When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge

by Chanrithy Him

  “Athy, do you want to eat pickled armmiage?” Mak asks me one day, seemingly in good spirits.

  “Mak, I like to eat pickled armmiage with broiled fish. It’s delicious, isn’t it, Mak?” My mouth waters as I think about it, a green plant resembling watercress.

  “Do you want to look for it so Mak can pickle it for you? It grows wild along the paths, by people’s huts. Mak picked some yesterday on the way to work. This is what it looks like. Please go find some more for Mak.”

  I eagerly ask my mother for something to put the armmiage in. Mak ties knots at both ends of a scarf; draped around my neck, it creates two pouches. She gives me a plant of armmiage to take with me in case I don’t remember what it looks like. From hut to hut, my eyes take in all the plants and weeds growing on the paths or in the yards. Mak is right about a lot of armmiage growing wild. It grows everywhere, along the pathways and in front of people’s huts. After I pick a patch of it, I look up and see more armmiage ahead of me, some growing in clusters, others scattered randomly. Both of the pouches fill quickly, but I am still picking. I know how good it will taste once it is pickled and ready to be eaten.

  I am stooping down by the path at the corner of a house when I hear a chorus of women’s voices.

  “Who else dropped the bombs?” An angry voice demands. “It was him, Aseng, who dropped them. Our families and children were savagely killed because of him. When he comes, we’ll torture him and make him feel pain.”

  Her anger makes me look up. The name the woman spits out sounds familiar. I realize they are talking about my Uncle Seng. The woman who made the first angry remarks was Yiey Chea, a woman who I found out later to be related to us—she’s actually Uncle Seng’s biological aunt. When I saw her before, she seemed nice and friendly to Mak. Now I’m startled, scared by the vicious tone of her voice, as well as that of the other women. But the Khmer Rouge have been at work, turning family against family in the name of Angka Leu.

  “It won’t take much to kill him. He’ll die just by each of us peeing on his head,” an older woman quips sarcastically as she steps off the ladderlike stairs of the house.

  There are fifteen women in their fifties and sixties dressed in black coming out of the house. It appears they just had a meeting. I’m afraid of Yiey Chea, fear she will recognize me and accuse me of spying. With the two filled pouches weighing down my neck, I walk away, trying to appear unobtrusive while contemplating all they’ve said.

  Bombing their relatives? I think to myself. Uncle Seng didn’t bomb them. The B-52s did. I’m confused by their accusations and sarcasm, but most of all I’m perplexed by their hatred toward him, their utter conviction even when they don’t know the truth.

  The Khmer Rouge are now focused on turning the people from the city into laborers. At first, most of the adults are forced to build irrigation canals, backbreaking work using only hoes. Everyone must work. My mother and aunts have to gather cow and buffalo dung scattered in the village and transport it to the rice fields. Mak has been given a basket to transport the excrement. Separating her head from the animal dung are a layer of the basket and a cushion formed by the scarf folded beneath it. When she walks across Kong Houng’s orchard, I ask her, “Mak, what’s in the basket?”

  “Only cow dung, koon,” she says, showing me.

  “Yuck! Yuck,” I cry, repelled by the dark, drenched excrement. Mak smiles, amused. She chuckles, putting the basket back on her head, and resumes her work, which is unlike anything she has ever done in her life. I run over to my seven-year-old sister Avy and tell her about the dung on Mak’s head. She wrinkles her nose, and we laugh at the new lesson in our lives.

  But more lessons are to follow. There’s a meeting for children, and I’m told to go. I dress up in my best navy blue skirt with a nice white blouse. I wear my new leather shoes that Mak bought for me just before the Khmer Rouge takeover. I report there alone. To my surprise, children aged about ten to thirteen gather at a barn amid bundles of hay. Among the tumbled straw, the “city children” stand apart from the local children, whose clothes are thickly patched, bulky and ragged, their hair uncombed. I realize my idea of a meeting will never be the same as the Khmer Rouge’s.

  Three women wearing dark, faded uniforms and old scarves around their heads instruct us to follow them to a rice field, a two-mile trip from the village. While I don’t want to go with them, I remember what they did to Pa. I’m afraid to protest, and it frustrates me. I continue to follow the group of children, consisting mainly of village children, the Khmer Rouge’s faithful slaves. They run barefoot on the elevated pathway between rice paddies as if the rough ground were a cushion under their feet. Unlike them, the city children walk leisurely, as if going to a market.

  Like fish drawn to water, the village children dash ahead to the drenched rice paddy recently plowed—a brown flooded field with bunches of soft green rice seedlings. Following the women, the village children troop into the muddy field. This is work they’ve grown up with, and they know what they’re doing as they move quickly to scatter seedling bundles in the paddy. They plant them in rows, in a pattern. Their feet spread apart, legs straddled widely, they stoop down to shove a few seedlings into the mud with one hand while holding the loose seedling bundle in the other. To them, it seems like a pleasant game. To me, the fieldwork looks grim, uninteresting. One of the women yells out at us, the city children, to get into the muddy field. We are hesitant, especially me, when I realize that I will dirty my school clothes. But I have no choice. I hold my breath as I step gently into the field after more commands from these women, leaving my school shoes on the bank behind me.

  I’m shocked at the way they speak to me, without the warm, formal endearments that adults typically use, calling young people “niece” or “daughter.” I cannot remember women ever yelling rudely at me, ordering me around. In Sangkum mun (the previous society), Mak or Pa would have intervened, confronting and correcting the women. I hold my skirt up and wish the Khmer Rouge never existed, that they were only as harmless as a villain in a movie, gone when the lights come on.

  As I wait in the cold, thick water, the mud already making my skin itch, one of the women hands me a bunch of slender stalks. I wad my skirt between my legs, squeezing it safely above the mud. The woman shows me how to plant, dealing out seedlings swiftly and skillfully.

  I try to plant like her, but the stalks don’t stay put. They float to the surface like bubbles. I only wish I could do the same, feet leaving the mud and floating gently away. I perspire profusely, wipe my forehead with my arm, and swallow the urge to scream. Unlike the rural children, I don’t straddle my legs, instead standing with my ankles together—a modest stance when you’re wearing a skirt. Other city children do the same. My back and legs are killing me from stooping at a steep angle, as if perpetually caught in a deep, formal bow. One with the city children, I lag behind the village children.

  I’m only two feet from the elevated pathway, and they are already halfway across the field. They look coordinated and fast as they shuffle backward. I watch them, observing their work. I try to emulate them, but I still don’t get it. Again, I study posture, technique. But I can’t figure it out, and this begins to eat away at me, as if I were trying to master a simple game of jump rope. If they can do this, I can do it, too. I try to copy them and plant fast, but the stalks float and I almost fall facedown into the muddy water.

  “Move this leg this way.” I feel a hand grabbing my right leg. One of the women pulls my right leg apart from my left, startling me.

  A chorus of giggles erupts from my coworkers. I look up and see the village kids looking amused, as well as the city kids. I laugh with them, feeling less frustrated and angry. I’m relieved that the woman doesn’t scold me for being slow. Instead, the women and the village children quietly plant rice seedlings around me and the other city children, closing in on the open areas until we finish. They fix my floating stalks as well as other stray stalks. Since the woman pulled my legs apart, my slende
r skirt now drags in the muddy water. By now I don’t worry too much about my clothes. I figure I can wash the skirt and the spots off my blouse. I’ve adjusted to what I can’t change.

  By the time we’ve planted all the rice paddies, stomping through four fields, I’m exhausted. I’m hungry and sticky from the sun. A small part of me is proud that I’ve learned how to plant rice, but I hate this way of life. Here, we are moving backward, just as the village children scuttle backward putting down the rows of seedlings. Again, I yearn to go back to school and long for my previous life—even reading about dead kings sounds appealing.

  Today Than encounters the most appalling lesson by far. He is among a group of young boys ordered to destroy Buddhist temples and shrines of guardian spirits called Ronng Neak Ta, special places typically tucked beneath the giant umbrella of shade cast by huge, majestic old po trees (banyan trees), where spirits are thought to dwell. These sacred shrines are made of small wooden boxes in the shape of a house, secured between large branches or in caves created by the massive tree trunks. In each of them is a tin can filled with sand, into which incense sticks are planted during prayers and food offerings. To the sanctuary of Ronng Neak Ta women and men would bring food, candles, or incense. Here, they would pour their hearts out to the presiding spirits, imploring them for good health, luck, and happiness.

  Than is baffled as he tells Mak and our relatives of today’s task. With sledgehammers and hoes, they shattered walls and shrines that have stood for years. From village to village they went, the Khmer Rouge urging the boys to shout and grunt as they crumbled walls, like an evil cheering section. Everyone is shocked, at a loss for words. As Than speaks, his expression asks the question, Is it okay to do that? It’s hard not to remember Tha, who died after the mere slight of peeing on someone’s grave. But at eleven, Than has already learned that he has no voice when it comes to the work of the Khmer Rouge. Finally he shrugs, “They made us do it…. Kept shouting at us to destroy…. Now I’m worried about angry spirits….” He frowns. If they reject the culture of religion, if they have no fear of the wrath of spirits, why didn’t they destroy the temples themselves?

  The Khmer Rouge wish to rule not only our inner spiritual lives but our outward appearance as well. They require girls and women to wear their hair short. The rule is a deliberate slap in the face of our culture, which prizes the traditional beauty of long hair. If we don’t cut our hair to our earlobes, they warn, they’ll do it for us. Chea, Ra, and Ry decide that they’ll have Mak cut their hair. My mother takes her scissors and carefully, evenly trims the hair that once fell down their backs to their ears. The hair falls, another measure of loss. I look at Chea, Ra, and Ry with curiosity, as if they were now wearing Khmer Rouge wigs. My own hair barely brushes my shoulders, and I dread the day I must join them. For now, I’m not old enough to worry anyone. The Khmer Rouge’s barbers cut hair without thought. A coconut shell is placed over the head. Any hair dangling from below the edge of the shell is snipped away, the shell a crude cutting line. The style was easy to spot—uneven hanks of hair falling randomly, it looked like the handiwork of a five-year-old.

  The Khmer Rouge know how to strike deeply. The head is the most sacred part of the body to a Cambodian. To be struck in the head, even to have a younger person or an enemy touch your head, is enormously insulting. And yet our captors seem indifferent to our lives before this moment. There is only the history of the here and now.

  Every day the Khmer Rouge set new rules. Now they want to control the words out of our mouths. We have to use the rural terms of address, calling our mothers Mae, and our fathers Pok. Our other option is to call our parents “comrade,” a strange, detached word that, by the sound of it, makes me laugh. How absurd! In our culture, we have four or five words to describe the act of eating, to designate an older person, a monk, or a king. Suddenly our very language has changed without our consent. And yet, standing in line for rice rations, I hear the voices of other city children easily slip into the new way of speaking. Still, it amuses me, an ebullience that has to spill out somehow.

  “Comrade Mak, can I say that?” I curtsy before my mother, causing her to grin. It’s so nice to see her familiar smile. This eggs us on. My sisters and I briefly practice our new vocabulary, mocking it in our play. We address each other as “Comrade Athy” or “Comrade Chea” with graceful little courtesies. It is our attempt to cope with what we can’t change. However, when no one is listening, we address our family properly. They may take our language from our family in public, but they can’t take away the family itself, the bond that binds us. Our private words are our own.

  Instead of giving us currency, the Khmer Rouge dole out rations of paddy (unhusked rice). The rations are taken directly from the abundant stores they’ve seized from Kong Houng—hundreds of thousands of kilograms of unhusked rice. They distribute the paddy to us, stingily measured into woven baskets. Older people receive larger rations compared to a nine-year-old kid like me. We have to process our own rice from scratch. Watch and learn. I take the initiative, determined to conform, to survive. I help my mother and sisters crush the unhusked rice. The golden unhusked grains are tossed into a huge cement mortar buried in the ground. Above it hangs a large, heavy vertical pole connected to a horizontal arm. Together we step on the end of the arm, then release it. The pounding pole smashes into the grain like a gigantic pestle, releasing the grain from its husk. Then we winnow it, sifting the unhusked from the husked, and repeat the process. As for meat, we fish when there is spare time, which has become scarce. We harvest vegetables from Kong’s rapidly failing orchard and other plants that grow wild like weeds in fields and around people’s houses.

  Paddy rations are never enough. Most of the time, Mak leaves the hut after she helps set up our meal on the wooden deck. When some of us ask for more rice, she sadly puts her spoon down and offers to share her ration. Increasingly, she seems to have errands to run when it’s time for dinner. She tells us to eat, and not to wait up for her. We obey, leaving no food. I begin to realize that she never eats. I never think much about it, but wonder why she doesn’t seem to be hungry.

  Later I find out. All those times, Mak has been going around Year Piar asking for meals from the local women she has befriended. To beg means that she has humbled herself before those women. This brutal reality cuts me like a knife. From now on, I know there’s no future under the Khmer Rouge.

  It is now October, four months after Pa’s execution. Rumors have spread. Soon we will be moved to a different place. Where? Mak asks around, but no one knows.

  The night before we are to leave, Mak dreams about Pa. He appears without a head. He walks toward her and tries to tell her something with his hands, but she can’t understand. As Mak asks him questions, he stands there headless, yet he’s listening. Then he disappears into the dark night, leaving Mak screaming for him to return. This nightmare is a dark omen for all of us.

  The next day we gather for our meal of rice and vegetable soup with banana stalk and fish. No one says anything except to make terse requests to pass dishes. I’m scared. I break down, crying. My sisters, too. Through the open hut, where we’ve been eating our meals, I gaze at the orchard. The empty space where the pineapples once were. The fruit trees, the shady tamarind—my eyes caress them, as if saying good-bye to a refuge where I’ve found shelter, a place almost outside the revolution.

  Even Kong Houng and Yiey Khmeng must now leave their home, a place he has struggled to protect all these years. For my family, this final act is the beginning of a naked existence. Turning us out of Kong Houng’s home, built as his bridal gift to Yiey Kmeng, represents more than an eviction. It strips us of our last semblance of a normal life, our threads of family community. From here, we are scattered like grains of rice cast in random directions. When we came here, Pa was with us. Now he’s gone. To abandon the last place I have a physical memory of him hurts me deeply. In Cambodia, we believe the spirits of loved ones look after us. To me, this is where his spirit
dwells. It’s as if I’m leaving him.

  As Chea, Ra, Ry, and I walk outside, waiting for Mak, Avy, and our brothers to catch up with us, I sob. I think the words I cannot speak. The Khmer Rouge will kill us. I don’t want to die, to be killed with a hoe like Pa. My tears are contagious, igniting fear and sorrow in Chea. She weeps. The rest join in. Chea puts her arms around me. Together we cry until we can cry no more. The fear remains, but the tears are spent.

  Heading down the dusty village road, Chea and Ra carry our belongings the primitive way—suitcases and bags of blankets strapped on either end of carrying sticks. Mak balances a bag of clothes on her head, guiding us like a hen herding her chicks. Walking through Year Piar and other villages, I pray to Buddha. Protect us, protect us. Then I ask Pa’s spirit to watch over us, as I’ve heard my elders pray to the spirits of their ancestors for protection and luck.

  We cross many fields and pass through a succession of small villages until we see a collection of wilted souls waiting by a train track in a barren field. Squatting and standing around are hundreds of people waiting uneasily along the tracks. Suddenly Khmer Rouge cadres dash alongside the freight cars, appearing out of nowhere in their black uniforms with rifles on their shoulders. Some run toward the end of the train. A few open the freight cardoors before us.

  “Get in, get in!” they shriek, waving their hands in the air.

  We obey. We crowd into the freight cars. We are mostly women. Mothers reach out to find the hands of children, and children reach for mothers. “Mak, koon, hurry, wait” are the only words spoken as the steady stream of humans overflows into the freight cars. Then the cries. The Khmer Rouge begin to separate members of families into different cars, as randomly as you would divide livestock. Angka Leu is your family now. Mothers implore, children wail. The waves of rifles silence them. Squatting on the wooden floor in the car with Mak and my brothers and sisters, I’m relieved that I’m already inside, squeezed among strangers.