You only began to learn English on arriving in the U.S. at age 11. How did you learn to write? What was it like re-invoking the story in a language entirely different from the language of that experience?
It began with reading. I was a copious reader in my own language, and I was a copious reader as soon as I learned to read in English. I’d devour anything I could get my hands on. I read things I didn’t quite understand. Jane Eyre, I remember, was my first grown-up novel. I thought it was so illicit—the man keeps his wife locked up in another part of his mansion while he develops romantic feelings for his young employee, this impoverished governess. Sounds like a Cambodian love story! But it wasn’t just literature I read. I’d linger over descriptions on shampoo bottles, lost in the shower, deaf to my mother’s call, soothed by adjectives—foamy, invigorating, silky... I’d move on to the list of ingredients, all those scientific names had a ring and rhythm to them, almost like poetry. In chemistry class, learning to decode the letters and numbers in formulas, I came across “tetra,” its familiarity heavy on my tongue. Then suddenly there was this flash in my memory. Tetracycline. I remembered that it was medicine—yellow and valuable as gold—that we’d had in our possession during our time in the countryside when medicine was almost nonexistent. Reading introduced me to an endless range of expression, from the thematic language of “family secrets” and “complicated love” articulated in a novel like Jane Eyre to small, incidental words that jogged my memory, revealing buried recollections.
Then, when it came to actually learning how to write, I basically did it on my own, at my own slow pace. Except for a summer writing camp I went on through a community arts program in Minnesota when I was in high school, and a short-story writing course I took at Cornell University, I’ve had no formal training in writing. But I believe there are no better teachers than great pieces of writing: classics that tackle universal and timeless questions, and contemporary writings, from many cultural and linguistic backgrounds, that not only delve into these existential queries but also enlarge my world by transplanting me to a whole new geography of thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.
I wanted to do something similar with this story. I didn’t want just to translate my family’s experience, a Cambodian experience, to a foreign audience; I wanted to take the readers and replant them in the fertile ground I’d sprung from, to let them take root and sprout, and to see my world as their own. I wanted them to see Cambodia before it became synonymous with genocide, before it became the “killing fields.” It was once a place of exquisite beauty, and I try to show that not only by locating the readers in the loveliness of the natural world but also by immersing them in the rhythm of a people’s thoughts and sentiments, in its literature and art. Only when we know what existed can we truly mourn what is lost.
So, I feel, writing In the Shadow of the Banyan was not just a retelling. It was an act of creation, a long journey toward its realization.
In the Author’s Note you tell the story of visiting the royal court of Cambodia in 2009. Can you describe that experience? What was it like to return after all of those years?
Even before my visit to the Royal Palace, I had visited Cambodia countless times, always in search of my father. Each time I see him in all that’s lost and in all that’s found. My first trip back was in 1992. I went to my family’s estate in Phnom Penh. Our house was not there. Everything was gone, except, I believe, for one charred column of the bath pavilion. But even though our home was gone, I revisited other places I remembered my father and I had frequented—the promenade along the river, the lotus fountains near the Independence Monument, temples around the city...During a trip several years later, I visited the Royal Palace, just the grounds that was open to tourists, and I came across a golden statue that took my breath away. It was of a man on a horse, with a sword in his raised hand. Very gallant! I remembered that statue! For a long time I had thought it was on our estate and that it depicted my father. But it turned out the statue was of one of the kings! When I told my mother about being shocked by that encounter and the confusion in my own remembering, she had a very simple explanation: I had often accompanied my father to the Royal Palace, and the statue, with its lovely surrounding gardens, was where my father and I would escape to from the formality of a ceremony or function inside the courtly halls. There, beside the statue, he would tell me stories and tales, using the ornate setting to launch into mythical adventures. In my memory, I suppose, my father and the statue became fused—a single entity.
From 2005 to 2009, when I returned with my husband and daughter to live in Phnom Penh, a lot of things became clear in my mind. In particular, I got to witness the power of the monsoon, how in a single day the rains could flood the land; the different ways rice is grown and harvested through the seasons; the monumental struggles of the tiny creatures against the elements. I would spend hours with my little daughter watching a dung beetle fighting its way out of a cow pie! It was an epiphany. Living there—while at times difficult because of its proximity to the past—helped tremendously with the writing of In the Shadow of the Banyan.
In late 2009, just before returning to live in the States again, I was invited to have an audience with His Majesty King Norodom Sihamoni, to be formally reintroduced into the royal family. I didn’t want to go, actually. I panicked. What would I bring as a gift for the king? One ought to bring a gift, right? But what could His Majesty possibly desire? Chocolate? I didn’t think so. I called my mother, and she said that I ought to consider a gift that would honor my father’s name, his spirit. So I brought three tons of rice for the poor, as a contribution to His Majesty’s humanitarian effort. At the Royal Palace, facing His Majesty, I could barely speak. All I could think about was my father, the sacrifice he’d made so that a moment such as this, my taking his place, was possible. And yet, I couldn’t help thinking, he couldn’t have known with absolute certainty that I would survive. He’d only hoped, and I felt that hope in my throat. When I swallowed it, tears rushed to my eyes. The next year, when I had another audience with the king, I was much more prepared and composed.
As In the Shadow of the Banyan makes clear, one of the Khmer Rouge’s primary strategies was splitting up families. How do you maintain your connection to your family members today—including those who only live on in your memory?
I have an uncle in Cambodia now, one of my father’s two elder brothers, the middle son. I despair every time I see him. I mourn his lost self. Once when he rode in a car with us to go to lunch, he became suddenly agitated. He explained that he was not used to being in a car and was completely disoriented. He was once a lover of cars. Now, no longer a prince, he lives a humble life, has kept the name he took on when we’d relinquished our royal identity, and feels most balanced when he shuffles along the uneven streets of Phnom Penh in flip-flops or barefoot. Whenever I look into his eyes, I think there are small deaths like these, some parts of ourselves that were buried with the others. My uncle cries every time he sees me, as I do when I see him or read the letters he sends me.
When I returned to live in Cambodia with my husband and daughter, one of the first things I did was to surround our new home with flowers I remembered from my childhood home. I filled our small garden with orchid, jasmine, bird of paradise, lobster claw, and frangipani of different colors, even though, I learned, Cambodians believe it is a flower that attracts ghosts. If so, I thought, it was a fitting offering. I filled our vases each day with fresh stems of lotus. A couple of years later, we bought a piece of land in Siem Reap and built a house there, which for me was very therapeutic, a willful act to counter the destruction I had helplessly witnessed as a child.
How does your family, specifically your mother, feel about your decision to write In the Shadow of the Banyan?
My family is extremely supportive. They’ve watched me persevere for so long with this. They’ve not only seen me tormented by my recollection, by my reckoning with the past, but also by the labor of writing itself. They are very hap
py that this is a story I can now share with the world.
As for my mother, she’s very proud. I couldn’t have written this book without her blessing, and, of course, her sharing of painful memories. Some of the stories about family members she told me have made their way into the narrative. We’ve been through everything together. This book is hers, too.
An important theme of your novel is the power of stories. What do you hope readers will take away from your own storytelling?
I’ve always loved stories, the written word. Even at a very young age, I sensed their intrinsic power. Like Raami, I saw and understood the world through stories. In Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge, when I was lost in a forest or abandoned by my work unit among the vast rice fields because I moved too slowly, I would recall the legends my father or nanny had told me or those tales I’d been able to read myself. I’d invoke them like incantations, chanting aloud descriptions and dialogues I’d memorized, to chase away my fear of being alone in the middle of nowhere, in the silence around me. Stories were magic spells, I felt, and storytelling, the ability to tell and recall something, was a kind of sorcery, a power you could use to transform and transport yourself. I still feel this way, and I think it shows in crafting In the Shadow of the Banyan as I did. But I hope the story is layered enough so that every reader finds the inspiration or message they seek.
About the Author
© KRISTINA SHERK
Vaddey Ratner was five years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. After four years, having endured forced labor, starvation, and near execution, she and her mother escaped while many of her family members perished. In 1981, she arrived in the U.S. as a refugee not knowing English and, in 1990, went on to graduate as her high school class valedictorian. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Cornell University, where she specialized in Southeast Asian history and literature. In recent years she traveled and lived in Cambodia and Southeast Asia, writing and researching, which culminated in her debut novel, In the Shadow of the Banyan. She lives in Potomac, Maryland. Please visit her website at www.vaddeyratner.com.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Vaddey Ratner
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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2012
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Designed by Nancy Singer
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ratner, Vaddey.
In the shadow of the banyan / Vaddey Ratner.
p. cm.
1. Cambodia—History—1975–1979—Fiction. 2. Refugees—Cambodia—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3618.A876I52 2012
813'.6—dc23 2011033320
ISBN 978-1-4516-5770-8
ISBN 978-1-4516-5772-2 (ebook)
In the Shadow of the Banyan Page 36
