Survival in the Killing Fields (58 page)

Chana was almost in tears. His old friend Balam was a wreck of a man, skinny, dressed in rags, his hair prematurely grey. He looked at me and saw another wreck. He turned to his wife, who stood
next to him, and said something in Thai. She reached into her purse and pulled out two stacks of money several inches thick. She gave one to Balam, the other to me. We accepted the money with our
heads bowed.

Then we did some fast talking.

‘Ambassador,’ I said, after Balam and I had come to agreement, ‘you have a very good heart. You brought us from the border and now you have helped us again by giving us money.
We thank you both very, very much.’ I paused to see if he followed me. He did.

‘You have already given us the ultimate gift,’ I continued. ‘You have saved our lives. We accept your gift of money, but we wish to give it back to you. It is too much for us.
We wish you to have it, so you will have savings for your old age.’

Chana sincerely meant for us to take the money and he tried to press it on us, but we resisted, and finally his wife accepted it back. There was a deep and unspoken meaning to the exchange, and
everyone there understood it. Balam and I still had our dignity. We initially accepted the money to give Chana face, then returned it to keep face ourselves and to show our respect for him.

As it turned out, Chana had been in Peking talking to Sihanouk when our letter arrived. When Chana looked at it upon his return, he was mystified – he didn’t read French any more
than he read Khmer, and he had to get the letter translated. But he was well aware of the desperate circumstances Cambodians were in, and he was probably more sympathetic to Cambodian refugees than
anyone at his level of government. A few days after coming to see us, Chana, who was not only a diplomat but a major general in the Thai national police, sent passes to Balam and me. The passes
allowed us to leave and enter Lumpini whenever we liked. But I didn’t use mine.

I was still depressed. Black clouds closed in, blocking out the sun. I didn’t want to talk to the other refugees, or explore Bangkok. All I could think of was my family and Huoy.

I remembered something Huoy told me during the Lon Nol regime. She said I should sell the gasoline trucks, buy an airplane ticket out of Cambodia and go wherever I wanted. That was just like
Huoy. She didn’t even ask me take her along. She told me to leave the country for my sake. She wanted what was best for me.

If I had listened to Huoy and left the country before the Khmer Rouge takeover, and taken her along, she would have been alive today. We would have been living happily together as man and wife.
If I had listened to her, and if I had shown more leadership, I could have saved my entire family. But I hadn’t, and they died.

If only I had listened.

Besides Ngim and my cousin Balam, I had one other relative in Lumpini. He had a Chinese name, Lo Sun-main. We were not related by blood – he was actually my brother Hok’s
brother-in-law – but we had been friends in Phnom Penh, and now that there were so few of us alive we felt a strong kinship. Sun-main saw that I was depressed. He tried to keep my spirits up.
He talked with me and brought me food. He said the food came from a rich uncle of his who lived in Bangkok.

He kept trying to get me to meet this uncle, but I resisted. My excuse was that I had nothing but rags to wear. And it was true that my hair was in my eyes, my spiky beard was an inch long, and
I didn’t want to lose face by meeting strangers looking that way. But my real reason was that I wanted to remain in my misery and punish myself for my failures.

Finally the uncle, Lo Pai-boon, came to visit Lumpini. He was about fifty years old, with thin hair combed straight back. His wife was plump and wore her hair long. They brought food and fruit
to me – to this doctor-relative they had been hearing about. When they saw me they broke into tears. They bribed the gate guards and drove me home in their car.

Uncle Lo had emigrated from Cambodia to Thailand as a child. He had worked hard, as overseas Chinese usually do, and he was now the owner of a large textile shop. He couldn’t remember much
of the Khmer language. I didn’t speak much Thai. But we both knew the Chinese Teochiew dialect, and we had no trouble communicating. It was irrelevant that I was a Cambodian national and he
was a Thai. Our backgrounds were close enough to connect us like a bridge.

While I was sitting in his house in my torn clothes, he summoned a tailor, who came in and measured me from head to foot. When the tailor left, the neighbours started coming in with gifts and
Uncle Lo introduced me as a close relative and a doctor. In a few hours the tailor returned with five pairs of trousers and five shirts, freshly made. Uncle Lo and his wife took me to a shoe store,
and then food shopping. From there they took me to the best Chinese restaurant in Bangkok. He and his wife sat on either side of me, heaping food on my plate. It was the most delicious meal I had
eaten in more than four years.

Before he drove me back to Lumpini, Uncle Lo gave me 3,000 baht, which was then worth $150 US. And he wasn’t done. He invited me back a second time, gave me prescription eyeglasses and
more clothes and more money, and did the same for Balam.

With these two great gifts from Thai men – my full freedom from Ambassador Chana, and the clothes and money from Lo Pai-boon – I began to come out of my depression. But there was one
more thing I needed to do before regaining self-respect.

I took the ID card photograph of Huoy from my luggage. I put all the money from Uncle Lo in my pocket, and I showed the pass Chana had written to the guards at the Lumpini gate.

In Bangkok’s Chinatown district, I had Huoy’s picture photographically copied onto a small heart-shaped piece of porcelain, then hand-coloured. I took the porcelain to a goldsmith
and ordered a gold locket to fit. When the locket was done, I hung it around my neck on a chain.

The locket was a talisman. Its heavy, reassuring weight was always there, under my shirt, over my heart. I truly believed that Huoy would guide and protect me as long as I wore it. I never took
it off. She was with me, day and night.

I began to feel better. Something like a normal human being. My grieving wasn’t over; and at night my dreams took me back to prison to be tortured again and again and again. But most days
my mind was clear. I began to pay more attention to this remarkable place, Lumpini transit centre, whose occupants had all escaped from communist regimes.

Camped next to me on mats was a Vietnamese family of ethnic Chinese background. Speaking in Mandarin Chinese, the lovely young daughter told me how her family had escaped Vietnam by boat. It was
a dramatic story: hundreds of people crowded into small boats, storms approaching, waves breaking over the sides, everybody frantically bailing – and then Thai pirates. She didn’t say
much about the pirates except that they robbed the refugees of gold, but I knew what had happened to her by what she didn’t say and by watching her expression. It made me glad that I
hadn’t sailed from Kampot to Thailand with Huoy.

There were also Chinese-speaking Laotians, merchants from the lowland towns and cities. They said that when the Pathet Lao communists took power in 1975, the soldiers and the high-ranking
officials from the old regime were sent to ‘re-education’ camps in the countryside. There they were forced to work long hours and sit through boring propaganda meetings. It was like the
front lines in Cambodia except that far fewer died, because the Pathet Lao communists were not as cruel and not as fanatical. But the Pathet Lao attempt to reorganize the countryside into
collectives was no more successful than the Khmer Rouge attempt, and most of the educated people and many of the peasants decided to leave. They crossed the Mekong River to Thailand, some of them
swimming at night, others hiring boats or bribing officials to let them leave in broad daylight.

Unlike the lowlanders, the Laotian hilltribes didn’t speak any of the languages I did, so I never got their story directly. But I learned that the men had been guerrillas for a CIA-backed
army that fought in the mountains of Laos against the North Vietnamese. Their war didn’t end with the takeover in 1975. The Vietnamese kept attacking. The hilltribes fought back as long as
their supplies held out, then left when there was no other choice. The men were sturdy and tough, with black baggy trousers that went down to the middle of their shins. Their children were dirty
and usually had snot running out of their noses. They were from different tribes, the H’mong and Yao and others. Some of the women wore headdresses with coins jangling, while others wore
cloth wrapped around their heads like turbans, and necklaces made of silver.

With the Vietnamese and Cambodians and Laotians, the lowlanders and highlanders, the city people and rural people, the French-speaking intellectuals and the peasants who had never worn shoes in
their lives, Lumpini was like Indochina in miniature. The teenagers were always fighting, just like the adults in their home countries, and the Vietnamese teenagers were the most aggressive of all.
Speaking different languages, belonging to different races and cultures, we didn’t think of ourselves as ‘Indochinese’ or as ‘Indochinese refugees’. Besides suffering
under communism, we had little in common.

But it was an interesting place. I started working as a volunteer in the medical clinic with a Vietnamese doctor, a very nice man who was a refugee like me. Speaking in French, we agreed that
the Vietnamese were in the best physical shape of the refugees, the Cambodians in the worst shape, and that the most serious health problem in Lumpini was mental depression. No matter where the
refugees came from, most were traumatized from the loss of their families and their ways of life.

Working in the clinic, I began to make a lot of friends. Even the Thai guards started coming to see me for their medical problems, usually venereal disease. The guards liked me. They said I
could leave or enter Lumpini anytime I wanted, with or without a pass. So finally I did.

The streets of Bangkok were jammed with buses, cars, trucks and three-wheeled
samlor
taxis whose noisy diesel engines gave off clouds of greasy exhaust. Motorcycles
swooped and darted through the traffic with suicidal daring. Water taxis roared through an old network of canals, and ferries travelled back and forth across the Chao Phraya River. It was not a
clean city. The air was smoggy and the water in the canals was black and disgusting. But I liked Bangkok. It was exciting and energetic. Everywhere there were high-rise buildings and skyscrapers
and overpasses. The noise of traffic and construction came from all directions, at all hours of the day and night. I had never seen so many televisions, radios, refrigerators, restaurants, bars and
soccer fields. The people were well dressed. Their standard of living was high.

Bangkok was like the dream city Chea Huon had talked about at the dam site, but instead of being a fantasy for the future, it was real and in the present. There was plenty of food. The roads
were paved with asphalt. The houses had electric lights. Cranes and bulldozers did the heaviest work. Many families owned cars or motorcycles. Most important, the Thais were free. They did not have
an ‘Angka’. Nobody made them go to propaganda meetings or treated them like slaves. They organized themselves. And because they were free they were far more productive than we war
slaves had ever been.

I went to the Royal Palace. It looked like the royal palace in Phnom Penh, with spires and multicoloured tile roofs. I visited temples. There were a lot of them, clean and well maintained, with
many Buddha statues and monks in saffron robes. I stopped by the open-air street-corner shrine in front of the Erawan Hotel. At this shrine, a few feet from a busy intersection, where the cars and
motorcycles and
samlors
impatiently rev their engines and then take off like road racers before the traffic light turns green, a scene of intense religious worship went on day and night.
Musicians played their instruments, classical dancers danced serenely, and people crowded in to light sticks of incense and pray. The ancient and the modern lived right next to each other, and both
were doing well.

I envied the Thais. How I envied them! They had kept their traditional culture intact, while ours had been destroyed. Our temples were wrecked, our monks were killed, our books ripped apart for
cigarette paper. The Thais had their past, and they were assured of a prosperous future. For most Cambodians, the future was going to mean searching in the forest for wild food, living in huts
without electricity and obeying orders from soldiers. We didn’t have a modern, bustling capital like Bangkok. Compared to it, Phnom Penh had been a quiet town in the provinces.

Back in Lumpini I began to talk with my friends. We had all noticed the same thing. Until coming to Bangkok few of us had known that a city so modern existed in all of Asia, much less in the
country next door. We had always been told the reverse, that Cambodia was far ahead of its neighbours. All our leaders had told us so, from Sihanouk through Lon Nol to the Khmer Rouge.

It was a strange contrast, we agreed: two nations with similar cultures and resources, one of them a great success, the other a total disaster. We could understand how Thailand had succeeded,
but why had Cambodia failed? We had answers, but they were inadequate to our sorrow. And probably we will ask ourselves the question as long as we live, and never be satisfied by the
explanations.

This much I do know: the destruction of Cambodia could have been avoided. What led to it was politics.

By politics I do not just mean the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge dealt the worst blow to Cambodia, but they did not destroy it by themselves. Outside countries lent a hand, most of them without
realizing the effects their policies would have. It is a complicated story, going back many years.

To begin with, France, our former colonial ruler, didn’t prepare us for independence. It didn’t give us the strong, educated middle class we needed to govern ourselves well. Then
there was the United States, whose support pushed Cambodia off its neutral path to the right in 1970 and began the political unbalancing process. Once Lon Nol was in power, the United States could
have forced him to cut down on corruption, and it could have stopped its own bombing, but it didn’t, until too late. The bombing and the corruption helped push Cambodia the other way, toward
the left. On the communist side, China gave the Khmer Rouge weapons and an ideology. The Chinese could have stopped the Khmer Rouge from slaughtering civilians, but they didn’t try. And then
there is Vietnam. Even in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the Vietnamese communists used eastern Cambodia as part of their Ho Chi Minh Trail network, they were putting their own interests first.
They have always been glad to use Cambodia for their own gain.