The Road of Lost Innocence (3 page)

Mam Khon told him a story to appease him. “She’s my daughter,” he said. “I lost her in the Troubles, but now I’ve found her. She’s mine.” This was how I got my name: Mam Somaly. Mam, like him. And Somaly, which he had chosen for me. I liked it.

I was so proud of my school uniform and was always careful to wash and care for it. The skirt and shirt were hand-me-downs, from Mam Khon’s daughters, but they were beautiful to me. At last, I felt I was like everyone else. But the others didn’t feel the same way. The village children called me
“khmao,”
which is like “nigger.”

In Thlok Chhrov the darker you were, the dumber you were—this was an established fact. But I found it wasn’t true. I studied and learned quickly. Soon I had learned mathematics and how to read and write Khmer.

There was no school in the afternoon, but we often had to do physical work there: every school was supposed to have a productive component, a vegetable garden or rice field. We planted jackfruit trees and coconut palms. I remember when we had to dig a huge pit in the schoolyard for a duck pond. It was hard, dirty work, but fun.

Sometimes in the afternoons we did military training in the neighboring field because there was still a war going on in the countryside. The soldiers taught us how to clean and handle rifles, how to shoot, and how to throw a hand grenade. We learned how to dig a deep pit with sharp spikes sticking up in the bottom of it—to capture men—and how to cover it with large dry leaves.

There were accidents. Sometimes during military training children were wounded. Once a hand grenade blew off a boy’s foot. They took him away, but he died. This was sad but didn’t seem to affect people a great deal. Death was random, normal—it was too routine to care much about one kid.

I remember the time the teacher asked us to list all the bad things that had happened to us under the Khmer Rouge. I had been living in the forest with the Phnong—nothing had happened to me under Pol Pot, so I gave back my paper blank. This teacher was Mam Khon’s colleague, Mr. Chai. To punish me, he made me kneel for an hour in the sun on the thorny, hardened skins of dried jackfruit. My knees bled.

But other than that there were no real punishments in school. I was never tied down and lashed, as Grandfather used to do to me when he was drunk and out of money.

When we did military training I always took the role of the Khmer Rouge, because I wanted everyone to be frightened of me. I hated everyone—not just the children in my class, but all Khmer. But I didn’t hate the Khmer Rouge fighters who sometimes emerged out of the forest to help us with the harvest, and I didn’t hate the government soldiers who taught us, either. Occasionally the soldiers would give us things to eat—their rations allowed for milk and sugar. There were times I would have sold my soul for a glass of milk.

After about a year it got better. I had a new best friend, Pana, a boy who also worked in the fields and lived in a nearby village. We used to walk home together, though his walk was longer than mine. One day I had just arrived at Mam Khon’s house when we heard a huge explosion from the direction Pana had taken. Mam Khon told me to take his bicycle, and I rode to Pana’s house, still too small to reach the bike saddle. He had exploded. A rocket-propelled grenade had hit him. Apparently a soldier some distance away had thrown his RPG launcher on the ground and it had gone off. Pana’s hand was in a tree, his arm was somewhere else—there was no body left, but I helped find all the pieces. Afterward I had nightmares about it. I went to the pagoda sometimes to pray for him. It was a long time before the nightmares went away.

Pana was my first friend and he was dead. I thought maybe I really did bring misfortune, just like Grandfather said.

In my second year in school, I came in at the top of the class. In those days, under Communism, the best students were given awards that were meaningful—bolts of cloth, milk, and rice. That year I received two bolts of cotton, blue and pink. I took them over to Mam Khon’s house and his wife helped me cut out and sew a pink shirt with a heart-shaped pocket and a blue skirt. These were the first new clothes I had ever had, and they were my most precious possessions. I kept that blouse until I was in my twenties, when it burned with Mam Khon’s house in a fire.

I began, shyly, to call Mam Khon “Father” a few months after he first took me to the school. It doesn’t sound so unusual in Khmer. It’s a term of closeness and respect, and other children called him “Pok” too. He was such a good man. He used to take me out fishing with him. He could never have survived on his minuscule schoolteacher salary, but he had a small, low rowboat we used to take up the Mekong in the evenings, trailing our nets along bamboo poles at different depths to catch various kinds of fish.

At around three in the morning we would tie up in midriver with other fishing boats—once you were away from the village, it was much too dangerous ever to sleep on the banks. Then, at dawn, we would make our way back and sell our fish on the shore. We gave the rest of the catch to his wife and daughters to ferment and make into
prahoc
sauce, or simply to dry. That way we could always trade dried fish for rice when the wet season came and fishing was difficult. There wasn’t much money in those days, and we traded for everything.

We never talked much—Father was a silent person. But we grew closer, spending time alone together on the river. He taught me how to mend nets and throw them flat and wide. I loved to be out on the Mekong, far from other people, even though I knew it wasn’t particularly normal for a girl to be doing this work. Father’s daughters never liked to fish. I suppose they thought it was disgusting, or maybe they were worried about keeping their pale skin out of the sun and the wind.

I tried to work hard for Father’s family so they would let me stay there as much as possible. Father had six children, and the older ones were both girls. Sochenda was the eldest, about fourteen, and Phanna was two years older than I was, but I felt they were so far ahead—in school, in life, in everything. They were pale and beautiful, and they cooked and washed and studied during the day, in the house with their mother. They had time for study and were allowed to use an oil lamp to study by. This seemed miraculous—when I studied, it was by moonlight.

Sochenda and Phanna and the younger children were not overjoyed to have me as their new sister—at first I took to calling them Sister, and Pen Navy Mother. Still, they were not horrible about it. Even Phanna, the little princess of them all—the prettiest and the palest skinned—could be very nice.

Mam Khon’s family was a traditional Cambodian family, by which I mean they never spoke about personal matters. It was not only inappropriate, it would give other people a hold on you. Children were taught that one should never give anything of oneself away, either in public or in private. Somebody who understands you can use your words to mock you or betray you. Confiding in someone means you are weak. Anything you say may one day be used against you. Better to hide what you think and feel.

There was a fortune-teller in the village, an old woman who lived near the riverbank in a hut even more derelict than Grandfather’s. Everyone respected her and went to her for advice. I must have been about twelve years old when Pen Navy took us all there one day. I think she really meant to ask about her daughters’ wedding prospects, which we all assumed were good—they were both so pretty and white—but the fortune-teller said Phanna would have an unlucky life with a lot of misfortune. Then she looked at me and said, “But the black one—she will have the three flags”—power, honor, and money. “She will travel in a plane and she will be a leader in the family. She will help you.”

The other children hooted with laughter. Phanna laughed the loudest. “You’ll have children so dark you won’t be able to see them at night,” she told me. It was good-humored, and I joined in the laughing. It just didn’t seem possible that this would be my destiny.

Phanna didn’t believe I was her sister in a real, biological sense or even her half-sister, and neither, to be honest, did I. I also wasn’t sure about the story that these were my cousins. Another time when Father found me crying I asked him about it, and he told me he really was my father’s older brother. He said his brother had left, and married a Phnong woman, and had a child, and that this man—his brother, my father—had a bad temper just like me. He held a mirror up and pointed to his eyes and mine, to his forehead and mine and said, “We are the same.”

Another time he told me, “Your uncle, your father, it doesn’t matter—the important thing is that we are together.” I suspect he knows what really happened to my real parents, but he has never talked to me about it. Finally, I have listened to his advice: I no longer ask.

My breasts were growing, and Grandfather began touching them. He would roll heavily across the sleeping pallet at night and I would feel his hands on me. When he did this, I ran. I was fast—even today, people in the village remember me running. I would run down to the river in the dark and sleep there, on the banks where we kept the fishing boats. The reflection of the moon on the water calmed me, and I would curl into the roots of a tree or crawl into Father’s boat and sleep on the nets. I continued to do my water duty and leave Grandfather the money that I’d earned, but I left as soon as possible in the morning, and during the day I tried always to be at school or at Father’s house.

One evening a couple of months after we went to the fortune-teller, Grandfather asked me to get oil for the lamp from the Chinese merchant’s where we bought our goods. The request sounded innocent enough—there was no electricity, so we used an oil lamp, and I often bought things from the Chinese merchant. He traded in rice and lent people money at high interest. He and his wife were respected in the village. Sometimes they gave me sweets or cakes.

But that day the merchant’s wife wasn’t there. The merchant had me follow him to the storeroom and offered me a cake. Then he threw me down on a pile of rice sacks and held me down. He hit me hard and then he raped me. I didn’t know what he had done, but it felt as though he had cut me between my legs.

Then he threatened me: “If you tell anyone, I’ll cut your throat. Your grandfather owes me a lot of money. If you talk to him about it, he will beat you. So shut it.” He held out some striped candy.

I didn’t take it. I refused and ran. I was bleeding, and I felt horrible shame, though I didn’t understand what had happened. I went to the riverbank, and I told the tree about my pain and my disgust at these evil people, especially the Chinese man who had insulted and hurt me.

I tried to throw myself into the Mekong that night, at a place where the riverbank is very steep. I went under, but I couldn’t help myself from swimming—it seemed that I couldn’t make myself die. I washed up along the muddy bank a little farther down the river.

When I got back to Grandfather’s, he beat me. He said it was because I was late. He didn’t even ask what had happened to the oil I was supposed to bring. I realized somehow that he knew what had happened to me that night, and that he had sent me to the merchant on purpose.

I went back to the fortune-teller and I shouted at her. I told her she was talking nonsense, that she was an old madwoman who told lies.

Now I understand that Grandfather owed that Chinese merchant money and sold my virginity to pay his debt. In Cambodia, many men believe a virgin will keep you strong and imbue you with fresh strength—today it is widely believed that raping a virgin will also cure you of AIDS. I can see now that what the Chinese man did to me was called rape, but at the time I had no words for it—I didn’t know about penises. I thought he used a knife.

I also knew that I had to keep quiet, that this was something I could never talk about. Not only because of the fear the Chinese merchant had instilled in me, but also because it had something to do with things that were unspeakable in a Khmer family. Until today, I’ve never told my adoptive father about the rape. I felt good in that family, and I knew if I opened my mouth I’d be beaten, because Cambodian people don’t talk about such things. It would only shame me and the people who heard me.

I learned to shut down all my feelings so that none of it mattered—so that it never even happened. Pain is temporary. It goes away if you let your brain go numb.

After that night, I no longer wanted to speak. I no longer wanted to understand Khmer. I closed myself up in silence and lived like a mute. The next time Grandfather asked me to go and get oil for the lamp, I refused, and he beat me. Then he went to get some of those red ants that sting so viciously it hurts for weeks. I don’t want to remember that man.

After that night, I tried to avoid sleeping at Grandfather’s house. But I always had to go back every morning and every evening to bring him money and cook his meal. Today, of course, I would leave. Today, I would probably kill him—but then, as a child, I just never thought of leaving. Maybe I was stupid, but there seemed to be nowhere I could go. I couldn’t just settle in as part of Father’s family—that would create conflict between my adoptive father and Grandfather, and Father hated conflict of any kind, with anyone.

So I continued to do chores for other families after school and take the money to Grandfather. One day when I was doing the dishes for an old woman, I got startled and dropped a glass, which broke. The old woman picked up a cane and started to beat me like a fury until my back was all bloody. At school I couldn’t sit down, I was so cut up. I ran a high fever. My adoptive parents took care of me. They rubbed
moxa
on me—a traditional paste of herbs, which stings. It hurt so much I was crying. Father explained to me that in life one has to bear suffering. No matter how much it hurts, it is best to stay quiet.

He always used to say, “If you want to stay alive, grow a
dam kor
tree in front of your house.” The
dam kor
is the silk-cotton tree, but the same word,
kor,
also means mute. To survive, you must be silent.