When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [38]
By the time we’ve planted all the rice paddies, stomping through four fields, I’m exhausted. I’m hungry and sticky from the sun. A small part of me is proud that I’ve learned how to plant rice, but I hate this way of life. Here, we are moving backward, just as the village children scuttle backward putting down the rows of seedlings. Again, I yearn to go back to school and long for my previous life—even reading about dead kings sounds appealing.
Today Than encounters the most appalling lesson by far. He is among a group of young boys ordered to destroy Buddhist temples and shrines of guardian spirits called Ronng Neak Ta, special places typically tucked beneath the giant umbrella of shade cast by huge, majestic old po trees (banyan trees), where spirits are thought to dwell. These sacred shrines are made of small wooden boxes in the shape of a house, secured between large branches or in caves created by the massive tree trunks. In each of them is a tin can filled with sand, into which incense sticks are planted during prayers and food offerings. To the sanctuary of Ronng Neak Ta women and men would bring food, candles, or incense. Here, they would pour their hearts out to the presiding spirits, imploring them for good health, luck, and happiness.
Than is baffled as he tells Mak and our relatives of today’s task. With sledgehammers and hoes, they shattered walls and shrines that have stood for years. From village to village they went, the Khmer Rouge urging the boys to shout and grunt as they crumbled walls, like an evil cheering section. Everyone is shocked, at a loss for words. As Than speaks, his expression asks the question, Is it okay to do that? It’s hard not to remember Tha, who died after the mere slight of peeing on someone’s grave. But at eleven, Than has already learned that he has no voice when it comes to the work of the Khmer Rouge. Finally he shrugs, “They made us do it…. Kept shouting at us to destroy…. Now I’m worried about angry spirits….” He frowns. If they reject the culture of religion, if they have no fear of the wrath of spirits, why didn’t they destroy the temples themselves?
The Khmer Rouge wish to rule not only our inner spiritual lives but our outward appearance as well. They require girls and women to wear their hair short. The rule is a deliberate slap in the face of our culture, which prizes the traditional beauty of long hair. If we don’t cut our hair to our earlobes, they warn, they’ll do it for us. Chea, Ra, and Ry decide that they’ll have Mak cut their hair. My mother takes her scissors and carefully, evenly trims the hair that once fell down their backs to their ears. The hair falls, another measure of loss. I look at Chea, Ra, and Ry with curiosity, as if they were now wearing Khmer Rouge wigs. My own hair barely brushes my shoulders, and I dread the day I must join them. For now, I’m not old enough to worry anyone. The Khmer Rouge’s barbers cut hair without thought. A coconut shell is placed over the head. Any hair dangling from below the edge of the shell is snipped away, the shell a crude cutting line. The style was easy to spot—uneven hanks of hair falling randomly, it looked like the handiwork of a five-year-old.
The Khmer Rouge know how to strike deeply. The head is the most sacred part of the body to a Cambodian. To be struck in the head, even to have a younger person or an enemy touch your head, is enormously insulting. And yet our captors seem indifferent to our lives before this moment. There is only the history of the here and now.
Every day the Khmer Rouge set new rules. Now they want to control the words out of our mouths. We have to use the rural terms of address, calling our mothers Mae, and our fathers Pok. Our other option is to call our parents “comrade,” a strange, detached word that, by the sound of it, makes me laugh. How absurd! In our culture, we have four or five words to describe the act of eating, to designate an older person, a monk, or a king.