by Alice Pung
*
The children’s army was starving too. From sunrise to sunset they were forced to work. Chicken Daddy’s boys, Chicken Brother and Egg, had dug up some sweet potatoes they found in the ground. Vegetables the size of little tumours, which they hid in their clothes. If you scooped up a handful of dirt and someone saw you, you would be accused of stealing from the revolution.
Somebody had seen these boys. Somebody had turned them in. They were dragged away by two Black Bandits, deep into the jungle.
‘Dig,’ the soldiers said, handing out hoes.
The boys started to dig.
‘Chicken Sister, Chicken Sister, your brothers have been dragged away to be smashed!’ A young boy ran to tell their sister, who was digging in the field. She dropped the hoe.
‘Where?’ she cried. ‘Where have they taken my brothers?’
The young boy pointed towards the jungle.
She ran through the thick tangle of vines, hoping she would not be too late.
She found her brothers stooped over, digging the holes where their bodies would be buried.
She pleaded for their lives. ‘Please don’t kill my brothers please don’t kill them!’
She folded at the knees, knocked her forehead against the ground again and again, banging out her mantra. Please don’t kill my brothers, please don’t kill my brothers, please don’t kill them! Praying harder to these boys in black than she had to any deity.
She even yelled out the obvious: They were hungry!
The Black Bandit stared at her. Everyone is hungry.
The Black Bandit then took the hoe from the younger brother’s hand. She looked up to see her brother wipe his forehead with his hand. A pardon!
But then the soldier handed her the hoe.
She took it, thinking it was meant for her.
You! the soldier commanded.
Yes, she whispered.
You dig their graves for them.
‘Sister,’ her younger brother whispered. ‘Don’t dig it too deep.’ Such conviction in his voice. ‘Sister, don’t dig too …’
He was shouted quiet.
His sister dug.
‘Do it properly!’
She dug some more.
‘Lie down, both of you,’ the boys were told. The boys folded themselves into the holes. Each brother lay flat on his back, looking up at his sister.
Don’t dig too deep, she was told, and she remembered, but she still had to bury them alive. Throw dirt over their breathing faces.
It was like killing one bird with two stones, three times.
REVOLUTIONARY MEDICINE
The commune hospital for the proletariat was death row for the defunct worker. The building was a hut, the doctors were teenage girls, and the medicine was a red liquid in a Pepsi-Cola bottle. These ‘doctors’ visited every patient and demanded, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I have a fever,’ a boy with the flu would croak.
‘I have diarrhoea,’ a man with dysentery would moan.
‘I have stomach pains,’ cried a girl who had accidentally swallowed the poison of a cane toad.
‘He feels the chills,’ a deathbed parent would wail next to their death-rattling child.
To be at the hospital meant that your rice rations would be reduced. Your body was only a machine that was keeping you alive, and so long as that machine was in working order for the revolution, it had some value. After it was broken, you were just spare parts, the sum of which did not make a whole. The only thing of value would be the buttons on your clothes.
Red and black – when those two colours were one beside the other, he would always associate them with death. The black-clad girls would poke their syringes into the bottles and extract the red fluid, the ‘revolutionary medicine’, and then inject it into each person using the same needle. It was a one-size-fits-all forced euthanasia, because with or without this medicine, the patients died.
Most of the sorry lot in this sanatorium were teenagers or young children. The Black Bandits waited like hyenas at the work units to carry them away. ‘Hmm, they are too sick to work, they have to go to the hospital,’ they would say. By the time they carried you to hospital, you were a cadaver with working lungs and a beating heart.
There were two types of patients – those who were already past the point of no return but whose organs had not yet shut down, and those who were on the brink but not quite over the edge. They still felt hunger pangs.
The hospital gave out watery rice porridge. There was a bowl of the stuff next to a woman who was like a corpse with a chest that rose and fell. That was the only sign of life left. She would be dead in a few hours. A young man with an impossibly yellow sick glow leaned over from the rattan mat next to hers to take the bowl from the dying patient. Just to move his few remaining muscles took so much effort that watching him was like watching a slow-motion wind-up skeleton.
The Black Bandit doctor saw this and walked over. Instead of giving the grasping man the porridge, she kicked him. The doctor kicked him to the ground, while his fingers still gripped the rim of the bowl. Even as he fell and the bowl tipped over, the man was still grabbing at the spilled grains and shovelling them into his mouth.
This was what palliative care looked like when Kuan first visited the hospital. He was at the hospital with Chicken Daddy, whose daughter was dying.
In her old life, her brothers had called her DeeDoo, which meant Spider, because they said she was black with angular arms and gangly legs. True, but this was only because she played in the sun so much when she was very young and had a sticking-out stomach. Then at thirteen, because she spent so much time indoors, her tan faded. Her hair was ink-black. She became lovely. All the adults reverted to calling her Chicken Sister, daughter of Chicken Daddy.
She’d grown up in the factory. For a time it had produced felt-tipped markers and pencils. Her great-aunt had given her packets of these, but taken out the black and white ones: the bad colours, her great-aunt told her, because they were the colours of death and funerals. Hers had once been a world filled with likes and dislikes. These preferences outlined who she was at ten, at twelve. She liked the colour orange, she didn’t like green. She liked the smell of nail polish, she didn’t like prahok. She liked her uncles but didn’t think much of her aunties. Every day they told her a million things she could not do and should not do. Her brothers would also never shut up. When told off, Egg, the youngest, would thrust his chin out and up. Roll his eyes and stare you down. It was comic, the way he did it. ‘Look at that little face!’ It was because he was so skinny with such large eyes that you wanted to love him. Same with her – her very thinness and hunched concentration over coloured pencils made adults want to keep her away from sharp objects. Chicken Sister had grown up in the capital with nannies and minders and chauffeurs. She had spent her days studying and playing.
Now she was in a world where none of these things existed.
Still, she tried very hard.
She wasn’t too tired, she had said in the fields. She could still keep working.
Keep working, then, they told her.
She vomited one day. Still not sick, she insisted.
She could still keep working.
But after her brothers were gone, she decided she’d never dig another hole in the ground, not even a thumb-sized hollow for little rice shoots to sprout.
*
Chicken Daddy was stroking the face of his daughter.
‘Ba is here, Ba is here,’ Chicken Daddy kept saying. But Ba wasn’t there to stop them taking her away to the collective with the other children. Ba did not see when she fell sick. Ba did not see how they hauled her to hospital by her arms, with her legs dangling down and dragging on the ground, or how long she had been there. How hard she had tried.
�
�She was still able to speak a little when they first brought her in a few days ago,’ the patient in the next bed said. ‘She kept whispering, “Went back to find the place.”’
‘What place?’ her father asked.
‘How am I supposed to know? Perhaps she buried some food somewhere. “Went back at night,” she kept breathing so quietly, “but couldn’t find the place. It was so dark.”’
At the end of the day, when these little revolutionary scouts had their survival skills tested, they were entirely alone. When the last breath slid out of her, she did not even open her eyes.
The patient leaned over and told them, ‘You are lucky she still has all her buttons. Yesterday, the doctor wanted to take the buttons off the clothes of the lady opposite. We told her, “She is still alive!”’
These were the only words of consolation, from a dying patient in the next bed who used all his strength to utter them.
Chicken Daddy wanted to fold up his daughter in his arms and take her home to bury her at the back of his hut. But the Black Bandits would not allow him to do that. She was buried in the field at the back of the hospital.
FERTILISER TEAM
He had been a sort of doctor once. It mattered to Kuan that useless limbs should be restored, that the machinery of the body be made to work again.
His training had started when he was a teenager, when his parents took him on his first trip to China. He’d grown up reciting the poems of Chairman Mao, but on the day of his arrival in the Middle Kingdom his luggage was taken out of his hands by an old woman stooped over at a ninety-degree angle. He had read about young people helping the elderly in the agrarian paradise, but nowhere had he read about healthy young men’s bags being carried by bent old people hoping to be tossed a few coins. Nowhere had he read about children so hungry that when he and his mother unloaded a few tins of cooking oil and set them on the ground, the oil leaked onto the dirt and the children lapped up the leaks like pups.
He saw tens of people rolling a round rock to flatten the road. This land was all dirt and ditches, not the beauty of The Butterfly Lovers and the Yellow River. When he was in the school band, the conductor was a die-hard communist sympathiser who told them that their thoughts of Mao Zedong had to be good and pure, otherwise they would not be able to convey the sentiment of the song. The conductor told them that they had to have Lao Dong Ren Min: the melody of the peasants, the harmony of the proletariat.
For the first time he heard what the harmony of the proletariat sounded like, right there in front of him, a collective mass of thin muscle heaving a massive rock to flatten a road. When they were pushing it, he heard them mutter ooohh whooo ahhhhhh. So that was the song of the working class. Even in Cambodia, they had vehicles to grade roads.
His parents knew a doctor in China who worked at the hospital, so they gave Kuan a blanket and a box of 555 cigarettes to take with him as gifts. ‘Cigarettes and one measly blanket for medical training?’ he had thought. But that was before he had seen the children lapping oil from the ground. Dr Tian was very happy about the gifts and let him come over to his house in the evenings. There, he would teach the basics of acupuncture – where to stick the needles and what they would do to each nerve.
The doctor would also tell stories. He did this while sucking on a cigarette like it was a tube of oxygen.
‘Once I cured a communist officer who came to me with impotence. All it took was a couple of needles, and a couple of weeks. This officer was so ecstatic that he invited me to a meeting held by the Party to celebrate his newfound virility. It was a big affair, with all the important hotshots there. The officer stood up, bursting with gratitude, and made a speech about what a great man I was. I swear this man had no shame about his flaccid past, because he then turned to me and asked me in front of everyone how I did it. What special skills did I possess that the other doctors did not? So I said the first thing that came to mind. I told them that I read Mao Zedong books and the potent writings of the Chairman inspired me to achieve extraordinary things.’
The doctor winked at him. ‘But of course it was all bullshit, you know.’
On the third day Dr Tian took him to hospital. Kuan was sixteen and he stood around watching as the doctor asked a patient what was wrong. Dr Tian nodded and wrote a few things down. He then told the patient to go to the consultation table and lie down while he discussed some things with his intern. When the patient was out of earshot, he handed the paper to Kuan. A prescription. Then he passed Kuan the needles.
‘But I’ve never done this before!’ Kuan blurted out.
‘Don’t worry, he’s a peasant,’ explained the doctor. ‘They don’t feel as much pain as ordinary people.’
So the sixteen-year-old boy stuck the needle in the man’s arm, but he couldn’t find the right place. He took it back out and re-jabbed it. The patient didn’t flinch or shudder.
See, I told you, the doctor’s wink signalled. These peasants are tough. They don’t feel pain as much.
*
‘Brother Kuan! Brother Kuan, please please help. Please get out your needles!’ Back to the world of Year Zero. He had found some wires on the ground in the first village: thick copper things covered in red and black plastic. He peeled off the plastic and sharpened their ends to a point. They became his acupuncture needles. Soon enough, people in the collective knew all about them. They knew that if they had an ailment, they could go to him and he’d prod and poke them in the right places and bring limbs back to life. But he could not fix the ones who had eaten entire cane toads. Sight he could not restore, or limbs gone rotten from gangrene, or hunger. You couldn’t make someone not hungry with a few insertions of the needle.
Some nights Kuan would sleep in a hut crammed with men exhausted from the field work and from sickness. He would be talking to them before bed, and they would trail off mid-sentence because he thought they were dead tired, but the next morning he would realise that they were cold-stiff dead right beside him. Sometimes their faces were still turned towards him, eyes slightly opened.
One evening, one of the Black Bandits bellowed from beneath his hut for Kuan to come out. He got up, stumbling over branches of limbs. It was a sticky human forest down there, exhausted and grunting.
‘Come with me,’ the soldier ordered, and led him on a long walk into the night. They arrived at the largest hut in the collective, that of the Black Bandit chairman. When he entered, he saw that the chairman was writhing about on his bed, as if someone had sewn live puppies inside his stomach.
‘We heard that you can do acupuncture,’ said the Black Bandit who had led him in.
He nodded. No use denying it now.
‘Then get your needles out.’
He was sent back to retrieve his copper wires. If he did not fix this chairman’s stomach pains, he would be done for. The man’s belly was bloated not from starvation but by a layer of fat. Like a jellyfish wrapped around his midriff beneath the skin. Kuan stuck the first needle into his leg, and it was like treating the Chinese peasant when he was sixteen: the chairman did not make a noise.
The next morning, the chairman was sitting up and gulping down a bowl of rice porridge. The wires had worked.
‘I would never go to the Khmer Rouge cadre hospital,’ he told Kuan. ‘The only time I went, they gave me a syringe of some shit or other. It caused my ulcer to swell and gave me fever. I almost died from that medical treatment, I tell you.’
When Kuan returned to the collective triumphant and smiling, people gathered around, mouths agape. ‘We thought you were dead!’ they told him.
For saving his life, the chairman transferred Kuan to the best job on the collective. He was sent to work in the fertiliser team. It was infinitely easier than working in the fields, and it was just him and another man and five single women. The women were hand-picked too, but where he had had to earn his job, they were city women h
and-picked in the way a person would pluck the best flowers from a field to keep briefly in a jar of water until they wilted.
In the collective, there were two ways people could shit. They could do their business standing on two planks above a square hole in the ground as large and as deep as a bedroom, teeming from edge to edge with brown-yellow-green matter and squirming white maggots. Or they could crap in buckets in their huts.
Each morning, he would visit every waste hole in the village. He had a diesel-fuel barrel, cut in half, which he used to collect the contents. He had even fashioned a ladle from a tin container with a wooden handle attached, which he used to scoop out the shit. He felt great relief when he saw a full toilet: it meant he did not have to go to many more to fill up his barrel. Their fertiliser truck was a wagon pulled by two cows, which was also used to carry dead bodies, one on top of the other, with legs and arms swinging out through the wooden grates.
His team would collect the shit and mix it with water to make wet fertiliser for the vegetables. You had to keep the wet shit covered for ten days or so. There was a marked increase in the size of plants that had been treated with this human waste water. He marvelled that a dying cluster of people could still create life from their bodies, could make things grow even though they were being eaten away by hunger.
They also made dry fertiliser by mixing the shit with rice husks, ashes and ground-up termite nests. The mix would be baked flat on the ground by the sun and then stored in a hut.
He and his team eventually became experts in excrement. ‘Look at this green watery stuff. How long can that poor guy live?’ they asked each other. He could tell when a person had to scavenge for wild leaves and shrivelled plants. ‘Look at that beautiful thick yellow one; they must come from a well-off family.’ Being well off under Angkar meant having enough rice to make your shit golden yellow. A man’s contentment was measured by the sunshine coming from his bowels.
