When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [41]
The train stops and I’m jerked back to reality. The sliding door is flung open, and we’re released, disoriented, wobbling out of our cage. Sunlight bathes us as we trudge behind others across the dry, cracked earth. It is the first time I’ve been able to stretch my legs in twenty-four hours, and my muscles protest as I struggle like an old woman to master my coordination.
Our lives are like a phrase from a familiar song, Chivith choun reang choun pleang. “Life sometimes has drought and sometimes has rain.”
This is our time of drought.
6
Worse Than Pigs
The New York Times
July 9, 1975
“Cambodia’s Crime…”
Some twelve weeks after the Communist entry into Phnom Penh and the forced exodus on foot of millions of urban Cambodians to distant countrysides, a veil of silence still cloaks the full horror of what has happened—with the worst yet to come in predicted deaths from hunger and disease. The agony and degradation that followed may never be fully known. Tens of thousands are believed to have fallen by the wayside, victims of hunger, thirst, exhaustion and disease, including a spreading cholera epidemic….
Can life be worse than it already is? This question becomes a mental game, a way of throwing down an emotional challenge to myself: It can’t be any worse. It can’t be any worse. This is enough. They can do no more.
In my mind, the words become both a dare and a comfort.
Just as we were randomly squeezed into the train cars, now we’re discharged. Hundreds of us march into a desolate field, rushing behind the Khmer Rouge. Carrying our remaining belongings, we trudge behind them. Children, mothers, and elderly parents hurry past each other. Little children sob constantly as they’re yanked along, scolded to keep up with the moving crowd. We cross one barren field into another, propelled by sheer will.
As we enter a green grove of trees and shrubs, they command some of us to stop. The rest of the group funnel down a path flanked by bushes and trees. Among these people, I don’t see my grandparents, aunts, or cousins. We’ve been so hungry and scared that we haven’t had time to worry about our extended families. But now we depend so much on our immediate family, and in the faces of my mother, my brothers, and my sisters, I feel a sharpened sense of their value which I’ve never known before. For the moment we take refuge near clumps of wild vines that snake around shady trees.
A man dressed in black appears. He’s tall and slender with dark skin and short hair. He looks smart, different from many of the stocky Khmer Rouge peasants we’ve seen. Standing before us, he explains that he’s a leader of Daakpo village. As soon as he opens his mouth to talk, I’m intrigued by his strange accent. I’ve never heard anything like it, and it almost makes me giddy.
“Mak, how come he talks funny?” I can’t help asking as we follow along, carrying our belongings.
Mak smiles and says, “This part of the country, near Battambang province, speaks this way, in rurdern [a drawl].”
“It sounds funny,” I say chortling, realizing there are actually other Cambodians who speak this oddly, in this drawn-out, singsong way. As grim as our situation is, I find it hard to take him seriously.
“Comrades, this is where you’ll stay,” the village leader announces, standing under four tall shady trees.
I’m shocked. I was hoping to see shelters, huts or beds where we can rest. But there’s nothing except trees, thick woods. It looks like no one has ever lived here before. Green and quiet, it is nature in its naked form. Trees are my walls, the sky my roof.
“Comrades, there’s a pond near here. Right over there,” the village leader says, pointing. His voice no longer amuses me.
A few days later, bamboo, palm leaves, palm thread made from palm bark, and freshly cut trees are brought to us. Shrubs and trees have to be cleared to accommodate the sudden swelling population, hundreds of us accumulating here and in nearby villages in a matter of