When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [39]
“Comrade Mak, can I say that?” I curtsy before my mother, causing her to grin. It’s so nice to see her familiar smile. This eggs us on. My sisters and I briefly practice our new vocabulary, mocking it in our play. We address each other as “Comrade Athy” or “Comrade Chea” with graceful little courtesies. It is our attempt to cope with what we can’t change. However, when no one is listening, we address our family properly. They may take our language from our family in public, but they can’t take away the family itself, the bond that binds us. Our private words are our own.
Instead of giving us currency, the Khmer Rouge dole out rations of paddy (unhusked rice). The rations are taken directly from the abundant stores they’ve seized from Kong Houng—hundreds of thousands of kilograms of unhusked rice. They distribute the paddy to us, stingily measured into woven baskets. Older people receive larger rations compared to a nine-year-old kid like me. We have to process our own rice from scratch. Watch and learn. I take the initiative, determined to conform, to survive. I help my mother and sisters crush the unhusked rice. The golden unhusked grains are tossed into a huge cement mortar buried in the ground. Above it hangs a large, heavy vertical pole connected to a horizontal arm. Together we step on the end of the arm, then release it. The pounding pole smashes into the grain like a gigantic pestle, releasing the grain from its husk. Then we winnow it, sifting the unhusked from the husked, and repeat the process. As for meat, we fish when there is spare time, which has become scarce. We harvest vegetables from Kong’s rapidly failing orchard and other plants that grow wild like weeds in fields and around people’s houses.
Paddy rations are never enough. Most of the time, Mak leaves the hut after she helps set up our meal on the wooden deck. When some of us ask for more rice, she sadly puts her spoon down and offers to share her ration. Increasingly, she seems to have errands to run when it’s time for dinner. She tells us to eat, and not to wait up for her. We obey, leaving no food. I begin to realize that she never eats. I never think much about it, but wonder why she doesn’t seem to be hungry.
Later I find out. All those times, Mak has been going around Year Piar asking for meals from the local women she has befriended. To beg means that she has humbled herself before those women. This brutal reality cuts me like a knife. From now on, I know there’s no future under the Khmer Rouge.
It is now October, four months after Pa’s execution. Rumors have spread. Soon we will be moved to a different place. Where? Mak asks around, but no one knows.
The night before we are to leave, Mak dreams about Pa. He appears without a head. He walks toward her and tries to tell her something with his hands, but she can’t understand. As Mak asks him questions, he stands there headless, yet he’s listening. Then he disappears into the dark night, leaving Mak screaming for him to return. This nightmare is a dark omen for all of us.
The next day we gather for our meal of rice and vegetable soup with banana stalk and fish. No one says anything except to make terse requests to pass dishes. I’m scared. I break down, crying. My sisters, too. Through the open hut, where we’ve been eating our meals, I gaze at the orchard. The empty space where the pineapples once were. The fruit trees, the shady tamarind—my eyes caress them, as if saying good-bye to a refuge where I’ve found shelter, a place almost outside the revolution.
Even Kong Houng and Yiey Khmeng must now leave their home, a place he has struggled to protect all these years. For my family, this final act is the beginning of a naked existence. Turning us out of Kong Houng’s home, built as his bridal gift to Yiey Kmeng, represents more than an eviction.