The cooks continue to make rice soup in a big pot and serve it to the villagers. During mealtime, my family lines up with our soup bowls in our hands along with the other villagers to receive our ration. The cooks used to serve us rice gruel, but now there are only enough grains in the pot to make soup. When it is my turn to receive the food, I watch anxiously as the cook stirs the rice soup. Holding my breath nervously, I pray she will take pity on me and scoop my ladle of soup from the bottom of the pot, where all the solid food rests. Staring at the rice pot, I let out a breath of hopelessness when I see her take the ladle and stir the soup at my turn. Both hands tightly gripping my bowl, I take my two ladlefulls and walk to my shaded spot underneath a tree, away from all the others.
I never eat my soup all at once, and do not want my own family to take mine away. I sit quietly, savoring it spoonful by spoonful, drinking the broth first. What’s left at the bottom of my bowl is approximately three spoonfuls of rice, and I have to make this last. I eat the rice slowly, and even pick up one grain if I drop it on the ground. When it is gone I will have to wait until tomorrow before I can have more. I look into my bowl, and my heart cries as I count the eight grains that are left in my bowl. Eight grains are all I have left! I pick up each grain and chew it slowly, trying to relish the taste, not wanting to swallow. Tears mix with the food in my mouth; my heart falls to my stomach when all the eight grains are gone and I see that the others are still eating theirs.
The population in the village is growing smaller by the day. Many people have died, mostly from starvation, some from eating poisonous food, others killed by soldiers. Our family is slowly starving to death and yet, each day, the government reduces our food ration. Hunger, always there is hunger. We have eaten everything that is edible, from rotten leaves on the ground to the roots we dig up. Rats, turtles, and snakes caught in our traps are not wasted as we cook and eat their brains, tails, hides, and blood. When no animals are caught, we roam the fields for grasshoppers, beetles, and crickets.
In Phnom Penh, I would have thrown up if someone told me I would have to eat those things. Now, when the only alternative is to starve, I fight others for a dead animal lying in the road. Surviving for another day has become the most important thing to me. About the only thing I have not eaten is human flesh. I have heard many stories about other villages where people have eaten human flesh. There was a story about a woman in a village nearby who turned to cannibalism. They say she was a good woman, not the monster the soldiers portray her to be. She was so hungry that when her husband died from eating poisonous food, she ate his flesh and fed it to her children. She did not know that the poison in his body would kill her and her children as well.
A man in our village came upon a stray dog in the road one day. The poor dog did not have much meat on it, but the man killed and ate it anyway. The next day, the soldiers arrived at the man’s door. He cried and begged for mercy, but they did not pay any attention to him. He raised his arms as a shield, but they did not protect him from the blows of the soldiers’ fists and rifle stocks. He was never seen again after the soldiers took him away. His crime was that he did not share the dog meat with the community.
I feel sorry for this man’s fate, for I would have done the very same thing to my dog. In Phnom Penh, our family had a friendly little puppy with a wet nose. It was a tiny thing with shaggy long hair that dragged on the ground. The dog loved to hide underneath big piles of clothes on our oriental rugs. Our housekeeper was quite fat and did not know that the dog liked to hide. It was a terrible sight when she stepped on and killed the dog. Pa threw the body away before any of us girls saw it. It shames me now to know that I would eat it if it were alive today.
Thinking about food makes my stomach growl with hunger. Pa tells me today is New Year’s. Though my feet ache I decide to go for a walk in the nearby fields. Pa has been granted permission from the chief for me to stay home because I am sick. After a few hours of lying in our hut, the growls in my stomach demand that I search for food. My eyes probe the ground, hoping to find some food to fill my hungry stomach. It’s a hot day and the sun burns right through my hair, searing my greasy scalp. I run my fingers through my hair feeling for the lice that make my head itch. With no shampoo or soap, it is a constant battle to keep myself clean, and as a result, my hair clumps together in greasy knots, which makes it hard for me to catch the lice. I pause in the shade underneath a tree for a short rest.
In Phnom Penh, I could run very fast around our home, barely avoiding the corners and sharp edges of furniture. Even on school nights, I would seldom go to sleep until late. I am now always so tired. Starvation has done terrible things to my body. After one month of having very little to eat my body is thin all over, except for my stomach and my feet. I can count every rib in my rib cage, but my stomach protrudes outward, bloated like a ball between my chest and hips. The flesh on my feet is so swollen it glistens as if it will pop open. Curious, I push my thumb into my swollen feet, pressing the flesh inward and creating a big dent. Counting under my breath I wait to see how long it takes for the dent to fill itself up. After a while, I make more dents on my feet, legs, arms, and face. My body is like a balloon. The dents I make reinflate slowly. Even walking is a difficult task because my joints hurt whenever I move. When I do move, seeing where I am going becomes a challenge because my eyes are nearly swollen shut. When I do see well enough to walk, my lungs yearn for enough air, and being short of breath, it takes a laborious effort to control my balance. Most days, I have neither the energy nor the desire to walk around, but I must walk today to search for food.
Slowly, I make my way to the blackened forest in the back of the village. A couple times a year, the soldiers set sections of the forest ablaze to create more farmland. I don’t know why they do this since we haven’t the strength to work the land already cleared. This part of the forest has just been burned a few days before and the ground is still hot and smoking. I search the ground for animals and birds that might have been trapped or killed in the fire, providing me with ready-cooked food. Last month, in another part of the forest the Khmer Rouge razed to create more farmland, I found an armadillo curled up in ball, its shell burnt and crisp. Still, it took some work on my part to uncurl the ball and get to the tasty cooked meat inside. Today, I have no such luck.
A long time ago Pa told me that April is a very good luck month. In the Cambodian culture, New Year’s always falls in April, which means that all the children born before New Year’s become a year older. In the Cambodian calendar year, Kim is now eleven, Chou is nine, I am six, and Geak is four. In Cambodia, people don’t celebrate the day on which they were born until they’ve lived past their fiftieth year. Then families and friends gather to feast on sumptuous food and honor the person’s longevity. Pa told me that in other countries, people become a year older only after having passed the exact day and month that they came into the world. On this day every year, friends and families gather to celebrate with food and presents.
“Even children?” I asked him, incredulous.
“Especially children. Children get a big sweet cake all to themselves.”
My stomach swishes at the thought of having a sweet cake all to myself. I pick up a piece of charcoal from the ground. Tentatively, I put it in my mouth and chew it. It does not taste like anything, just chalky and a little salty. I am six years old and instead of celebrating with birthday cakes, I chew on a piece of charcoal. I pick up a couple more pieces for later and put them in my pockets as I head toward home.
Passing through the village, the stench of rotten flesh and human waste hangs heavily in the air. Many of the villagers are getting sicker and sicker from disease and starvation. They lie in their huts, whole families together, unable to move. Concave faces have the appearance of what they will look like once the flesh rots away. Other faces are swollen, waxy, and bloated, resembling a fat Buddha, except they don’t smile. Their arms and legs are mere bones with fleshless fingers and toes attached to them. They lie
there, as if no longer of this world, so weak they cannot swat away the flies sitting on their faces. Occasionally, parts of their body convulse involuntarily and you know they are alive. However, there is nothing we can do but let them He there until they die.
My family does not look very different from them. I think how I must appear to Ma and Pa. Their hearts must break at the sight of me. Perhaps that’s why Pa’s eyes cloud over when he looks upon us. As I near my hut, the stench and heat overwhelm me, causing my temples to throb. The pain in my feet travels up to my stomach. Showing no mercy, the sun burns through my black clothes, scorching the oil on my skin. I tilt my face up to the sky, forcing myself to look directly into the sun. Its brightness stings my eyes, making me temporarily blind.
As April turns into May and May into June, the leaves shrivel, the trees turn brown, and the river streams dry up. Under the summer sun, the stench of death is so strong in the village, I cover my nose and mouth with my hands and breathe only the air that filters through my fingers. There are so many dead people here. The neighbors are too weak to bury all the corpses. Often the bodies are left in the hot sun, until the smell permeates the surrounding air, causing everyone passing by to pinch their noses. The flies come buzzing around the corpses and lay millions of eggs on the bodies. When the bodies are finally buried, they are nothing more than large nests of maggots.
For lack of anything else to do when my body gets too sick to work in the garden, I often watch the villagers dispose of the corpses. I see them dig a hole underneath the hut of the dead family and cringe as they push the bodies into the hole. The dead families are buried together in one grave. There were times when such scenes terrified me, but I have seen the ritual performed so many times that I now feel nothing. The people who die here have no relatives to grieve for them. I am sure that my uncles do not know of our whereabouts either.
One of our neighbors in the village is a widowed mother of three. She has been alone since soldiers murdered her husband. Her name is Chong and her girls Peu and Srei are five and six, and she had a baby boy of about two. The boy has become the village’s latest victim of starvation. I saw him before he died: his body was all swollen, very much like mine, with bloodless skin that looked like white rubber. Chong held him in her arms everywhere she went. Sometimes she carried him in a scarf tied diagonally across one shoulder and her back, his lifeless feet dangling in the air. Once she tried to breast-feed him at our house, but nothing would come out of her body. Her breasts were empty sacks hanging against her ribs, but nevertheless she lovingly put them in the boy’s mouth. He never responded to his mother’s nipple. He moved or cried but lay in her arms as if in a coma. Every once in a while, he jerked his head or moved his fingers to show that he was still alive, but we all knew he would not make it. There was nothing we could do for the baby. He needed food, but we had none to spare. At our house, Chong held her baby and talked to him as if he weren’t dying, just sleeping. He died quietly in his sleep a few days after they visited us. Still, his mother continued to carry him with her, refusing to believe he was dead until the chief forced the baby from her arms and buried him.
The two girls and Chong have taken a turn for the worse since the death of the boy. A few days after his death, his two sisters decided to go to the forest and look for food by themselves. They were so hungry they ate mushrooms that turned out to be poisonous. After they died, Chong ran hysterically over to our house. “They were shaking all over! They kept calling me to help them, and I couldn’t! They kept crying. They didn’t even know what happened to them!” Ma catches Chong in her arms as she falls to her knees.
“They are resting now. Don’t worry, they are sleeping.” Ma holds Chong in her arms.
“They turned all white, the hair on their bodies stood up and blood came out of my babies’ pores! My babies shook and cried for me to help them, for me to take their pain away. I couldn’t do anything for them. They rolled on the ground screaming in pain, asking me to make it stop. I tried to hold on to them, but I wasn’t strong enough. I watched them die! I watched them die! They died crying for me, but I couldn’t help them.” Chong sobs uncontrollably, sliding to the floor, and lays her head on Ma’s lap.
“There is nothing we can do now. They are resting.” Ma strokes Chong’s arm, trying to soothe her pain. But no one could save her from the pain; she cries in howls. She reached her hands into her shirt to massage her chest as if trying to exorcise the pain from her heart.
Standing beside Ma, I watch the girls being buried near their house. I cannot see their bodies, but earlier two villagers had brought out two small bundles wrapped in old black clothes. The bundles looked so small that it is hard to imagine they were once the girls I knew. I wonder if the Angkar cares that they are dead. I remember when we first arrived at Ro Leap, the chief told us the Angkar would take care of us and would provide us with everything we need. I guess the Angkar doesn’t understand that we need to eat.
I turn to look at Geak, who is sitting under a tree with Chou, away from the burial procession. She is so small and weak. The lack of food has made her loose so much of her beautiful hair and it is now little more than wispy patches on her head. As if sensing my stare, she turns her head toward me and waves. My poor little sister, I cry silently, when will it be your turn to be bundled up like them? Geak waves at me again and even attempts a smile, baring her teeth. A wave of heaviness descends upon me. By smiling, she only manages to stretch her skin back even more, and I can see what she will look like when she is dead and her skin dries over her bones.
Chong sobs loudly as the villagers put the girls in a little hole. When she sees the villagers cover her girls with dirt, she runs over to the grave and attempts to climb in. Tears, phlegm, and drool from her eyes, nose, and mouth drip all over her shirt. “No,” she cries. “I’m all alone. I’m all alone.” Two male villagers pull her out of the grave and hold her back until the last shovel of dirt is piled on top of Peu and Srei. When the job is done, the villagers walk away to the next hut to dig the next grave. “This one will be easier,” a man says as he shakes his head. “No survivors in the family.”
After the deaths of her children, Chong has now gone crazy. Sometimes I see her walking around still talking to her kids as if they are there with her. Other times her eyes clear up and she realizes they are dead, and screams, beating her fists on her chest. A few days later, Chong comes to our house with great news for Ma. “I have found the perfect food—don’t know why I didn’t think of it before! It’s safe and it doesn’t taste bad either,” she says excitedly to Ma. Then her eyes fog over, her hands wave about her in agitated motions, and she whispers, “I could have saved my children.”
“Wait, what is it? What is it?” Ma asks anxiously.
“Earthworms! They’re fat and juicy. You take the dirt off, cut them open, wash them, and cook them. It isn’t bad, cook ’em like you do noodles. I’ve tried it! Here’s a little bowl.” She hands her bowl of earthworms to Ma.
“Thanks,” Ma manages to say.
“I have to go. I have to go find my children.” Chong smiles at Ma and rushes off.
I feel like retching at the thought of eating them. Earthworms feed off of dead things in the ground. For me, eating them would be like eating dead people. I try to picture a nice clean bowl of worms, but the picture changes to worms crawling on the rotten flesh of the dead we bury, writhing and squirming their way into the body by the thousands. “Don’t worry, I still have some jewelry left that we can trade for food. We won’t have to do this,” Ma says to me.
We are some of the few very fortunate people in the village who have possessions to trade with the base people for food. Our situation is not as bad as others because we still have gold, diamonds, and precious gems. At Uncle Leang’s hut, Ma managed to hide them from the soldiers by sewing them in the straps of our bags, which we kept even after they burned our clothes. This jewelry, though beautiful, is now almost worthless because of the war. An ounce of gold buys only a
few pounds of rice, if we’re lucky. Most of the time, we get less than that. Among the many crimes that exist in the Khmer Rouge society, bartering for food is viewed as an act of treason. If caught, the trader is whipped into confessing the names of all parties involved. The Khmer Rouge believes one individual should not have what the rest of the country does not have. When one person secretly acquires more food than the others have there is an inequality of food distribution in the community. Since we are all supposed to be equal, if one person starves, then all should starve.
A few weeks ago, Kim told me that maybe the Angkar isn’t to blame. He says the name Pol Pot is passing through many lips in the rice fields and village. Many are saying that Pol Pot is the leader of the Angkar but still no one knows who he is. They whisper that he is a soldier, that he is brilliant, and that he is the father of the country. They also say he is fat.
They say he has kept his identity a secret to guard against assassins. They say that he liberated us from foreign domination and gave us independence. They tell us Pol Pot makes us work hard because he wants to purify our spirit and help us achieve beyond our potential as farmers. The say he has a round face, full lips, and kind eyes. I wonder if his kind eyes can see us starving.
After the villagers buried her children, we see less and less of Chong now. She has come to be known in the village as “the crazy lady.” She eventually ate some poisonous food and died the same way her daughters did. Her body was found by one of the villagers the next day, all contorted and bloody. They buried her in the ground next to her children.
We survive this period because Pa is friendly with the chief. The base people do not eat at communal kitchens but cook for themselves. Among them, the chief’s family is the fattest and wears only new black, shiny clothes, not the faded gray rags we have on. Pa is able to get extra rice in exchange for the gifts he gives to the chief. Pa lies and tells the chief that he was only a shopkeeper in Phnom Penh, that he found the jewelry in the deserted houses during the evacuation. Pa gives him Ma’s ruby bracelets, her diamond rings, and much more in exchange for a few pounds of uncooked rice. Pa puts the rice in a bag, inside a container, and hides it beneath a small pile of clothes so that the other villagers cannot see it. On some nights when we really need it, Pa allows Ma to cook a tiny portion of the rice and mask the smell by burning damp, decayed leaves in the fire. This extra rice is our family’s defense weapon against completely starving to death.