Survival in the Killing Fields Read Free Page B

every morning they went back to the village to do business at their dry-goods store. Until one afternoon Papa didn’t come back.
    The guerrilla rebels kidnapped my father. My mother collected money for his release. After she paid them, they set my father free but took her prisoner instead, so then Papa had to raise ransom
money for her. When they were both free, corrupt soldiers of the other side – Cambodian officers of the French-backed government – arrested my father and put him in jail. They accused
him of working for the guerrillas. After all, he had been seen leaving Samrong Yong every afternoon to visit them. Of course, the soldiers were using this as an excuse for getting ransom money.
    I was sent to stay in Phnom Penh. While I was there, the rebels and the military took turns kidnapping my father again. My father hated paying ransom, but there was nothing he could do. He had
nobody to protect him. Like nearly all merchants, he was Chinese-looking, with pale-coloured skin and narrow eyes. This made him an easy target. Most other Cambodians were of the Khmer race, with
round eyes and dark brown skin, or else were of mixed racial descent.
    When I finally came back to the village, the rice fields looked the same. The monks still made their rounds in the morning. But every afternoon, a new militia of young men and women marched
around the village with machetes and wooden rifles. They were always out of step, and never looked like a real army, but they had the strong support of the people. The whole village was tired of
the corrupt soldiers of the French-backed government, and tired of the corrupt guerrillas too. The man who had helped organize the militias, our young king, Norodom Sihanouk, felt the same.
Sihanouk was trying to get the French to leave the country. He wanted the guerrillas to leave too, because some of them were communists allied with Ho Chi Minh. Sihanouk didn’t want the
country ruled either by a Western power like France or by communists. He wanted Cambodia to be independent and neutral. In the Buddhist tradition, he wanted the middle way.
    Because of all the ransom payments my father was very poor. He sent me to a Chinese school with my older brother, Pheng Huor, but soon he took me out because he couldn’t afford the tuition
for both of us. I didn’t mind. Pheng Huor was smarter than me. He could take an abacus, the Chinese calculator with rows of wooden beads, flick the beads around with the tip of his finger and
get the answer to a problem in seconds, while I would still be trying to remember what each bead stood for. Pheng Huor had always helped my father after school. I had always helped my mother. My
mother was darker in colour, like me, partway between a Chinese and a dark rural Cambodian.
    While my father rebuilt his business and my brother studied at school, my mother and I went off on daily bartering trips in the countryside to get the family’s food. I carried a long piece
of bamboo across my shoulders with a hook at each end. From one hook hung a basket with fresh pastries cooked by my hardworking father, and from the other hung another basket with peanuts, dried
fish, salt, soy sauce, and anything else we thought we could trade. At sunrise we were off, on foot. The baskets bobbed up and down from my shoulderboard and I adjusted my stride to fit the rhythm.
My mother wrapped her krama, or scarf, around her head and placed a basket on top, steadying it with one hand.
    We walked away from National Route 2, the paved highway that passed through our village, onto oxcart trails and footpaths. Soon we were out of earshot of the automobile traffic and into an
entirely different world of fields and forests. We walked through open rice fields to shady villages, where thatched-roof houses built on tall stilts stood among tamarind, mango, banana and palm
trees. The villagers were ethnic Khmer, friendly, dark-skinned people who had mastered the art of living off the land without