Survival in the Killing Fields (11 page)

In Cambodian society, it is bad manners to talk back to a father or father-in-law. To push him physically is almost unthinkable. It was as bad-mannered, in its way, as it was for Lon Nol to
overthrow Sihanouk several years earlier. And like the coup against Sihanouk, my sister-in-law’s pushing of my father set a long chain of events into motion.

I took Papa to the hospital and then brought him back to my bachelor apartment. Nay Chhun’s parents showed up to apologize and later Nay Chhun herself. I shut the door in their faces. In
the evening, my brother came. He stood in the doorway with the same wide face and calm, grave manner as my father.

I told my brother that if he wanted to help Papa he could come in. But he would have to make a choice: he could be loyal to his father or his wife, but not both.

My brother was silent for a moment, listening. I thought he was at least going to apologize for what Nay Chhun had done.

But all he said was, ‘I have come to bring Papa back.’

‘So your wife can finish killing him?’ I said. ‘I just came back from putting fifteen stitches in him at the hospital.’

My brother turned quietly and went away.

Inside, my father was lying on the couch, pale and old and tired. I could no longer hold back my jealousy and dislike of my brother. ‘Which of your sons is treating you well, now,
Father?’ I said. ‘After all these years, do you know which son really tries to help you and which son has the heart of stone?’

‘I know, I know,’ my father muttered. ‘But it is best not to speak about such things.’

‘You know now, Father, but it is too late. Do you remember when you beat me as a small child, when you thought I stole the box of playing cards? Do you know who really stole them? Do you
know who has been stealing from you ever since you bought the lumber mill?’

My father turned his face to the wall. He knew.

Pheng Huor’s and Nay Chhun’s fall from grace gave me an opportunity to do something I had long wanted, and that was to expose my brother’s embezzling from the lumber mill.

I called a meeting of the senior family members, including uncles and cousins. They were all in Phnom Penh because of the war. They all showed up for the meeting and my father and my brother did
too. I read them the list of my father’s properties that my brother had put in his own name: five big gasoline delivery trucks, two buses, a Land-Rover and another house near the lumber mill
that my father rented to tenants. As I spoke I held the deeds for these properties right in my hand. How much cash my brother skimmed from the lumber mill wasn’t clear, I said, because my
brother still had the books.

Next I raised the subject of my father’s estate. The inheritance was going to be large. Because I was making a living as a doctor, I didn’t need a share of it. Those who did, I said,
were our younger brothers and sisters. If their shares were guaranteed, Pheng Huor could have my share. He had done more for the mill’s success than anybody except than my father himself. He
could have my share if he signed all the stolen assets back to Father.

I looked around the room at my relatives. They were nodding their heads in approval. I was betting on my brother’s greed to get him to admit that he had done wrong. But I underestimated
Pheng Huor.

Asked why he had put the assets in his own name, he replied calmly, ‘I worked hard. I deserved them. And I needed to have something for my sons and daughters in case anything happened to
me.’

‘Did you think about other people who have sons and daughters?’ I said sarcastically.

My brother folded his hands and shrugged. ‘Another reason was the government laws,’ he said. ‘Papa is Chinese, but he refused to carry a Chinese identity card. There were
certain kinds of contracts that it was easier for me to sign.’

‘That’s not true and you know it,’ I said. ‘I helped you do the paperwork. There are very few businesses the government does not allow Chinese to go into, with or without
an identity card. We may have racial problems in this country, but they have not gone that far.’

‘This is not a good time to talk about business affairs,’ said my brother. ‘I think we should just be glad that I was able to rescue Papa from the communists. Maybe he would
not be alive today if not for me.’

Try as we could, none of us could get my brother to admit that he had done anything wrong. Each time he managed to turn the questions aside. He would not agree to sign the ownership of the
gasoline trucks and the other assets back over to Papa. He ignored my suggestion that he get my part of the inheritance.

The meeting ended unresolved. My father didn’t say a word. He didn’t know what to do. His daughter-in-law had insulted him by pushing him over. His son had stolen from him. But
perhaps he felt it was better to have a son steal from him than anyone else.

A month later my father called his own meeting. All his children were there, except for Pheng Huor, who was his number-two son, and the number-one son, the slow-minded one, who had argued with
my father and left the family. There were six of his sons and daughters in the room, all grown, and all married except for me. On a plate were twelve crumpled pieces of paper. We each chose two.
Written on the inside of each piece of paper was the licence number for a twenty-five-hundred-gallon gasoline delivery truck. The trucks were ours now. So were the delivery contracts, the business
connections and the employees. My father had begun giving out the inheritance.

Delivering gasoline turned out to be an easy way of making money. We ran our trucks in cooperation with each other, Pheng Huor included. Before long, I took my profits from fuel, added them to
my savings from the part-time medical jobs and bought into the ownership of the obstetrical clinic where I worked. Tacitly, Pheng Huor and I made our peace. I respected him for his ability as a
businessman. He respected me for speaking out against him. He never cheated me and we never quarrelled again.

I was able to run the fuel business, work two medical jobs and go to medical school because of Huoy. She had her own job, as a schoolteacher, but she kept my accounts and watched over my
employees. We both worked very hard. She had to overcome her shyness to give orders to employees. She got frustrated adding long columns of numbers together when she was tired. But all in all she
was better at business than me. I continued to be the hotheaded one, losing my temper when government officials asked for bribes. She calmed me down and told me when we had to pay and when we could
get out of it.

Together, Huoy and I made far more money than we had ever dreamed of. We began eating in restaurants every night. I bought a Mercedes. I bought Huoy French dresses, gold bracelets, diamond
earrings. I paid the rent for her apartment, which was only right, since we were going to get married. Our only worry was that we didn’t know when the wedding was going to be.

Papa had nothing against Huoy, but according to his beliefs a prospective daughter-in-law had to prove her worth. So Huoy and I sacrificed our long lunch hours together to try to change
Papa’s mind. At noon every day Huoy went over to my parents’ house to make desserts for their lunch. If my father wasn’t feeling well, Huoy rubbed his neck or the small of his
back.

My father just ate the pastries, accepted the back rubs and ignored Huoy. He had many servants. Huoy was just one more. He also had many relatives who had come to Phnom Penh and were trying to
ingratiate themselves. Papa was a rich man, and everyone wanted something from him.

From all over Cambodia, from the towns and the far countryside, people were flooding into Phnom Penh. The original population of six or seven hundred thousand had doubled, and
it was on its way to doubling again. The newcomers built huts of corrugated sheet metal or cardboard or thatch. They begged on the streets or took work as servants or labourers at absurdly low
wages. If they had relatives in Phnom Penh they moved in, five or ten to a room, or else borrowed money. My father had dozens of relatives show up at the door. His brothers and sisters came from
the town where they were born, Tonle Batí, not far from Samrong Yong.

The most persistent visitor was his half sister Kim. She asked my father for a loan so she could set up a new business. My father gave her the money readily. It was the duty of family members to
support one another, especially in these times. It also gave my father face to be the one the others relied on.

Aunt Kim could smell money – she was friendlier to my mother than to my sisters, and friendlier to my sisters than to Huoy, all in a neat gradation. But she couldn’t be too rude to
Huoy because she wanted medical help from me.

I obliged Aunt Kim as much as I could, for the same reasons as my father. I treated her husband for tuberculosis. I also treated their son Haing Seng for minor illnesses. Haing Seng looked up to
me. He called me ‘brother’. He told me over and over again how much he appreciated what I was doing.

With the money from my father, Aunt Kim bought military fatigues and T-shirts and sold them in the market. There were hundreds of market stalls like hers with US-made supplies openly for sale:
canned food rations, mosquito repellent, mosquito nets, hammocks, cots, knives, ammunition pouches, ammunition clips for M-16 rifles, knapsacks, helmets and fatigues. The olive-green colour was
everywhere. Barefoot soldiers looked wistfully at the new boots for sale but didn’t have the money to buy them. The only thing not for sale in the open-air markets was weapons, because the
officers had already sold them to the communists.

Aunt Kim was not satisfied with the living she made from her market stall. She asked me to supply her with government rice. With most of the countryside in the hands of the communists, rice was
scarce, so the US government shipped in rice from Korea. Employees of the government, including part-time military doctors like me, could get two twenty-five-kilo bags a month at a price far below
its market value. I had never used my ration, because I didn’t think it was honest to take rice at a cheap price when I could afford to buy it at a full price from merchants. But Kim
pressured me. She pointed out that everybody else was selling government rice in the market. Reluctantly, I gave in. I got two bags for seven thousand riels each and sold them to her at cost. She
sold them for fifteen thousand riels each, more than doubling her money.

In Phnom Penh, prices had risen astronomically because of shortages and because of the cost of paying bribes to officials. People used every imaginable angle to make money. When my gasoline
trucks made deliveries there was always a shallow puddle of gas left in the bottom of the tank. The drivers siphoned it into wine bottles, mixed it with kerosene, which was cheaper than gas but
made engines sputter, and sold it on the street. Fuel vendors like them were on the streets at all hours, waving their bottles, trying to make a living. Teachers became taxi drivers. Doctors,
nurses and orderlies were absent from their jobs, working for private clinics or selling medicines stolen from pharmacies. Military officers who needed real, live men instead of ‘phantom
soldiers’ sent trucks and troops to wait outside movie theatres in the evening. When the films were over, young men leaving the theatres were thrown into the trucks and driven away, unless
they had the money to bribe their way out.

Phnom Penh had become a city of
bonjour.
Nobody was immune to it. One day in 1974 my father went for a walk outside his house with his grandson, Chy Kveng. My father was wearing a faded
olive-green military T-shirt, the kind Aunt Kim sold openly in the market. A military policeman drove up in a truck, leaned out the window and said, ‘Hey, you goddamn Chinese! Stop right
there! How did you get that shirt? That’s for military use only!’

My father blinked his puffy eyes and said, ‘No, it’s an old shirt. I bought it in the market a long time ago. I’m entitled to wear it.’

‘No you’re not, you fucking Chinese,’ the military policeman said.

‘Then you’ll have to close down the market. Don’t let people sell military goods. As long as the markets sell the stuff, people will buy it.’

‘You’re breaking the law. Get into the truck.’

My father and his two-year-old grandson got into the truck. The military policeman drove around Phnom Penh, threatening to arrest them and throw them in jail. Eventually my father gave him eight
thousand riels and was set free.

Kim’s son Haing Seng located me at the hospital and told me the news about my father.

My patience for the regime was at an end. After losing Samrong Yong to the communists, after bombing my family’s home, after allowing corruption to spread like an infection throughout
society.

I changed into my military uniform, which I hardly ever wore. By then I had been promoted to the rank of captain, with three bars on the shoulders. I went to the military police headquarters.
The man at the desk was a lieutenant, two bars on the shoulders. He saluted and stood at attention.

I said in a deadly calm voice, ‘I want to know who controls the area my parents live in. Someone in a truck just
bonjoured
my father for wearing an army T-shirt. And he insulted him
for his Chinese ancestry.’

‘I’ll look into it, sir.’

‘You’re goddamn right you’ll look into it. And I’ll tell you something else. Why don’t you people stop
bonjouring
innocent civilians on the street? What the
hell’s wrong with you? Don’t you steal enough money as it is? Why don’t you just
bonjour
the merchants in the market? Better yet, why don’t you stop the stealing from
military warehouses and fight the communists like you’re supposed to?’

‘I’m sorry your father was bothered, sir.’

‘
Listen
to me, asshole!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t care about the money. But I care about the discrimination.
Look at your own skin.
It’s the same colour as
mine. You’ve got Chinese blood too. You’re mixed-race! So why do you allow discrimination? You motherfucking
idiot
! How stupid can you be?’

The lieutenant begged me with the palms of his hands together. He said he realized that his subordinate did wrong. He apologized over and over. He said he would find out who did it.