by Somaly Mam
One evening a couple of months after we went to the fortune-teller, Grandfather asked me to get oil for the lamp from the Chinese merchant’s where we bought our goods. The request sounded innocent enough—there was no electricity, so we used an oil lamp, and I often bought things from the Chinese merchant. He traded in rice and lent people money at high interest. He and his wife were respected in the village. Sometimes they gave me sweets or cakes.
But that day the merchant’s wife wasn’t there. The merchant had me follow him to the storeroom and offered me a cake. Then he threw me down on a pile of rice sacks and held me down. He hit me hard and then he raped me. I didn’t know what he had done, but it felt as though he had cut me between my legs.
Then he threatened me: “If you tell anyone, I’ll cut your throat. Your grandfather owes me a lot of money. If you talk to him about it, he will beat you. So shut it.” He held out some striped candy.
I didn’t take it. I refused and ran. I was bleeding, and I felt horrible shame, though I didn’t understand what had happened. I went to the riverbank, and I told the tree about my pain and my disgust at these evil people, especially the Chinese man who had insulted and hurt me.
I tried to throw myself into the Mekong that night, at a place where the riverbank is very steep. I went under, but I couldn’t help myself from swimming—it seemed that I couldn’t make myself die. I washed up along the muddy bank a little farther down the river.
When I got back to Grandfather’s, he beat me. He said it was because I was late. He didn’t even ask what had happened to the oil I was supposed to bring. I realized somehow that he knew what had happened to me that night, and that he had sent me to the merchant on purpose.
I went back to the fortune-teller and I shouted at her. I told her she was talking nonsense, that she was an old madwoman who told lies.
Now I understand that Grandfather owed that Chinese merchant money and sold my virginity to pay his debt. In Cambodia, many men believe a virgin will keep you strong and imbue you with fresh strength—today it is widely believed that raping a virgin will also cure you of AIDS. I can see now that what the Chinese man did to me was called rape, but at the time I had no words for it—I didn’t know about penises. I thought he used a knife.
I also knew that I had to keep quiet, that this was something I could never talk about. Not only because of the fear the Chinese merchant had instilled in me, but also because it had something to do with things that were unspeakable in a Khmer family. Until today, I’ve never told my adoptive father about the rape. I felt good in that family, and I knew if I opened my mouth I’d be beaten, because Cambodian people don’t talk about such things. It would only shame me and the people who heard me.
I learned to shut down all my feelings so that none of it mattered—so that it never even happened. Pain is temporary. It goes away if you let your brain go numb.
After that night, I no longer wanted to speak. I no longer wanted to understand Khmer. I closed myself up in silence and lived like a mute. The next time Grandfather asked me to go and get oil for the lamp, I refused, and he beat me. Then he went to get some of those red ants that sting so viciously it hurts for weeks. I don’t want to remember that man.
After that night, I tried to avoid sleeping at Grandfather’s house. But I always had to go back every morning and every evening to bring him money and cook his meal. Today, of course, I would leave. Today, I would probably kill him—but then, as a child, I just never thought of leaving. Maybe I was stupid, but there seemed to be nowhere I could go. I couldn’t just settle in as part of Father’s family—that would create conflict between my adoptive father and Grandfather, and Father hated conflict of any kind, with anyone.
So I continued to do chores for other families after school and take the money to Grandfather. One day when I was doing the dishes for an old woman, I got startled and dropped a glass, which broke. The old woman picked up a cane and started to beat me like a fury until my back was all bloody. At school I couldn’t sit down, I was so cut up. I ran a high fever. My adoptive parents took care of me. They rubbed moxa on me—a traditional paste of herbs, which stings. It hurt so much I was crying. Father explained to me that in life one has to bear suffering. No matter how much it hurts, it is best to stay quiet.
He always used to say, “If you want to stay alive, grow a dam kor tree in front of your house.” The dam kor is the silk-cotton tree, but the same word, kor, also means mute. To survive, you must be silent.
When the dry season came, Father began letting me and one of his young sons, Sothear, take out the fishing boat by ourselves. Sothear was about four or five years old, a quiet kid with hair that spiked right out of his head and huge, wide eyes. I was about twelve, but I liked having him around. Sometimes we went out in the evening and slept with the fishing families on the red earth down by the boats. Sothear helped me build a shelter of palm leaves and bamboo by the riverbank where I could sleep—it was just four bamboo poles and dried palm leaves for a roof. I made a floor out of dried rice stalks from the fields and I slept there.
It wasn’t dangerous. A lot of people lived by the river. If I went out fishing at night, I would give a handful of rice to someone who was staying by the bank, and when I came back from the river my rice would be cooked, and we could share a fish. Every morning I would give my catch to Father and we would sell some, and if I had enough money to give to Grandfather, I could go to school that day.
In the wet season, when the Mekong swelled and flooded the banks, a lot of wood would come down the river. We would go out in boats to grab it and haul it in so we could dry it to burn in the fire. Sometimes we sold it, or traded it for rice, but mostly we kept it for Father’s family.
At school, Mr. Chai began selecting children to train for a show of traditional Cambodian dance. Everyone was astonished when he picked me. He explained that at night, makeup would show up better on my skin than on the paler girls. Also, I had very long hair, unlike most of the other girls; under the Khmer Rouge, everyone’s hair had to be short.
Mr. Chai trained us in the precise gestures of the Apsara, to curve our fingertips and hold our necks stiffly, like cranes. I didn’t care much for the music or the dance, but people thought I was pretty, and I liked their surprised admiration.
We lived very collectively in those days. It wasn’t like today, when individual families keep more to themselves, especially in cities. Cambodia was a Communist country. Every village was organized into groups called krom samaki—eight or ten families who would plant the rice together and share the labor of the village’s few buffalo. After the harvest the group leader would ration it out; every family would receive perhaps fifty kilos of rice for the year.
I look back now at those days, and I think it was the best system for Cambodia. School was free, and it gave children a way out of poverty—not like today, when parents must pay huge sums of money for education and every diploma can be bought for a price. Hospitals were few and poorly equipped then, but they were practically free. Nowadays you could be dying, but if you can’t pay they won’t look after you.
Communism wasn’t like life under the Khmer Rouge. People were no longer frightened. They no longer had to obey the orders of murderous young children who had been indoctrinated by the government. And so now they began to return to the old ways. The elderly ordered the young about instead of the other way round. Women no longer called their husbands “comrade,” as they had to under the Khmer Rouge, but “older brother” or “uncle,” and now they had to behave with the proper submission and respect.
Like all the girls at Father’s house, I had to learn to chant the chbap srey, the code of good behavior for Cambodian maidens. It was part of the school curriculum—part of the government’s desire to erase what the Khmer Rouge had done and go back to the old culture. All the girls in school had to learn to chant it, but Mam Khon wanted us to have it word perfect.
Ideally in Cambodia a woman walks so quietly you can’t hear her footsteps. Sh
e smiles without showing her teeth and laughs softly. She never looks directly into the eyes of any man. A woman must not talk back to her husband. She must not turn her back to him in bed. She must bow before she touches his head, and if she walks over his legs she will become ill. In Cambodia, you must respect and care for your parents, and your husband is your master—second only to your father.
I was obedient, but I was not gentle. I seethed. I remember one afternoon when I was out fishing with Sothear. The two of us were on the riverbank when we caught sight of some rich people—people from Phnom Penh, the capital. To me they looked like gods, especially the woman—slender and pale, with clothes that looked new, and shoes with pointy toes. She talked softly and almost glided. She was so pretty, I was overcome with admiration.
I said to Sothear, “Maybe one day we’ll be rich like them.” He stood up and waved his arms, he was so excited. Sothear said, “We must really believe that—we will be rich like them. We must work hard at school and we can do it!” He told me he wanted to become a rich trader. I told him, “If I get married one day I want to marry a rich man too—a soldier, so he can kill my grandfather.”
.3.
“This Is Your Husband”
Sochenda, Mam Khon’s eldest daughter, was seventeen and due to pass her school-leaving certificate, a real achievement in our village. (I, aged fourteen, had still not quite finished primary school.) There was great excitement in the family, because if Sochenda passed she could go on to further studies, a rare thing for a village girl.
It was a national examination and it took place in Kampong Cham, the provincial capital, which was about three hours by bicycle from Thlok Chhrov. It was decided that we would all go there with Mother and spend the night at the house of one of Mother’s aunts on the way.
That night, at this “grandmother’s” house, Phanna woke me up to listen, because downstairs the old woman and our mother were talking. They were saying how lucky Mother had been to find a good man. We heard that when she was young, our mother’s stepmother had taken her to another town and had sold her into a brothel. She had suffered a great deal. Father was a poor young man, but he loved her. After he got his school diploma, he went to find her in the brothel and he bought her freedom.
All this had happened long before the Khmer Rouge, in the impenetrable time when Father and Mother were young. I suppose it was probably the 1950s. Phanna and I were overwhelmed by this revelation and we cried together. Our mother had never told us anything about her past. She simply couldn’t and she still can’t. To this day we have never discussed it.
I think selling women into prostitution has always existed in Cambodia. People get into debt—it’s easy, when the interest is 10 percent or more a month. By working in a brothel where the moneylender has an arrangement, a daughter acts as collateral and repays the loan. Expenses, such as food, clothes, medicine, and makeup, are extracted from her account, of course, and the parents can incur even more debts that will add to the money she must earn.
In other cases, the parents sell their daughters outright to the brothel, essentially transferring their ownership of her. A twelve-year-old girl might bring in fifty or a hundred U.S. dollars for her family, perhaps more if she has canny parents and very pale skin. Other families just tell the girls to do it, and they obey. The family goes to the brothel every month or so to pick up her earnings. Daughters have a duty to obey their parents and provide for them.
I know this is hard to imagine. But after all these years, I can truly say that I think that for many parents, feelings have nothing to do with it. Their children are money on legs, an asset, a kind of domestic livestock.
About a month after we returned from that trip to Kampong Cham, Grandfather caught hold of my arm one morning when I was dropping off his money. He said, “Prepare your things and come to the house tonight.” I did what he said—it never occurred to me to disobey him. That evening, when I went back to his house, there was a man there, and Grandfather told me, “This is your husband.”
I didn’t feel anything. I had made myself numb long before. Girls respected their elders, and I owed Grandfather obedience. This was just one more event in my life, after a lot of others. It’s possible that I felt a little relieved: perhaps I would be leaving Grandfather’s house. But I didn’t want to leave with this man. I knew I was only exchanging one master for another.
We went to the temple—it was a wooden hut that the villagers had constructed in the grounds of the old Buddhist pagoda, which the Khmer Rouge had destroyed. A priest was there, but we had no ceremony to speak of. Usually there is a marriage ceremony and a big party, but Grandfather did not want to spend money on me. I wore my school skirt. We made offerings to the spirits at the temple, to respectfully request that they leave us alone; in Cambodia, you must constantly propitiate the spirits of the dead, or they will come into your house and cause you harm. The priest said, “You’re married,” and that was that.
My husband’s name was Than, but I always called him “Pou,” which means “uncle,” as a mark of submission and deference. My new husband was older than I was. I was about fourteen and he must have been in his mid-twenties. He was a soldier. Tall, dark skinned, curly hair, white teeth. Quite nice looking and very violent. I hate to think about that man. Grandfather owed him money—he told me that later. The first night of my marriage I slept at Grandfather’s house and my husband slept elsewhere. The next day we traveled, with Grandfather, to Chup, where my husband was stationed. It was about seventy-five miles away, and it took from dawn till late at night to get there—first on the boat to Kampong Cham and then on a truck.
Before we left, I went to Mam Khon’s house. I told Mother that Grandfather had married me to a man. She told me, “Maybe it is for the best. You must leave with him, and perhaps it will be better with him than with your grandfather.” She and Father must have suspected how often I was beaten, though we never talked about it.
My husband’s house was a small shack built by the army amid the rubber plantations. It was one empty room, stained by red dirt and empty except for a cooking fire and a bamboo sleeping platform.
I hate marriage. It puts women in prison. On her wedding day the girl obeys her parents, and when the ceremony is over she is raped. What does a young girl in Cambodia know about sex? Nothing. I had already had sex, but I knew nothing about it. I didn’t know what the Chinese merchant had put inside me—only that it hurt—and I had no idea that this was what happened in marriage.
I don’t think I was unusual in my ignorance. One time, in school, when we were in military training, a boy stepped over a girl’s back and she cried, because she thought she was pregnant. We were all like that. People told their daughters you got pregnant if you touched a boy’s hand.
That first night my husband raped me on that platform several times, and when I resisted, he hit me. He grabbed my hair and smacked my head against the wall, then he slapped me so hard I fell down on the bed.
When it was morning I had to get up and make food. There was no explanation—no mercy or shame. We hardly ever spoke to each other.
I saw other people only when I walked into the village to buy food. I cooked grasshoppers, vegetables, dried fish, and he ate what I served him. If he didn’t like it, he hit me.
That man—my husband—beat me often, sometimes with the butt of his rifle on my back and sometimes with his hands. With his fingernails, which he kept long and pointed, he gashed a deep scar into my cheek. He did it because I didn’t smile, because I wasn’t welcoming, because I was ugly, and because I was a death’s head—that’s what he called me.
He was very violent. Many soldiers are. When he was angry I would try to breathe as softly as possible, so as not to be noticed, because anything could set him off. To frighten me, sometimes he shot at me with his military rifle. At first it worked, but I grew used to it. Inside, I felt dead. When he raped me, I would try to disappear.
This was my life—another kind of domestic slavery. I neve
r spoke to anyone about it. There were houses around us, with other soldiers and other soldiers’ wives in them, but you don’t talk about such things. Cambodians have a saying: You must not let the fire that is outside come inside your house, and the hearth fire must not be allowed outside. You don’t talk about what happens in your household.
My husband was often gone, fighting the Khmer Rouge. The government couldn’t afford to lose control of the rubber plantations, so the region was crawling with soldiers. When he left, I would quickly run out of money for food, with no idea of when he’d come back. Going back to Thlok Chhrov simply wasn’t an option—Grandfather would only beat me, and I knew my husband would too, when he came back.
Chup was separated in two parts—the village itself, and then, near the rubber plantations where I lived, the clinic and the military grounds. The clinic was always full of wounded soldiers and village people who were brought there when land mines exploded as they worked in the fields, blowing off their legs or hands. There were land mines everywhere. The Khmer Rouge laid mines, and the government soldiers laid them to stop the Khmer Rouge from moving around the plantations—maybe there was even unexploded matériel from the American bombing of Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War.
Nobody wanted to work at the clinic, especially at night, even though you were paid almost thirty pounds of rice every month. Nobody wanted to handle body parts and dead people. But all I wanted was work—I wasn’t frightened of the dead. A dead body was like my body, no difference at all. Once or twice, though, I did step on a severed leg or arm in the dark—and I admit that was horrible.
Sometimes when land mine victims came in, all we could do was amputate. If there was no anesthetic—and there often wasn’t—we tied the person down. There were doctors at the clinic, but they weren’t proper doctors—they were just medics who had learned their job under the Khmer Rouge. If they weren’t there, we nurses had to carry out the operations ourselves. Only one of us had any medical training at all: our chief nurse had done one course in Phnom Penh for a few months.
