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

important to my survival.
    As a child trying to endure the Khmer Rouge regime, I had many questions about the strange world that had overtaken my homeland. At twelve years of age, during the Khmer Rouge regime, I asked my oldest sister, Chea, a question in the hope of understanding our pain and the loss of those I loved. Her answer became the seed of my survival, planted by a sister whom I idolized.
    “Chea, how come good doesn’t win over evil? Why did the Khmer Rouge win if they are bad people?”
    Chea answered: “— jchan baan chea preah chnae baan chea mea ,” which means “Loss will be God’s, victory will be the devil’s.” When good appears to lose, it is an opportunity for one to be patient, and become like God. “But not very long, p’yoon srey [younger sister],” she explained, and referred to a Cambodian proverb about what happens when good and evil are thrown together into the river of life. Good is symbolized by klok , a type of squash, and evil by armbaeg , shards of broken glass. “The good will win over the evil. Now, klok sinks, and broken glass floats. But armbaeg will not float long. Soon klok will float instead, and then the good will prevail.” Chea’s eyes pierced me with an expression that reinforced her words. “ P’yoon , wait and see. It will happen.”
    At age twenty-two, in 1978, Chea died of a prolonged fever and deprivation, three months before the Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia that drove the Khmer Rouge to the border. At thirteen, unable to help save her, I was angry at myself for not having Pa ’s medical knowledge, for not having learned from him. As if talking to Chea’s spirit—as her wrapped-up body was being carried away to be buried in the woods—I said in my mind: Chea, if I survive I will study medicine. I want to help people because I couldn’t help you. If I die, I will learn medicine in my next life. That vow helped me cope with my own helplessness and pain, but I never knew how it would later affect my own life in America.
    In 1982, when I began high school in Portland, Oregon, my desire to study medicine was rekindled. After finishing my undergraduate studies at the University of Oregon in 1991, I was determined to become a medical doctor. It has been thirteen years since Chea’s death, and I wanted to fulfill my promise to her spirit and to take up where Pa had left off.
    In preparing for the MCAT, I had tried to shelve my memories, deliberately shoving them aside to make room for chemistry and physiology. Yet they had a way of sneaking back. Studying how the body uses carbohydrates, fat, and protein for energy would remind me of the edema that was rampant in wartime villages. The lack of salt in our diets became lethal, robbing our bodies of the ability to produce energy. In Cambodia we had a term for vitamin A deficiencies—a condition we called “blind chicken.” At night, my eyes wouldn’t work. With no real medicine available, the cure was a folk remedy: catch water in a banana leaf or lotus leaf and throw it into the eyes of the afflicted. Listening in the classroom and looking back, these weren’t abstract lessons.
    The sight of someone dressed entirely in black would also trigger a memory—the uniforms of the Khmer Rouge. And for a moment it could paralyze me as if I was under a spell. Watching a documentary on Ethiopia showing children lining up for rations would jolt me back to the muddy fields, to a time when I was as frail and exhausted as those African waifs, existing only for food. Memories seep back to me in ways I hadn’t imagined. A stay in Hawaii stirred a sensory memory—moist, green smells, blossoming mango trees, dangling clusters of coconuts, the dance of palm trees at the airport, the humid breeze. The senses awakened the long-forgotten.
     
     
    There are times when I’ve denied my own memories, when I’ve neglected the little girl in me. There would always be time to grieve, I told myself. I pushed down memories in