Escaping the Khmer Rouge Read online

  Spring 1979 — Chileng returns to Prayap to search for family members

  Summer 1979 — Chileng finds work in Phnom Penh at a roofing factory

  Late summer 1979 — Chileng escapes to the Nong Chan Border Camp on the Cambodian-Thai border, then moves to Camp 007 nearby

  October 1979 — Chileng escapes Cambodia for Khao-I-Dang Refugee Camp in Thailand

  November 1979 — Chileng reunites with Chan at refugee camp

  January 5, 1980 — Chileng and Chan marry

  March 1980 — Chileng reunites with his three younger brothers

  October 1980 — Chileng and Chan have a daughter, Sokhary

  May 1980 — Chileng and family arrive in the United States

  1981 — International community refuses to recognize the Vietnamese-backed government of Kampuchea; Khmer Rouge government-in-exile retains seat at the United Nations

  1982 — Chileng and Chan have a son, Sokchea

  — Khmer Rouge gain strength and fight a guerrilla war

  1983 — Chileng gains permanent employment

  1989 — Vietnamese troops withdraw from Cambodia; prime minister Hun Sen renames the country the State of Cambodia and re-establishes Buddhism as the state religion

  1991 — Peace agreement is signed by Cambodian government, various resistance forces, and neighboring countries; United Nations transitional authority shares power with representatives of various factions

  — Elections result in power-sharing among parties; monarchy is restored with Sihanouk again king, and country is renamed Kingdom of Cambodia

  1994 — Khmer Rouge splits; Ieng Sary and some defect to the government

  April 1998 — Pol Pot dies in exile

  1998 — Khmer Rouge collapses

  September 1998 — Chileng is sentenced to federal prison

  October 2004 — Chileng is diagnosed with liver cancer

  April 2005 — Chileng passes away

  Introduction

  by Carol Mortland

  Few of us ever spend time in a concentration camp, watch our family starve to death, see a wife and child killed before our eyes, live in a refugee camp, or serve time in federal prison. If it had happened to us, would we be able to then live with grace and humor and compassion?

  I know a man who could, and in the pages that follow, he will tell you his story. Chileng came to the United States as a refugee, a man willing to leave the country he loved because of the experiences he’d had there. He came from a tiny land in far-off Southeast Asia: Cambodia. This country, with a population of a mere seven million people in 1970, saw more than two million die over the next decade, killed by bombs sent from America, half a world away, and by other Cambodians. Cambodians, including those closest to Chileng, were killed by strangers they never saw and by fellow countrymen they knew intimately.

  Chileng was part Khmer (Ka-MYE), the ethnicity of most Cambodians, and part Chinese, a minority group in Cambodia. Like most of his fellow countrymen, Chileng was a Buddhist. He was also very smart and very funny.

  Before Chileng begins his story, I will tell you how my life joined his and briefly describe the events in Cambodia that led to Chileng’s life experiences.

  When I began learning about the horrors Cambodians had endured under a series of tyrannical governments—one of which has become the prototype of a government that consumes its own people, resources, and future—I was struck by the contrast between their lives and mine. I thought I’d been through difficult times. Now I was learning how difficult life could be. Even today, in 2008, I can count the major losses of my life—including the death of Chileng—on the fingers of one hand. Compare that to the losses in Chileng’s life when I first met him, twenty-five years ago: already, he’d lost all the members of his immediate family, most of his extended family, and many of his friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. If they weren’t dead, he didn’t know where they were.

  Chileng was born five years after me in a country that was still a protectorate. Cambodia had once ruled Southeast Asia, extending far beyond its present-day boundaries. Its wealth was based on intensive rice cultivation, and its ninth through fourteenth century empires built numerous temples whose ruins stand today. France’s primary interest in Cambodia was to exploit its resources for the benefit of the French, and they did little for the country but build roads and railroads by which to extract those resources. In the twentieth century, Cambodian nationalists increasingly called for independence. France responded by appointing a seemingly docile young prince to succeed to the throne in 1941 and, in the 1950s, by building a few schools and hospitals.

  Much to their surprise, King Sihanouk was far from docile, and he ended up championing the cause of Cambodian independence. By 1953, he had achieved his goal, and Cambodia declared her independence. Giving up his title to his father in order to throw himself entirely into politics, Prince Sihanouk led his country under a variety of titles, including prime minister, ambassador, and head of state. Endeavoring to keep his nation free of entanglements with other countries, Sihanouk joined the non-aligned movement and walked a fine line between cold war rivals. Sihanouk saw his country’s prosperity increase, its major products being rice, rubber, timber, fish, and gemstones; he also expanded educational opportunities and encouraged limited industrialization.

  Chileng’s family benefited from the expanded opportunities in the country, through his parents’ businesses and in his own schooling. By the early 1970s, he had earned an associate degree in sociology. At the same time, I completed a master’s degree in anthropology. But thereafter our lives could not have been more different.

  By 1970, America’s involvement in Vietnam had had a deep impact on some Americans but, for most, the immediate effect was negligible. Sure, we Americans argued about the war, saw sad scenes on our television screens, worried about higher taxes to cover war expenses, or knew someone who’d served in Vietnam. Some of us even demonstrated against the invasion of Cambodia in 1970.

  But the effect of the war on Cambodia was devastating. Vietnamese communists were increasingly seeking refuge in rural Cambodia, and American incursions and secret bombings were not effective in targeting these forces. Sihanouk stoutly refused to allow the United States to fight in Cambodia, and strongly protested what he saw as intrusions into his country. Angered by this cocky, independent little prince who wouldn’t assist in the struggle against the Vietnamese communists, the United States supported a coup against Prince Sihanouk. In 1970, a pro–American general took control of Cambodia, and its slide toward destruction accelerated. Corruption flourished as America pumped money and weapons into Cambodia, and the result was a bloated, inept army and government. General Lon Nol’s incompetence and obliviousness to what was happening around him were exceeded only by his arrogance.

  Meanwhile, the Cambodian communists were gaining strength. Numbering merely in the hundreds in the 1960s, they increased to tens of thousands by the early 1970s. Sihanouk was the first to call them the Khmer Rouge, or “red Cambodians.” Their control over land and people increased rapidly, drawing the country further into war.

  As America withdrew its troops from the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam, President Nixon increased efforts to defeat the communists by bombing them into oblivion. It’s difficult to understand how that didn’t happen, considering the bomb tonnage the United States dropped on Southeast Asia: 3.3 million tons, or more than America dropped on both Europe and the Pacific during all of World War II. In Cambodia alone, for six months in 1973, the United States dropped more bombs than it dropped over Japan in World War II. Phosphorous bombs, cluster bombs, and napalm all poured down on the heads of peasants.

  It is difficult to overstate the damage wrought by these bombs. It is estimated that between 200,000 and half a million Cambodians were killed. Some scholars suggest that American actions in Southeast Asia, particularly the bombing campaigns to “clear out the sanctuaries” in Cambodia, led to conditions that facilitated the flourishing of the Cambodi
an communists; that without the bombing, they wouldn’t have come to power and committed their slaughter.

  During this descent into chaos in Cambodia, Chileng found his options limited by the corruption, war, and violence surrounding him. Rather than continue his studies or do social work as he had wished, he became a policeman and then a soldier to avoid death in the rapidly spreading war. At the same time in the early 1970s, back in the country that was contributing to this mess, I—as oblivious to the situation as were the great majority of my countrymen—began doing what I wanted to do with my life: some archaeology, some anthropology, and I bought a thirty-acre farm with a friend in Washington. The war affecting Chileng in his country, although funded and partly run by my country, was affecting me very little.

  While Chileng drank wine and wondered what was going to happen in his homeland, I drank wine and wondered where to go to school and with whom to sleep. While he married and had a son, trying to make a life in the midst of war, I milked the goat and partied with my friends, surrounded by peace.

  When the Khmer Rouge won the war and changed his life in 1975, I was applying to graduate school. I studied and did dissertation research while the Khmer Rouge turned his country into a concentration camp and caused the deaths, in less than three years, of as many as two million people, almost a third of the population. When Chileng’s grandmother died in 1976 and his family was killed in 1977, I was studying for a doctorate at the University of Oregon—consumed with my own academic and personal traumas, unaware of his distress. When he escaped to Vietnam, I was falling in love, again.

  Fed up with Khmer Rouge intrusions over their border and frustrated by their continuing insults, the Vietnamese finally took action and invaded Cambodia in the winter of 1978–1979. Chileng accompanied the Vietnamese on their invasion while I was doing dissertation research in a Pentecostal church in the southern United States. When he escaped to Thailand, leaving his country forever, I was living in a log cabin on the peninsula across from Seattle, writing my dissertation. I wrote while he married Chan, joined her family, reunited with his brothers, and had a baby—all in a refugee camp outside his homeland.

  As I completed my doctoral requirements, he began his refugee journey to America. Two months after I became director of a refugee resettlement program on the West Coast, his family came to America.

  I met them at the airport on May 24, 1981. I laughed when I read Chileng’s description of our first meeting: I’ve never been “strikingly good looking,” but then I’ve never been a refugee meeting his sponsor.

  I didn’t yet comprehend the extent of Cambodia’s horror, but as the English of Chileng’s family improved and our contact increased, my innocence faded. I learned not just from books but from the mouths of people freshly freed from terror.

  As our communication and friendship developed, I occasionally talked to Chileng about the contrasts between my life and his, often with considerable guilt. He was conciliatory and comforting, and also realistic. How could I have known of his travail? What good would my knowing have done him? But I sensed, also, a tinge of anger that I hadn’t known, that no one had come to his rescue. While he brushed off my comments of regret and confusion, I felt he welcomed them.

  When Chileng evacuated Phnom Penh with his wife and family, he never saw his neighbors, extended family, school chums, teachers, fellow police, or army mates again. He never again saw oxcart drivers, Uncle Chung and Aunt Kanika, or fellow refugees on the road out of Phnom Penh, or the vast majority of his fellow Prayap villagers. He never again saw the Khmer Rouge cadre he met in Phnom Penh nor those who tormented him in Prayap. He never again met the other refugees among whom he lived and trained in Vietnam, nor any of the Vietnamese soldiers with whom he fought. It is as though someone had swept up his life behind him, removing the signs of the path he had walked.

  Chileng came to America with a large family, and it has grown larger since. But the family with whom he came was not the family with whom he left Phnom Penh in 1975 by order of the Khmer Rouge. There were eleven members of his family when Chileng left Phnom Penh, and ten members of his family when he came to the United States six years later—but they were completely different people. When he was evacuated from Phnom Penh, he left with a wife and son, grandmother and sister, parents-in-law, and brothers- and sister-in-law. First his father-in-law was led away to his execution. His wife’s mother, three younger brothers and little sister were moved to another village. He saw them a few times but then lost contact and never saw any of them again. His grandmother died of starvation. A few months later, his sister was sent to another site. Then, he saw his wife and baby killed.

  Of all these people, only one remained alive besides Chileng, and that was his sister. But, because he emigrated to America before he regained contact with her, she stayed behind in Cambodia, and he saw her only on his several visits there. He came to America without his sister, but with a different wife and child, brothers rather than a sister, different in-laws, and a stranger they attached to their family as their uncle.

  Chileng was a devoted Buddhist. He thought the Buddha had helped him survive the Khmer Rouge years. Why hadn’t the Buddha also spared his wife and young son? He wondered why so many other Cambodians had to die, why he had to suffer going to prison after being in America over fifteen years when he was just trying to help people. This was a paradox that bothered him, but not enough to forego the comfort of his temple and beliefs.

  In addition to his family, Chileng’s personality drew to him a great number of friends everywhere he lived: in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, and the United States. He lost not only family throughout his life, he lost friends. And now they have lost him. He had so many friends where he lived that it was a challenge for his family to keep him from over-extending himself, and they usually failed. I can’t forget his last visits to the temple; when he came unexpectedly, those at the temple quickly called others and within minutes many more people were there to greet, laugh with, and talk to Chileng.

  I also have been the beneficiary of Chileng’s friendship and that of his family. They not only allowed me to witness their lives, they drew me into their lives. Always, they were kind, solicitous, and generous. And for that, and many other reasons, they were family to me. I loved some of them some of the time, didn’t like some of them some of the time, was angry with some of them some of the time, and was often offended. I have no doubt—and they shuffle around as they try to deny it—they had the same experiences with me.

  I was drawn to Chileng and his family because they were bright and ambitious, and they were interested in me because they were eager to learn English. They were also fun to be around. My colleague, Judy Ledgerwood—a fine anthropologist—also worked in the refugee office and began studying Cambodian language with Chileng’s sisters. Chileng’s family was especially helpful in teaching us more about Cambodian culture, and they valued what we knew about America. As Chileng and I drove from appointment to appointment, meeting to meeting, he told me his story.

  Now he can tell his story to you. Chileng passionately wanted this book written. He’d told me so many times in the first years I knew him. But his English and my Cambodian were inadequate to the task, and neither of us had the time. Being in prison almost two decades later, ironically, provided time for him to increase his vocabulary and write. He also met fellow prisoners and teachers who proofread his work. He was spurred on by the work of Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor who won an Oscar for the first acting he ever did in the movie The Killing Fields. He also wrote an autobiography. I think Chileng envied Haing Ngor: many Cambodians did. They thought their stories as potent and moving as the story he portrayed in the movie and told in his book. Other Cambodians have told their own stories but, still, Chileng felt driven to have his version recorded.

  Chileng shared much with Haing Ngor. Both survived the holocaust of their homeland, both had jobs helping refugees in the refugee camps and after coming to the United States, and both died before their time.
But Haing won an Oscar and Chileng went to prison. That intensified his desire to tell his story.

  I promised Chileng I’d finish his manuscript, but it was more difficult than I’d anticipated. It was hard to proofread his words and harder still to write the epilogue. Chileng hadn’t told his family, even his wife, that he was writing a book, and for good reasons. He was worried that his wife would be upset with his description of his love for his first wife. He worried that his brothers would resent his portrayal of his stepmother. Just before he died, he said again that he didn’t want to hurt his brothers. He also recognized that, although he was being as accurate as possible, his memories weren’t necessarily the same as his brothers. He saw the complexity of his memories, the possibility that his stepmother suffered in comparison with both his lost mother and his beloved grandmother.

  Chileng’s story was written on his body and in his memories. Now it is written on these pages.

  1

  My Good Life

  Cambodia is the land of my birth, and I was happy there as a child and a young man. Then, in my early twenties, Cambodia became a charnel house, with vast dark fields of brutal labor, villages pale with starvation, and red forests of killing. I’ve lived through good times and bad, but my life began with the good.

  I was born on October 3, 1950, in the year of the dragon, under the zodiac sign, Libra. On that day, my Chinese Cambodian father was wandering restlessly in his ripening vegetable gardens on a hot humid morning. Although it was already 80 degrees, a cool breeze had started up from the southeast, signaling the beginning of the end of the monsoon rains. Pausing a moment to wipe his brow, my father heard shouts from his house. His mother was calling to him, saying, “Come quick, Keang! It’s time! Your wife is in labor, and your child will come soon!”

  When my father reached home, he heard his wife, Kany, crying out in pain, despite his mother’s attempts to make her comfortable. “You should go fetch the midwife now,” she said, and he left to do just that.