First They Killed My Father_ A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers - Loung Ung [27]
“Pa! Pa! Here comes something!” I scream excitedly one day.
“That’s a good one. It looks like a rabbit.”
“Look Pa, here comes another,” Chou tells him.
Pa extends his hand to catch them with his net. He reaches in and pulls out two rabbits by the heads. The size of big rats, they hang limp and lifeless in his hands, their fur matted to their bodies. He takes the rabbits and places them on a wooden board. Their necks make a small crunching sound as he chops off their heads with his little knife. Kim then pours a bowl of water on the corpses to wash away the blood. Pa cuts open the skin from the neck all the way down to the bottom of the stomach. With that, he grabs the skin from the neck and pulls it off the bodies. Pa then separates the meat from the bones and cuts the flesh into very thin slices to soak in the lime juice that Ma has prepared. Because everything is wet and there’s a foot of water underneath us, we cannot make a fire. Pa feeds us young children slices of the rabbit meat. Though the lime juice cuts the taste a little, I still hate the texture of it. The flesh stretches and pulls in my mouth and it’s hard to chew. My stomach tightens, wanting to throw the food back out. Sucking on a slice of lime, I force the meat to stay down because I know that there is no more food for me if I spit it out.
Eventually, the rainy season is over and the flood recedes, leaving behind wet, muddy ground. The whole village is in a state of panic for there is no food anywhere. “We have to leave,” Pa tells us one night. “People are discontent. They are hungry. The native villagers are suspicious of everybody, and they are asking too many questions. We are different, your ma speaks Khmer with a Chinese accent, you kids have lighter skin, and, besides me, this family does not know much about farming, so the villagers will make us the first scapegoats for their problems.” Pa says hunger and fear make people turn against one another, so once again we have to flee. Pa pleads with the chief to relocate us to another village before people have the chance to turn against us. In the morning, we will leave with only the clothes in our bags, trek down the mountain, and wait for a Khmer Rouge truck to pick us up.
“The killings have started,” Pa tells my older brothers as we walk back down the mountain to our rendezvous area. “The Khmer Rouge are executing people perceived to be a threat against the Angkar. This new country has no law or order. City people are killed for no reason. Anyone can be viewed as a threat to the Angkar—former civil servants, monks, doctors, nurses, artists, teachers, students—even people who wear glasses, as the soldiers view this as a sign of intelligence. Anyone the Khmer Rouge believes has the power to lead a rebellion will be killed. We have to be extremely careful, but if we keep moving to different villages, we may stay safe.”
It has become too familiar to me by now. When Ma wakes me up in the early morning, I do not ask her any questions. It has become a routine. After many hours of walking, we arrive at the same spot where we were dropped off months before. There, we wait all afternoon and into the night for the truck that the chief arranged to come and take us far away to where no one knows us. When the truck comes in the darkness, we quietly climb in the back. We do not greet the families already on it but silently step over their bodies to find empty spaces to sit.
The truck takes us to the other side of the mountain to a village called Leak, where we wait for new orders from the soldiers. I wonder why the Angkar keeps uprooting and relocating people, herding them like cows from one location to another. For our family, the uprooting