When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [29]
After dinner Chea, Ra, Ry, and I rest in our room, surrounded by our belongings, which lean against the walls like weary travelers. Listening to Chea, Ra, and Ry talk is like a balm. All of a sudden Chea jumps up. She scurries to her school briefcase to look for her watch.
“You guys, it’s almost time for the Voice of America.” Chea’s eyes widen. “Ra, where’s the radio?”
Ry and I jump up as Chea and Ra locate the radio near one of the suitcases.
“Athy,” Chea exclaims anxiously, “go get Pa.”
In a minute I have Pa with me, along with Mak, Than, my aunts and uncles, and Grandma, all crowded into the room and the doorway. Already Chea is fumbling for the Voice of America’s frequency. The static crackles loudly.
“Achea, turn it down,” Pa says, knitting his eyebrows.
The faint, brassy strains of American music come through—the theme song of the Voice of America.
“This is the Voice of America in Khmer,” a man’s voice announces in English. Then a woman comes on, speaking in Cambodian: “From the city of Washington, I’m…Ladies and gentlemen, please listen to the events that have taken place in Cambodia….”
At first I find comfort in her voice, for she connects us to the world, unveiling facts, or what the broadcast claims to have happened. But that sense of comfort is brief. I become nervous when I notice Pa frowning. Then everyone else—Chea, Ra, my aunts and uncles—all look anxious, sad. They glance at Pa after he sighs. He is a thermometer for our fear.
“Achea, turn the radio off,” Mak orders. “They’ll suspect us.”
Chea throws Mak a glance, but her hand doesn’t obey. Mak strides toward the radio and reaches to turn it off.
“Not yet,” Pa cries, raising his hand to shield Mak from the radio.
Then Kong Houng’s head peeks through the door. He nervously whispers, “There’s someone standing below the house listening. He stands right underneath this room,” he points, stabbing at the floor, with its wide gaps. “It’s a chhlop.* You’d better be careful.”
Pa turns to his father. Mak quickly reaches over and flips the switch off. She disconnects us from the outside world but links us to the mask of horror on her face. By then my father has digested what his father just said.
The next day a Khmer Rouge cadre seizes the radio, his simple black uniform a mark of his authority. He says the radio now belongs to the commune. All I know is fear. At night, following the chhlop’s eavesdropping, I’m afraid to speak to my sisters, even to utter words like “hand me the blanket,” as if whispering anything at all will cause trouble or bring bad luck.
At night I lift the mat below me and look through the spaces between the floorboards to see if a chhlop is beneath the house, lurking like a demon. Sure enough, I see the shadow of a person standing in a dark corner of the house just below our bedroom. Quickly I drop the mat, recoiling as if I’ve just scorched my fingers on a hot iron. I snuggle closer to Chea.
Within a few days of our arrival, Year Piar Khmer Rouge leaders, who were formerly my grandparents’ employees or tenants, order my father and uncles to work in the name of Angka Leu. The office for Pa is now replaced by an empty field. A hoe, woven baskets, and a carrying stick replace pens and paper. They order the newly arrived men to dig dirt, to build water canals for no pay, in order to advance their revolution.
After dinner, the evening breeze brings my relatives and me to the solid oak bed—a heavy slab of wood, really—which has been brought outside and down the stairs. With the heat and fieldwork, the men seek relief, yearning for a cool breeze the way some men thirst for a quenching drink of water.
It is here that Pa shares his thoughts and feelings about his first day of labor for the Khmer Rouge. “These