by | 2 July 2024 · 11:37 am

Journalism in China & Taiwan, 1990s

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 1-4:

My mom bought a radio for me when I was sixteen. I found out I could hear broadcasts from Taiwan. Listening to “enemy radio” had been illegal for a long time. One of my father’s colleagues had been tortured as a spy in the 1960s, when there was hostility between Taiwan and mainland China, for breaking this law. He ended up cutting his own throat with a razor.

The way the hosts spoke surprised me. They didn’t read from a script or talk like official spokespeople. They shared literature, music, plays, and jokes. One time one of them even went out to her balcony and described how beautiful the sunset was. I’d never experienced such a thing in any media before. I learned to make my own tape, telling stories to myself, in my lonely girlhood.

In 1994, while studying at a railway college in Hunan Province, I took one of those tapes to Hunan People’s Broadcasting Station to look for a summer job. I was too naïve to know that there was no possibility for a student like me to work at a state-controlled media network. The state allocated jobs to everyone. My role was decided already, as an accountant working at the 17th Railway Bureau. The head of the station told me to leave. However, after listening to my tape, the radio host Shang Neng offered me a half hour in his program. He was famous enough to be able to fight against his boss’s disapproval. All state-controlled stations needed money to survive after the 1992 economic reforms—when China set the goal of establishing a socialist market system, opening the gate to the outside world—and Shang Neng attracted a lot of commercials for them.

One year later, in 1995, I signed a contract with the radio station by winning an open competition. It was the first time the station had selected staff through an open market and fair competition. Thinking that a contract meant a job that was only temporary, my mother wrote a harsh letter to warn me of what I might lose if I gave up my state-allocated railway job: my house, hukou, social benefits, safety. In short, all she had had to struggle for her entire life. I didn’t write back to her. Living in a society with a long history of collectivism, we rarely talk about our personal feelings at home, and this was especially true after a period of excessive politicization where the idea of individual humanity was seen as “spiritual pollution.” It was hard to tell my mom that, for me, a job was a spiritual human bond. People wrote to me and I read their letters on the radio; it was a human bond. There were long-suppressed voices that wanted to be heard, and I was there. I did nothing but listen, yet the hole in my life was filled by strangers. More than making a living, I was alive.

In 1999, in order to survive, all the stations—radio and television alike—had to produce programs that spoke to people’s needs. New Youth, a program on Hunan TV, invited me to be their host, and my job was to interview young people who brought sharp ideas to different fields. This was during China’s explosive economic growth, and I realized these people had one thing in common: instead of destroying the old, they built the new where creativity was most unfettered. Life itself has to grow, and where there is a gap, there is a way out. I ended up writing their story as well, including the parts that the station cut, to provide a fuller picture for the magazines. The media market was expanding quickly and competitively around 2000, so it had been to my advantage to work freely, and not sign a contract with the TV station. As one of the first generation media freelancers, I got a taste of what it was like to be independent. Like the rock-and-roll star Cui Jian sang, “As long as I have a pen, no one can stop me.”

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by | 28 June 2024 · 5:02 pm

Khmer Villagers vs. Forced Migrants

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 211-213:

When we first arrive in the village, I give my personal history as a widower separated from his wife, hoping to be able to stay in the village and have the possibility of planting some food to send to my brother, who is required to go to the front lines (in the youth mobile unit). However, quite the contrary, in this village we have no possessions whatsoever. We are only temporary people. Even the place where we sleep is temporary.

The owners of the house stare at us like we are creatures of Hell risen up to dwell beside them. They loathe us. They never invite us up into the house to visit.

On the day of our arrival, it just so happens that there is a large rainstorm, so kingkuok toads come out here and there to catch food. The toads in this area are strangely large, even larger than toads in the river country. We catch the toads for food. The owners of the house find this very odd, and Mother Lam says to us, “Damn, you children eat such awful food! The people who came before you never ate such things as you folks. It’s disgusting! Hey! Bury the skins far away, don’t throw them into my mulberry bushes!”

Indeed, the people of this area are very clean. Never mind the toads—they won’t even eat little frogs caught in the village. They will only eat frogs caught out in the rice fields. But we are filthy people, eating anything. Some even go so far as to eat earthworms. The earthworms in this place are also strangely large, as thick as my pinky and as long as twenty-five to thirty centimeters. They call them traok earthworms.

After leaving the jungle, we thought we had escaped from worry. But after coming to live with the base people, we have emotional issues, trouble sleeping, trouble eating, trouble relieving ourselves. Having just arrived, we do not yet know the proper order of things, and we don’t know where to find a latrine, so we dig holes and defecate among the mulberry bushes. They scold us so loudly it can be heard throughout the village, and then they take us to the cooperative chairman to be “built.” Have we no shame!? The jungle people come into society and can’t do anything right—not even shit.

…

Back when we lived in the jungle with other people of the same “ministerial” [kongsey < Fr. conseil for colonial administrator, therefore urban] class as ourselves, when we all got full or starved together, we never suffered emotional hurt. But coming to live with the “capitalist” [figuratively, the base people, not the new people, but separate from the kongsey] class is emotionally painful. We collect our rice rations at the appointed rate of half a can apiece, while they collect a different amount. We bring bowls to collect the rice, while they bring baskets. They eat rice for every meal, while we eat only phek porridge (porridge mixed with leaves).

When we fall sick with a fever and ask to rest, they say it is “consciousness sickness” [psychosomatic or faked illness due to prerevolutionary mindsets], and they taunt us, saying that it is because we are so lazy that we can’t find anything to eat. The others can get sick as often as they like, and when they do, they are tasked with fishing with nets. We are the only ones they send out on mobile units, while the others cool their heels back at the village. Only a week after arriving at this village, my younger brother Samorn is once again assigned to the district’s young men’s mobile unit at the Kok Rumchek worksite.

One evening, as we are busy transplanting rice seedlings, we are suddenly sent back to the village to prepare for departure on a mobile work detail. We are not led by any of the base people, but are instead driven off like cattle, without a grain of rice or salt for rations. They tell us that clothing, shoes, and rice have already been prepared for us in Phnom Srok. At dusk we enter Phnom Srok and have no idea where to find clothing, shoes, or rice. It’s not until very late at night that we finally get some uncooked rice to make porridge with. In the morning we are sent away again with no directions and no assignment.

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by | 27 June 2024 · 6:22 am

Khmer Rouge Fertilizer Crews

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 201-203:

The piles of ash on the farm are all used up now. The fertilizer unit makes its own ashes to mix with the excrement. Making ashes is not an easy task; we must fell large trees, saw them into pieces, carry them and place them into piles, and then light fires to burn them. Now the fertilizer unit has been divided into three teams: the ash makers, the excrement carriers, and the fertilizer mixers.

I and Bong Sae, my group leader (a former teacher in Kampong Speu province), who both have similar wounds, are placed in the excrement carrying team. This team has four people: Bong Sae, Bong Phon, Bong Him, and me. We stop using bangky baskets to carry the excrement because we find two wooden buckets, each attached to a board. We carry one bucket between two people. It’s very difficult because we can’t breathe without taking in the stench, but our labor is not as rigorous as that of the ash makers.

Each morning we carry the buckets from the fertilizer shed and scoop the excrement out of the latrines from one end of the village to the other and then back again. In the morning, we must carry four buckets, and another four buckets in the evening. At first, we are reluctant out of sheer disgust. Then after doing it every day, our noses get tighter, and we grow accustomed to the stench. After scooping the excrement into the buckets, those who smoke sit and have a smoke to gather their strength. I’m not a smoker, so I walk around and look at the villagers’ huts, observing the lives of each family. Only we, the excrement carriers, have the possibility of becoming so intimately familiar with the real lives of the villagers.

We go from one latrine to the next, from one hut to the next. The shit from this latrine is like the shit from that one, their shit is like my shit. All of it is dark green colored like the leaves of trees, different from animal droppings only in that ours smells worse. Before we had latrines, we relieved ourselves in the fields. When they encountered our excrement now and then, the base people would say, “human tracks, but animal shit.” Only the excrement of the cadres, the chhlops [lit. ‘spies’: monitors and enforcers], the cooperative chief, and the soldiers has a natural color. If any of the people’s latrines has fresh excrement with a color like that of an animal, it is certain that last night they had rice or corn to eat. If they didn’t trade for it, then they must have stolen some corn from someone’s field.

Some latrines have a decent amount of excrement, while others hardly have anything at all to scoop out—even if we only come by once a week. It’s because the owner is down sick and has no leaves to eat, so there’s not much excrement to produce. At each hut we see illness and suffering. Tears, pus, blood, clear fluid from sores, all flowing and mixing together. When I never saw anybody besides myself, I used to think that I suffered the worst. But after seeing others around me, I am surprised. Most of the people in the village are suffering as badly as I am. Some even have it worse than I do: they have no family, but are left to suffer in illness, all alone.

Some days, the excrement carriers postpone scooping excrement for a while to help carry a dead body to be buried. We cut wild bamboo and split it into strips about a meter-eighty in length, then we use dah kun, yeav, or preng vines to weave the strips into a lattice to wrap the corpse in (instead of a coffin) and carry it to be buried. Some corpses have grass mats to be wrapped in, while other corpses have nothing at all but these bamboo lattices. The four of us don’t know any proper religious rites, so we simply bury the corpses straight, like we would any other thing. And we are not afraid of the corpses either, for we have become the village corpse buriers, and we are as accustomed to this work as we are to the smell of excrement.

Those with strength are sent out on mobile assignments away from the village, and those who are ill nearby have no strength to carry the corpses to be buried. So it falls to the excrement carriers. Every two or three days we have a body to carry off and bury.

There is no special place for burying bodies. We usually bury them in the forest behind the houses of the dead, a distance of only about 100 or 150 meters.

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by | 24 June 2024 · 5:57 am

Khmer Jungle Hospital

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 157-158:

All the patients at the hospital are Life Slaves; there are no base people mixed in. Some people have the shivers, some have swelling, some have dysentery, some have skin lesions. These are the types of illnesses common during this so-called revolutionary era. Patients lie moaning and groaning day and night. Some patients with no hope of survival have been abandoned here by their families to lie alone, sick and moaning. Some of them have siblings or a spouse to sit with them, help them relieve themselves, and bring them food or water.

We can’t tell who are the medics and who are the soldiers. They all wear the same black clothing and black caps with silk kramas around their necks. The medics don’t watch the patients. They are at their own place over near the dining hall all the time. At about nine in the morning, three or four of them walk over to poke their heads in and check on us. In the afternoon, at about three o’clock, they come again. If a patient dies in the night, the body lies with us until morning. If a patient dies during the day, only after one of the patients goes to tell the medics will they quickly take the body away to be buried. They have no medical supplies or equipment whatsoever. They don’t come by to treat the patients; they only check to see who is close to dying and who is not yet close to dying.

Contrary to what I had heard, there is not much medicine. I have been here for four or five days now and haven’t seen so much as a single pill. If there is medicine, it is mostly just “rabbit turd” pills. If liquid medicine, it is mostly clear or reddish-colored medicine in old soft-drink bottles.

Most of the medics are females who seem to have no medical expertise. One day they bring some foreign medicine to administer by injection to patients with shivering fever. They have ampules with the word QUINOBLEU written in French on the sides, containing a dark blue intravenous liquid. The female medics give me an injection. I feel excited to be so fortunate to be treated with foreign drugs. They turn my arms back and forth, left and right, forearms, wrists, looking for a vein. One of the female medics gives up and hands the task over to another medic. They trade off back and forth and after ten sticks still can’t find a vein. I am sick and just can’t take any more of this, and I beg them to stop sticking me. They don’t know how to give an injection or how to find a vein. I’ve lost my chance at the good medicine.

The two other patients who came with me from the village to stay in this hospital house are both gone now. One of the men, about my age, had a shivering fever but was still able to walk. He went back to the village after trying out the hospital for about two days. It’s better that he left anyway; if he had stayed, it would only have led to catching some other illness. Like me—when I left the village, I only had a shivering fever, but now I have swelling as well.

As for the other man (about forty years old), who had some swelling when he left the village, after he got to the hospital the swelling got worse. He came from the village alone, like me, without any wife or children accompanying him. He dies after sleeping at the hospital for nearly a week. I’m not able to go back to the village, but if I remain, the outcome is clear.

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by | 23 June 2024 · 5:29 pm

Oxcarts Into the Khmer Jungle

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 141-143:

The sun rises dimly and the sounds of oxen calling moo! moo! moo! mixed with the sound of their wooden bells clack! clack! clack! and metal bells clang! clang! clang! awaken us from sleep. We are surrounded by hundreds of oxcarts pulled by small oxen. Other oxcarts hurriedly approach, churning up clouds of dust behind them. Where have they come from? Have they come to transport us? The answer becomes clear when we are ordered to board the carts and continue our journey onward.

Where are we going? They don’t tell us. They are a very secretive bunch. Trucks, trains, tractors—they never tell us where we are going. If we ask the cart drivers, they might as well not answer at all because we don’t know the area anyway. But we do know that they are taking us to a place where trucks and tractors can’t go. Damn! Maybe we really are going to eat the stones of the mountains. No, there are no mountains here. As Life Slaves [an epithet coined by the author to denote the “new people,” the class of people treated most harshly by the Khmer Rouge (though sometimes defined as everyone except the cadres); opposite: Life Masters; p. 644], we are prepared to accept our fate.

Last night we slept outside some village. Now the oxcarts take us over a wooden bridge across a large canal [the moat around the town] and into the village. We see a sign reading “Phnom Srok District Primary School.” When we arrive in the village, the locals—young and old, male and female—stand around in an orderly fashion watching us as though waiting to welcome a kathen tean parade [annual festival when clothing is donated to the monks]. Indeed, it’s a parade like none they’ve ever seen: hundreds of oxcarts, one after another.

The carts steer through the village and then back out again. We pass over a sandy road through rice fields and sparse trees. I think of my family moving from our house north of Wat Tuol Tumpung to the shores of Boeng Trabek more than nineteen years ago. We had ridden on an oxcart through fields of kantraeuy [Chrysopogon sp.] and barang [Urochloa sp.] grasses with small reang [Barringtonia sp.] and trah [Combretum sp.] trees growing here and there in clumps. At that time, I had ridden the cart with my mother. But now there is no mother on the cart with me. [She died of starvation.]

The small oxen struggle to pull the carts along the sandy road, making me feel particularly sorry for them. I ask the driver, “Father, why are the cows here so small?” “Nephew, this land can only support small cows like this. We can’t use the big ones because there is so little grass here that the cows have to eat prech leaves.” Prech leaves? What are prech leaves? I used to know of a novel (or maybe a movie) entitled The Hunter’s Trail, the Prech Buds. Prech must be in the jungle, where a hunter goes to hunt animals. This driver’s home village must be near the jungle. Are we going to live in his village?

After passing through the fields and forests for a while, we enter a village. It’s a fairly small village with dense stands of banana trees, coconut trees, papaya trees, and manioc [= tapioca] shrubs growing here and there. But we couldn’t even see it from very far away. The villagers are surprised at our presence, and they call out to each other and stand around staring at us.

The people of Phnom Srok had looked at us with familiar gazes, but these villagers look at us with amazement and wonder, as though they’ve never seen such a thing. Perhaps they’re as puzzled as we are, wondering where we are going.

I tap the driver and ask, “Uncle! What village is this?”

“This is Boh Sbov village, Nephew,” the cart driver replies. None of the cart drivers are soldiers or members of the Organization. They are all locals with oxen and carts who have been gathered from various villages to help transport us. After leaving the village, we again pass through rice fields, then through scattered clumps of trees, then through sparse trees, then through forests so wild they nearly overgrow the cart road, forests with tall thin trees. They are taking us into the jungle! Are they taking us to live in the jungle? We drive through a forest with large, tall trees and after a while the carts begin to stop one after the other, about ten or fifteen meters apart.

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by | 17 June 2024 · 5:14 pm

Khmer Rouge Stated Goals

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 78-80:

One day, about a week after the groups and villages are organized, we receive an order to attend a meeting in Tuol Tnaot at 7 p.m. Each family is to send one representative. When we return from work in the evening, we hurriedly eat dinner and head out for the meeting at the appointed time.

Tonight is a new moon and there is no moonlight. We all sit on the ground in front of a wooden house with a tiled roof beside the highway, near the mouth of the road leading to Wat Don Sar. A small kerosene lamp has been lit and casts a flickering light on the meeting.

A revolutionary cadre dressed in black and wearing a black cap on his head and a krama around his neck comes and stands before us to announce the start of the meeting. We don’t know his name or his rank, and we can’t see his face clearly in the dark. He begins to speak:

“Greetings, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, who have just been evacuated from Phnom Penh. The Revolutionary Organization regrets taking so long to get you organized into groups and villages. Our Organization has faced many responsibilities and has been very busy. Now we have gotten you organized, so you ought to understand the political line of the Revolutionary Organization and the way of life in revolutionary society. The Revolutionary Organization has the political aim of annihilating all traces of the regime that ruled the country for sixteen years [Sihanouk, 1954-1970], as well as the five-year, one-month regime [Lon Nol, 1970-1975]. Therefore, anything in the image or spirit of these two regimes must be obliterated. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters who used to live under these two regimes, you must learn to align, temper, and build yourselves to become suitable as a revolutionary people.

“Cast off the morality of vice! The morality of exploitation! The morality of taking advantage of others! Obey the discipline of the Organization! Don’t be free! Don’t have your own opinions! Don’t be vague in your consciousness!

“Food will be distributed according to your labor. Those comrades who work will receive food. The Organization has no need for the lazy or the worthless!

“The wheel of history rolls forward! No one can stop the wheel of history! Whoever puts forth his arm will lose his arm! Whoever puts forth his leg will lose his leg…”

This is our first lesson. We hear them say nothing about returning to Phnom Penh. We hear only the words “revolution,” “annihilate,” “temper.” Now we see clearly: They don’t support Sihanouk’s royalist regime as Dad thought. They will squeeze us because we are the people of the two regimes that the Revolutionary Organization must annihilate.

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by | 14 June 2024 · 4:07 pm

Khmer Rouge “Grandpa Snoopy”

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 76-78:

Starting now, a new administrative structure has been put in place: group, then village, then cooperative. All of the leaders are people who had been living in the liberated zones. My group is led by Pu Et. He is in his sixties, dark skinned, skinny, balding in front, with large eyes and curly hair, about a meter sixty in height. He was born here in Tuol Ampil. He has built a hut about seventy meters to the north of mine. The cooperative cadre who has taken charge of Tuol Ampil is called Phal, a man of about thirty-five who used to live at Boeng Trabek near my house and knows my parents very well.

We are a people who no longer have the freedom to move about or eat as we please. We have become workers who labor as we are ordered, in line with the aims of the Organization, at the appointed hours: from six until eleven o’clock in the morning, and from one in the afternoon until five o’clock in the evening. The Organization provides us with the necessities of survival: rice and salt. Occasionally, we receive a small portion of kerosene. We are to go and receive these supplies at the cooperative headquarters in Tuol Tnaot every day when we return from work at noon.

After the land is divided up, our corn ends up on the common land. We are worried that the Organization will confiscate these crops and make them common property.

I ask the cadre who comes to measure and divide the land, “Excuse me Brother, the corn that I planted before—is it still mine?”

“How much corn is it, Comrade?” the cadre asks.

“About twenty by thirty meters, Brother,” I answer.

“Oh, that’s nothing! You keep it and eat it,” the cadre reassures me. We stop fretting and once again our mouths have spit to swallow.

Each day Dad leads his two granddaughters, Sophal and A-Lin, by the hand to go sit and watch the corn so that cows don’t eat it. The corn is already starting to produce some ears. The rice that we transplanted with Mom in the water in front of the hut is starting to look nice. One day Pu Et, our group leader, comes to my family and says, “The Organization is taking your corn. Don’t touch it!”

This news causes all of us to lose heart and despair, especially my father. He says nothing, and he stops bothering to sit and watch the corn as he used to. One day, as I am going to collect our rice ration at Tuol Tnaot, I ask the advice of the cooperative chairman on the corn problem. He assures me that there is no problem, that we should keep it for the benefit of our own family. His assurance alleviates our anxiety, but with no one to stand guard and protect the corn for a few days, the cows have already eaten nearly half of it.

Pu Et is a very jealous and strict man. He has just arrived from the liberated zones, and he has nothing yet. None of his plants have had time to bear any fruit, so when he sees that others’ plants have already borne fruit, he gets jealous and wants them for himself. If we have better food than he does, he is unhappy. If he catches anyone sneaking off to trade things at the villages along the highway for rice, bananas, or yams, he confiscates their spoils and then “builds” them, guiding them in the way of the Revolutionary Organization, forbidding free movement and trade.

Each day he walks by and pokes his head into our hut at about eight or nine o’clock to see who has what to eat and who hasn’t gone out to work. How we despise this attitude! We, all of the “new people,” give him the name “Grandpa Snoopy.” When we see him coming from a distance, we call out or whisper to each other, “Here comes Grandpa Snoopy!” Both his wife and his daughter act haughty, as though they, too, are our leaders and supervisors.

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by | 13 June 2024 · 3:03 am

Leaving Phnom Penh, 1975

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 56-59:

Between dawn and 11 a.m., we are finally able to cross the Monivong Bridge, and we continue beyond to the Chbar Ampov subdistrict headquarters building where we stop to rest and prepare food. Here there are tamarind trees with cool shade. My brothers and I go to look for water for cooking rice. We figure that drawing water from the river will be easier than searching for well water at local houses. We walk through Chbar Ampov Market (the old market on the south side of the highway) and head for the river.

This is the first time in my life that my eyes have ever witnessed such an awful scene. Only four days ago, this was a battleground, and large brick-and-cement houses have been demolished, with chunks of brick and cement of all sizes, shards of roof tiles, dishes, pots and pans, tables, and chairs littering the ground all over the road. In the gendarmerie post, the body of a woman lies face up on a desk, naked and swollen, maggots perforating her flesh. Along the riverbank lie the bloated corpses of soldiers, some on the banks, others floating half in and half out of the water. Some bob up and down on the water’s surface, occasionally washing up against the bank. The water here, which appeared from above to be decent, is in actuality covered in a slick of dark-green foam mixed with grease from the corpses. The river water is undrinkable, and we return empty-handed.

…

As our thoughts drift with the smoke into the sky, suddenly the sound of gunshots pierces the air: bang! bang! bang! Startled and shaken, nearly losing my grip on the bicycle handlebars, I look around, worried that someone has just been wounded or killed. I think this because as we rested a little earlier, we heard that this morning a soldier shot and killed two people who took rice from a warehouse on the west side of the river. But I can’t see that anything has happened. The crowd continues walking forward. Then a military vehicle comes driving against the flow of foot traffic with two or three black-clad soldiers sitting on the hood. They are the ones who fired the shots, to open the road. We squeeze together on the right side of the road to allow the vehicle to pass.

We have walked another 200 meters when suddenly a mid-Pisakh [=April/May] rain shower begins to pour down without the slightest warning. Our bundles of bedding and clothes are soaked. We continue forward in the rain until we are nearly to Wat Niroth before finding shelter.

The locals here have all been evacuated. We take shelter in a wooden house with a corrugated iron roof whose owner was a fisherman. Up in the house, there are still several old fishing nets of various types and sizes. We salvage one small net and one larger net to take with us. We rest at the house for two nights until our bedding and clothes are dry and then continue our journey.

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by | 11 June 2024 · 12:10 pm

Evacuating Cambodian Cities

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 45-46:

I dash into the house and call out, “Dad! Mom! They’re forcing everyone out of the city!” But my neighbors and family are busy celebrating peace and the end of the war and the spoils of victory at the hands of the Organization; they are not interested in what I have to say.

I have just spent a day filled with worry and fear. My family has just spent a day celebrating with a happiness that they haven’t seen for five years. Everything that I had just imagined to myself was all wrong—especially the reaction of my parents. In fact, my parents haven’t worried a bit about my absence. They feel that everything is going wonderfully. They have figured that I was gone all day tasting the joy of the birth of a new Khmer society.

The neighbors who have been going back and forth to gather loot from the Chamkar Mon warehouses know perfectly well that people are being evacuated from the city. But they assume that this matter does not affect them, that they won’t be ordered out by the Organization, because the Organization has allowed them to take freely from the warehouses.

Almost every family goes out to collect loot and stockpiles it in their house. My younger brothers procure three sacks of rice, several cases of beer, two or three mattresses, and large amounts of salt, fish sauce, soy sauce, and soft drinks, and pile them all over the house.

A French proverb says that “a single swallow does not herald the arrival of Spring.” I am but a lone swallow, the one person who desires to instill fear and an awareness of what will come. But no one believes me! They only believe in what is plain: that they have become wealthy without the necessity of effort. Let the neighbors refuse to believe, but I must win over my own family. My mother doesn’t matter; my father is the one who controls the power in the family.

I attempt to speak with my father about what is on my mind, but he objects, saying, “A-Moeun! You aren’t thinking straight. If they have just taken the city, what is the point of forcing us out? Do you remember what happened last year? People in Steung Mean Chey and Boeng Tumpun fell prey to propaganda that they would be forced out, and they fled in the middle of the night all the way to the riverfront by the palace. When they went back home, all of their stuff was gone.”

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by | 10 June 2024 · 6:10 am

Cambodia, April 1975

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 11-12:

Cambodia is a small Southeast Asian kingdom, bordered by Vietnam on the east, Thailand on the west and north, and Laos to the north. Its primary religion is Theravada Buddhism. Its main ethnic majority are referred to as Khmers, and the national language is Khmer. The capital city, sitting at the confluence of the Mekong and Sap rivers, is called Phnom Penh.

The kingdom was colonized by France for nearly a century, from 1863 until 1953 when it secured full independence from France under the leadership of King Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk abdicated the throne a year later to take a leading role in Cambodian electoral politics, which he dominated for the next fifteen years as a popular and powerful head of state.

On 18 March 1970, Sihanouk was deposed in a parliamentary coup by his prime minister, General Lon Nol. This seminal event broke Sihanouk’s long and carefully maintained neutrality that had kept Cambodia out of the Vietnam War raging next door, as Lon Nol immediately aligned with the United States against the communists, causing the conflict to spill over into Cambodia.

Thus began a bloody civil war, as Lon Nol founded the Khmer Republic, notoriously corrupt and heavily funded by United States military aid; and the embittered Sihanouk, with Chinese support, publicly allied himself with the Cambodian faction of communists, dubbed (by him) the “Khmer Rouge,” in an armed resistance against the new government. Hoping for a return to power, Sihanouk allowed himself to be made the nominal figurehead of this armed resistance, and because he was highly revered by many Cambodians, especially in the countryside, this decision lent tremendous influence and strength to the Khmer Rouge in recruiting large-scale support from the Cambodian populace.

Five years of violent conflict and devastating national division led, ultimately, to an imminent Khmer Rouge victory in mid-April 1975. As Khmer Rouge forces surrounded Phnom Penh for the final battle against disintegrating government forces and prepared to capture the city, the city’s population eagerly awaited the end of the war and the return of peace.

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Filed under Cambodia, China, France, military, religion, U.S., Vietnam, war