who has also been brought to our village. As fate would have it, all of Mak’s side of the family also end up in Daakpo. But there is little joy in this fact. We hardly see each other. Starvation has given Yiey Srem a swollen body much like her daughter’s. My grandmother’s sagging, wrinkled skin is inflated. Oddly, there is a cruel family resemblance in the edema—we are all becoming a tribe of puffy people, all the “new people” in the village. It is a hideous badge, a way to identify us. We become preoccupied with the lack of food. The memory of it is a living, breathing thing. It infects us. It tires us. It is everything.

  Now time becomes hard to measure. We mark its passage in terms of who has died and who is still alive. Time is distilled and recalled by death. Before Vin died…After Pa was executed…This is how we talk. Before Yiey Srem’s death, I’m able to walk and see her briefly. Such visits are rare, even though our extended family members live close to each other. We have to weigh our desire for such contact against the risk of being punished for exhibiting “family intimacy”—a connection the Khmer Rouge frowns upon. Even while working, we are not permitted to talk with family members. Harder still, we have to sneak visits when we are supposed to be working. And we have to decide whether the energy consumed by walking half a mile should be used instead to find food, for we are all starving.

  Angka doesn’t care. It no longer gives us anything. No salt, no meat, and no rice. Every day I search for edible leaves, anything to survive. One day I find weeds beneath a tree, duck leaves Mak calls them. Only a few months ago, these were weeds that were mixed with rice and fed to pigs. Today, they are a welcome food. “Now we are worse than pigs,” Mak mutters, boiling the leafy greens.

  This is our routine. During the day we clear weeds from fields of yucca and yams, stacking the weeds in piles. Early the next morning, we scatter the debris, tearing through the piles in search of the small black crickets that scurry from beneath their dark hiding place.

  “Koon, koon, help me catch crickets. I can’t run,” Grandma Two Kilo begs. “Just two crickets a day, I can survive.”

  Tadpoles. Crickets. Toads. Centipedes. Mice. Rats and scorpions. We eat anything. As we till the earth, we look upon bugs as buried treasure. Our eyes scan the soil, tucking any edible treat in a waistband, a pocket, tied into a scarf. Later the prize is retrieved, skewered on a stick, and stuffed into the fire. Those who haven’t caught anything watch, their begging eyes following each move. We must ignore them, and also ignore what we eat. There is no revulsion. Food is food. Anything, everything tastes good—even the smell of roasting crickets makes stomachs rumble with desire. Yet even the smallest creatures, the rodents, the insects, are becoming scarce. Some days, our meals for the entire day consist of boiled leaves.

  Our lives are reduced to a tight circle. Each day revolves around what we can find to eat for the following day. And until it comes, we think about food.

  All day. All night.

  Hunger owns us.

  7

  Remnants of Ghosts

  The Economist

  April 16, 1996

  “The Real Toll”

  A handwritten note is scrawled at the bottom of a document signed by two of Pol Pot’s men at Tuol Sleng, the former Phnom Penh school that became the most notorious prison of the Khmer Rouges. It reads, “Also killed 168 children today for a total of 178 enemies exterminated.”

  The year is 1976. Hunger is constantly on our minds, an inner voice that will not be stilled. Yet the Khmer Rouge lecture us about sacrifice. In a mandatory meeting they tell us that we need to sacrifice for the mobile brigades that are working on the “battlefield.” These mobile brigades, they stress, are building padewat (the revolution). We, here in the village, are not worth much since we don’t work on the battlefield. We’ve planted rice, yams, and yucca, yet we get to eat little or nothing of the harvest. Most of the food is sent to the brigades. Later, I learn exactly what “battlefield” means—a place where the only fight is to survive the revolution itself.

  Mak’s swollen body somehow improves, so she can walk short distances now. Like a vulture sensing a corpse nearby, an informant begins circling our hut. He orders Mak to a meeting. Mak pleads that she’s not well yet. But he pounces on her slight improvement. As long as Mak can walk, she must go, he demands. Mak is angry and murmurs to herself, “When I was sick and hungry and couldn’t walk, why didn’t it [that creature] stick its head in here? Ar’khmaoch yor [The-ghost-take-you-away]!”

  Surprisingly, Mak comes home in a better mood. The village leader will be sending children to build an irrigation canal near Daakpo where there will be lots of food to eat. Fish, yams, solid rice. Mak can’t wait to tell me, thinking, perhaps, that her young children will survive after all.

  “Athy, koon, you should go to the meeting. They’ll send you away to work, but it’s near here. You’ll have more food to eat there. Eat until you are full while there’s plenty.” It is something to cling to, and she will not let it go. Mak sounds dreamy, desperate. “Maybe you can bring Mak some food.”

  “But I’ll be away from you, Mak. I don’t want to go. I’ll miss you, I’ll cry.” Tears burn my eyes as soon as the words leave my mouth.

  “Athy! The camp won’t be far from here. You’ll come to visit me at night after work, you’ll have food to eat, koon. If you stay in the village with me, we’ll all probably die of hunger. Go with those children. Come to se
e me at night when you miss me, but don’t stay here—you’ll starve.” Mak looks into my eyes, willing me to simply listen, her own eyes begging me to understand her intentions.

  “I still don’t want to go, Mak! I don’t want to go away from you. I can find leaves and other things to eat. I’ll be okay.” But it’s not okay, I know.

  “Koon, you have to go. They won’t let you stay in the village. If you don’t go, they will take you to Angka Leu. You don’t know what they’ll do to you. I don’t want them to torture you, koon. You go—you’ll have food to eat. Go, koon Mak, listen to me.” Her voice strains, her breath puffs in protest. Mak is miserably frustrated. I can only cry.

  It is a powerful choice, food or the comfort of Mak. In this time of hardship, I can’t choose. The lack of food makes me confused, light-headed. There is nothing that I can depend on. In the end, I don’t have a choice. I’m ten, and I need my mother. But the mention of food draws me, memories of food I had in Phnom Penh pop to life. With these memories come doubts. Fears. Wisps of questions no one can answer. What if they lie, like they’ve done in the past? What if I never see Mak again, like Chea and Ra, who have gone away for months? There are no words, no letters from them. What if Mak starves to death before I return?

  When the evening comes, I go to the meeting. As I get close to the sahakar,* I wipe away my tears, erasing any evidence of weakness. Before the sahakar lies a blanket of children, about fifty of them. It’s getting dark, and I can hardly make out the faces of the leaders. I take a seat in the back, and a few heads turn to look at me. I’m not alone in my despair. In front of me, children are steeped in their own sadness. We are small, obedient statues. The reek of cow dung and urine rises from the ground. The cool, breezy night is lit by the moon. I gaze at the silhouette of the village leader, and I’m hypnotized by his descriptions of food. He makes life in the brigade sound like going to a restaurant, a daily feast. With words, he casts his spell.