Her Father's Daughter (11 page)

Kuan and his family were in their house. Huddled on the third level, peering out behind windows heavy-lidded with material, they stayed to defend their business. No one took stock of who was inside that day. If they had, this is what they would have seen.

They would have seen a woman in her late sixties, Huyen Thai, living with her unwed 26-year-old son, Kuan, and his sister, Kieu, a couple of years younger.

They would have seen Kuan’s recently married older brother Kiv, Kiv’s wife, Suhong, heavily pregnant with their third child, and their two other children – a girl, Huong, and a boy, Wei. They would have seen Suhong’s mother, a gentle, wistful widow in her early sixties.

They would have seen the family of Kuan’s cousin Chicken Daddy, who owned half the factory. They would have seen his three teenage children – Chicken Brother, Chicken Sister and Egg. His wife, however, was not all there. She spent her days loitering around the front door of the factory, clutching a red poly-vinyl purse, which matched her painted lips, muttering about going to the market. She never went anywhere, and when she did, one of her children would have to come and guide her back.

Kien, the girl from the factory Kuan would one day marry, was already leaving Phnom Penh. Her family watched everyone else pack and dash from their houses, and so they grabbed what they could and followed the human deluge. After all, there were soldiers with guns. And their house was rented. They didn’t want to be left behind.

Of course, in Kuan’s family they didn’t believe that the Americans were going to bomb the city. It was the curse of the educated classes, to know too much, to not get caught up in panicked rumours, but to stall in the certainty of reason. An army-general friend had reassured them a few months back: ‘Don’t worry. The Americans have the latest poison-gas bomb. If the Khmer Rouge gets near Phnom Penh, just one of these bombs could kill people to a radius of several kilometres.’

But they were not entirely convinced. Kiv decided that they should depart in two groups. Kuan, his sister and Chicken Daddy’s three children were to leave first, and then the rest of the family would follow once they had confirmed there was imminent danger, or else they would send news that the coast was clear. A guide was arranged to take them to the airport, where they would fly to Thailand and then to France. Plane tickets were booked. Bags were packed. There was no time for weepy goodbyes: the family was methodical and matter-of-fact. Kuan’s mother gave them a dozen flattened sheets of gold leaf, each no larger than a cigarette paper.

That morning they met their guide in front of a local noodle restaurant as arranged. He was a man in his mid-thirties with far-apart eyes, which, according to Kuan’s mother, was always a sign of trustworthiness.

‘Bad news, my friends,’ the guide told them. ‘I went by Pochentong airport this morning, and it is closed.’

‘Closed? What’s happening?’ asked Kiv, but the guide had no idea.

So they returned home, agreeing to return the next day to try again. The next day was 17 April 1975. When elements – flood, fire and quake – wipe out the material things that make up your existence, there is no one to blame but nature. When people wipe out your life, that’s a different matter. When the government of a country declares that it will uproot time and start from the beginning of history, you know that there is indeed fear in a handful of dust.

*

In the early morning it was very quiet, until he heard gunshots. Kuan went to the third-floor balcony and looked out onto the street. That was when he first saw them: dots of black in the distance that morphed into small raggedy soldiers. People started hanging white bed sheets, white towels and white T-shirts from their shopfronts and balconies. At last the civil war was over and the encroaching Vietcong had been warded off. Hooray for these young soldiers. People came towards them, cheering and welcoming, offering smiles.

They were an army of children.

They did not smile back.

Their skin was brown. Their hair shone orange. Their eyes were oysters in two moons. They looked around, moving slowly as if lost. Some of these boys had never been inside a city before. They breathed in and they breathed out like people who had not been taught how to walk, eat, laugh, move or breathe, but discovered it by doing it – it was the breath of small animals in the night who walked on land. Every sense woke up when they reached the city. When they looked at something, they did not roll their eyeballs, they turned their whole head and shoulders. Every stimulus could only be predatory.

Some carried their AK-47s upright, as though they were going to set off firecrackers. They were children who had never tasted candy, so they didn’t realise that this was the stuff you were meant to steal from the shops. Instead they smashed things up. They were like children in a fireworks factory. Children with guns, children with bang-bang-shoot-them-dead-I-kill-you-long-time-Mister minds. Kill was a long time, dead was even longer. This was the only truth they knew. When they looked up at the sky, they did not see the fingers of God; they saw the direct cause of death of their parents.

When you didn’t know anything, how did you know that it was not a new sun that crawled up over the fields every day? How did you know that the earth was not flat? The only modern marvel they had seen was the stick of a gun, the iron bird in the sky and the green disc on the ground. But what was a stick of gum? A block of paper fastened at one end? What was a globe of the world? A tennis ball? What was a cinema? A grandfather clock inside a house? Baby shoes with little squeakers inside that made squeaking sounds when a baby toddled down Monivong Boulevard. Jip jip. Jip-jip-jip. Jipjipjipjip as they ran faster, the baby’s arm a weak chain linked to the vice-grip of her mother’s hand.

Clearing the city was harder than they thought; it was crammed with so many people. They had never seen so many people before. People with bundles on their backs, people with their cars and buckets of water. So much stuff.

The young soldiers tested out their new sentences like walking on an element they’d never encountered before – not solid and not liquid. ‘The Americans are bombing you!’ How many of them had actually seen an American? No, the Americans were quiet this time, there were not many here anymore. All they had left were their bomb craters swimming with fish.

‘Leave your homes! Everybody out!’ they ordered. ‘Leave your homes! The Americans are coming! The Americans are coming to bomb the city!’ They said that they would stay inside the city to defend it, and after that everyone could return.

*

Inside the factory, Wei woke up, with half his hair squashed by the night into a startling shape – it was the only part of the toddler that seemed to have an inkling that something bizarre was going on. The rest of him was the way a baby should be, and sooner or later babies cried. His pregnant mother put him in the small space left on her lap that was not taken over by the swell of the unborn child and fed him his bottle of Nestlé formula milk. She feared that he could taste the difference, but he just sucked along. She had crushed sleeping pills in there so that he would not holler and reveal their hiding place. She could feel his little heart under her hand, and she felt sick to her stomach that it might stop working. When his eyelashes closed like the filaments of tiny flowers, she held her hand under his nose for a long time, to make sure she could feel the in-out breeze.

At around midday, they saw the boys in black breaking into the shops and taking things. The pharmacy at the corner of the street was the worst hit. Its shelves were knocked over and drugs spilled from the smashed doorway into the street like a mouth regurgitating bad medicine. Some shops were locked with steel shutters. The boys in black tied one end of a chain to these shutters and the other end to a nearby car. They drove the car and the shutters fell, pulled out like a plug but in clattering metal. From the smashed cars, tyres were slashed to make Ho Chi Minh sandals.

Forget about burning books. Fridges, televisions, washing machines and other electrical appliances were swept into huge piles in the scorching heat. Telephone wires were ripped out. Some dangled from posts like post-apocalyptic maypoles. The man who was responsible for this vision had failed his electrical-engineering degree in France.

Within a few hours it had become a strange world, but it would become even more bizarre: a world in which batteries were taken out of the clocks, and the clocks were stacked and smashed. Watches were worn upside-down on the arms of those who controlled them, and those who controlled them were children. But not children as one would ordinarily know children, nestled in their families and schools and familiar pastimes of hoops and sticks, marbles and plastic pearls. No, these children were not part of any family unit anymore – they were atomised, separated and turned into the foot soldiers of the new world, a world bent on going back to the Middle Ages, uncoiling like the cogs of a defunct timepiece, to the beginning of time. Back to Year Zero.

In the beginning of time, there would only be the earth and the sky. And then the creatures of the earth with their backs facing the sky. And the creatures with their stomachs on the ground and the creatures with their gills filled with fluid and the creatures with their feathers scraping the air. All these existed to serve the Base Man. Nowhere was a country more green, nowhere did a land offer itself up with rambutans and mangoes falling from trees to serve his simple appetites.

So when the Base Man – or the Base Boy, to be accurate – entered the city, he saw things there that he had never known existed. And because he was unaware of their existence or function, desire for them had never been cultivated in him. What was this infernal hard thing that was shaped like nothing they had ever seen before, a wheel dotted with magical symbols, a tightly curled tail connected to a heavy mallet that rested on its head, and which screeched like a bird? He raised his gun to shoot at it.

‘No, it’s harmless, it’s harmless!’ cried the owner of the house who was a woman with white stuff on her face and pointed branches erupting from her heels. ‘It’s a telephone! Have a listen.’ She yanked the mallet, placed it at her ear, paused and then held it towards him. The coiled tail stretched like that of a dead thing.

He carefully put it near his ear. Sweet Bodhisattva, it sounded like a human being – a human trapped inside the tail end of the creature. ‘Who is this? Who did this?’ the Base Boy demanded. ‘Who would do this to another person?’

This was the exact question the city people asked themselves when they entered the end of time. What to call these thieves dressed in sun-soaked black in the tropics? They were Black Bandits. Yes, that’s what they were, and that’s how they would be referred to forever afterwards by those who came out alive, those who would never see children in an innocent light again.

On the second day the Black Bandits announced that they would shoot. Evacuate, or die. At the main hospital, doctors with scalpels poised mid-operation looked up and saw boys with guns. Nurses wheeled their patients outside. Soldiers of the former government donned their uniforms one last time and walked onto the road to meet their ends.

On the third day Kuan’s mother led her family outside to surrender. It was no use staying and defending when everybody else was leaving. When they reached the main street, tens of thousands of people were walking. They saw a few hospital beds on wheels, drip bottles swinging at the bedpost, pushed by people dressed in white uniforms. Their mouths were a straight line of horizon. Kuan wondered how those kind-hearted nurses and doctors could survive, taking nothing with them but their patients.

As they walked out of the city, there were still Chinese street vendors by the roadside selling sweet red-bean soup from mobile carts. If the vendors had not boiled up their beans, they could have saved them to ensure their own survival, Kuan realised later on. Still, some people bought the desserts. When they did, the vendors would rest their carts and boil up the beans for them. Still working, his people, still seeking to earn a highly inflated buck, even at this hour.

His family had only taken a small amount of rice, all their remaining gold, the keys to their house-factory and two enormous shoulder-squeezing pails of water because they did not want to die of thirst. They saw the poor dumb folk who had brought all their earthly possessions – right down to their sugar containers and their MSG jars. At first they scoffed, but as they walked on, their shoulders ached. Carrying these buckets was backbreaking. They stopped and dropped their load when they realised that of course there was water. Streams were running with a noise like a little boy peeing to spite them. Why had they thought they needed water when they were being herded into the countryside, next to rivers and streams?

Not too long after, they ran out of rice. For a tiny pinch of MSG, you could buy tinfuls of rice. But they had no MSG. They were too practical, the Chinese. City people – always thinking their book learning would win out in the end.

Yet Suhong, his sister-in-law who was a midwife, had packed scissors, cotton cloth, everything she needed to deliver her baby. She knew they weren’t heading home any time soon. Some people were carrying their belongings by hand; others had stacked their things on bikes. Some lucky ones drove in cars.

He saw the old, the frail and the sick dying on either side of the road, with their families being forced at gunpoint to move on. ‘Leave me, leave me,’ an old man cried, sitting like a crippled insect on the ground with one leg folded under him and the other one sticking out. His son tried to lift him up, but he stubbornly made himself a dead weight, as if to prove that this was what he would always and forever be. And so they left him, by the side of the road, watching the exodus.

They didn’t make it into Vietnam because of a car. If not for that car, perhaps they would have been spared the four years of the fields. The car wasn’t even a flash one, it was a boxy yellow thing that someone had abandoned beside the road because it had run out of fuel, so they came up with the idea of sitting Suhong in the car and pushing her along. She was so large with child that she couldn’t even see her feet to walk. All the things they held in their hands were loaded in the car, and the two children crawled in next to their mother. ‘Ready for a ride?’ Kuan asked them before he closed the door. He, his brother and Chicken Daddy walked to the boot and pushed the car along from the back. Chicken Daddy’s three teenage children trailed behind.

Soon they came to a bridge that crossed the Mekong River. The bridge was teeming with people. Some of the hundreds of Vietnamese fishing boats that had moored beneath the bridge were peddling trips to Vietnam – he later found out that Kien’s family gave away some gold and that’s how they ended up in Saigon instead of living through Year Zero.

But they could not push the car over the bridge, so they kept following the other city exiles who walked straight ahead as the soldiers directed them, prodded along like cattle by heavily armed cowherds.

While pushing the car, he couldn’t see much in front of him except hot metal and glass. It was a sad little float made of a mother and her two children and all their earthly possessions, propelled by the muscle-force of three skinny men, and they kept pushing for many days.

When night fell, they would stop walking and find a place to sleep. When it grew dark, little Wei would cry about going home.
When are we going to go home? Why don’t we go home? I want to go home
and all possible variations on that dirge, even after he didn’t have to walk anymore and could just sit in the car. In the end, the wailing became comforting. It was as if the boy was venting all of their anger through a very thin reed. It allowed them to feel a little sorry for themselves.

Sometimes Kuan slept on the roof of the car after the metal had cooled down, because the heat of the days seeped into the skin and swelled inside his skull; and on the roof he could see the stars, which seemed to take him outside his head.

One day a Khmer Rouge truck was driving slowly alongside them. His sister-in-law stuck her head out of the window: ‘Ay, why don’t we ask the soldiers if they can pull us along?’ She hobbled to the side of the soldier’s vehicle and waved her arms. Because she was a woman with a sweet voice and a distended belly, the soldiers stopped for her. They tied the car to their truck and dragged them along for the rest of the journey. People weren’t monsters or gods. People were just people, he thought.

He, Kiv and Chicken Daddy had their hands free now. As they walked, they pushed their shoulders up to their ears and swung their arms to loosen those muscles that had been set stiff by pushing the car; it was a strange form of walking Tai Chi.

When they arrived at their destination village, the Khmer Rouge cadres got out of their armoured vehicle and helped them unhook the car. The soldiers wore rubber shoes made from car tyres.

‘This is where you’ll settle,’ they were told.