When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge Page 4

  “Pa?” I squeeze my father’s hand, looking up at the shadow of his face. He doesn’t say anything, but keeps on looking at the burning sky, trembling. I stand there with Pa watching it after everyone else has gone back to their beds.

  Never before have I seen men cry, so much, like Pa tonight.

  A few days later, news circulates. Pa and other adults talk about casualties reported in different villages outside Takeo province. He says that B-cinquante-deux (B-52s) bombed those areas, and many Cambodian civilians were killed in villages where his aunts live, near Srey Va village. Some were killed by direct hits, others perished in the intense heat created by the bombs. Pa’s young sisters’ families have had to leave their homes since the bombs dropped near their villages. Like other families, they seek refuge in Takeo City, staying in a house close to us. I don’t understand that these are planes from across an ocean. I don’t understand they are in pursuit of escaping Viet Cong soldiers, who have infested Cambodian border provinces like stubborn cockroaches, refusing to leave.

  After this destruction and death comes a new life.

  My baby brother, Bosaba, is born in June, two months after the bombing. He is named after the month of February, the rice-ripening season, when the land is lush and the rice heads golden and heavy and ready for harvest. Mak caresses the dark, fuzzy head of her eighth child. “We lost the older one, and now we have a little one,” she tells us. Mak gazes at Bosaba’s closed eyes and his tiny mouth, which moves as if he is nibbling. His small pink fingers open and close, and I insert my index finger into one of his fists. A snug, perfect fit.

  I am glad that Bosaba is born because it makes Mak and Pa happy, but my youngest brother is only a brief gift. Perhaps he was born prematurely, his health compromised by the trauma my mother endured during the pregnancy. He falls ill and cries constantly. No one can console him. Pa can’t help him, and neither can the doctor.

  Medical help is becoming so scarce that many people fall back on traditional folk ways. Pa begins suffering sharp pain in his abdomen. He says he is suffering from appendicitis. A friend of his, or perhaps a doctor, cautions him, “If you don’t get medical intervention to break the “turtle neck”—the inflamed appendix—you will surely die.” But the hospitals are not manned. Only time and fate can help him. Somehow, Pa lives. But life has become so tenuous. Real medicine is increasingly out of our reach, and the consequences are frustrating and deadly.

  After a few weeks, my new brother Bosaba dies.

  More displaced villagers and refugees are pouring into the city, including Mak’s mother and six brothers and sisters. Her father remains in Prey Ronn village to take care of his farming business. Our second-story home is becoming crowded. We have to share it with Mak’s mother and siblings. Signs of war have already begun to trickle into the city. One day I am playing marbles along a street with cousins and neighborhood children. We glance up to see a cluster of grown-ups. Our game is abandoned as we run to discover what has captured their attention, fighting our way to the front of the crowd. There on the street sit the decapitated heads of two men. The blood on their necks is encrusted with dirt and hay. Their faces are puffy and purple, their eyelids bruised. “Here, see, Khmer Rouge heads,” a man fiercely declares. “We captured them. Look at them.”

  My first reaction is to reel backward, my spine slapping into the circle of adults standing around me. I am baffled. Rouge is “red.” Khmer means “Cambodian.” I do not understand what I am hearing. These lifeless faces before me could be those of anyone in the crowd. Quickly, other adults begin to herd us away from the gory spectacle, chastising those who rolled the heads before us like melons at a market. “Don’t you know better?” they bark at them.

  Pa says that there has been more bombing along the Cambodian border, and more people are fleeing their homes to Takeo. In these strange times, after returning my brothers, sisters, and me to school for a year, my parents consider relocating. They decide to buy a house in Phnom Penh that had been owned by a Vietnamese family. Pa says many Vietnamese families have been involuntarily repatriated, and their homes in Phnom Penh are being sold in a hurry and at good prices.

  For Pa these have been months of frustration entangled in brutal lessons. He has lost two sons, children not touched by bombs but who might have survived if there had been access to hospitals and advanced medical care. Pa has become silent, but out of his silence comes a burning desire. A desire to fight back, not with guns but with the mind—a desire to learn.

  In ways I can never imagine, his desire will come to affect us all.

  3

  A Grain of Rice on a Dog’s Tail

  Phnom Penh is a city designed for the senses. Everywhere there is activity, sound, and tantalizing smells. Here, people don’t seem to feel the shadow of war creeping up on them. Now it’s the summer of 1972. We delight in the sudden normalcy of human activities. People stroll through the city. Others crowd around the carts of food vendors, jostling for their right to fried noodles, sour yellow fingers of pickled green mangoes served on a stick with a touch of red chili and salt, or crispy, golden fried bananas, battered with flour and sesame seeds. My personal favorite is the pâté sandwich—thick baguette rolls stuffed with three kinds of sliced meat, wafers of cucumber, and green onion or cilantro.

  Phnom Penh truly is a capital city. Everywhere we see markets, pharmacies, restaurants, schools—the normal bustle of urban living. Even though the bus has taken us only seventy miles north of Takeo, following winds up from the Gulf of Thailand, it is a different world.

  Soon after our arrival, we welcome another person into our family. Mak gives birth to a healthy baby boy, whom she and Pa name Putheathavin, who has beautiful, long eyelashes, longer than those of anyone in our family, and velvety tan skin like Pa’s. We call him Vin, using the last sound of his first name. Similarly, my name is Chanrithy, and everyone calls me Thy or Athy. Ra is Chantara, and we call her Ra, but Pa and Mak call her Ara because they’re older and they can use A before her name. Ry is Channary, Than is Chanthan, and Avy is Putheatavy, but Chea is Chea because this is her special nickname, which means “heal,” but at school her friends call Chanchhaya. Now Pa and Mak have seven children, more than the neighboring families.

  Our neighbors on the right are two Chinese families, quiet and polite people. On our left is a nice Cambodian family, pure and cultured Cambodians, Mak said, with dark skin and large eyes. Across from us lives another Cambodian family, an aunt with her family and a niece who is single and works as a policewoman. Her name is Veth and I am in awe of her.

  Sala Santeu Mook (elementary school) is my school and also Than’s. Colorful flowers in planters stand sentry before each building and around the flagpole, where we uniformly line up to salute the flag every morning and sing the national anthem:

  We the people of Cambodia are well known in the world. We succeed in building monuments. Our glorious civilization and religion, our ancestors’ heritage, have been kept on this earth. Cambodians, stand up, stand up, fight, defend the republic. When enemies attack, we defend, we fight.

  Two years after Vin was born, Mak has another healthy baby. He is adorable with dark brown eyes and light skin like Mak, but his face resembles Pa’s. After his birth, a nurse told Mak that the placenta had been wrapped around his body. This means he will be a teacher when he grows up and will be smart and compassionate. That makes Mak smile, her eyes gazing at his pink face. His name is Phalkunarith, but sometimes Pa calls him Map (chubby) because his cheeks are plump.

  Now I’m eight, forgetting the past with its enemies and bombs. I’ve learned new things in school, among them Cambodian history, which I have to memorize. Sometimes I find it boring because it is filled with wars, battles with neighboring countries, and dead Cambodian kings with names as long as my first and last name combined. It seems Cambodia has never been a country fully at peace. Chea says it’s important to learn Khmer history. But right now I’d rather learn math or, better yet, I’d like to know more about
the magical power of the medicines tucked in the drawers of Pa’s desk.

  When no one is around, I gently, ever so gently, slide open one of Pa’s medicine drawers. Before me lie boxes of powdered medicine in vials, and clear liquid medicine in small glass cylinders blown into different shapes. There are tiny metallic seesaw blades, which Pa uses to saw into the cylindrical glasses, and alcohol papers wrapped in little packages. I am spellbound by the array of glittering, magical treasures. Finally my eyes come to rest on two things: the medicine for the injections Pa gives me in my butt and the liquid he shoots into the veins of my arms.

  There is a kind of magic in my home: medicine. I’m not sure where or how my father has learned medicine, but he does so hoping never to be as helpless as he was during Tha’s and Bosaba’s illnesses. This is very much like Pa. To him, life is a series of problems waiting to be solved.

  Pa is a good father and, now, a good doctor. When I am sick with asthma, he always takes care of me. When my breathing is labored, he puts his ear against my chest and back to listen for wheezing. Sometimes he takes me to a hospital for X rays and blood tests. Then he knows what medicine to give. Somehow, with seven children to treat, he readily makes room for other patients. No appointments necessary. As he helps my ailing cousins and the neighbors’ children, I look on with adoration. I hold Pa’s hand and say to him, “Pa, when I’m big I want to be like you. I want to give people shots. Make them better.”

  Beside Pa, Chea is my number two idol. She’s very smart. She often receives presents and awards for being at the top of her class. Mak and Pa are proud of her. I want to be like her—to do math in a thick spiral notebook and have lots of good friends. Chea teaches me how to sing French and English songs. Often I ask her to teach me how to count to ten “in American.” Noticing my fascination with the language, she promises me she will talk to Pa about enrolling me in a private English school called Engloria when I turn ten.

  There’s no doubt Pa will let me. He and Mak are pleased when my brothers, sisters, and I study. It makes me think of a poem Chea once recited to me:

  “Knowledge cannot be destroyed by termites…. One can spendit and never run out of it.”

  Our household shifts once again. Pa helps arrange Aunt Cheng’s marriage, then takes her and her husband under his wing. They stay with us until they can find their own place. It’s nice to have Aunt Cheng around. It feels strange to see her married to someone she doesn’t know. And I miss her, the aunt I knew before she married.

  Eventually Aunt Cheng moves, but Uncle Seng, Pa’s youngest brother, who has lived with us since we bought the house, stays. He’s my favorite uncle who likes to tickle me on my stomach. Uncle Seng is single and good-looking, especially when he wears aviator sunglasses and his pilot’s uniform. Pa once told friends of his who came to our house for dinner that Uncle Seng flew reconnaissance missions for the Cambodian air force. He looks for khmang, enemies, Pa explained softly. I know he means the Khmer Rouge.

  I have taken an interest in the world and the ways of adults. Often I sit quietly on the red couch watching the news on television with Pa or listen to the radio. I don’t understand many things, but I know it’s important. There is news about fighting with the Khmer Rouge, about Prince Sihanouk, the “god-king” whom many Cambodian elders believe to have the divine touch, who has somehow lost power and joined the Khmer Rouge. It is his voice, Pa says, that now calls out on the radio, in Peking, China, beseeching Cambodian people to join the Khmer Rouge in the jungles. Pleading for us to join the “king-father” and fight against people supporting the “American imperialists.” The broadcaster reports the mounting casualties among soldiers and civilians and pinpoints outlying provinces where skirmishes have taken place. It is news that still seems very far away.

  Although I make time for adult news, I also turn my back on it, drawn to my childhood duty in life—to have fun. When Than and his friends are about to play kick-the-can, I dash out and open the gate. I hope they haven’t divided into two groups yet. I make my way into the circle of boys. “Hey, can I play?”

  Than says, “Wait! Athy, come here!” He waves me away from his friends.

  “What?”

  “Don’t play with boys—you’re a girl. Go play with your own friends! Go!”

  “But I want to play kick-the-can. You can play with them, why can’t I play with them?”

  “But they’re my friends! If you play, I’ll tell Mak. Mak will hit you for playing with boys.” He glares at me as he makes his way back to his friends.

  Right behind him, I say, “Well, your friends don’t say I can’t play!”

  I couldn’t care less about the culture or what Mak will do or say to me. Besides, Than’s friends don’t seem to mind that I play with them. During the game, I run as fast as any of them. I have fun and forget all about Than’s warning.

  Than runs home. I race with him. I pass Mak sitting on the red couch and Pa sitting at his medicine desk with his glasses on, inspecting something.

  “Athy, where did you come from, all sweaty?” asks Mak.

  “Play.”

  “Mak, she played with boys! I told her not to, but she’s stubborn.”

  “Why is that, Athy?”

  I walk back to the living room to defend myself.

  “Koon, they didn’t want you to play with them, why didn’t you listen?”

  “Why couldn’t I play? His friends didn’t say I couldn’t play. Only Than told me not to play!” I reply.

  “But she was the only girl, Mak!”

  “But my friends weren’t playing tonight. Why couldn’t I play kick-the-can with your friends? Selfish!” I retort. “Want to have fun by yourself.”

  Mak laughs as if amused by what just transpired. She turns to Pa, sitting at the desk, then says: “Pa vea [Father of the children], listen to your children!”

  I look at Pa, bracing for what he will say. I wonder if he will have me kneel on his desk again as my punishment, as he did when I sneaked out to watch TV at my friend’s house after he had told me not to watch ours. By now Pa should know that this sort of discipline will never work with me. Crying as hard as I possibly could, I had slowly climbed up the chair onto the desk. My shrieky cry was more difficult for Pa to handle than having me kneel on his desk. So now I wonder what Pa will do as he slowly looks up. He turns to Mak and gazes above his glasses, which hang on the tip of his nose. To my relief, he grins.

  The verdict is clear. I’m exonerated again.

  Strangely, without my knowledge, the same thing that has been going on in our childhood game of kick-the-can has been escalating throughout the country, on a grand, and dangerous, political scale. Just as my friends and I challenge each other to sneak in and kick a tin can over to the winning side, so government and grassroots armies have been challenging each other, jostling for a win. Just as neighborhood children size up their teams, picking the strongest players, so the Khmer Rouge has been sizing up their allies. Who to pick? Who can run the fastest? Communist China? Russia? Certainly it cannot be France or the United States. In the midst of all of this, Cambodia has become the coveted tin can. We begin to feel the reverberations of a game growing out of hand.

  Fighting around the country is escalating. As the Khmer Rouge begin to seize outlying provinces, thousands upon thousands of families flee their homes, seeking refuge in Phnom Penh. In a matter of months, the population has more than tripled from about 600,000 to almost 2 million.

  With so many people now living here, prices are sky-high. And so is the corruption among government officials. When my aunt’s husband, an officer in the Cambodian army, is arrested for secretly selling weapons to the Khmer Rouge, my father is devastated.

  “How stupid, greedy. He has sold the country,” Pa murmurs, unable to comprehend the pressure to betray. My aunt weeps, telling Mak and Pa about the sentencing, the bail. Somehow, my uncle is released.

  To make things worse, terrorist activity is seeping into the city. Plastic explosives have now be
en planted in public places, such as movie theaters and markets. We hear warnings on the radio, which prompt Mak to remind Than to be careful, “Koon, Than, do you hear that?” The newspapers also say the Khmer Rouge are terrorizing the nation, especially Lon Nol’s government.

  At night Pa updates Mak on what has happened at work or the news he reads. He talks about fleeing families. There are more beggars in the city and, now, homeless families. Children sneak into restaurants and ask customers for leftovers. Proprietors tell them to leave. They vanish for a moment, but appear again.

  That evening he tells me a Cambodian saying. Pa says to me, “There comes a time when a grain of rice sticks on a dog’s tail, and everyone will fight for it.” He looks at me gravely, and so does my mother, awaiting my reaction. It makes no sense to me.

  “Don’t be picky, koon,” Mak adds. “Eat what we have.”

  “Koon, there’s a lot of hungry people out there,” says Pa.

  In his eyes I see his concern. Only then do I begin to realize how much my parents love me, how much they want to teach me, to prepare me for the changing world surrounding us. To prepare me for the Year of the Rabbit, for the unknown it will bring.

  Already it is the Time of New Angels. The Cambodian New Year is around the corner, April 13. That’s when families throughout the country begin to celebrate the festivities that traditionally stretch until the fifteenth. On the radio we hear music that tells of old angels who will be sent back to heaven, replaced by new angels who will take care of mortals. Usually, my family goes to Wat Phnom, a beautiful temple perched on a hilltop in Phnom Penh, or the Independent Monument, a parklike national memorial. At home we offer food and drink before the shrines of Buddha to welcome the angels—rice, candles, incense, and fruits.