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

Although I have photographic memories of what happened in my childhood as early as when I was three, some of the events in this book were recounted to me as I grew up and filled in by my relatives. To protect some people, I have changed their names in the book.

I remember a little girl’s wish for the world to learn the bitter chill of her grief, and of the tragic death of her family. Her wish is mine and it is realized. I must thank those individuals who’ve helped the dream come true: Ryan Hinke, my dear, loving friend, who provides a home with precious solitude that allowed me to write this memoir.

I am grateful to Uncle Seng for bringing us to America.

I am indebted to Amy Cherry, a sensitive, shrewd, godsent editor.

Meredith Bernstein, my agent, I thank you for believing in my story. Your kind words gave me courage.

My sister Channary, who cheers me on in my journey.

I thank the Literary Arts, Inc., and those who have helped Cambodia and her people in the Khmer diaspora.

A Seed of Survival

I
wake, confused.
It’s still dark
. My past has haunted me again. Memory has taken me back in my dreams, a hapless passenger, even though I’m no longer in Cambodia. In my nightmares I am trying to keep a childhood promise that I made to the spirit of my mother, who came to me in my sleep twenty years ago. A promise made in another dream which I must honor.

In this dream, I am crying out to God to help me find Map, my three-year-old brother. Enemies are infiltrating the United States. I hear a voice cry out. I can’t distinguish words, only human fear.
America is being invaded? This can’t be happening
.
I fled to America to escape war. Now where do I go?
My questions are shattered by the familiar sound of gunfire, a hollow boom, the distant chatter of artillery that still sends terror pulsing through my veins. The sounds are of Cambodia, but the landscape is of the Pacific Northwest. The guns speak from somewhere I can’t see, beyond a grove of pine trees in the shadow of a mountain. The world has become a landscape of light and shadow. Around me, a human river flows crazily out of control. People are running everywhere. A sobbing woman carries a bundle of clothes and a child, slowed by the weight of her own terror. I am stiff in fear and shock. In the blur of faces around me, there are no Americans, only Cambodians.

I am carried along by the crowd, and yet I’m alone, without my family.
Where is Map, my baby brother?
My heart races and my head moves like a windshield wiper, looking for him. I can’t find him. The sound of gunfire obliterates the human noise around me. It’s getting closer and louder. My sobs accelerate, and I begin to gasp for air. My lungs are screaming, my insides crying out in unison with my mind. I can no longer run and drop to the ground. I scream with all my might:
No, my promise! I can’t lose another brother! God, help me.

It has been twelve years since I came to America. From here, I look back upon a childhood consumed by war. I could recognize the sounds of war at the age of four, when the spillover from the Vietnam conflict forced my family from the home my parents had spent their life savings to build in the affluent Takeo province in southern Cambodia. By the age of ten, I was forced to work in child labor camps, among thousands of children separated from parents and siblings by a system of social slavery instituted by the Khmer Rouge in their bizarre quest to create a utopian society.

Family ties were suddenly a thing of suspicion. Control was everything. Social ties, even casual conversations, were a threat.
Angka
, the organization, suddenly became your mother, your father, your God. But
Angka
was a tyrannical master. To question anything—whom you could greet, whom you could marry, what words you could use to address relatives, what work you did—meant that you were an enemy to your new “parent.” That was
Angka
’s rule. To disobey meant the
kang prawattasas
, the wheel of history,
*
would run over you. That’s what they told us as we cast our eyes downward under the weight of their threats.

Unlike so many of the children I worked with in muddy rice fields and irrigation canals, unlike many in my own family, I outran the wheel of history. I survived starvation, disease, forced labor, and refugee camps. I survived a world of violence and despair.

I survived.

Since 1981 my new home has been mostly in Oregon, as verdant as the land I left, but different. The coconut and papaya groves, the mango trees that grew in front of my childhood home, have been replaced by mountains dense with pine and fir, timber-flanked valleys, and cold, clear streams. From dramatic coastal cliffs to lacy spigots of waterfalls that feed the Columbia River Gorge, the sites, scenes, and sounds of this place have become my image of America. Now, strangely, it has also become the landscape of my nightmares.

In Cambodia the term for childbirth is
chhlong tonlé
. Literally translated, it means “to cross a large river,” to weather the storm. Looking back, I have crossed the river on my own, without my mother. I have started a new life in a new country. I have learned a new language and lived in a new culture. I have been reincarnated with a new body, but with an old soul. It lives symbiotically inside me.

In many ways I occupy a world of blurred boundaries. Since the fall of 1989, I have been involved as a researcher on the Khmer Adolescent Project, a federally funded study of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among 240 Cambodian youths who endured four years of war in Cambodia.

The need for this research was initially prompted by the observations made by Dan Dickason, an ESL (English as a second language) teacher at Cleveland High School in Portland, Oregon. In the early 1980s, Cleveland High School had experienced an influx of young immigrant Cambodians. In these students Dickason saw something unfamiliar. Once, on a trip to a high school teacher’s home, a young Cambodian girl was digging in the ground and unearthed a bone. She began to unravel, screaming and running about. Slowly other Cambodian students began to share their stories. One shared stories about cannibalism. Another described how the Khmer Rouge had cut people open to eat their livers. At the time, little was known about the horrors of Cambodia. Dickason himself was in denial until he saw footage on the CBS News in May 1983 showing a mountain of human skulls in Cambodia. Then he began to pay attention. The next day he called Dr. David Kinzie, director of the Indochinese Psychiatric Program at Oregon Health Sciences University.

I was one of the Cambodian students at Cleveland High School. When three psychiatrists, Dr. William Sack, Dr. David Kinzie, and Dr. Richard Angell, came to our school to interview us, I asked them why they were so interested, what was their goal? What did they know about Cambodia that I didn’t? I told my cousin and a friend of my fear of talking to them, my fear that I could not be strong about the past. That I would cry in front of strangers. Even in our relocated Cambodian communities, the past was something we had tried to leave on the road behind us.

Most of our scars were well hidden, set aside in our battle for academic success. Out of forty students at Cleveland High School who had lived under Pol Pot, half were diagnosed with PTSD, and half suffered from some form of depression. It seemed curious. Many were motivated students and some were on the honor roll. At the time, it all sounded abstract to me.

Four years later, Dr. William Sack received a grant for over $1 million from the National Institute of Mental Health to expand the research. I was approached at that time to help interpret and to interview subjects. In two weeks I suddenly had to master a brand-new vocabulary including terms like “schizophrenia,” “cyclothymia,” and “dysthymia.” Harder still, I had to learn to ask questions that triggered memories. At twenty-four, I had no idea what I was getting into. Like soldiers going into battle, I didn’t know what outcome to expect. Maybe it was better that way.

My first hint came at the end of our training. The staff had gathered to watch documentary films about Cambodia, including part of the Academy Award-winning film
The Killing Fields.
After a few minutes, I stormed out. I remember taking refuge in the women’s rest room, leaning against the wall and weeping. For the first time in years, I had allowed myself to feel the pain of the past that was buried in my soul.

How familiar everything was: the fields of broken flesh; legs, arms gushing blood; corpses covered with buzzing flies; and the sweet stench of decaying flesh. I didn’t need to watch this to have a better understanding of what Cambodian subjects had endured. I had lived through it myself. All I needed to do was to close my eyes and the memories came back.

And so began my dual life. As a researcher, my job was to be a cultural voyeur. I was to use my knowledge of Cambodian customs, culture, and my own wartime experiences to establish a common ground with other refugees. In theory, they would be more comfortable talking to someone who knew what they had endured. It was a strange role for me. In conducting psychiatric interviews, I was both the insider, who knew their trauma, and the outsider, the dispassionate, clinical researcher. There I sat, efficiently recording details that jogged so many of my own harsh memories. Unlike during my training experience, I couldn’t run away and take sanctuary in a rest room. I couldn’t stop listening when subjects’ and their parents’ or guardians’ distressing stories awakened my emotions. My job was to listen, to record answers, and continue to ask questions, pressing until some of these people broke down as they confronted things that had been successfully repressed.

A memory of this time returns to me. Sitting in Room C in Gaines Hall, I am interviewing a woman, the mother of a subject. In the interest of reliability, I interview her about her daughter’s experience as well as her own. The woman weeps when asked about her family’s separation. She studies the tabletop as if the answers were projected there like a movie. While sitting only a few feet across from me, she is distant. For her, as for many subjects and their parents, this was the first time since leaving Cambodia that she could turn and face the brutality she had left behind.

Were you ever tortured by Khmer Rouge soldiers? Did you ever witness others being killed during this time? Did you ever see corpses during this time? Did you ever lose your mother or father during the Pol Pot time? Did you lose any siblings during this time? Did you ever witness the executions of family members? Did you suffer from not having enough to eat so you looked thin, had swollen legs, or a puffy stomach? Were you ever forced to do things by the Khmer Rouge soldiers against your will?…

These questions are sharp triggers. As soon as they leave my mouth, I too search for answers. I watch as suffering is released through the ragged sounds of sobbing. It is all I can do to offer Kleenex while I fight back my own tears. There is recognition. The woman’s red, flooded eyes look briefly into mine—a directness unusual in Cambodia. She apologizes for interrupting the interview, a mark of Cambodian courtesy that survived the years of brutality. I am always amazed that some bit of humanity outlived
Angka
and is more powerful than the wheel of history.

Often the subjects meet with me in medical offices, but sometimes I am invited into their homes. I am braced for their reactions when I call them to arrange for interviews or when I’m about to interview them. Sometimes they’re angry or paranoid. I try to fight it with familiarity. “Oh, I’m Sam’s cousin,” I tell them. “You know Sam?” Sometimes they are open, surprised that I’m interested enough to ask, referring me to other families, unwilling to let our conversation end. Sometimes they are suspicious. In 1990 Cambodia still remains home to political unrest. Pockets of the Khmer Rouge still fight. And we refugees were well aware of their deceptions. Orwell’s words aptly describe the Khmer Rouge: “Big Brother is watching you.” Even on the streets of Portland I look over my shoulder. And here I am on these survivors’ doorstep, asking them to reveal difficult memories. The Khmer Rouge are a continent away, and yet they are not. Psychologically, they are parasites, like tapeworms that slumber within you, living passively until something stirs them to life. I was asking these subjects to wake those parasites.

The woman is crying so hard that the interview stops. In the past she had made up stories when her daughter asked “Where’s
Pa
?” She could never bring herself to say that the child’s father had been executed by the Khmer Rouge. “He went away, he’ll be back soon,” she would say. All that was left of her husband was pain, which was only compounded by the questions posed by her daughter and, now, me. I assure her that in the long run, talking about it will help. Pain was simply reality.

I am reminded of the Buddhist doctrine
Mean ruup mean tok
, which means “With a body comes suffering.” I heard a monk say these words once and immediately thought them overly grim. But to survive Pol Pot is to accept this doctrine as readily as you might accept the change of the seasons, the death of winter and the rebirth of spring.

After a few hours of interviews, I am exhausted. My fingers work, recording hellish images in exquisite detail.
The memory of crude executions—seeing a pregnant woman beaten to death with a metal spade. Makeshift hospitals filled with feces; flies and rats hungry for food, human corpses, anything—everything. The memory of bodies swollen with edema. Cheeks and temples sunken with starvation.
As I note it all, my body and soul are drained. Inside these four walls I am flung back to Cambodia. A door separates me from safety. I step out into the sunshine, the rolling green campus of the Oregon Health Sciences University. I squint to get my bearings. I have escaped from Cambodia again.

Another day, another interview, another horrific reality. This time it’s an account of the massacre of Cambodian refugees pushed over a mountain precipice. Thai soldiers gathered up hundreds of Cambodian refugees in 1979 and told them that they would be taken to a camp and given aid. Yet the Thai were devils in disguise. At gunpoint, they forced refugees to run down the precipice facing Cambodia. Run they did. There before their eyes rolled their children, wives, husbands, and the elderly. A carpet of bodies tumbled down the precipice as they ran, like pebbles in a rock slide. They had been shot, the subject recounts. The story paralleled a Cambodian parable: “In water one faces a crocodile, and when on land, one faces a tiger.” People were caught between two devils: the Khmer Rouge and the Thai soldiers.

I dutifully record the carnage, yet my mind doesn’t want to accept it. But this same inhumanity was also documented by a journalist in the
Washington Post
. I had never heard of it. How strange, I thought, to find a history lesson about my own homeland here in America. Stranger still to realize what might have been in my own life.