Survival in the Killing Fields Read Free Page A

Buddha amulets and prayer beads. He
had no shirt. He was not from the towns or cities. He was a man of the earth, from the countryside. From the very heart of peaceful Cambodia. And he had rebelled.
    Now, many years later, grown up and living far away, I think: Yes, there was trouble even then. Maybe not revolution but a deep, hidden discontent.
    To outsiders, and often even to ourselves, Cambodia looked peaceful enough. The farmers bound to their planting cycles. Fishermen living on their boats, and their naked brown children jumping in
and out of the water. The robed monks, barefoot, walking with deliberate slowness on their morning rounds. Buddhist temples in every village, the graceful, multilayered roofs rising above the
trees. The wide boulevards and the flowering trees of our national capital, Phnom Penh. All that beauty and serenity was visible to the eye. But inside, hidden from sight the entire time, was
kum. Kum
is a Cambodian word for a particularly Cambodian mentality of revenge – to be precise, a long-standing grudge leading to revenge much more damaging than the original injury.
If I hit you with my fist and you wait five years and then shoot me in the back one dark night, that is
kum.
Or if a government official steals a peasant’s chickens and the peasant
uses it as an excuse to attack a government garrison, like the one in my village, that is
kum.
Cambodians know all about
kum.
It is the infection that grows on our national soul.
    But the fighting had been so small-scale back then, before the other countries got involved, that the damage was limited. When those few ragged guerrillas attacked the garrison in my village, it
was only news for those of us who lived there. Nobody else cared. The attack might have been reported in the Phnom Penh newspapers, but not outside the country. It was only a minor incident in an
inconclusive, low-level civil war. Wars like this are always going on in different parts of the world. And those in the outside world know little about them.
    Cambodia: it is just a name to most people. Someplace far away where something terrible happened, and few can remember exactly what. Mention Pol Pot or the Khmer Rouge and people start to
remember. Or bombs dropping and genocide or even a film called
The Killing Fields.
But all that came later.
    Cambodia is a part of Indochina, which in turn is part of the landmass of Southeast Asia. ‘Indo-china’ because a couple of countries to the west lies India, which gave Cambodia its
religion and alphabet; and a couple of countries to the north is China, which gave Cambodia its merchant class, including my father’s side of the family. For many years the region was known
as French Indochina, because France colonized Cambodia and the neighbouring countries of Laos and Vietnam beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The guerrillas who came to my village were trying
to get rid of French rule. And in Vietnam at the same time as this shoot-out, Ho Chi Minh and his communists were also trying to force the French to leave, with a rebellion on a much larger
scale.
    Vietnam has usually overshadowed Cambodia in world news, because the wars there are larger, and because Western countries have gotten directly involved in the fighting. So more people know about
Vietnam than Cambodia. But I have never liked having to explain that Cambodia is next to Vietnam, or even near India and China. To me, Cambodia means something very special. It was the name of the
country around my village. And like all children, I believed my village was the centre of the world.
    The village was called Samrong Yong. It was a sleepy crossroads on the highway south of Phnom Penh, with houses one row deep and rice fields and forests beyond. After the shooting incident, my
parents moved us children out of the village to a friend’s house in the countryside, where they thought we would be safer. Every afternoon my parents came to the house and spent the night
with us, and