by Nawuth Keat
During the winter rains the saturated ground was almost impossible to cross, so we waited until the dry summer season of 1980 to begin our long walk to freedom. I was sixteen. We walked and walked, except when we could find a truck driver who would agree to give us a ride for a fee. At night, we slept on the ground.
The Vietnamese soldiers did not want people to leave Cambodia. They wanted the world to consider them our saviors, and if Cambodians fled, then no one would believe the Vietnamese were “saving” us. Traditionally, Vietnamese and Cambodians had not gotten along very well. When the Vietnamese saw an opportunity to gain power in Cambodia, they took advantage of it. But compared to the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese were far better. They did not kill people simply because they felt like it.
Along our route to leave the country, we would run across Vietnamese soldiers and use hand gestures to indicate that we lived nearby, since we did not speak Vietnamese. We carried almost nothing with us, so we looked like a family simply returning home from an afternoon’s activity, not like what we really were: people running away from their country forever. Without telling me, before we left, Chantha had sewn our valuables inside the soles of our shoes. All she told me was, “It is really important that you always wear your shoes. Do not take them off. Do not lose them. Do you understand?”
I understood.
In the jungle, there was safety in numbers, so some escapees joined together whenever they could. As a large group, we felt less vulnerable to roving bandits. Individuals might join groups, and sometimes, whole families—or what was left of them—would try to come along, too. But we could not really trust anybody. A stranger might be friends with some Khmer Rouge still in the area. We kept to ourselves most of the time, minding our own business and hoping no one would bother us.
Van Lan knew it was not possible for us to walk straight from Battambang to the border. If we heard that any Khmer Rouge were nearby, we changed our route. Van Lan decided where we would go each day. Even if we had to travel in the wrong direction, away from the border, we did it if it meant keeping away from the Khmer Rouge.
I was hot and thirsty, but in the summer, most of the ponds we came across had dried up, looking like nothing more than mud. Parts of skeletons, maggot-filled and decaying corpses, and remnants of clothes floated in the murky swamps. At one point we came to a pond that looked clean. People stood near it, but did not drink. But we were so parched, we gulped the water down. One bystander later told us, “That pond water is contaminated. There are dead bodies in it.” We had already drunk the water, so there was nothing we could do. Luckily, we did not get sick.
Later that afternoon, we got caught in a situation that made bad water seem like nothing to worry about. We were walking with about a dozen other escapees along a trail through the jungle. The Vietnamese controlled one side of it, the Khmer Rouge the other. As I trudged along, thinking about almost nothing, I was suddenly shocked into awareness. Gunshots! I didn’t see bullets, but I sensed the ringing of them whizzing past us. We all ran in the same direction we had been walking. Bunna, carrying Vibol, was behind me. Everybody was going as fast as they could, and in the commotion, I lost sight of Chantha and Van Lan. My panic pushed me to keep running. By the edge of the trail, I nearly stepped on a dead body. It lay face down, rotting, bloated, and stinking. Horrified, I kept going. Some people stepped on land mines as they ran. The mines exploded and the people were killed.
I don’t know how long I ran. It might have been for twenty minutes, it might have been for two hours. I didn’t stop running until everything was quiet. Then I walked and watched, focusing on the hope that Van Lan, Chantha, Vibol, and Bunna were safe. The first person I spotted was Van Lan, sitting at the base of a tree. He had made it! Who else was still alive? Van Lan and I waited together, asking any people who came by, “Have you seen our family?” I dreaded their answers, because they might say they had seen their bodies. No one had any news.
Then, Chantha appeared. “Where’s Vibol?” she asked. We had no idea. It was impossible to know if he and Bunna had been killed by bullets, blown up by a land mine—or they might be completely safe, looking for us somewhere else on the trail.
“Because Bunna has Vibol with him, he’s probably going slowly. It makes sense that they’re behind us. Let’s wait here for them,” said Van Lan.
Van Lan was right. Bunna, carrying Vibol, stumbled upon us. We did not jump up and down, hug each other, or shout with joy. My heart was full, but I had not known true happiness for so long, I did not remember how to express my deepest emotions. Simply, we were together again. We resumed our walk.
As escapees got closer to Thailand, some Khmer Rouge let them pass. They even allowed them to sleep in their camps. Why? I’m not sure. Maybe they wanted people to like them, maybe they felt regret for what they’d done. But they still had guns, and we did not trust them.
We slept one night in a Khmer Rouge camp. We arrived in the dark, so tired that I did not know where we were. Van Lan told me it was okay to go to sleep, so I did. In the morning I awoke in a tent, the kind I had seen the Khmer Rouge use. In shock, I blurted out, “This seems like the Khmer Rouge!” Van Lan clapped his hand over my mouth. “It is!” he said. “But just keep your mouth shut.” The Khmer Rouge did not like to be identified by that name. They did not refer to themselves as Khmer Rouge, which meant the “Red Communists.” They called themselves “Angka,” which meant “The Organization of Saviors.”
We stayed at the camp throughout the day. In the darkness that night, we sneaked away. Then Chantha, Van Lan, little Vibol, Bunna, and I began the last stage of our trek away from our country, toward the unknown.
We walked all night. We crossed muddy streams, got our clothes drenched, and then walked so long that our clothes dried again.
The original plan was for Bunna to return to Battambang once he had helped us carry Vibol to the border. He was going to live with Van Lan’s family and Chanya. But now he didn’t want to go back. He said, “They don’t really need me, and I want to stay with you.” So he did.
We were still walking when the sun rose. And then, we emerged from the Cambodian jungle. We saw a well-tended rice field. We had arrived in the Land of the Free!
Chapter Eleven
WAITING
Crossing the border meant little unless we made it into a refugee camp. Van Lan had talked to other people who had tried to escape, multiple times. They told him they had not been allowed to stay in Thailand. Based on what Van Lan learned from them, he warned us, “If we don’t get to a camp, the Thai border patrol will send us back to Cambodia.” We slept much of the day, resting up before trying to get to a refugee camp under the cover of darkness.
At dusk, we met another group of escapees, and together we hired a guide, someone who made his living helping refugees escape. We came to a paved road that looked deserted, but the guide warned us there might be Thai soldiers in the area. He said, “Some Thai soldiers shoot Cambodian refugees. Some do not.” There was no way to tell whether any particular soldier would be our helper or our killer.
One member of our group crawled slowly to the road to listen for cars. He heard none, so we ran as fast as we could across the road. But where was the refugee camp? Someone climbed a tree and saw a mountain in the distance. The guide told us the camp stood at its base. We walked all night long, nonstop, until predawn, when we finally got to the camp. It was fenced. Soldiers watched the surrounding area from tall guard towers. The camp was full and officially closed. Our guide explained, “No more refugees can come in, that is, unless they manage to sneak in.”
Before dawn, when it was still fairly dark, our guide said, “At this time, the camp guards might be dozing. But if they are awake, they are probably surveying the distance from the lookout towers.” He advised us, “Run, very quietly, close to the base of the tower. If you’re lucky, they won’t notice you.”
That’s exactly what we did. After we got past the tower, Van Lan gestured to Bunna to climb the camp
gate. He was the tallest, and without too much trouble he pulled himself up and over it. Van Lan helped Chantha climb up it, and Bunna raised his arms to help her on the other side. Next, Van Lan lifted Vibol over and lowered him to Bunna. Finally, he gave me a push, and up and over I went, too. Then Van Lan climbed the gate. We had all made it. Within minutes, I collapsed, asleep on the ground. When I awoke in the daylight, I was surrounded by people staring at us. They were hoping to find their family members among us.
The camp police did not send anyone away who had made it into the camp. It was packed with over a thousand people. We didn’t speak Thai, but we understood the camp’s name to be “Khao-I-Dang.” Because it was so crowded, my family huddled under a makeshift roof that extended from a shack. Most of the camp structures were ramshackle, thrown together quickly, and then jammed with too many people. People were hungry, and they fought over food. We stayed to ourselves most of the time. There was almost nothing to do, and time passed very slowly. We spent hours playing chess. The chess sets had been made by old men in the camp who whittled wood figurines. There were no jobs, no schools, nothing. There was no joy in this “freedom.” Instead, I felt bored and frustrated, waiting and hoping for a sponsor who would allow us to leave the camp. Some people had been waiting for years, and some children knew no other life. My favorite activity was to play with Vibol. He was still learning to talk, and I laughed when he mixed his words up. He was the only one who did not understand our situation.
We heard about other camps that the Thai government used to run but then abandoned. At gunpoint, they made a thousand refugees go back to Cambodia. They forced them in huge groups to move through the mountains and return to the land from which they had suffered so much to escape. Thai soldiers shot old people who could not climb down the steep terrain. Land mines exploded, killing people in the front of the group. People in the back were forced to walk over the dead bodies as the soldiers pushed the group forward. The cruelty of the Thai soldiers shocked the world, and finally the United Nations got involved. They ran the camp where my family and I stayed.
The rations for Van Lan, Chantha, Vibol, Bunna, and me combined was one chicken every two weeks and one bag of rice for a month. I shouldn’t complain, because it was given to us for free. But it was not enough for five people to live on. If you had money, you could buy food. In Thailand, the people eat a lot of noodles, but we never could afford to buy noodles. We lived on rice. If we were lucky, we had a pinch of salt to put on it. We had no meat or fish, but sometimes we cooked the rice in water flavored with tiny shrimp that the camp officials gave us.
Some people in the camps had really, really rich relatives in the United States. They would receive as much as twenty dollars in the mail. Twenty dollars! That could buy everything! The most money I ever had at one time in the camp was one dollar. I bought food with it.
To earn money, I worked in the children’s center. Twice a day, I helped distribute United Nations food to the youngest kids. I took Vibol with me every day, so he would get enough to eat. I got food for myself, too, and I took some for Chantha, Van Lan, and Bunna. The cook used to keep water in a barrel that had originally contained cooking oil. He gave the water to me. Before I left the center, I slipped an egg, a vegetable, or piece of fruit into it, and then I’d close the lid so no one could see what I’d done.
For the first time in my life, I watched TV. The camp had electricity, and sometimes people would pay to watch the TV. I tried to look from outside, but I could not afford the twenty cents they charged to enter. Sometimes they showed movies translated into Cambodian, but usually the TV was in Thai, a language I could not understand.
I had no warning at all before Chantha gave me news that would change my life. “Mop,” she said, “I’ve found a way for you to get out of this camp. You can be the first to go to Paris!”
“What? How?” I asked in disbelief.
“I never told you before, but I have some gold. It’s worth one hundred dollars.”
“A hundred dollars? You have that much money?” I asked, again finding this hard to believe.
“I’ve held onto it all these months. Now, I’m using it to buy your freedom,” she said. “Van Lan and I have arranged everything for you.”
She had given the gold to a woman who lived in a shack near ours. In exchange, that woman promised she would say that I was her son. I was to call her “Mom.” She and her children had a sponsor in Paris. Van Lan had a sister in Paris, and he was hoping that she would sponsor them. Chantha tried to reassure me, “You will already be in Paris when we come join you there.”
My stomach felt wrenched. I couldn’t wait to leave the camp, but I couldn’t stand the thought of separating from my family.
Van Lan said, “This is the best plan we can work out.”
“Thank you,” I said, knowing my words were not enough to convey my feelings. I didn’t really even need words. After what we had been through, our understanding went beyond what was said.
I tried to imagine what was going to happen. I had only finished third grade when the Khmer Rouge took over, and I had no idea where Paris was. People in the camp said, “They speak French in Paris, so it’s important to learn it.” For a few months, a local volunteer came to the camp and gave French lessons. I attended and listened hard when I heard people using French, but we did not have any books, and I learned only a few words.
When “Mom,” her daughter, two sons, and I prepared to leave the camp, I was terrified that I would never see my real family again.
“Bon voyage,” said Chantha in French, trying to act happy and lighthearted in saying goodbye.
Van Lan said, “Think about what we’ve survived. This is the final step to true freedom and a future we can make for ourselves. We will see you soon, little brother.”
I was so excited, so scared, so upset, I could barely say anything. I told myself that we had been separated many times, and we had always found each other again. I did my best to believe that this time would be no different. I shook Bunna’s hand, and I gave Vibol a hug. When my eyes filled with tears, I knew it was time to go.
“Mom’s” kids and I were sent to another camp, called Chunbory. There, all we did was wait to hear whether we had been sponsored. “Mom” had told Chantha that she had a sponsor, but now, that didn’t seem to be the case. Her oldest son, who had lived on his own in Phnom Penh, had already passed through this camp before we got there. He had gone to France, but he was not sponsoring us for some reason I did not understand. Every family was on hold, just like we were. When anybody was notified that they had a sponsor, they were really excited and happy. They were going to get out of the camp! Their lives were going to move forward. Everybody acted happy for a family that got a sponsor, but behind their backs, jealous people complained. “Why do they get to go, and we have to stay?”
People said I looked more like “Mom” than her other children did. I didn’t tell them the truth about my not being related to her at all. As the weeks and months passed, I missed my real family so much. I had no idea what they were doing, whether they had already left for Paris, whether they’d gotten sick and died, or been sent back to Cambodia. When the Khmer Rouge controlled our daily lives, I had learned more than I ever wanted to know about fear, hunger, and surviving on my own. I was used to the ache in my heart for my mother and my father, but I had filled up the emptiness with love for the family members I still had—Chantha, Van Lan, little Vibol, and my brothers.
Now, even though “Mom” said I was her son, I was not part of that family. I was alone.
All I owned was two pairs of shorts, two shirts, and a towel. Our shack was cramped with twenty people crowded together, so another boy and I slept outside. In the rainy season, I was wet all the time. Our only protection was a small piece of plastic. There were no building materials to make better shelter for ourselves. I spent wet sleepless nights shivering, and I was disgusted by the smell of the nearby sewage drain.
At that camp, my U.N.
ration was a chicken a week. I would have starved to death if that was all I ate. Thankfully, religion saved me.
Wealthy Buddhists in the camp used to burn incense and make small food offerings to the gods in the evening. I would sneak over and take any food they left. Sometimes it was a banana, an orange, or even a whole chicken. I’d been warned that food left as a religious offering would poison any thief who took it. But I didn’t care, for me that food was not poison. It saved my life.
I no longer believed in God. If there was a god, I knew that he would have had the Khmer Rouge kill me instead of my mother. She had children who needed her, especially our baby sister. My family was Buddhist, but after the Khmer Rouge took over, I stopped believing in any religion. I believed in luck.
From eleven until two o’clock every day, local villagers held an open market next to the camp fence. I had no money, but I hoped to make some at the market. I planned to sell an empty rice bag I had taken and to use the money to buy something nutritious. The bag was worth about a dime. But the camp guards saw me sneak out of the camp with the bag. They ran after me, and they caught me. With big nightsticks, they beat me so badly I slept for more than a day. My body was black and blue, and my head throbbed. I gave up trying to make money at the market.
After we had been in the camp for many months, and for a reason I didn’t really understand, “Mom” told me we were not going to Paris after all. I was devastated. My real family was going to France. If I did not make it there, how could I reunite with them? “Mom” said we might go to Canada or the United States. Those names had almost no meaning to me. I had no idea how far France was from the United States or Canada. “Mom” chose the United States, where she said someone else had sponsored her. But the waiting continued. We ended up staying in that camp for a year.
