First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

by Loung Ung

  “Oh Pa, I love you. I will always miss you.” My spirit cries and hovers down over him. My spirit wraps invisible arms around him, making him cry even more. “Pa, I will always love you. I will never let you go.” The soldier walks up to Pa, but I will not let him go. The soldier cannot hear or see me. He cannot see my eyes burn into his soul. “Leave my Pa alone!” My eyes dare not blink as the soldier raises the hammer above his head. “Pa,” I whisper, “I have to let you go now. I cannot be here and live.” Tears wash across my body as I fly away, leaving Pa there by himself.

  Back in the hut, I slide next Chou. She opens her arms and takes me in. Our bodies cradling each other, we cry. The cool air chills the beads of sweat on my skin, making my teeth chatter. Beside us, Kim holds on tight to Geak.

  “Pa, I cannot bare to think that you struggled for breath lying on top of the others in that hole. I must believe the soldier took pity and used one of his bullets on you. I cannot breathe, Pa. I am sorry I had to let you go.” My mind swirls with pain and anger. The pain grows larger in my stomach. The pain spasm convulses as if it is eating away my linings. Turning on my side, I dig my hands into my stomach and squeeze it violently to make the physical pain stop. Then the sadness surrounds me. Dark and black it looms over me, pulling me deeper and deeper into it. And then it happens again. It is almost as if I am somewhere else for the moment and I simply black out the part of me that feels emotion. It is as if I am alive but not alive. I can still hear the faint noise of Ma’s muffled cries outside, but I do not feel her pain. I do not feel anything at all.

  Ma is up before anyone else the next morning. Her face is all puffy, her eyes are red and swollen shut. Chou gives Ma some of the very little food we have left, but she will not eat. I join them on the steps, daydreaming about our lives back in Phnom Penh when I was happy. I cannot allow myself to cry because once I do I will be lost forever. I have to be strong.

  By the third day, we all know that what we feared most has happened. Keav, and now Pa, one by one, the Khmer Rouge is killing my family. My stomach hurts so much I want to cut it open and take the poison out. My body shivers as if evil has entered it, making me want to scream, beat my hands against my chest, and pull out my hair. I want to close my eyes and blank out again, but I don’t know how to do it at will. I want my Pa here in the morning when I wake up! That night I pray to the gods, “Dear gods, Pa is a very devout Buddhist. Please help my Pa return home. He is not mean and does not like to hurt other people. Help him return and I will do anything you say. I will devote my entire life to you. I will believe you always. If you cannot bring Pa home to us, please make sure they don’t hurt him, or please make sure Pa dies a quick death.”

  “Chou,” I whisper to my sister, “I am going to kill Pol Pot. I hate him and I want to make sure he dies a slow and painful death.”

  “Don’t say such things or you will get hurt.”

  “I am going to kill him.” I do not know what he looks like, but if Pol Pot is the leader of the Angkar then he is the one responsible for all the miseries in our lives. I hate him for destroying my family. My hate is so strong it feels alive. It slithers and moves around in the pit of my stomach, growing bigger and bigger. I hate the gods for not bringing Pa back to us. I am a kid, not even seven years old, but somehow I will kill Pol Pot. I don’t know him, yet I am certain he is the fattest, slimiest snake on earth. I am convinced that there is a monster living inside his body. He will die a painful, agonizing death, and I pray that I will play a part in it. I despise Pol Pot for making me hate so deeply. My hate empowers and scares me, for with hate in my heart I have no room for sadness. Sadness makes me want to die inside. Sadness makes me want to kill myself to escape the hopelessness of my life. Rage makes me want to survive and live so that I may kill. I feed my rage with bloody images of Pol Pot’s slain body being dragged in the dirt.

  “As long as we don’t know for certain that your pa is dead, I will always have hope that he is alive somewhere,” Ma declares to us the next morning. My heart hardens at her words, knowing I cannot allow myself the luxury of hope. To hope is to let pieces of myself die. To hope is to grieve his absence and acknowledge the emptiness in my soul without him.

  Now that I have accepted the truth, I worry about what will happen to Ma. She was very dependent on Pa. He had always been there to make things easier for her. Pa was raised in the country and was accustomed to hardship. In Phnom Penh, we had live-in housekeepers to do just about everything for us. Pa was our strength and we all needed him to survive, especially Ma. He was good at surviving and knew best what to do for us.

  I hope Pa comes to me again tonight. I hope he visits me in my sleep and meets me in my dreams. I saw him last night. He wore his tan military uniform from the Lon Nol government. His face was once again round like the moon and his body was soft. He was so real standing next to me, big and strong like he was before the war.

  “Pa!” I run to him and he picks me up. “Pa, how are you? Did they hurt you?”

  “Don’t worry.” He tries to soothe me.

  “Pa, why did you leave us? I miss you so much it hurts my stomach. Why didn’t you come and find me? Pa, when will you come and find us? If I go to the orphanage camp will you be able to find me?” I rest my head on his shoulder.

  “Yes, I will.”

  He’s my pa, and if he says that he will find me, I know he will.

  “Pa, why does it hurt so much to be with you? I don’t want to hurt, I don’t want to feel.”

  “I am sorry you are hurt. I have to go.” Hearing this, I grip his arms tighter, refusing to let go. “Pa, I miss you so much. I miss sitting on your lap like I did in Phnom Penh.”

  “I have to go, but I will look after you always,” Pa says softly, putting me down on the ground. I hold on to his finger and beg him not to leave me.

  “No! No! Stay. Pa, stay with us. Please, don’t leave. I miss you and I am scared. What will happen to us? Where will you go? Take me with you!”

  Pa looks at me, his eyes brown and warm. I reach out my hands to him, but the farther I reach, the farther away he moves until he fades away completely.

  My body fights to sleep when the sun shines through our door to tell us it is morning. I want to stay asleep forever just so I can be with him. In the real world, I don’t know when I will ever see Pa again. Slowly, I open my eyes with Pa’s face still lingering in my vision. It is not the face of the gaunt old man the soldiers took away but the face of the man I once thought was a god.

  It was during our trip to Angkor Wat that I first thought Pa was a god. I was only three or four years old then. With my hand in Pa’s, we entered the area of Angkor Thorn, one of the many temple sites there. The gray towers loomed large before us like stone mountains. On each of the towers, giant faces with magnificent headdresses looked out in different directions over our land. Staring at the faces I exclaimed, “Pa, they look like you! The gods look like you!” Pa laughed and walked me into the temple. My eyes could not leave those huge round faces, with their almond-shaped eyes, flat noses, and full lips—all of Pa’s features!

  Waking up I try to hold on to these images of Pa even as we resume our lives without him. Ma returns to the field, working twelve to fourteen hours a day and leaves Geak behind with Chou. With Geak toddling after us, Chou and I and the other children work in the gardens and do menial labor in the village. It has been over a month since Pa was taken away. Ma seems to have recovered and is trying to get on with her life, but I know I will never see her truly smile again. Sometimes late at night, I am awakened by the sound of Ma sobbing on the steps, still waiting for Pa. Her body slumped like an old woman, she leans against the door frame, her arms wrapped around herself. She looks out into the field at the path Pa once walked, crying and longing for him.

  We miss him terribly and Geak, being so young, is the only one able to vocalize our loneliness, by continuing to ask for Pa. I am afraid for Geak. She is four years old and has stopped growing because of malnutrition. I want to
kill myself knowing that it was I who stole the food from her mouth that one night. “Your pa will bring us lots of food when he returns,” Ma tells Geak when she asks for Pa.

  The soldiers come to our village more and more often now. Each time they leave, they take fathers from the other families. They always come in pairs—though never the same pair twice—with their rifles and casual excuses. When they come, some villagers try to hide their fathers by sending them off to the woods or having them be conveniently gone. But the soldiers wait, standing around the chief’s house, slowly smoking their cigarettes as if they have all the time in the world. After they finish the pack, they walk to their victim’s hut and loud cries and screams from inside follow. Then there’s only silence. We all know they feed us lies about the fathers coming back the next morning. Still there is nothing we can do to stop them. No one questions these disappearances, not the chief, not the villagers, not Ma. I hate the soldiers now as much as I hate the Angkar and their leader, Pol Pot. I etch their faces into my memory and plan for the day when I can come back and kill them.

  There have been rumors in the village that Pa was not killed in a Khmer Rouge mass execution. Rumors spread that the soldiers made Pa a prisoner on a faraway mountain and tortured him every day. But he survived and escaped to the top of the mountains. The soldiers, hunting for him, have not have been able to catch him. People passing by our village say they have seen someone fitting Pa’s description. They tell tales of Pa forming his own army, trying to recruit more soldiers to fight the Khmer Rouge. Upon hearing these rumors, Ma’s face lights up and her eyes shine once again with hope. For a few days, she walks off to work with a little more life in her step and even twelve hours later the glimmer of a smile is still on her face. At night, she continuously fusses over our appearance, wiping the dirt off our faces, combing the knots out of our hair. She believes the stories wholeheartedly. “If he has escaped, it will not be long now before he comes searching for us. Until we know for sure of his fate, we must never give up hope.” Once again, she devotes herself to sitting on the steps waiting for Pa’s return.

  Ma (right) and her sister.

  Pa, at right, with his military friends.

  My mother, Ung, Ay Choung.

  My father, Ung, Seng Im. I always thought his face looked like the stone faces of the gods at Angkor Wat.

  Left to right: My mother (holding Keav), Meng, Khouy, my grandmother, my aunt, and Uncle Keang.

  Left to right: Meng, Keav, Ma (holding Kim), Khouy, and Uncle Keang.

  Left to right: Kim, Keav, Khouy, Meng, Chou, and Ma on a family trip to Angkor Wat.

  My brother Khouy. I always perceive him to be so hard and sad. He rarely smiles, so I treasure this happy photo.

  Left to right: Me, Chou, Kim, and Keav.

  Left to right: Me, Chou, and Keav.

  My father is wearing the plaid shirt, smiling.

  Chou and me (right), 1975.

  Two pictures of Kim superimposed together.

  Kim, Ma, Geak, me, Chou, and Khouy. The only surviving picture of Geak.

  Meng, me, and my sister-in-law Eang, on our first day at the refugee camp in Thailand. We had just gotten off the boat at Lam Sing, 1980.

  Khouy (top row, far left in black) and family gather at Grandfather’s gravesite in Cambodia on the day we set aside each year to remember our ancestors, 1988.

  Chou and her husband, Pheng, 1985.

  Chou, with her family on an outing.

  Khouy, his wife Morm, and their family, 1991.

  Kim, his wife Huy Eng, their daughter Nancy, and a friend’s son, 1998.

  Meng, in the center, talking with friends and family during his 1995 trip to Cambodia.

  Wat Ta Prom, the temple where my father told me the gods live. Photo © Sally Strickland.

  Chou, me, and Meng’s two daughters, Victoria and Maria. This photo was taken in 1995 when I visited Cambodia with Meng and his family. It’s the end of the trip and Chou is seeing us off.

  Me and a little girl selling goods on the street at Angkor Wat. Photo © 1999 Michael Appel.

  Weeks pass after we hear the rumors about Pa and still he has not returned. I know Ma misses him and believes he is alive somewhere. Eventually, she stops waiting for him and tries once more to resume her life. Time passes slowly without Pa in our lives. Even with our own ration of food, our survival depends on our older brothers bringing more food to us each week. When Khouy gets sick, coughing up blood, we are forced to fend for ourselves. Khouy is a strong young man, but he pushes himself too hard at work. His work consists of constantly loading and unloading one hundred kilograms of rice onto trucks to be sent to China. Meng also cannot come because the soldiers are keeping him busy with work. We are all very worried for them both.

  Life is hard without Pa. People in the village look down on Ma because she is not good at field work. It is too dangerous to have friends so she does not talk to anyone. The villagers also look down on her white skin and often make rude comments about lazy white people.” To my surprise, Ma becomes a hard worker and is surviving without Pa. On the days when Ma is assigned to work with fifteen other village women fishing for shrimp in nearby ponds, I go with her, leaving Chou behind with Geak. My job in the group includes fetching water for the shrimp catchers, helping untangle their nets, and separating the shrimp from weeds. Though hungry, we are not allowed to eat the shrimp we catch because it belongs to the village and must be shared with all. If anyone is caught stealing, the chief can publicly humiliate her, take away her possessions, and beat her. The punishments for such acts are grave, but our hunger does not allow this to stop us from sometimes stealing.

  “Loung,” Ma calls me. “I need some water, come here.” She stands up and wipes her brows with her sleeve, leaving a trail of mud on her face. Scooping a coconut shell of water out of the bucket, I run over and hand it to her. “Here,” she whispers, “give me your hand fast while no one is looking.” Ma turns around and takes another careful look at the others to make certain we are not being watched. She quickly gives me a handful of baby shrimp as she takes the water cup from me. “Quick, eat them while no one is looking.” Without hesitation, I shove the raw crawling baby shrimp into my mouth, shells and all. They taste of mud and rotten weeds. “Chew quickly and swallow,” Ma tells me. “Now, you look out for me while I eat some. If anyone is looking, call me.” I see Ma in a very different light now and have more pride in her strength. Somehow, one way or another, we find ways to stay alive.

  ma’s little monkey

  April 1977

  It is two years since the Khmer Rouge rolled into Phnom Penh with their trucks; four months since the soldiers took Pa away and Kim became head of our household. It has been almost a year since we last heard from Meng and Khouy. New Year’s has come and gone, making us all a year older. Geak is now five, I am seven, Chou is ten, and Kim is twelve. Now head of the household, Kim takes seriously Pa’s words for him to look after us. At dawn each morning, he wakes before us and runs to the town square for our work assignment. At the hut Ma gets us girls up and spends a few minutes with each of us. Before she is done combing Geak’s hair and washing her face, Kim is back with the day’s instructions. As I slowly rise from my slumber, he is already telling Ma where to go. After Ma’s left for the fields, we all walk to the community garden together with Geak clinging to Kim’s back. Though Kim’s face looks like a monkey more than ever, Ma has not called him by this nickname since they took Pa away. Now he is only Kim to us.

  A few miles down the road from our village there is a cornfield. We have had a good rainy season this year and the corn is ripe for picking. However much we fear the punishment for stealing, our desperation is too strong to stop us. “Why not, Ma?” Kim argues. “We work morning, noon, and night planting these crops and now that they are ripe we’re told we can’t eat them. We are all starving.”

  “It is just too dangerous, Kim. You know what the soldiers will do to you if you get caught.”

  “Ma, we
are starving to death. Many people are dying in the village. Yet the government trades our crops to buy guns to kill more people.”

  “Shh … don’t talk so loud. It is a crime to speak against the Angkar. If the soldiers hear you they will take you away and kill you.”

  “Ma, I am going to go and get us some corn tonight.” With a determined look, Kim has made his decision.

  “Be careful,” Ma says to him and turns away.

  Chou and I do not try to stop him from going either, even though we know it is dangerous. Pol Pot has many soldiers with guns and rifles guarding the cornfields every night. The soldiers have the right to punish thieves any way they see fit, killing them if they choose. Their power is so omnipotent that no one dares question their actions. However fearful I am, my hunger makes me want to go myself, but I do not have the strength or courage to actually do it. I hear tales that the soldiers rape the girls they catch stealing, no matter how young they are.