The Road of Lost Innocence (2 page)

.2.

The Village

When the logging truck dropped us off, we moved onto some kind of military truck that was carrying soldiers. After that, sometimes we rode in horse-drawn carts. There were people everywhere. A momentous change had dragged practically everyone in Cambodia back onto the road. A year or so earlier, in 1979, after four years of Khmer Rouge border attacks, the Communist government of Vietnam had invaded Cambodia. After the Vietnamese defeated the Khmer Rouge, they set up a new government, and starved, terrified people from every corner of the country began moving back to their home villages. When my journey took place, the country was still teeming with movement.

I knew none of this at the time, of course, but I was mesmerized by the crowds. The roads. The motorcycles. All the noise. The people looked beautiful, their skin so pale and their clothes exquisite. There were markets, with forks, bottles, string, shoes, matches, cigarettes, medicine, cosmetics, radios, and guns—all things I had never seen. There was so much metal, and so much color.

We were traveling southeast, across the border into Vietnam, though the concept of “Vietnam”—or even “Cambodia”—meant nothing at all to me then. Grandfather was delivering a load of sandalwood from the forest to a trader in Da Lat, in the high plains of southern Vietnam, and I helped him carry it. After Da Lat we traveled south, toward Saigon, and then began circling back.

One day I caught sight of a crowd of Vietnamese girls in their white tunics and trousers, like a huge flock of white birds. I was hypnotized. I suppose they were leaving school, but I had no idea what school was, nor any idea that I might go to one. I could see they were girls, but to me they looked more like angels.

Everywhere I went, I was horrified by the way people shouted at one another. In Vietnam, they were particularly scornful of me, a dirty, dark-skinned girl with no more brains than a lump of wood. They pushed me, yelled at me, insulted me.

I knew nothing and I asked nothing. I just kept silent. Everything was unfamiliar and dangerous. When Grandfather bought Vietnamese noodle soup, I tried to eat the long slippery stuff with my hands, though the soup was boiling hot.

As we made our way back north, toward the Mekong River, the flat countryside was unlike anything I had ever seen, flooded with rice paddies in every direction. To me it looked empty, as empty as I felt. I had a mission in this hostile flatland—to find my parents—but I was no longer sure that I would.

Eventually the road disappeared into the swelling waters of the Mekong River. The rainy season was coming. We got on a large, two-story ferryboat crammed with people and animals. We arrived in a Cambodian village on the riverbank. There were wooden houses on stilts, about forty of them, and red dirt paths snaking around the fields and into the forest. This was Thlok Chhrov, the “Deep Hole,” so named because the banks of the Mekong are especially steep there.

Grandfather had a house in Thlok Chhrov, a little way from the river, made of woven palm leaves and palm trunks, with a bamboo floor. This village wasn’t where he came from, and I don’t know when or why he settled there. He had no wife or family. He spoke Cham, Khmer, Viet, and a form of Chinese, but nobody knew where he came from. Perhaps he too suffered during the terrible years of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Grandfather’s house was small and ramshackle, half falling over, with one room, a sleeping pallet in the corner, and a charcoal brazier outside. It was my job to clean, cook, fetch water from the river, and wash the clothes. He beat some Cham words into me, enough so that I could understand his demands.

I was his domestic servant. Such things are common in Cambodia. It didn’t matter if Grandfather had bought me from Taman or not. Now that I was there and he fed me and gave me lodging, I had to serve him. I owed him obedience.

Pretty quickly, I learned enough Khmer to understand the insults the villagers called out to me, the only Phnong in the village. I was fatherless, black, and ugly. Like most Khmer, the people in Thlok Chhrov see us Phnong as barbarians who are uncontrollably violent—some even say we are cannibals. Of course, this is completely untrue. The Phnong are honest people, true to their word and peaceful—unless, of course, they are provoked by Khmer attacks. They also do not beat and mistreat their children, which all the villagers in Thlok Chhrov seemed to do. This shocked me.

The Khmer may scorn us as cannibals, but we Phnong see them as treacherous serpents who never move straight and will hurt you even if they have no need to eat.

Even though he was a Muslim, Grandfather gambled frequently. He would take his small wooden chess set wrapped in cloth wherever he went. He smoked cheroots of rolled-up tobacco leaves and drank rice alcohol every night. When he didn’t have enough money for drink, his eyes would grow hard. He would make me kneel and beat me with a long, hard bamboo stick that cut into my flesh and made me bleed with every blow.

I learned fear and obedience. Grandfather made me work for other people to earn him money. Every morning I had to fetch water from the river for several villagers. At first, it was almost impossible to climb up the steep riverbanks with the heavy pails balanced on a stick across my shoulders. I would slip and fall, the zinc buckets cutting into the backs of my legs. Sometimes the cuts became so infected I could hardly walk.

In the evening, I had to use stones to grind rice into flour before I could make it into noodles for dinner. That’s how it was in those days. If you had enough rice to eat, you were rich. We often didn’t. When that happened, Grandfather and I would root through the food that the other villagers had thrown out for their pigs.

Grandfather often rented out my labor during the day. I worked in the rice paddies, near the river. In the dry season we rebuilt the small clay walls that kept the water in, and when the river began to rise, we planted seedlings.

Sometimes men and boys would appear from the forest and help us harvest the rice. They were Khmer Rouge fighters. In those days there were still large groups of soldiers in the countryside. There was a new, Vietnamese-backed government in power, but the Khmer Rouge didn’t melt away into thin air. Instead, Pol Pot’s army retreated into hiding.

For a long time, there were a lot of skirmishes in the countryside between the Vietnamese-backed government army and the Khmer Rouge fighters. In Thlok Chhrov we often heard outbursts of gunfire and exploding land mines and saw soldiers or Khmer Rouge fighters running through the village. When this happened, the villagers always ran indoors. They were terrified.

One time a boy who often worked in the fields with me—who wasn’t right in the head—went looking for a buffalo at nightfall, even though there had been a lot of shooting. The next morning we found his body. His head had been cut off, and it had rolled into the scrub growth along the path.

I don’t know which side was responsible—the Khmer Rouge or the Vietnamese-backed government—and I didn’t really understand the difference. In those days, nobody talked in Cambodia. Nobody wanted to discuss the murder and starvation and death camps of the four years they had just lived through under the Khmer Rouge, or talk about how we were now living under Vietnamese occupation. They never talked about the Pol Pot time, the years of starvation and murder. It was as if they had blanked it out.

People learned from those years that they couldn’t trust anyone—friends, neighbors, not even their own family. The more you let people know about yourself—the more you speak—the more you expose yourself to danger. It was important not to see, not to hear, not to know anything about what was happening. This is a very Cambodian attitude toward life.

I never saw parents explaining things to their children. They told them what work to do and they beat them. Many children were beaten every day, as I was, and some of them were much younger than I. It’s mostly women, in these cases, who do the beating. Men hit more rarely, but when they do, it’s more dangerous because they’re so much stronger.

I dreamed of killing Grandfather, but it never occurred to me to slip away and try to make my way back home to the forest. That part of my life was gone forever—somehow it didn’t seem possible for me to make my way back. I had discovered his true nature and I hated him. But I owed this man—even though he starved and hurt me, I belonged to him. He accused me of bringing him bad luck. Since I’d been with him, he said, everything was going wrong with his business, and it was my fault.

Sometimes Grandfather would leave on long trips, and I would get relief. But most of the time he didn’t work—he would sit at home, or gamble, and leave it to me to bring in the money. If I washed the dishes before I went to get fresh water, he beat me because there was no water to drink; if I went to get fresh water before I did the dishes, he beat me because the dishes weren’t done. Sometimes I cried, but I grew accustomed to neutralizing my emotions. Who could I count on? People seemed to think it was normal that I should be beaten, since I was this small black savage, the lowest person in the village.

Most of the people I fetched water for never had a kind word for me. They were only angry when I came late, or if the water had spilled a little. But one elderly woman who lived alone was good to me. She used to fuss over my cut feet. One day she gave me a pair of blue rubber flip-flops—my first shoes. They rubbed uncomfortably between my toes, and they were very worn: the soles had two large holes and were so thin that thorns could pierce my feet through them. But they were shoes, and to me, that was really something.

From time to time I’d chat with her. I asked her why Cambodians were so horrible to the “black savages,” why they accused us of being cannibals. While I was living in my village with those supposed savages, no one had ever beaten me, but in Thlok Chhrov, the villagers beat their children for the most trivial things. So who were the savages?

I remember the misery I felt during that first dry season in Thlok Chhrov. Huge mounds of rice stalks had been piled into haystacks, and I began to burrow holes into them, making nests in which I could hide from Grandfather. Sometimes I slept there. It was dark and hidden, and I felt safe.

After a few months I found another place where I could take refuge. A younger boy who worked with me in the rice fields used to go and eat at the schoolteacher’s house, and he took me along too. Mam Khon, the village schoolteacher, was poor, but he and his wife looked after children. They had six children of their own, but they also fed a number of children who attended school but lived too far away to return to their homes every day. There were often twenty or more children in the house. It was a small house on stilts, made of plaited bamboo, with just one room. Everyone slept on the floor, and in the dry season the boys slept downstairs, on the bare earth, on beds laid out underneath the house.

Mam Khon’s wife, Pen Navy, made cakes she used to sell, and sometimes she would give me one. I began helping her with the cooking and I would eat over there sometimes. She fed us all, though the family was so poor they often didn’t even have rice, just rice soup.

Pen Navy was kind but stern, a rough authoritarian. She was half Chinese and had very pale skin. I thought she was beautiful. One afternoon while we were working she asked me why I didn’t go to school.

The village school was an open-air classroom, with a thatched roof to give shelter from the rain. Mam Khon and another teacher had started it up again after the Khmer Rouge regime fell. There were crowds of laughing children, all in uniform—a dark blue skirt or pants and white shirt. Of course, I longed to go there, but I didn’t think Grandfather would ever let me, and I told Pen Navy this. I called her “Aunty,” as a sign of respect. For a while, we left it at that. It was clear to us both that Grandfather had the right to stop me from going to school if he wanted to.

Mam Khon himself hovered over the household like an apparition—he was a gentle, good man, but he rarely spoke. One day he found me crying, because the other children had insulted me. He bent down—he was a tall man, with a strong face and clear, dark eyes—and took my face in his hands. “You’re not a savage,” he said. “You’re the daughter of my brother. My brother left to go to Mondulkiri with a woman and had a child there, and now I have found that child—it’s you.”

I had no idea whether or not I should believe him. But Mam Khon told me he would register me for school and said he would sort this out with Grandfather. Grandfather finally agreed that I could go to school as long as it didn’t cost him anything. School itself was free in those days, because we were living under Communism, so he meant that I must still work for him and bring him money.

School was from 7:00 a.m. till 11:00 a.m. As long as I got up before dawn to fetch the water and bring home the money, I’d be able to wash and dress in time to leave. When I arrived, Mam Khon’s colleague, Mr. Chai, a dark-skinned man, pinched and dry, said I couldn’t register for first grade—I was already over ten and far too old.