by Loung Ung
“I’m not a baby,” I mutter and try to smile.
Ma nods her head, her eyes red and brimming with tears. Bending down, I lay my hand on Geak’s head. Her hair is fine and soft. Gently, I smooth out the strands that stick up in the air. Then I quickly turn and walk away. They are both crying. I walk away not knowing when I will see them again. Though I long to be with them, being with them brings back too many memories of my family, of Keav, of Pa.
the last gathering
May 1978
The period of plentiful food did not last long. Once again our rations have been reduced and many people are becoming sick. My stomach and feet swell as my bones protrude everywhere else. In the morning I find myself short of breath just walking to the rice fields. I have lost so much weight it feels as if my joints are rubbing against each other, making my body ache. In the rice paddy, my head throbs and it’s difficult to focus on the task at hand. By midday, during lunchtime, the effort of pulling the leeches out of my toes requires more energy than I have in me. So tired, I allow the leeches to feed on me and only remove them at the end of the day.
Each morning my face puffs out a little bit more, my cheeks rounder and my eyelids more swollen. Each day, I awake feeling weaker and weaker, my arms, fingers, stomach, feet, and toes feeling heavier, until I am no longer able to train or work.
“Met Bong,” I wheeze out the words, “may I have a permission slip to go to the infirmary? My stomach hurts very much.”
She sighs with impatience. “You are so weak. You must learn to be strong,” she shouts at me and walks away, leaving me standing in the sun with my head down. I curse myself for being small and weak. As I turn and walk back to the hut, she calls to me. “Where are you going, you stupid girl?” Met Bong puts a piece of paper in my hand. “Go to the infirmary and recover, then come back. I am taking you out of the dance troupe!” I let out a sigh of relief and thank her.
The infirmary is a few hours’ walk from the camp. With permission slip in hand, I walk toward it. The sun climbs higher and higher above the trees, heating everything around me. I walk over to a shallow pond near the roadside and squat down. The mud oozes warm and soft between my toes, soothing my aching joints. I wade in deeper to where the water is clearer, but each time I move, my feet disturb the water, making it brown and hazy. Standing still until the residue settles to the bottom, I scoop up the water in my hand. It is warm and soothing to my throat but tastes of rotten weeds.
I move on until the water reaches my chest. Slowly, I put my face in the water, my arms floating on the surface. My upper body floats easily in the water, pulling my feet up from the bottom. The water amplifies my heartbeat so that the thumps are much louder. The rhythm sounds normal but my heart feels very hollow. Listening to my heartbeat, my mind wanders to Ma and Geak. April and New Year’s are behind us, so now we are all one year older. Geak is six now. She is a year older than I was when the Khmer Rouge took over the country three years ago. It has been six months since I visited Ro Leap when Ma showed me her bruises. Nine months since I pulled my hand out of Chou’s grasps. Twelve months since I said good-bye to Kim, seventeen months since the soldiers took Pa away, twenty-one months since Keav-I stop myself from counting more dates. It is no use remembering when I last saw them. It will not help bring them closer to me. Yet in my world where there are so many things I don’t understand, counting dates is the only sane thing I know to do.
When I am cooled down, I raise my head and spot a small cotton field in the distance. I get out of the water and walk toward it. The cotton stands as tall as my chest, puffy, white, and soft like the clouds, but I can actually touch the cotton. I pick a ball and pull it open. In the middle of the puffy cloud, there is a cluster of black round seeds like pepper. I have heard that they are safe to eat, but I hesitate momentarily before putting one in my mouth. I roll the seeds on my tongue—they are hard and have no taste. Tentatively, my teeth crack the shells and dig into the soft, oily meat. Slightly sweet, the seed quiets the noise in my stomach. I quickly pour the rest of the seeds onto my hand. Scanning the field to check for guards, I shove the seeds in my mouth as fast as I can. Then I collect a few more handfuls and put them in my pockets.
By midmorning I arrive at the infirmary, an abandoned concrete warehouse with moldy, crumbling walls and open spaces for rooms. There is no electricity so it is dark, except for the area that is illuminated by sunlight pouring in through the glassless windows. In the air hangs the unmistakable smell of rubbing alcohol and stale flesh. The two hundred or so patients are lined up on straw mats or cots on the floor, their cries echoing off the cold stone walls. The bodies lie motionless, some bloated, others skeletal, all on the verge of death. Some are so sick they cannot get up to relieve themselves. There are not enough nurses to help so they He in their own messes.
Keav’s face flashes before my eyes as I gasp for air, only to cough at the stench of death that floods into my nostrils. Keav slept in cots similar to these, drenched in urine and waste. Some people come to this hospital hoping to be cured of their sickness, but many are dumped here because they are too weak to work and therefore of no use to Pol Pot. Those “who can no longer work come here to die. A cold draft hits me and pricks my skin with tiny stings as I imagine Keav staggering here alone to die among a thousand strangers. In a makeshift hospital, on these yellow-stained cots, many of these patients will die before the sun rises tomorrow.
Forcing myself to focus on something else, I try to shake off the feelings of pity I have for these patients. I look intensely at my hand in the yellowish light. It looks stubby and waxy like five pale fat worms attached to the palm. When I move my fingers, they wriggle and I momentarily envision them detaching and crawling away. My toes wriggle in the same way. I am jerked out of this vision by the moans of the sick. This must be how Keav died, lonely and afraid. Am I to die in a sea of sick people I do not know?
In my dreamlike state I hear Ma’s voice calling to me. “Loung! Where are you going? Come to us!” I wake up, gulping air. Am I hearing voices? Am I going crazy? “Ma?” I whisper. My heart dances with hope, but I suppress it. “Ma?” I cry in anguish. “Over here!” I hear the voices of Chou, Geak, and Kim! I force my eyes to open wider against the heavy pull of my swollen lids, searching among the people for their voices.
Far in the corner of the room, I see hands waving excitedly in the air. I stare at the faces of Ma, Geak, and Meng. Chou and Kim run toward me, smiling broadly. Everyone in our family but Khouy is here! I cannot believe my eyes. I look into their beaming faces: Chou is barely able to suppress a laugh, Geak looks at me in confusion, and Ma is crying.
“Silly girl,” Ma hollers at me. “You almost walked past us.”
“I’m so glad you are here! I was afraid to be here alone!”
“This is the only infirmary in the area!” Ma replies. She pats the ground next to her, gesturing for me to sit. My knees go weak and I fall into Ma’s arms. My eyes wide open, I clutch her sleeves while the rest of my siblings look on awkwardly. “We’re all together now. We’re all together,” her voice is muffled through my hair. Looking into the faces of my siblings, I no longer fear I will die alone.
As Ma releases me from her grasp, Geak crawls over and seats herself between us. Ma tells me that she and Geak came here five days ago with stomach pains. Like me, all the siblings traveled separately and were lucky to find each other here. Ma says that Chou was the second to arrive, followed by Kim and Meng, who just arrived yesterday. Everyone is here but Khouy!
We spend our days in the infirmary lazily talking to one another about many things but never about Keav or Pa. No one in the family has ever explicitly stated that we are not to bring them up in our conversations. Yet we all know not to speak about them. Each of us keeps our memories of them private and safely locked in the boxes of our own heart. Instead, we spend the time telling Ma about our lives. Chou tells us she enjoys being one of the only two cooks at her camp. She says the other girl is nice. Being in charge
of the food supply, she is able to steal a little of everything to bring to Ma. When the girls make her mad, she takes revenge by spitting in the food. At his boys’ camp, Kim works day and night in the fields planting and harvesting rice. The setup of Kim’s camp is identical to that of Chou’s and mine, where all the children sleep together in a large hut. Every night he also has to attend the same propaganda meetings that Chou and I do. Meng tells us that before he fell sick, he and Khouy were still loading bags of rice onto trucks that are rumored to be delivered to China. He reports that he still lives with Khouy and Khouy’s wife, Laine. Despite our curiosity, Chou and I never ask Meng about her. Three years living under the Khmer Rouge regime has taught us that some things are better left unsaid.
Though we do not have to work, we are given a ration of rice and salt and sometimes fish. The amount of food is comparable to what I was given while I worked. Though from our shiny faces and swollen bodies, we realize that we are all suffering from similar symptoms: stomachache, extreme exhaustion, diarrhea, and aching joints. After much discussion, we conclude that we are not so much sick as weak from starvation. First thing in the morning and after dinner, the nurses walk over and pour water into a smooth, polished coconut shell bowl, then they put a small cube of white granulated material on my palm, telling me to eat it. I put the cube on my tongue and feel it dissolve. A smile spreads across my face when I realize it is sugar! Sugar for medicine. I plan to stay in the infirmary for as long as I can.
Even with the daily ration of “medicine” I am always hungry. It is hard for me to walk, but I must scavenge for food. I search the bushes for frogs, crickets, grasshoppers, or anything else that can be eaten. But I am a clumsy predator, moving slowly in my sickness. On my way back to the infirmary one afternoon, I see a rice ball left unguarded beside an old woman. My hand quickly grabs it and puts it in my pocket. My heart pounds rapidly, and I walk away as fast I can before anyone notices.
Once alone outside the compound, I am wracked with guilt for what I have done. The fist-sized rice ball rests weightily in my pocket as the face of the old woman comes back to me. Her gray oily hair clings to her skull and her chest contracts and expands in shallow breaths beneath her black clothes. Her lids are half closed, exposing the whites of her eyes. Her helpers will return to find the rice missing and they will have nothing more to give to her. Knowing she will die anyway, they may forget about her. By taking her food I have helped kill her. But I cannot return the rice. I lift it to my lips as salty tears drip into my throat. The hard rice scrapes down in a dry lump, thus I put a marker on the old woman’s grave.
With heavy feet, I make my way back to my family. They are sitting quietly, happy to be together. Somberly, I sit next to Ma and scratch my head with both hands. My hair is in greasy knots and my head itches. Our clothes are tattered and have not been washed in weeks. The well water is reserved for the nurses’ use and the stream where we bathe is far away.
“Come.” Ma’s hand reaches for my head and parts my hair. “We will fix that.” She reaches, into her bag and takes out her special lice comb. She sits across from me and spreads her red-and-white scarf on the ground. She gently pushes my head down so that I am looking at the scarf and drags the brown plastic comb with its micro teeth through my hair. My scalp hurts from the pull, but it is worth it as I see the six-legged bugs fall from my hair onto the scarf. They scurry all over the scarf, trying to escape but are met with our thumbnails crushing them to bits. Blood squirts from their bodies and they make small popping sounds. Chou and Geak laugh and join in the killing. One by one, Ma combs our hair and rids us of the lice. We spend our days this way, sitting around, talking, laughing, and loving each other again.
One night I dream about Keav. She is beautiful, young, and exuberant. My dream starts peacefully. I am somewhere alone with her. We are talking, walking. I reach out to her but stop because her appearance is changing. In front of my eyes as she continues to talk, she grows thinner and thinner. Her skin becomes yellowish, aged, and hangs loose from her bones. Then the skin on her face begins to melt, becoming transparent, exposing the outlines of her large eye sockets and the skeletal bones behind them. I want to run away but I also want to stay. Her lips are still moving and she says, “I’m all right, I am not as you see me.” I love her and want so much to be with her, to find out where she is now so that I can meet her. I do not understand what she is saying and I scream myself awake. Determined to live, the next morning I force myself to walk the hospital grounds looking for food to steal to fill my stomach.
I stay in the infirmary for as long as I can, and with the sugar cubes and food and rest from work, my body gradually grows stronger. After one week, the infirmary becomes overcrowded and the nurses force us to leave. First they kick out Meng, then Kim, then me. I cry, whine, and he, but in the end I am forced to leave. Walking away, I break my farewell rule and look back to see Ma, Chou, and Geak crying and standing in the doorway. It was a mistake to turn around, my body aches to run back to them, to hold on to them. Expanding my lungs with air, I straighten my shoulders and march away firmly, wondering when I will see them again.
the walls crumble
November 1978
Another six months has passed since our family reunion at the infirmary. Back at the camp, my life continues as before and with another increase in food rations, I become still stronger. We no longer work in the fields but spend the hours learning to fight in combat as rumors spread that Youns have invaded our borders. During the day, we train with the few sickles, hoes, knives, stakes, and guns that are available in the camp. Most of the training is repetitive, but Met Bong insists that only when the movements become automatic will we be able to fight well. In the evening, after our meal, we gather brush and sticks to build a fence around our camp.
Early one morning, I wake up with dread and panic. My stomach knots and I am drenched with sweat. I tell myself it is nothing, just nerves; I convince myself that I get nervous easily. After washing my face, I join the other kids in training. Met Bong takes her old clothes and stuffs them with leaves and straw to make dummies. For the heads, she stuffs her red checkered scarf with straw. She calls them her Youn dummies and hangs them on trees in the field. After another long report about the evil of the Youns, she lines us up single file across from the dummies.
With a six-inch knife in my hand, I stand at attention in front of the line. Panting like an animal, with my legs shaking and my hand gripping the knife, I attack at Met Bong’s cue, charging at my dummy, I yell, “Die! Die!” Though I focus on its head, I am only tall enough to thrust my knife into its stomach.
The next morning, I wake up in great agony. My head throbs, my stomach hurts, and my chest constricts as if someone is sitting on it. I wrap my arms around my stomach, wanting to scream to the world. Something hurts inside me. Rage erupts in my body, making me jump and run out of the hut. I don’t understand the electricity in my body, this panic, this sadness, hatred, emotions that manifest into physical pains.
I have to see Ma. It is dangerous to travel without permission, but I do not care. I have to go to her. I know I cannot leave through the front gate; if the girls see me, they will tell on me. I walk around the hut and search for a part of the fence where I can make my escape. I see a loosely built part where the stakes are far apart and the bushes sparse. Making sure no one can see me, I drop to my knees. Quickly, I part the prickly brushes, get on all fours, and crawl through.
I walk in the hot sun without food or water. Though my throat begs for water and my feet crave to stop, I push on. My heart races as images of Ma and Geak flash before me. Their faces are long, their mouths turned down, their eyes glisten with tears. They sit at the hut in Ro Leap, calling out to me, as if they are trying to tell me something. I know why they are calling out to me. But I cannot accept it. I know.
My thought turns to Pa, and I remember how he told me I had extrasensory perception. Even as young as I am, I have always felt as if I live 80 percent of my life in
déjà vu. In Phnom Penh, many times I knew who was on the other line even before Pa picked up the phone. Walking in the streets with Pa or eating noodles with Ma at the shops, I would sense that we’d run into a certain person and we would. In Ro Leap, I had a dream that a certain house would catch on fire, and it did. Pa said it is a power and though I did not fear it then, I fear it now.
The minutes turn into hours until I reach Ro Leap. It is midmorning. The village is quiet. When I enter the village, I run to Ma’s hut. “Ma,” I call out frantically. “Ma! Geak!” No one replies. “Ma!” I run as fast as I can into the garden. Ma and Geak are not there. Tears blur my vision as I run back to her hut. Everything is still there. Their wooden rice bowls and spoons. The small pile of clothes. “Ma!” I scream, my voice hoarse.
“They are not here,” a voice answers. A young woman stands in the doorway of the next hut. She is new; I do not recognize her. “They left yesterday. My baby is sick so I did not go to work. I saw them leave.”
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. They went with soldiers,” the woman says quietly and looks away. She stares into the distance, refusing to look back at me.
We both know what it means when the soldiers come to the village and take someone with them. Part of me cannot believe what the woman says, but the other knows it is true. Yesterday I could not explain the mental anxiety and physical pains I woke up with. Now I know it was Ma and Geak telling me about the soldiers.
“Ma, where are you? Ma, you can’t do this to me!” I scream into the empty hut. They cannot have survived three years of starvation and the loss of Keav and Pa only to be taken now! The last time I saw her she was doing okay without Pa. I believed she was going to make it. She fought so hard to live! She cannot be gone. Poor little Geak, she never got anything good out of life.
