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Traveling_with: Sopheak
Weather: Hot
Health_status: Recovering
Morale:
Appeal: 100
Next_expected_update:
Date: June 06, 2002
Time: 07:34 -0400
The road to Choeung Ek is a tree-lined rural track through the rice fields south of town, even today it is still scenic and pastoral. It ends in the infamous Killing Fields. I should say, ONE of the killing fields, because they are all over the country. This is, I hope, the biggest.
It is an actual field, dominated by a massive, beautiful tree with branches arching out over dozens of rectangular depressions in the ground. These depressions are where bodies were dug up from in 1980, about 9,000 bodies of all ages. One of the depressions was filled primarily with infants. Another was specifically for bodies without heads. That bizarre, meticulous order again. Why do this? is one's first thought. But if you're going to do it, why be so meticulous about it?
I recognized another of the trees from paintings in Tuol Sleng. In the paintings, you could see prisoners kneeling at the edge of mass graves for executioners to bash their heads in. You could see black-clad executioners beating babies against the tree and casting them into a heap of corpses.
The paintings and stories would be harder to believe if not for the central monument at the Killing Fields -- a white glass-walled stupa, maybe eight or ten meters tall. Behind the glass are nine square shelves full of skulls in heaps. These are some, not all, of the people who were murdered here. Even now, they are in order -- Khmer males, ages 60 to 80. Khmer females, ages 15 to 20. In the more populated demographics, the skulls are piles too high to read the placards behind them. Is it any less horrific if they are all young men?
I didn't want to stay at Choeng Ek for very long. I didn't know how much of the atmosphere I really wanted to soak up. But when I came down the stairs from the stupa, I was surprised to run into Sopheak again. He had told me he'd wait in the parking lot.
We sat in the shade and he told me, as far as he knows, what happened to his father. Here's the story. Some mistakes are bound to happen, because Sopheak's English is imperfect and my Khmer is perfectly nonexistant. But I'm reproducing it as best I can.
The day the Khmer Rouge took over the city in 1975, Sopheak had two older sisters and one older brother. His father had a job with the Cambodian government, working in the city, and also had a position of some responsibility in the army. The family lived on the outskirts of the city, not in the countryside like today.
When the Khmer Rouge came in, there was a fight and Sopheak's father was involved. A friend of the family told him to leave the lines and go home. He didn't. Later Sopheak's older cousin came to the lines and told him again to go home to his family. He didn't.
Later, Sopheak's mother got word that his father had been shot through the leg, but was still alive and still at the front line. She was home with Sopheak, who was a baby at the time, and from this we deduce that he may actually be younger than the 29 years old that he claims on his resume. The other older children were in the city somewhere, studying and working.
She left Sopheak with a friend and went to bring food to her husband. But before she could find him, she ran into a Khmer Rouge patrol. They would not let her advance to her husband or older children, and would also not let her go back to her youngest son. She had to stay where she was in a panic.
Soon the family friend brought Sopheak into the city and gave him to his mother. In the morning she'd had a family of six with home and a steady income Now she had nothing but the clothes on her back, and her naked infant son.
I don't know the details of how she survived from this point, just that she did and millions did not. The three older children and the husband were missing for the rest of the Khmer Rouge's four-year reign, and for years after. Only three years ago, Sopheak's older sister and brother went on the radio on a show that helps reunite scattered families. Their mother heard them on the very first broadcast. They are alive and well, married with new families, and living not far away.
Sopheak's older sister, the third child of the family, is still missing. His father is gone too.
"When I go into the country to see my mom now," says Sopheak, "I look very happy. I take her some money and look like I have no problems. That's why, when I saw your picture of my mom playing guitar with a big smile, I feel so good. She has been too unhappy in her life, I want her to see me happy so she will be happy herself. "
"Are you happy?" I asked.
"Yes," he said. "When I go there I never want to come back to the city."
"No," I said. "I mean, are you happy on normal days?"
He thought about it for a while, and finally conceded that he was not. Actually this surprised me, because he puts on a good front for me too. "Always I try to make money. Not happy."
So, that's the story.
Now, I've been paying Sopheak to ferry me around the city for the last few days and teach me to eat like a Khmer. It's against my ethics to pay directly for good stories, so I've also paid him for his time. I've paid what the time has been worth to me, relative to what I can afford, and it's all been a hell of a bargain for me. If I had to guess, I'd say I've paid more than an average taxi driver makes in a day in Phnom Penh, but not much more.
Now I'm sharing his stories with you. Usually I write for the hell of it, because I can, but for all these past stories from Phnom Penh which involve Sopheak, I am just this once wondering if any of you think they're worth any money. If you do, please write to me at dkerby@hotmail.com, and I will send you Sopheak's mailing address. He's a working man, not a charity case, so if you need something for accounting purposes on a money order or something, put "For a good story."