Category Archives: Cambodia

Here’s a sample post from Santepheap (Peace), a promising new blog on all things Cambodian.

Leaving the House of Ghosts by Sarah Streed chronicles the lives of three Cambodian refugees who were sponsored by an American family in the early 1980s.

Jack and Joan Streed from Excelsior, Minnesota, took three teen-age refugees into their home to live with them and their four children. Having survived the traumas of auto genocide in their homeland by escaping to refugee camps in Thailand, these boys had major hurdles to overcome in living through the nightmares of their past horrors, becoming a part of their new family, attending high school and learning the ways of the American culture.

Sarah Streed, the oldest child of the family, was amazed at the stories told by her foster brothers. She decided to record their stories and the stories of many other survival victims of the Pol Pot slaughter. Her extensive research on Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge regime provide the beginning of the history of Cambodian immigration to the mid-western United States.

The strength of character and determination is well illustrated by both the host family and their newly adopted boys. This is a must read book for anyone interested in the cause of assisting Cambodians to rebuild their country.

Leaving the House of Ghosts is available on Amazon.com.

KNOWING CAMBODIA is a weekly feature on the Santepheap Weblog that highlights organizations, people and other things that give insight into Cambodia and overseas Cambodians. It appears every Thursday.

via Instapundit

And here’s a plug for another new book on Cambodians: In the Shadows of Angkor, edited by Sharon May, featuring photographs by Richard Murai (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004).

Every year, when my family finds reason to gather–for a holiday, birthday, graduation, and sometimes just because–when the coconut curry is cooked and smoke swirls heaven-bound from burning incense, the ghosts come home to feed.

Before any guests are allowed to eat, my mother prepares a tray of food, her best dishes–sticky rice, glass noodles fried with banana buds, steamed pork buns–and my father lights a handful of incense sticks. Setting these on an altar, we pray to the spirits of our dead relatives and invite them to the feast.

These spirits are the ghosts of my uncle, Sao Kim Yan, a math professor; my grandfather, Khan Reang, a rice farmer; my aunt, Koh Kenor, a housewife who was married to a businessman; and so many others who died during the war in our homeland. They are the restless ones who cross oceans and continents to find my family, now safe and comfortable in America. They are the ones who did not make it while they were living.

–From “The Dinner Guests” by Putsata Reang

See also earlier excerpts from Music in the Dark, about Daran Kravanh.

There must have been many “reluctant elements” in Cambodia at that time because every night the soldiers took someone to kill. At first they did not kill in the light of day. The soldiers always took people at night and killed them in the animal world of the forest.

The soldiers were constantly looking for mistakes, indications of sabotage, enemies. They became more and more irrational. At first just the staff and military officers of the former government were killed. After a while, the definition of enemies expanded to include anyone with an education, anyone wearing glasses, then the families, even small children, of the enemy. People were killed for the smallest imperfection–asking a soldier a question, eating food other than that rationed to them, being late to work, anything at all. We used to say these men had pineapple eyes: hundreds of eyes looking for mistakes and reasons to kill.

One of the men I had been in the forest with made the fatal mistake of missing his family. he had not adjusted to living in the cooperative and became depressed. His depression made him careless, however, and he began to talk about missing his wife and children, missing his home in Phnom Penh, misisng the feeling of being full. So one night the soldiers pulled him from his hammock and took him to the forest. We heard a single shot. They wanted to kill his idea of what society should be. That was how the soldiers were. They believed that in order to kill an idea, you must kill the body.

I came to know all of this not at once but gradually over a number of weeks. When I realized what had happened, I cried to myself, “This is not Cambodia and these are not my people! Where is my Cambodia?” I could not comprehend.

SOURCE: Music through the Dark: A Tale of Survival in Cambodia, by Bree Lafreniere (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 81-82. The speaker is Daran Kravanh, whose love for music endangered his life and whose accordion-playing helped save it.

I cannot tell you how or why I survived; I do not know myself. It is like this: love and music and memory and invisible hands, and something that comes out of a society of the living and the dead, for which there are no words.

UPDATE: By coincidence, the January 29 edition of The Guardian carries a story about a remarkable documentary film, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, by one of the few survivors of Tuol Sleng.

Unlike Belsen or Auschwitz, Tuol Sleng was primarily a political death centre. Leading members of the Khmer Rouge movement, including those who formed an early resistance to Pol Pot, were murdered here, usually after “confessing” that they had worked for the CIA, the KGB, Hanoi: anything that would satisfy the residing paranoia. Whole families were confined in small cells, fettered to a single iron bar. Some slept naked on the stone floor. On a school blackboard was written:

1. Speaking is absolutely forbidden.

2. Before doing something, the authorisation of the warden must be obtained.

“Doing something” might mean only changing position in the cell, and the transgressor would receive 20 to 30 strokes with a whip. Latrines were small ammunition boxes labelled “Made in USA”. For upsetting a box of excrement the punishment was licking the floor with your tongue, torture or death, or all three.

Of course, the reporter is John Pilger, so the chief culprits are Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, whose work “Pol Pot completed” (that notorious capitalist lickspittle!).

Weeks went by and word reached the cooperative leader that I was able to play music. This leader was a woman named Miss Khon. She replaced Mr. Nhek when he was taken away to be killed because the Khmer Rouge believed he had been disloyal.

One day, Miss Khon came to see me while I was cutting a log. She asked me, “Are you the one who plays the strange instrument?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then I order you to play!”

I was so scared I jumped down and ran to get my accordion and find Mr. Chhoeun. I looked for him everywhere and finally I saw him and exclaimed, “We must play music right away for Angkar!”

We returned to the leader, who stood waiting. Armed bodyguards were on either side of her. She did not have a gun. She did not need one. If she wanted someone to die, she just used her voice. I was nervous, and my arms were shaking from having cut logs all day. I wondered how well I’d be able to play. Miss Khon asked, “What do you call that instrument?”

“It’s called an accordion,” I said.

“Is that a Cambodian word?” she asked.

“No,” was all I said.

“Did you make that instrument yourself?” she asked.

“No,” is all I said again.

I grew more tense. I waited for Mr. Chhoeun to tune his mandolin. Miss Khon grew impatient and yelled at us to hurry. When we were ready to start, I asked the leader what song she wanted. She said she wanted to hear a song called “The Children Love Angkar without Limit.” I played and she listened while staring at the accordion. Then she sat down and asked for another song. I don’t remember what that song was. Then she requested a third song, “The Children Work on the Railroad.”

The last song she asked for was a song about how the capitalists killed the Khmer Rouge by hanging them from trees. The Khmer Rouge loved this song because it filled them with emotion and gave them a taste for revenge. As the leader sang along with the music, it appeared some distant emotions were flooding back to her. I recognized the look because I had seen the same expression on my mother’s face. Tears formed at the edges of her eyes. I pretended not to notice. After we had finished she stood up, put her hand on my shoulder, and said: “I want you to come play for me at my house.” Many times after that she ordered me to play.

Once when I went to the leader’s house, she asked me if I would like a bag of jewelry in exchange for my music. But what good was jewelry to me? I said, “Thank you so much. But may I have some sugar and oranges instead?”

She told me, “Yes, take what you like.”

I took the sugar and oranges and left her house running to share them with the others. Giving another person an orange was not just giving them an orange. It was giving them a day of life.

SOURCE: Music through the Dark: A Tale of Survival in Cambodia, by Bree Lafreniere (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 100-101.