When Broken Glass Floats_ Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge - Chanrithy Him [6]
In 1982, when I began high school in Portland, Oregon, my desire to study medicine was rekindled. After finishing my undergraduate studies at the University of Oregon in 1991, I was determined to become a medical doctor. It has been thirteen years since Chea’s death, and I wanted to fulfill my promise to her spirit and to take up where Pa had left off.
In preparing for the MCAT, I had tried to shelve my memories, deliberately shoving them aside to make room for chemistry and physiology. Yet they had a way of sneaking back. Studying how the body uses carbohydrates, fat, and protein for energy would remind me of the edema that was rampant in wartime villages. The lack of salt in our diets became lethal, robbing our bodies of the ability to produce energy. In Cambodia we had a term for vitamin A deficiencies—a condition we called “blind chicken.” At night, my eyes wouldn’t work. With no real medicine available, the cure was a folk remedy: catch water in a banana leaf or lotus leaf and throw it into the eyes of the afflicted. Listening in the classroom and looking back, these weren’t abstract lessons.
The sight of someone dressed entirely in black would also trigger a memory—the uniforms of the Khmer Rouge. And for a moment it could paralyze me as if I was under a spell. Watching a documentary on Ethiopia showing children lining up for rations would jolt me back to the muddy fields, to a time when I was as frail and exhausted as those African waifs, existing only for food. Memories seep back to me in ways I hadn’t imagined. A stay in Hawaii stirred a sensory memory—moist, green smells, blossoming mango trees, dangling clusters of coconuts, the dance of palm trees at the airport, the humid breeze. The senses awakened the long-forgotten.
There are times when I’ve denied my own memories, when I’ve neglected the little girl in me. There would always be time to grieve, I told myself. I pushed down memories in pursuit of important things. Education. Medical school. I wanted to make a difference in the world, to do good deeds, fulfill a child’s wish. There would be a time for memories, but I never anticipated it, never sought it out. There would be a time.
As I sit in the eerie glow of my computer screen summoning up the past, I know that it is time. I invite the memories back in, apprehensive but hungry for them. In trying to understand my drive to tell others what was scorched in my mind, I recognize my fortitude and ambition, which are rooted in the people who gave me life—my parents.
1
A Heavenly Comet Foreshadows War
The New York Times
Phnom Penh, Cambodia—March 28, 1969
(AGENCE FRANCE PRESS)
The head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, charged today that “Vietnamese Communists were increasingly infiltrating into Cambodia.” The prince showed newsmen here a detailed map drawn up by his general staff showing Communist implantation in Cambodia.
My parents’ future marriage had already been decided when they were children. Both their parents told them that someday they would marry each other. Both came from well-to-do families, which caused wide speculation about the marriage. Some thought that they were paired up because the brothers Kong Houng and Kong Lorng didn’t want their wealth dispersed. This way, the family wealth was centralized. And in Cambodian culture, it’s common for cousins to marry.
Fortunately, my father’s feelings were in harmony with