When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [36]
I eagerly ask my mother for something to put the armmiage in. Mak ties knots at both ends of a scarf; draped around my neck, it creates two pouches. She gives me a plant of armmiage to take with me in case I don’t remember what it looks like. From hut to hut, my eyes take in all the plants and weeds growing on the paths or in the yards. Mak is right about a lot of armmiage growing wild. It grows everywhere, along the pathways and in front of people’s huts. After I pick a patch of it, I look up and see more armmiage ahead of me, some growing in clusters, others scattered randomly. Both of the pouches fill quickly, but I am still picking. I know how good it will taste once it is pickled and ready to be eaten.
I am stooping down by the path at the corner of a house when I hear a chorus of women’s voices.
“Who else dropped the bombs?” An angry voice demands. “It was him, Aseng, who dropped them. Our families and children were savagely killed because of him. When he comes, we’ll torture him and make him feel pain.”
Her anger makes me look up. The name the woman spits out sounds familiar. I realize they are talking about my Uncle Seng. The woman who made the first angry remarks was Yiey Chea, a woman who I found out later to be related to us—she’s actually Uncle Seng’s biological aunt. When I saw her before, she seemed nice and friendly to Mak. Now I’m startled, scared by the vicious tone of her voice, as well as that of the other women. But the Khmer Rouge have been at work, turning family against family in the name of Angka Leu.
“It won’t take much to kill him. He’ll die just by each of us peeing on his head,” an older woman quips sarcastically as she steps off the ladderlike stairs of the house.
There are fifteen women in their fifties and sixties dressed in black coming out of the house. It appears they just had a meeting. I’m afraid of Yiey Chea, fear she will recognize me and accuse me of spying. With the two filled pouches weighing down my neck, I walk away, trying to appear unobtrusive while contemplating all they’ve said.
Bombing their relatives? I think to myself. Uncle Seng didn’t bomb them. The B-52s did. I’m confused by their accusations and sarcasm, but most of all I’m perplexed by their hatred toward him, their utter conviction even when they don’t know the truth.
The Khmer Rouge are now focused on turning the people from the city into laborers. At first, most of the adults are forced to build irrigation canals, backbreaking work using only hoes. Everyone must work. My mother and aunts have to gather cow and buffalo dung scattered in the village and transport it to the rice fields. Mak has been given a basket to transport the excrement. Separating her head from the animal dung are a layer of the basket and a cushion formed by the scarf folded beneath it. When she walks across Kong Houng’s orchard, I ask her, “Mak, what’s in the basket?”
“Only cow dung, koon,” she says, showing me.
“Yuck! Yuck,” I cry, repelled by the dark, drenched excrement. Mak smiles, amused. She chuckles, putting the basket back on her head, and resumes her work, which is unlike anything she has ever done in her life. I run over to my seven-year-old sister Avy and tell her about the dung on Mak’s head. She wrinkles her nose, and we laugh at the new lesson in our lives.
But more lessons are to follow. There’s a meeting for children, and I’m told to go. I dress up in my best navy blue skirt with a nice white blouse. I wear my new leather shoes that Mak bought for me just before the Khmer Rouge takeover. I report there alone. To my surprise, children aged about ten to thirteen gather at a barn amid bundles of hay. Among the tumbled straw, the “city children” stand apart from the local children, whose clothes are thickly patched, bulky and ragged, their hair uncombed. I realize my idea of a meeting will never be the same as the Khmer Rouge’s.
Three women wearing dark, faded uniforms and old scarves around