Survival in the Killing Fields (57 page)

In midmorning the line stopped. It went forward again, and then everyone was made to gather in a clearing. Eight newcomers had joined us. They had hunting rifles, and they spoke a language that
we guessed was Thai.

I do not know for a fact that these first men or those who came later were Thai citizens. Probably some were Cambodians who spoke Thai from living near the border. What I do know is that they
made me glad that Huoy was not with me.

They made the women remove their clothes and underclothes, but allowed them to change into sarongs to protect their modesty. With swift, expert hands, the thieves felt the brassieres, the straps
and seams and hems of dresses and trousers. They found the bulk of my gold in the underwear of Balam’s wife.

Then they started body searches. Mouths. Ears. Hair. Finger violations of the women.

Then they searched the men. Same thing. They found the gold in my waistband but not the gold in my sneakers.

Then they separated the men from the women, and the rapes began. In full view. The prettiest young women were raped again and again. The bandits who were not taking their turns kept their
hunting rifles pointed at the rest of us. There was nothing we could do.

They didn’t rape Balam’s wife and didn’t search or molest Ngim.

We walked half a mile farther, then stopped when we saw more armed men. No rapes this time. When they finished searching us, we picked up what remained of our baggage and trudged on for another
half mile, where we had to stop again.

From one tollgate we went to the next, and the next, and the next, until we were dazed. Sometimes the thieves spoke Thai and sometimes they spoke Khmer. They confiscated canes and the bamboo
sticks from hammocks, in case there was gold hidden inside. They removed bandages looking for gold. They tore the clothes off a pretty girl seventeen years old. She had no gold to hide, but she
struggled anyway, to protect herself. And because she resisted, they dragged her into the woods and shot her in the head.

Counting from Nimitt, including the two times we were searched by fake Khmer Rouge, we passed through thirty-seven tollgates. I lost my Vietnamese sneakers with the gold inside and the Zippo
cigarette lighter I had carried with me since leaving Phnom Penh. At the last tollgate, when we had little left, they took knives, hatchets, shoes, hats, new clothes.

Everybody was numb. We were unable to accept that it had really happened, that our women had been raped, that our possessions were gone. In all our years under the Khmer Rouge, we had never been
bodily searched, and few women had been abused.

In a daze we trudged past the swollen corpse of an ox that had stepped on a mine. There had been few mines since the thieves had set on us.

The landscape flattened. The vegetation changed from rain forest to a dry, open forest with little underbrush. The leaves of the hardwood trees nearly touched high overhead, but the tree trunks
were far apart.

A Thai civilian stood alone in the path waiting for us to arrive. He was an intelligence officer for the Thai government. He asked us in good but accented Khmer about the Vietnamese, the Khmer
Rouge and conditions walking toward the border. He said there were Thai soldiers ahead but not to worry. He added that the Thai Red Cross and United Nations agencies were there too.

We walked on and came to the Thai soldiers. They checked us for weapons and let us through. If there was a marker at the border, we didn’t see it.

As the sun was sinking we came to a city of tents and makeshift huts. The colour blue was everywhere – the relief agencies were giving away blue plastic tarps, and the refugees used them
for the roofs and awnings of their shelters.

This was Nong Chan, a border camp. I was surprised that so many had come before us.

We found a place by the river and sat down.

I thought: We have survived. They have taken our gold, but it does not matter. From now on, no more killings, no more rapes. We will block the past out of our minds.

The nightmare is over.

We are safe. We are free.

Ngim sat down next to me, smiling happily. She had been a good girl, and I had decided to adopt her as a daughter.

I sat there thinking about the future. About starting life over again, and going back to work as a doctor.

Then I thought: Yes, but I will never forget these past four years. And someday, somehow, I will tell the outside world what has happened.

There were still a few bits of gold taped under Ngim’s arm. I removed them, and Balam and I went to exchange the gold for Thai money from a man with a scale. For the
piece of gold I offered we got four hundred Thai
baht
in paper currency, which was then worth about twenty American dollars. We spent the money on rice, dry salted fish, fish sauce and
vegetables from market sellers nearby. When we finished we still had money left over.

Balam and I drifted back toward the family but stopped when we saw a man with a pushcart. There was a red, blue and white insignia on the side of his cart and ice and bottles of Pepsi-Cola
inside.

‘
Siep baht! Siep baht!’
the vendor yelled to the bystanders. The word
siep
sounded like the words for ‘ten’ in Mandarin and Teochiew Chinese. I asked some
Cambodians and they said yes, the price was ten
baht.

‘Brother,’ I said eagerly to Balam, ‘we’ve got to buy some. You drink first. Go ahead.’

‘It’s too expensive,’ said Balam, a man of cautious instincts.

‘No. I haven’t had ice or Pepsi for four years.’

‘Don’t waste your money,’ said Balam.

‘This isn’t a waste. This is living! Come on, brother, come on!’

I held up two fingers. The vendor nodded that he understood, then asked me a question in Thai. The other Cambodians translated:

Did I want him to pour it into a plastic bag, with a straw?

‘Tell him I want two bottles,’ I said. ‘I want the two coldest bottles he has.’

He reached into the bottom of his cart and pulled up two glistening bottles. The label on the bottles was in the Thai alphabet, which is a little different from the Cambodian alphabet, but I
recognized the name Pepsi-Cola all the same.

‘The very coldest,’ I repeated. ‘Two bottles.’

He opened the bottles and we lifted them to our lips.

After a few swallows I had to stop, the liquid was so cold. I could feel it going down my throat, cold and refreshing, all the way to my stomach. There was energy in my limbs. I felt
revitalized, exhilarated. I took a deep breath and lifted the bottle to my mouth again.

The Pepsi was like a drug. It made me stronger. Maybe it was the sugar and caffeine pouring into my malnourished body, but I think it was something else. To me, Pepsi meant that we had finally
made it to the West.

I finished the bottle and licked my lips.

‘Brother,’ I said, ‘it’s very, very tasty, isn’t it?’ Balam nodded but didn’t say anything. He was too busy drinking. ‘Two more!’ I shouted
at the vendor.

He poured the Pepsi into plastic bags for us this time, and put in plenty of ice. He put a straw in the mouth of each plastic bag, then tied them off with a rubber band, to make a carrying loop.
I gave him twenty more
baht.

I sipped at the straw. ‘How good!’ I exclaimed. ‘Like real, real, Pepsi-Cola!’

Before the revolution there had been Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola and other soft drinks in Phnom Penh. I took them all for granted. I hadn’t really liked any of them much.

But this was different. Nothing had ever tasted this good before. And nothing has ever tasted that good since.

I kept murmuring ‘How tasty’ as I walked back to the camp with my cousin. And, actually, I wanted more.

Cambodia has two traditional enemies: Vietnam to the east and Thailand (formerly Siam) to the west. Over the centuries we have had wars and border disputes with both of
them.

At the bottom of our differences is race. ‘Pure’ Khmers have dark brown skins. Vietnamese and Thais have pale yellow skins. To most Asians, including our neighbours, the lighter the
skin colour, the higher the status. They look down on Cambodians for having darker skins than themselves. Cambodians, who are shy by nature, sometimes outwardly appear to accept a lower status
while inwardly resenting it.

Speaking different languages and belonging to competing nations have added to the friction. So does having long memories. Every Cambodian schoolchild knows that a Siamese invasion caused the
downfall of the ancient Cambodian empire at Angkor. Every Cambodian knows the legend of the Vietnamese who used Cambodians’ heads for cooking stones.

But of our two neighbours, we dislike the Thais less. Culturally we have much in common with them. We practise the same kind of Buddhism, called the ‘Lesser Vehicle’; our Buddha
sculptures, temples and religious services are almost exactly the same. Most Vietnamese practise the ‘Greater Vehicle’ of Buddhism, whose temples, Buddha sculptures and services are
noticeably different. The Khmer and Thai languages have many similar words, but Khmer and Vietnamese have few that are similar. The rural people of both Cambodia and Thailand build their houses on
stilts, but the Vietnamese build on the ground.

The result is that Cambodians and Thais have mixed feelings for each other. Sometimes we are hostile, sometimes we are friendly, and most of the time we are a combination of both.

On the Thai-Cambodian border, in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime, the Thais were of mixed minds to us. Kindhearted Thai civilians brought gifts of clothing and food to refugees. (When
they gave clothing to Ngim, I had to teach her how to put her palms together in the
sompeah
to give them proper thanks – she had forgotten her manners in the dark Khmer Rouge years.)
But other Thais continued to rape, rob and terrorize the border camps. The Thai government was just as contradictory. It allowed international agencies to come to our aid, but on a few occasions
its military treated us brutally. We never knew what to expect.

Sitting in the Nong Chan border camp, malnourished, dressed in rags, Balam and I searched our brains for the names of people who could help us. One of them was a Thai gentleman named Chana
Samuthawanija, who had been ambassador to Phnom Penh during the Lon Nol regime. Balam had then been a wealthy airline owner and a man of high social standing, and he had gotten to know Chana
socially. Balam recalled that Chana spoke Khmer but didn’t read it, so I wrote a letter for Balam in French. We sent it off with a lot of other letters and appeals and soon forgot about
it.

A few weeks later, in June 1979, our names were called over a loudspeaker system. We went to see what it was about and found that a vehicle was waiting to take the entire family group to
Bangkok, Thailand’s capital. Bewildered, we got in and were driven several hours to the Lumpini transit centre, a former army barracks with long, warehouse-like buildings, in Bangkok. Nobody
explained to us what we were doing in Lumpini or why we had been taken there.

Nor did we know how close we had come to tragedy at Nong Chan. The day after we left it, 110 buses drove in, part of an unannounced programme staged by the Thai military. Buses came to the other
border settlements too. More than 45,000 Cambodians climbed in, believing they were being taken to different refugee camps where the conditions were better. Instead, the buses took them around the
northern slope of the Dangrek Mountains to another part of the Thai-Cambodian border near an ancient temple, called Preah Vihear. There, with rifles and whips, Thai soldiers forced the refugees
down a steep cliff and back onto Cambodian soil. At the bottom of the cliff was a minefield. Hundreds died in the mine explosions, thousands of dehydration and disease in the following days. Of the
survivors, some headed back across Cambodia for the border camps where they had been before – to be robbed and raped by Thais again on the way.

Balam and I didn’t hear anything about the Preah Vihear incident until later. At the time, we were looking around the Lumpini centre and trying to figure out what was going on. It was a
confusing place, with many languages being spoken at the same time. In addition to the Cambodian refugees there were also Vietnamese and Laotians, including hilltribe people from Laos. I stared in
disbelief at the women of the Laotian hilltribes. They wore strange headdresses and nursed their babies at enormous breasts. When they wanted to urinate they just squatted in full sight of
everybody, lifted up their dresses and peed on the ground.

From time to time lists of names were read over the loudspeaker system, and people rushed forward with their luggage to begin their trips to Western countries like America and France. I was
sitting with my back to a wall, wearing a sarong, watching the goings-on. Ngim had washed my trousers, the only pair I had left after the border thieves. I kept an eye on my trousers as they were
drying, so nobody would steal them. Toward midmorning there was a big commotion with police whistles and the gate opening and the guards saluting. A few minutes later the loudspeakers called out
Balam’s name and mine.

‘Cousin, we are lucky!’ I exclaimed to Balam. ‘Today we are going to the United States. Ngim, please hand me my trousers.’

‘Praise the gods,’ Balam said, raising his eyes to the sky. ‘They have guided us out of hell and they are leading us to good fortune.’

When we were fully dressed, Balam and I pushed our way through the crowd to the loudspeaker announcer. There Balam recognized a well-dressed man with a round face and a benign, wise expression.
‘It’s Ambassador Chana,’ Balam whispered. All around Chana, men and women were bowing and
sompeah
ing. We joined them. At last we realized who had been responsible for
getting us away from the border and bringing us here.

‘No, please, get up,’ Chana was saying in Khmer to the people who were bowing. He was not fluent in the language, but we had no trouble understanding him. Then he looked in our
direction and began talking to us.

‘Balam, doctor, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You are alive. Don’t think too much about the past. You have survived. The past is over. I will take care of you. If you
need anything, just ask.’