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Already there is work. They order us to look for tree branches for the cooks to use as fuel. Some of us have to dig big holes for the cooking pots. Others go to the stream to retrieve the milky brown water for cooking. I help other children to dig cooking holes. I dig until my body trembles. Suddenly I feel dizzy. I pause and take a deep breath.

Softly I say to myself, “I’m feeling sick.” A few children glance at me as I sink down to the ground. I close my eyes, resting my head on my knees, hiding behind a row of working children who block the chhlops’ view of me. Though I fear the informants will see me, I’m too exhausted to care.

Eventually it is time to eat, and I have not been found out. After we eat, the Khmer Rouge direct us to a grove of trees along the stream in which we are to make our shelters. First we have to clear the brush to make a space, then the “walls,” nothing more than little branches. Those who have brought extra clothes use them for a sleeping mat while Cheng and I gather leaves for ours. The local children, the “old people,” get to choose where they want their shelters to be, and whatever they don’t want belongs to us, the “new people.” All is done to keep the peasants on the side of the Khmer Rouge.

Being new to this task, Cheng and I agree that we should watch the “old people” build their shelters. We decide to find tree branches near their area, where they’re making their makeshift tents. As we study them working, they catch us.

“What are you looking at?” a local girl snarls, speaking in rurdern, a distinctive northwestern drawl. In the past, such an accent would have made me laugh. Here, I only risk a giggle under my breath. It is hard not to mock people you don’t respect. The trick is not to get caught.

Cheng and I turn away. I murmur to Cheng, and softly drawl what the girl said, “What are you looking at?” Cheng mocks her, too, and we laugh quietly to ourselves. For a moment I feel as if we’re back in school, laughing our girlish laughs.

Cheng and I build our tiny shelter away from the other children’s, close to the edge of the stream. Like the “old people,” we use vines and branches to assemble our roof and walls, so low that we must crawl in and out. But I grin to myself at our small achievement, and I’m glad Cheng is here to help. And I wonder if what I heard back in Phnom Penh is true. Cambodian elders used to say, “At home there’s a separate mother, in the forest there’s only one mother.” In the wild, you have to cling together. Here, Cheng is my family. Hope is our invisible mother, the presence that comforts us.

At night we are like a family, but we can’t be while we’re working. Every morning at about four o’clock, our brigade leader, along with her “pets,” shrill in the air, “Wake up, wake up. Go to work, go to work….” Our leader’s voice is annoying, and her face is perpetually angry. She always frowns when ordering us, as if we’re not worth looking at. But the feeling is mutual. I don’t like her either. She’s thin, with short, curly black hair and dark skin. Cambodian elders would say her heart is darker than her skin. She seems to be yelling at us all the time, even after we wake up and march into the field. As our eyes close, open, and close again, her venomous words are all that we hear.

In order to curry favor, our mekorg wakes us earlier and earlier.

“Evil woman!” Cheng hisses under her breath. “This creature wakes us up early for work, but it and its evil people go back to sleep. Dogs!” Cheng growls.

“How do you know they go back to sleep?” I ask, astonished.

“I’ve sneaked out to the cooking area to get fish heads. Then I hide them by our shelter,” says Cheng softly. “And I see them sleep. Those dogs!”

Now I know why Cheng always disappears during the lineup time for food rations. I have often noticed how she goes away to eat by herself, or eat with her back to me and other children. She’s brave, I think, gazing at her toiling in the morning’s shadows.

The next day as she waits in front of me for her rice ration, I assume Cheng has fish heads in her scarf. I want