First They Killed My Father_ A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers - Loung Ung [20]
After a joyous reunion with my aunts and many cousins, Pa disappears with Uncle Leang to meet with the village chief and request permission to live here. Uncle Leang and Uncle Heang say that since the Khmer Rouge have won the war, the soldiers removed the old village chief and replaced him with a Khmer Rouge cadre. Now the villagers have to seek permission for the simplest of human desires—to have family members live with them or to leave the village to visit another area.
They return shortly and report that our request is granted. My interest in the town quickly dies when Pa tells us we will all live with Uncle Leang and his family in their house. Uncle Leang and his wife have six children, so with the nine of us it makes seventeen under one thatched roof. Their house would not be called a house by city people’s standards. It looks more like one of those simple huts poor people live in. The roof and walls are made of straw and the hut has only a dirt floor. There are no bedrooms or bathrooms, just one big open room. There is no indoor kitchen, so all the cooking is done outside under a straw roof awning. Later that night Kim took me aside, scolding me for being snobbish about our new house. Even as a ten-year-old boy he understood how brave our uncle was to beg the new Khmer Rouge village chief to permit us to stay.
“The village is so poor,” I say to Pa as the family gathers on the floor of Uncle Leang’s hut. Sitting on straw mats or wooden stools and chairs, we listen to Pa’s instructions.
“So are we.” The sternness in Pa’s voice makes my face burn with shame. From now on we are as poor as all these people here. We have to live far away from the city where people might recognize me and know who I am. If anybody outside the family asks where we are from, tell them we are country people just like your uncles.”
“Why don’t we want them to know who we are, Pa? Why can’t we go home to our own house? The soldiers promised that we could go home after three days.”
“The Khmer Rouge lied. They have won the war, and we cannot go back. You must stop thinking we can go back. You have to forget Phnom Penh.” Pa has never spoken so bluntly to me before, and slowly the reality of what he says sinks in. My body trembles with fear and disbelief. I am never going home. I will never see Phnom Penh again, drive in our car, ride a cyclo with Ma to the markets, buy food from the carts. All of that is gone. He reaches out and takes me into his arms as my eyes water and my lips tremble.
As Pa continues to talk, I slide out of his arms and into Keav’s. Pa tries to make my brothers understand the history of politics in Cambodia. Led by Prince Sihanouk, Cambodia, then a French colony, became an independent nation in 1953. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Cambodia prospered and was self-sufficient. However, many people were not happy with Prince Sihanouk’s government. Many regarded the Sihanouk government as corrupt and self-serving, where the poor got poorer and the rich became richer. Various nationalistic factions sprang up to demand reforms. One of the groups, a secret Communist faction—the Khmer Rouge—launched an armed struggle against the Cambodian government.
The war in Vietnam spread to Cambodia when the United States bombed Cambodia’s borders to try to destroy the North Vietnamese bases. The bombings destroyed many villages and killed many people, allowing the Khmer Rouge to gain support from the peasants and farmers. In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was overthrown by his top general, Lon Nol. The United States-backed Lon Nol government was corrupt and weak and was easily defeated by the Khmer Rouge.
Pa says many more things to my brothers, but I don’t care much about politics. All I know is that I am supposed to act dumb and never speak of our lives in the city. I can never tell another