When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [5]
My father knew magic. I was convinced of this. I felt him work his magic when the heavy fingers of asthma clutched my lungs. I would sit up and gasp for air, but everything was stuck. Quickly my father would open his drawer of French medicine, grab a vial and a syringe. Then the magic worked, as it always did. It was as amazing to me as the wise man of the Himalayas—one minute I was taking my last breath, the next minute I was running off to play.
Sitting before my computer, I feel the long-ago magic of my childhood, now memory’s shadow. The war crushed my innocent belief in magic as neatly and efficiently as you might smash a cricket beneath your heel. At first I tried to hide inside the magic. It was a refuge against the surreal realities of war. My friends and I would pretend we had the power to raise the dead. I would talk to imaginary friends in the orchard behind our house. The guava, katot, and teap barang trees and the pond behind my home became the jungle I would have to pass through to get to the Himalayas.
For a time I thought the growing fears of the Viet Cong invasion into Cambodia in the late sixties were an abstraction, an illusion.
Time would tell me otherwise.
Time would take away the magic. And time would give it back.
Tonight the light from my computer screen reflects dull blue on my face. I feel my body and soul recovering from stress, from weeks of intense studies leading up to the MCAT, the all-day Medical College Admissions Test. Yet I feel a gnawing need to resume my writing. At first I felt it was my responsibility as a survivor. But now writing has also become my trek to the Himalayas, my search to recapture the long-lost magic in my life. This time I’m trying to use the power of words to caution the world, and in the process to heal myself. And even with an intellectual hangover from the toughest academic test I’ve ever taken, I’m searching for the words, the incantation, to make things right in my soul.
My heart keeps me writing despite the hour. Pushing hard has become my addiction. At first it was a lesson of necessity, my only means of surviving the Khmer Rouge regime, of outrunning the wheel of history. Being raised by educated and open-minded parents, I had advantages. I was never forced to live up to the sexist expectations of traditional Cambodian culture—a fact that would become important to my survival.
As a child trying to endure the Khmer Rouge regime, I had many questions about the strange world that had overtaken my homeland. At twelve years of age, during the Khmer Rouge regime, I asked my oldest sister, Chea, a question in the hope of understanding our pain and the loss of those I loved. Her answer became the seed of my survival, planted by a sister whom I idolized.
“Chea, how come good doesn’t win over evil? Why did the Khmer Rouge win if they are bad people?”
Chea answered: “—jchan baan chea preah chnae baan chea mea,” which means “Loss will be God’s, victory will be the devil’s.” When good appears to lose, it is an opportunity for one to be patient, and become like God. “But not very long, p’yoon srey [younger sister],” she explained, and referred to a Cambodian proverb about what happens when good and evil are thrown together into the river of life. Good is symbolized by klok, a type of squash, and evil by armbaeg, shards of broken glass. “The good will win over the evil. Now, klok sinks, and broken glass floats. But armbaeg will not float long. Soon klok will float instead, and then the good will prevail.” Chea’s eyes pierced me with an expression that reinforced her words. “P’yoon, wait and see. It will happen.”
At age twenty-two, in 1978, Chea died