by Loung Ung
One morning, Chou wakes all of us with her loud cries. “Pa, someone was in the container last night!” All eyes turn on the exposed rice container, the lid lies crooked on top and slightly ajar.
“Maybe some rats got into it and stole some. Don’t worry, tonight I will seal it very tight,” he says. “This rice belongs to all of us.”
As Pa speaks, I know that he thinks someone in our family has stolen the rice. The story of the rat is not true and everyone knows it. Convinced that he realizes it was me, I hide my eyes from him. Shame burns my hand like a hot iron branding me for all to see: Pa’s favorite child stole from the family. As if to rescue me, Geak wakes up and her cries of hunger interrupt the incident. “It was me, Pa!” my mind screams out. “I stole from the family. I am sorry!” But I say nothing and do not confess to the crime. The guilt weighs heavily on me. I had gotten up in the middle of the night and stolen the rice. I wish I had been still in between the sleeping and waking worlds when I did it, but that is not true. I knew exactly what I was doing when I stole the handful of rice from my family. My hunger was so strong that I did not think of the consequences of my actions. I stepped over the others’ sleeping bodies to get to the container. With my heart pounding, I slowly lifted off the top. My hand reached in and took out a handful of uncooked rice and quickly shoved it into my hungry mouth before anyone woke and made me put it back. Afraid that the crunch of uncooked rice might wake the others, I softened the grains with saliva. When it was soft enough, my teeth ground the rice grains, producing a sweet taste that slid easily down my throat. I wanted more, I wanted to eat until I was full and worry about the punishment later.
“Bad! You are bad!” my mind scolds me. “Pa knows.”
A long time ago, Pa told me people should be good not because they are afraid of getting caught but because bad karma will follow them through their lifetime. Until they make amends, bad people will come back in the next life as snakes, slugs, or worms. At six years old, I know I am bad and deserve whatever low life-form I will be reincarnated as in the next life. Who else but a bad person would cause the starvation of her family for her own selfish stomach?
From that day on, I stay more and more to myself. I stop going to Pa to ask him questions or to just sit near him. I stop looking at Geak, my four-year-old sister, slowly disappearing from malnutrition. My only constant companions are the growls in my stomach. Mean-spirited and restless, I fight constantly with Chou, who is older and more timid than I, and she only fights back with words. On the other hand, I often push her to fight with me physically. I want to be punished for the rice I stole from them, for someone to hurt me. Ma, however, allows our fights to go directly to her temples, giving her headaches. Pa is the only one who still has self-control, and our constant fights do not drive him over the edge.
During one fight, I push Chou too far, and she pushes me back. That was all the reason I needed to charge at her. Knowing she is no match for me, she screams to Ma for help. Angry, Ma picks up a coconut shell and throws it at me. The hard shell hits my head with a bang, as a flash of white pain explodes in my skull. Dizzy, I lean against the wall for balance, breathing slowly. Then something drips down my forehead, running down my cheek. Raising my hand, I wipe my cheek as droplets of blood fall onto my shirt. Staring at her with vehemence, I sit down and yell at Ma, “I am going to die because of you!”
Her face darkens with worry as she realizes what she has done. Quickly, she rushes over to me and tends to my wound. “Look at what you made me do,” she says, her voice breaking. “You kids just would not stop and you, Loung, always start these fights. You get on my nerves too much.” My lips quiver with shame for being bad. Ma is crying because of me, because I am bad and can do nothing right. Later that evening, Pa comes home and tells me I am not going to die, that it is only a bad cut. I trust Pa and believe him. He leaves me and goes to speak to Ma.
Ma avoids looking at him as he approaches her. My parents almost never fight. Pa is always so much in control of himself that. I have never seen him lose his temper. This time he speaks loud, angry words to Ma. She sits in the corner of the room, arranging and rearranging our black clothes and our food bowls. Standing, Pa hovers over her. “Why did you do that? You could have hit her eyes or worse. Then what would we have done? How would a blind child survive here? You have to think of things like that now!” Saying nothing, Ma quietly wipes her eyes with her red scarf. Pa says many other things to Ma, but I stop listening.
When Pa leaves for work, Ma, holding Geak, comes to me. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. You kids fight too much and I lost my head. Why are you always fighting with everyone?” That is as much of an apology as any child will get from an adult in Cambodia. I look at her, grit my teeth, and turn my head away. When I don’t want to listen to anyone, I go inside myself to a place no one else can reach. As Ma talks on, I ignore her. Noticing this, she sighs and finally walks away. When she and Geak leave the hut, a tornado of anger rises up in me, quickening my breath. Black and strong, I direct this anger at Ma for making me feel all this pain. Staring blankly at my empty rice bowl, I act as if I do not care what she said to me. For a brief moment, I even wish her dead. I wish her dead for showing me that I am bad. Inside, I hate myself for not being good and for always being the troublemaker in the family.
Moments later, Kim calls Chou to return to the communal garden for our work assignment. Seeing me, he glares and marches on ahead of us without a word to me. Chou runs over to me and grabs my hand. I bow my head down. I know our fight was my fault, and yet Chou is not angry with me. For her, the fight is over; she has already forgiven me. I wonder if she knows that I choose her to fight with because I know she will always love and forgive me. With our fingers entwined, we walk together to the garden.
That night, lying on my side between Chou and Geak, I stare at Ma sleeping next to Pa. My anger subsides and the bottom of my stomach opens, drawing me deeper and deeper into a pit of despair. I remember her in Phnom Penh, her laugh as I bounce on her lap as we ride in a cyclo. She was so beautiful. No one from our past would recognize her. Her red lips are purple and dry, her cheeks are sunken, there are deep shadows under her eyes, her porcelain white skin is brown and wrinkled from the sun. I miss the sound of my mother’s laughter in our house. I miss my mother.
Unlike Pa, Ma was never used to hard work or labor. She was born in China and moved to Cambodia as a little girl. After they were married, Pa took care of Ma in every way. Now he urges Ma to work harder than the other new women in the community. Ma also has to be extra careful because she speaks Khmer with a Chinese accent. Pa fears that this will make her a target for the soldiers who want to rid Cambodia of outside ethnic poison. Ma is proud of her heritage but has to hide it before it proves dangerous to us all. Pa says that the Angkar is obsessed with ethnic cleansing. The Angkar hates anyone who is not true Khmer. The Angkar wants to rid Democratic Kampuchea of other races, deemed the source of evil, corruption, and poison, so that people of the true Khmer heritage can rise to power again. I do not know what ethnic cleansing means. I just know that to protect myself, I often have to rub dirt and charcoal on my skin to look as dark as the base people.
keav
August 1976
Six months after Keav left our village and sixteen months since the Khmer Rouge took power, a young girl arrives at our village in the morning looking for Ma and Pa. “I come with a message from Keav,” she says. “You must come to the hospital. She is very sick and she wants to see you.”
“Why? What’s wrong with her?” Ma manages to ask, shifting Geak on her hip.
“The nurse believes it is something she ate. She has a terrible case of diarrhea. You must come now. She has been sick all morning and asking for you all this time.” Pa cannot get off work to go see Keav, and we do not know how sick she is. After receiving permission from the chief, Ma leaves with the girl to see Keav.
Keav still lives in Kong Cha Lat, a teenage work camp with about 160 laborers. The teenagers ar
e separated in two houses, one for the boys and one for the girls. At the camp, they work from dawn until dusk in the rice fields. The girls are given less food than the boys but are expected to work just as hard. Both their food rations consist only of watery rice soup and salted fish.
After Pa and Kim leave for work, Chou, Geak, and I wait for Ma to return. Since we have no instruments to tell us the time, and we’re no good at guessing it from the sun’s position in the sky, the wait feels like forever. While Chou fans the flies off Geak, who is asleep beside her, I pace the ground in front of our hut. Each step I take, the earth beneath seems to shift, throwing me off balance. Each breath I take, the air rushes quickly down my throat, choking me. In my mind, I envision Keav at her camp.
Keav woke one day to notice that her stomach was bloated and rumbling, making sounds as if something was swishing around inside. She ignored it, believing it was merely hunger pains. She took a deep breath, tears welling up in her eyes. Always there are the hunger pains. Sometimes the hunger pains hurt so much that they spread to every part of the body. It has been a long time since she’d had enough to eat. She rubbed her hand on her stomach, telling it to settle down.
Following the rules, she rolls her straw mat off the floor and leans it against the wall. The dirt floor is hard and full of black ants and other bugs. At night, she always makes sure she closes her mouth tightly and pulls her blanket up above her head, hoping to leave no openings for the bugs to crawl in. She looks around her camp, her eyes focusing on a few faces she recognizes among the eighty girls she lives with. She smiles at them but is greeted with blank stares. Clenching her teeth together, she turns away from them and inhales deeply. She knows she cannot show her emotion, or the supervisor will think she is weak and not worth keeping alive. Unlike our family’s hut in Ro Leap, she does not have the privacy of her own space to let go of her emotions. At the camp, if she cries she will be judged by 160 pairs of eyes that will think her weak. And she misses us so. This time the tears spill over and she quickly wipes them with her sleeves before anyone sees.
In my mind’s eye, I see Keav breathing deeply and trying to fill the void in her heart. Her lungs expand and take in more air as she chases our images away. This loneliness. How is she to survive this loneliness? To live in a place where no one cares about her and everyone is out to get her. She has no protection there. She is utterly and completely alone. She misses Pa so much, misses his protection and the way he looks after her and worries about her. She misses Ma’s arms around her, stroking her hair.
She walks over to the water tank and scoops out a bowl of water to wash her face with. She uses a piece of her old black pajama shirt to try and clean her teeth, remembering how Pa wanted her to take care of herself. She rubs the cloth across her teeth a few times, but her gums are too sore and she quits. She looks at her reflection in the water and gasps. She is ugly. Would anyone believe that she was once a very beautiful girl? She is fifteen and looks no bigger than a twelve-year-old. Her fingers gently touch her protruding cheekbones. In Phnom Penh, she often protected her skin with cleanser and moisturizers. Now damaged by the sun it is marked with scars and pimples. Her oily hair is so thin that her scalp peeks through. It is cut short, in the same block style as the rest of the eighty girls, and makes her look like a young boy. She glances at her body and she recoils. Her arms and legs are like sticks, but her stomach is fat and bulges out like she is pregnant.
Tears flow easily from her eyes, but it is okay. She could disguise them by splashing water on her face, pretending to wash her eyes. She is fifteen and has never held a boy’s hand, never been kissed by a boy, never felt a lover’s warm embrace. There are a lot of nevers in her life, not that it matters now. She only longs for them because she wanted someday to experience the love Ma and Pa have for one another.
She wraps her red scarf around her head and walks toward the rice fields. Every day she works in the rice fields, planting and harvesting rice. Everyday, it is backbreaking work. It is only five A.M., but today she could see that the sky is hazy and cloudless. The air is already hot and humid. In an hour, the haze dissipates to expose a white sky. Her black pajama pants and shirt absorb the sun’s rays and sweat drips out of all her pores. With the sun beating down on the top of her head, the heat and humidity make it difficult for her to breathe.
An hour passes and her stomach continues to growl, making loud, angry noises. She ignores it, hoping it will eventually settle itself. Talking and singing isn’t allowed during work. Planting rice now has become an automatic, physical action, requiring no concentration. Thus, she has lot of time to spend with herself in her head, too much time even. Her mind grows lazy and wanders around too many topics—her schoolwork, a cute boy she met in Phnom Penh, movies she saw—but always it comes back to our family. She misses us so much.
Another hour passes, and her stomach is now in great pain, causing her to double over. She wraps her arms around her stomach, runs to the bushes, pulls her pants to her ankles, and lets the poison run out of her. She pulls her pants up and walks back to the fields but soon has to rush to a bush again. After several visits to the bushes, she finally walks over to the supervisor.
“Please, I am very ill. It is my stomach. May I take the rest of the day off and visit the infirmary?” She pleads with the supervisor. The supervisor looks at her with disgust and contempt.
“No. I do not believe you are sick. We all have hunger pains. You are just a lazy, worthless city girl. Go back to work.” Keav’s heart shatters at being so denigrated.
Another hour passes, but her stomach refuses to settle down. In that hour, she spent ten minutes in the rice field and the rest of the time in the bushes. She is then so sick and weak that she has to drag her body to the supervisor.
“Please, I am very sick. I cannot stand up anymore.” As sick as she is, Keav’s face burns with embarrassment as she follows the supervisor’s gaze to her leg. On her last trip, Keav soiled her pants.
“You smell terrible. All right, you have permission to go to the hospital.” Finally, with permission slip in hand, Keav staggers back to her camp and collapses.
An hour after she leaves the field, Keav finally arrives at the makeshift hospital where there are many patients waiting to see the nurses. The hospital is a decrepit old building with many cots lined up on the ground. When Keav approaches a nurse and reports her illness, the nurse takes her arm and leads her to a cot to lie down. Without taking her pulse or touching her, the nurse asks Keav a few brief questions about her symptoms and hurries away, saying she will return later to check on her and bring some medicine. Keav knows this is a lie. There is no medicine. There are no real doctors or nurses, only ordinary people ordered to pretend to be medical experts. All the real doctors and nurses were killed by the Angkar long ago. Still Keav is glad to be out of the sun.
At Ro Leap, when the sun hovers directly over my head, the lunch bell rings at one P.M. Rushing out of our hut, Chou, Geak, and I meet Pa and Kim at the communal kitchen to receive our ration. Sitting in the shade, we eat our meal of thin rice soup and salted fish in silence. Chou feeds Geak from her own bowl, being careful Geak doesn’t spill or drop anything. Her round stomach, small head, sticklike arms and legs look disproportional to the rest of her body. All around us, groups of five to ten people sit together and quietly consume just enough food to live for another day.
I look up and see Ma’s figure returning. Her face is red and puffy from crying. We know something is seriously wrong, yet none of us are ready for the shock of the news. “She’s not going to live, she’s not going to make it,” Ma weeps as she whispers the words. “Keav is not going to survive the night. She is very sick and has a bad case of dysentery. They believe she ate poisonous food. She is so very thin and sick just from one morning of diarrhea.” Ma drags her palms from her eyes down to her cheeks as she describes Keav to us. She tells us there is no flesh left on Keav’s body. Keav’s eyes are sunken deep into their sockets, and she can hardly open them to l
ook at her. When she first saw Ma, she did not recognize her. Keav wheezed and gasped for air just from trying to talk to her. Ma breaks down and weeps loudly.
When she finally did speak, she kept asking for Pa. “Ma, where’s Pa? Ma, go get Pa. I know I am going to die and I want to see him one last time. I want him to bring me home to be near the family,” Ma tells us. “That is her last wish, to see her family and be near them even after she’s gone. She said she is tired and wants to sleep but will wait for Pa to get there. She is so weak she cannot raise her hand to wave the flies away from her face. She is so dirty. They didn’t even clean her mess up until I got there. They just let her lie there in her sickness and dirty sheets. No one is taking care of my daughter.”
After Ma and Pa receive permission from the chief to go get Keav, they hurriedly leave together. I sit on the steps of our hut with Kim, Chou, and Geak, watching our parents disappear to bring my oldest sister home to us. Kim and Chou sit quietly, lost in their own thoughts. Geak crawls over to me and asks where Ma went. Receiving no answers from us, she climbs down the steps to sit on the ground. Picking up a branch, she draws circles, squares, and crude pictures of our hut in the dirt. As we wait, the minutes turn into hours, the hours into eternity, and the sun refuses to lower in the sky to make time pass faster.
