The Disappeared (20 page)

This novel takes place during the Cambodian genocide (1975–79), in which two million people died, through the Vietnamese occupation (1979–89) and into the United Nations Transitional Authority, which was to supervise the administration of Cambodia and to attempt to create conditions for the first democratic election in 1993. Those who oppose the government continue to be killed.

Historical timelines have been compressed for this fictional story.

My reading about Cambodia’s and other countries’ genocides and truth commissions, and survivors’ and perpetrators’ reflections, is woven through the fabric of this story. The responsibility for this story, however, is mine, and all allusions to other writers’ reflections and witness accounts have been transmuted here into the kind of truth that fiction tells.

I would like to acknowledge the support of a McGeachy Scholarship from the United Church of Canada.

I am especially grateful for the work of Youk Chaang at the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam); Brad Adams and Human Rights Watch; Mark Gergis and his music collection; Rich Garella and Eric Pape’s article “A Tragedy of No Importance”; Kathy Gruspier for conversation and field notes from the Ontario coroner’s team; Kim Kieran for her diaries (unpublished); for photographs and the most generous consulting, Sonia Tahieri, Ton Paeng and Robert Fiala; Craig Etcheson; research from DC-Cam and the report “Documentation Center of Cambodia Forensic Project” and Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Data Bases.

Of many books about Cambodia, I wish to acknowledge especially Vann Nath’s
A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21
, his art and remarkable spirit; Dith Pran’s
Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields;
David Chandler’s
Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison;
Craig Etcheson’s
After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide;
Human Rights Watch/Asia’s
Cambodia at War
and François Ponchaud’s
Cambodia: Year Zero
. I would like to acknowledge Sophearith Chuong’s “Grandmother of ‘Fertilizer’” (DC-Cam) as a source for Chan’s fictional story on
page 102
, and Ralph Lemkin, who invented the word
genocide
, as the source of the quotation on
page 172
(“If women, children and old people were being murdered a hundred miles from here ...”). I would like to acknowledge the work of Vann Nath with director Rithy Pan in the film
The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
as the source for dialogue with former prison guards in Tuol Sleng on
pages 131
–132.

Readers who love Buddy Guy, Etta James and Sophocles’
Antigone
may hear echoes of their song and poetry. “Truth is as old as God ... / And will endure as long as He, A Co-Eternity” (
page 65
) is by Emily Dickinson. I have alluded to the thought of Jean Améry in
At the Mind’s Limits
. I believe it was Hannah Arendt who first said, “The authority of any government stops at its citizens’ skin” (page 220), and Simone Weil who wrote about
The Iliad
, “Force turns the one subjected to it into a thing” (
page 32
). Tzvetan Todorov wrote in
Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps,
“There is, however, no necessary correlation between how we tell of the past and how we use it; that it is our moral obligation to reconstruct the past does not mean that all the uses we make of it are equally legitimate.”

Others I would like to thank are Lin Chear, Debby deGroot, Shaun Oakey, David Ross, Elizabeth Schmitz, Sally Reardon, Cheryl Carter, Paulette Blanchette, Anne Simpson, Alex Levin, Barbara Jackman, Janice Blackburn, Peter Jacobsen, Rory Cummings, The Very Reverend Bruce McLeod, the late Dr. and Mrs. N.K. Campbell, Ian Small, Michelle Oser, Linda Gaboriau and the Banff Centre for the Arts, Monica Pereschi, Josephine Rijnaarts, Manfred Allie, the Khmer Buddhist Centre of Ontario, Leslie and Alan Nickell, Adam and Ann Winterton, Madeleine Echlin, Paul Echlin, Randy and Ann Echlin, Mark and Joanne Echlin.

To Ross Upshur, true gratitude for your insights and discussion, for sharing with me the dailiness of writing. To Olivia and Sara Upshur, thank you for daily joy.

A special thank you to Sandra Campbell for invaluable criticism and inspiration over many years. You have seen this story in a thousand lights.

To David Davidar and Nicole Winstanley, thank you for your talent, editorial imagination and risk-taking. You are true well-jumpers.

And thank you to a woman whose name I never learned. In a Phnom Penh market you broke silence and asked me to remember with you.

I imagine us in a place that could forgive us all.