First They Killed My Father_ A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers - Loung Ung [42]
In Phnom Penh, I would have thrown up if someone told me I would have to eat those things. Now, when the only alternative is to starve, I fight others for a dead animal lying in the road. Surviving for another day has become the most important thing to me. About the only thing I have not eaten is human flesh. I have heard many stories about other villages where people have eaten human flesh. There was a story about a woman in a village nearby who turned to cannibalism. They say she was a good woman, not the monster the soldiers portray her to be. She was so hungry that when her husband died from eating poisonous food, she ate his flesh and fed it to her children. She did not know that the poison in his body would kill her and her children as well.
A man in our village came upon a stray dog in the road one day. The poor dog did not have much meat on it, but the man killed and ate it anyway. The next day, the soldiers arrived at the man’s door. He cried and begged for mercy, but they did not pay any attention to him. He raised his arms as a shield, but they did not protect him from the blows of the soldiers’ fists and rifle stocks. He was never seen again after the soldiers took him away. His crime was that he did not share the dog meat with the community.
I feel sorry for this man’s fate, for I would have done the very same thing to my dog. In Phnom Penh, our family had a friendly little puppy with a wet nose. It was a tiny thing with shaggy long hair that dragged on the ground. The dog loved to hide underneath big piles of clothes on our oriental rugs. Our housekeeper was quite fat and did not know that the dog liked to hide. It was a terrible sight when she stepped on and killed the dog. Pa threw the body away before any of us girls saw it. It shames me now to know that I would eat it if it were alive today.
Thinking about food makes my stomach growl with hunger. Pa tells me today is New Year’s. Though my feet ache I decide to go for a walk in the nearby fields. Pa has been granted permission from the chief for me to stay home because I am sick. After a few hours of lying in our hut, the growls in my stomach demand that I search for food. My eyes probe the ground, hoping to find some food to fill my hungry stomach. It’s a hot day and the sun burns right through my hair, searing my greasy scalp. I run my fingers through my hair feeling for the lice that make my head itch. With no shampoo or soap, it is a constant battle to keep myself clean, and as a result, my hair clumps together in greasy knots, which makes it hard for me to catch the lice. I pause in the shade underneath a tree for a short rest.
In Phnom Penh, I could run very fast around our home, barely avoiding the corners and sharp edges of furniture. Even on school nights, I would seldom go to sleep until late. I am now always so tired. Starvation has done terrible things to my body. After one month of having very little to eat my body is thin all over, except for my stomach and my feet. I can count every rib in my rib cage, but my stomach protrudes outward, bloated like a ball between my chest and hips. The flesh on my feet is so swollen it glistens as if it will pop open. Curious, I push my thumb into my swollen feet, pressing the flesh inward and creating a big dent. Counting under my breath I wait to see how long it takes for the dent to fill itself up. After a while, I make more dents on my feet, legs, arms, and face. My body is like a balloon. The dents I make reinflate slowly. Even walking is a difficult task because my joints hurt whenever I move. When I do move, seeing where I am going becomes a challenge because my eyes are nearly swollen shut. When I do see well enough to walk, my lungs yearn for enough air, and being short of breath, it takes a laborious effort to control my balance. Most days, I have neither the energy nor the desire to walk around, but I must walk today to search for food.
Slowly, I make my way to the blackened forest in the back of the village. A couple times a year, the soldiers set sections of the forest ablaze to create more