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By Root 668 0

She was born in China and moved to Cambodia as a little girl. After they were married, Pa took care of Ma in every way. Now he urges Ma to work harder than the other new women in the community. Ma also has to be extra careful because she speaks Khmer with a Chinese accent. Pa fears that this will make her a target for the soldiers who want to rid Cambodia of outside ethnic poison. Ma is proud of her heritage but has to hide it before it proves dangerous to us all. Pa says that the Angkar is obsessed with ethnic cleansing. The Angkar hates anyone who is not true Khmer. The Angkar wants to rid Democratic Kampuchea of other races, deemed the source of evil, corruption, and poison, so that people of the true Khmer heritage can rise to power again. I do not know what ethnic cleansing means. I just know that to protect myself, I often have to rub dirt and charcoal on my skin to look as dark as the base people.

keav

August 1976

Six months after Keav left our village and sixteen months since the Khmer Rouge took power, a young girl arrives at our village in the morning looking for Ma and Pa. “I come with a message from Keav,” she says. “You must come to the hospital. She is very sick and she wants to see you.”

“Why? What’s wrong with her?” Ma manages to ask, shifting Geak on her hip.

“The nurse believes it is something she ate. She has a terrible case of diarrhea. You must come now. She has been sick all morning and asking for you all this time.” Pa cannot get off work to go see Keav, and we do not know how sick she is. After receiving permission from the chief, Ma leaves with the girl to see Keav.

Keav still lives in Kong Cha Lat, a teenage work camp with about 160 laborers. The teenagers are separated in two houses, one for the boys and one for the girls. At the camp, they work from dawn until dusk in the rice fields. The girls are given less food than the boys but are expected to work just as hard. Both their food rations consist only of watery rice soup and salted fish.

After Pa and Kim leave for work, Chou, Geak, and I wait for Ma to return. Since we have no instruments to tell us the time, and we’re no good at guessing it from the sun’s position in the sky, the wait feels like forever. While Chou fans the flies off Geak, who is asleep beside her, I pace the ground in front of our hut. Each step I take, the earth beneath seems to shift, throwing me off balance. Each breath I take, the air rushes quickly down my throat, choking me. In my mind, I envision Keav at her camp.

Keav woke one day to notice that her stomach was bloated and rumbling, making sounds as if something was swishing around inside. She ignored it, believing it was merely hunger pains. She took a deep breath, tears welling up in her eyes. Always there are the hunger pains. Sometimes the hunger pains hurt so much that they spread to every part of the body. It has been a long time since she’d had enough to eat. She rubbed her hand on her stomach, telling it to settle down.

Following the rules, she rolls her straw mat off the floor and leans it against the wall. The dirt floor is hard and full of black ants and other bugs. At night, she always makes sure she closes her mouth tightly and pulls her blanket up above her head, hoping to leave no openings for the bugs to crawl in. She looks around her camp, her eyes focusing on a few faces she recognizes among the eighty girls she lives with. She smiles at them but is greeted with blank stares. Clenching her teeth together, she turns away from them and inhales deeply. She knows she cannot show her emotion, or the supervisor will think she is weak and not worth keeping alive. Unlike our family’s hut in Ro Leap, she does not have the privacy of her own space to let go of her emotions. At the camp, if she cries she will be judged by 160 pairs of eyes that will think her weak. And she misses us so. This time the tears spill over and she quickly wipes them with her sleeves before anyone sees.

In my mind’s eye, I see Keav breathing deeply and trying to fill the void in her heart. Her lungs expand and take