When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge Paperback Read Free

opposing governments that have inflicted pain and suffering on innocent children, whose trust has been exploited time and time again throughout history: during the Khmer Rouge era, the Nazi era, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and, more recently, amid the ethnic aggression and bloodshed in Bosnia and Rwanda.
    Throughout a childhood dominated by war, I learned to survive. In a country faced with drastic changes, the core of my soul was determined to never let the horrific situations take away the better part of me. I mentally resisted forces I could only recognize as evil by being a human recorder, quietly observing my surroundings, making mental notes of the things around me. There would come a day to share them, giving my voice to children who can’t speak for themselves. Giving voice, as well, to my deceased parents, sisters, brothers, and extended family members, and to those whose remains are in unmarked mass graves scattered throughout Cambodia, the once-gentle land.
    As a child, I believed in the power of magic. I remember sitting enthralled in our living room watching a Cambodian movie set in the Himalayas. The hero was journeying to find a wise, bearded man who knew an incantation that could save the innocents from the murderous villains of the jungle. Simple, powerful words would make robbers disappear, abolish evil forces. Palms pressed together and raised in front of the chest with eyes closed, the characters murmured in soft recitation. Immediately things were set right. So easy , I thought. I just have to make it to the Himalayas. It was obviously a place where magic dwelled.
    My father knew magic. I was convinced of this. I felt him work his magic when the heavy fingers of asthma clutched my lungs. I would sit up and gasp for air, but everything was stuck. Quickly my father would open his drawer of French medicine, grab a vial and a syringe. Then the magic worked, as it always did. It was as amazing to me as the wise man of the Himalayas—one minute I was taking my last breath, the next minute I was running off to play.
    Sitting before my computer, I feel the long-ago magic of my childhood, now memory’s shadow. The war crushed my innocent belief in magic as neatly and efficiently as you might smash a cricket beneath your heel. At first I tried to hide inside the magic. It was a refuge against the surreal realities of war. My friends and I would pretend we had the power to raise the dead. I would talk to imaginary friends in the orchard behind our house. The guava, katot, and teap barang trees and the pond behind my home became the jungle I would have to pass through to get to the Himalayas.
    For a time I thought the growing fears of the Viet Cong invasion into Cambodia in the late sixties were an abstraction, an illusion.
    Time would tell me otherwise.
    Time would take away the magic. And time would give it back.
    Tonight the light from my computer screen reflects dull blue on my face. I feel my body and soul recovering from stress, from weeks of intense studies leading up to the MCAT, the all-day Medical College Admissions Test. Yet I feel a gnawing need to resume my writing. At first I felt it was my responsibility as a survivor. But now writing has also become my trek to the Himalayas, my search to recapture the long-lost magic in my life. This time I’m trying to use the power of words to caution the world, and in the process to heal myself. And even with an intellectual hangover from the toughest academic test I’ve ever taken, I’m searching for the words, the incantation, to make things right in my soul.
    My heart keeps me writing despite the hour. Pushing hard has become my addiction. At first it was a lesson of necessity, my only means of surviving the Khmer Rouge regime, of outrunning the wheel of history. Being raised by educated and open-minded parents, I had advantages. I was never forced to live up to the sexist expectations of traditional Cambodian culture—a fact that would become