SAFE AT LAST: REFUGEES IN AMERICA
by
DON E. MILLER, Ph.D.
COVER AND INSIDE BOOK ART WORK BY YASUKO BOCKMAN
SMASHWORDS EDITION
PUBLISHED BY:
Speranza Productions on Smashwords
SAFE AT LAST: REFUGEES IN AMERICA
Copyright 2011 by Don E. Miller, Ph.D.
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CHAPTER ONE: OVERVIEW
In 1883 Emma Lazarus wrote in The New Colossus, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me. I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door.” These words are inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Now, well over 100 years later, these words ring truer than ever for the many thousands of asylum-seeking refugee survivors in the United States, their new adopted land.
I am a Clinical Psychologist and over the years, I have interviewed over 2,000 refugees who escaped from danger and tyranny in many different countries. These are their stories as told to me. The stories are true though sometimes the experiences of several different individuals or families have been combined into a composite story. The stories are presented in the first person. Sometimes the survivor of the horror, perhaps mercifully, could no longer remember the details of the trauma they had experienced. So at times, the children of the survivors contributed to the stories. What their parents forgot, their children often remembered years later.
The names have been changed as well as some details in the stories to protect identities. These refugees went through terror and horror in their native countries. This included ethnic cleansing, starvation and torture, watching family members being beaten, murdered and long periods of incarceration in jails or Prisoner-of-War camps. In many countries people went to jail for their beliefs or for making a casual negative comment about the current regime. Many displaced people spent up to 20 years in a refugee camp before finally entering the United States. These refugee camps were often dangerous places. In some, refugees lived in a tent in the desert with insufficient food and water. In others, built in jungles, dysentery, disease and death stalked the refugees.
The refugees’ dream was that in America they would be free, that they would have food to eat and their children could make something of themselves. Many of the refugees who came to the U.S. worked hard and did get a piece of the American dream; a house, a business, a good job. But many others had been badly damaged by the beatings and horror. The moment they would close their eyes, even after settling safely in America, the nightmares began. For them, America meant sleepless nights and days spent shaking on the couch and jumping in fear if there was a knock on the door. These are the walking wounded who had seen family members murdered in front of them or who had spent days or even weeks in a coma after a beating. Some couldn’t remember their own names so trying to work was out of the question. Their only hope was for their children. These children, in their native country, would most likely have never gone beyond elementary school, if that far. In many refugee families who have settled across America the children are graduating from college and becoming nurses, engineers and schoolteachers.
The problems and abuses reported in this book span over 50 years. The world has changed. Many of the abuses and horrific residuals of wars that happened in various countries, as described in this book, have stopped. Other abuses and more dead bodies from more wars and more ethnic cleansings in different countries have taken their place. This book is neither about good and evil nor about the perfect system of government. Governments are different; countries are different. We are finding that what works in America will not necessarily work everywhere else. What should we do about the abuses around the world that still continue? Where is the line to be drawn between meddling in the affairs of a sovereign nation and preventing ethnic cleansing? The truth is that we in the United States don’t have the resources to fix all the problems in the world. United States saved many thousands from ethnic cleansing in Bosnia but we have not been able to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Africa, especially Darfur.
On a cautionary note to the reader, the stories of brutality, violence and multiple methods of torture and murder of fellow human beings witnessed or personally experienced by these refugees are very graphic in nature. In the final analysis, these stories of survival hold our interest because these brave souls pursued the goal of freedom in spite of incredible odds and risks. If it seems sad, when reading about the continued psychological suffering of the refugees described in this book, remember – these are the happy endings. These are the stories of the people who made it to America. Millions died in the Cambodian “killing fields.” Hundreds of thousands drowned escaping from Vietnam in rickety boats across the water. Other hundreds of thousands lie in mass graves, especially in Cambodia and Iraq. Some estimates place Saddam’s death toll at two million.
If there are lessons to be learned from these stories, one is that, compared to most of the rest of the world, people in the United States take care of each other very well. A number of developed countries have universal health care. Most of the refugees I interviewed said that before coming to America, they could not access health care if they didn’t have any money. Some watched their children die of fever because they had no medicine. Once in the United States, they had access to medical care. I have interviewed refugees who have been given very costly heart valve transplants in the U.S., paid for by the United States Government – operations that saved their lives. Such care was extremely unlikely in their countries of origin. We do a much better job of taking care of our children and the elderly than many countries. Even those in the U.S. with no health insurance have a better chance of accessing health care than the residents of many other countries.
We teach the immigrants and their children new trades, English, and how to become Americans. But there are things they can teach us, especially about family. Countless times I have seen the children of these enfeebled and elderly immigrants all pitch in to help. They take turns to make sure that the care provided to their sick and aging parents, in their own home, maintains as high a quality of life as possible, as long as possible.
Female refugees have reported incredible spousal abuse in their native countries but there was never any help. In many places in the world wives are still treated like property. Other refugees had experienced totally disabling job injuries but at the most, received a couple months of pay and were told to not come back to work anymore. United States does much better in taking care of abused women and injured workers.
Justice in their country of origin, according to many of the refugees I interviewed, was dispensed on the basis of how much money you had available to pay off officials. In the United States system of justice we have trials, not just executions or disappearances of those who have wronged someone in power. These benefits of living in America we often take for granted. Perhaps these stories will help Americans feel more appreciative of the freedom and many benefits and advantages in multiple life areas that we enjoy in America. Another lesson to be learned from these refugee stories is that what we have in the United States works well for us. We seem to be on the right path and we need to stay on that path and not lose our way.
Citizens of the United States can take great pride in the generosity and tender care the United States has provided for these refugee populations. Many died on the way here. Many died even in the sub-standard refugee camps while waiting to come. Many thousands of these refugees, because of being either too old or too disabled to work, receive monthly disability checks from the United States government Social Security Administration. No American could go to any of the seven countries represented here and receive a pension because of old age or because of disabling physical or mental injuries. Who pays for this? The taxes of the hard-working children of the refugees, if not now, will eventually pay back any money paid out to their ailing and aged refugee parents.
The people whose stories appear in this book deserve to have their stories told. How many thousands of books have been published and hundreds of movies have been produced about the Holocaust, even before “Schindler’s List?” Yet, each Holocaust story was different. What is the value of so many stories about the Holocaust? If we don’t study history, we take the risk of repeating it.
The Cambodian Khmer Rouge children were recruited from the mountains and taught to hate and kill, practicing from childhood by killing and torturing animals. Then they killed two million fellow Cambodians in a four-year period of time. If we do not study history we risk repeating it. Germany has learned and has taken exceptional steps to make sure they never have another Holocaust.
Obviously, not every immigrant who went through extensive trauma and suffering ended up as the ‘walking wounded,’ with confusion and poor memories. Incredibly, some who went through amazing trauma and torture have survived it all relatively intact. I rarely interviewed those who came through the trauma with flying colors. It was the immigrants who were suffering who were brought to me for my help. Only a small percentage of the refugees described in this book were able to take advantage of psychotherapy services. Most had suffered fairly extensive brain damage due to head trauma and other factors. Thus, anything talked about today in a psychotherapy session would be forgotten tomorrow, along with any new insights or coping skills.
Even so, psychiatric medications often provided considerable relief. Insomnia was an almost universal complaint of these traumatized refugees. Many were lucky to sleep a couple of hours a night. Up to three or four more hours of sleep per night could be added with antidepressants and tranquilizers. Pains from headaches caused by old head trauma and the multiple pains of other old injuries (often the result of torture and beatings), together with the night terrors from horrific nightmares, could be dulled with combinations of pain killers and psychotropic medications. Though psychotherapy usually wasn’t going to be a big help, there were other services I offered to these refugees. My evaluations often helped their treating physicians understand their needs. Their doctors could then prescribe antidepressants for depressions I had diagnosed and sleep or pain medications for insomnia or pains I had documented.
I often worked with family members, advising them in the care of these damaged individuals. After years of starvation and often arriving in the U.S. underweight, I saw many of these refugees experience rapid weight gains. Going from a shortage of food to an abundance often resulted in over-eating. Obesity would result in all the dangers of carrying extra weight including diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiac problems. These refugee’s children often noticed that their ailing parents would say that they were hungry and wanted to eat. When they would be told they just eaten awhile before they would say the children were lying and would demand to be fed again. Most of the time, the children would then prepare them another meal. I talked to the children about a need to learn to say no or at a minimum, provide a low calorie snack. I would encourage them to take the ailing refugee parent for a half hour walk each day. Lack of exercise and obesity contribute to even further mental deterioration.
I have seen many cases where the family had still left the control of medications to the patient. Family members would admit that the patient sometimes missed doses or took double doses, having forgotten they just took their medications. I have told many families that the patient’s medications will have to be closely monitored or their life is in danger. Often someone must approach the patient with the pills and water and stand there while they take them. Just leaving the pills next to the patient for the patient to take later often resulted in the pills still being there hours later. Their treating physicians were not always aware of the under-medication problems. Hopefully, my efforts resulted in a longer and healthier life for at least some of the refugees who came under my care.
Often, over a period of a few years I and the families of many refugees have observed drastic losses in cognitive/intellectual function in many refugees. There is yet another reason for cognitive decline. Researchers have found that extended time periods of high levels of the stress hormones, cortisol and adrenalin cause brain damage, particularly in the hippocampus. This is the area of the brain that processes new information. Insomniacs, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder sufferers and those with high levels of anxiety have high levels of cortisol and adrenalin in their blood stream. Thus, long months or years of anxiety, lack of sleep, fear and flashbacks, can result in actual brain damage. Also, high levels of tension and fear often result in high blood pressure, another condition that results in brain damage, especially if poorly controlled by medications.
This is yet another reason why I instruct family members to be diligent about closely supervising the medications of these damaged refugees. Other researchers have found that the death of brain cells caused by stroke or head trauma triggers the production of amyloid-beta protein, which forms the brain tangling plaques of Alzheimer’s. Treating high blood pressure can reduce the risk of stroke. Thus, head trauma in and of itself, though causing immediate brain cell loss and cognitive decline, over time, takes an even greater toll due to plaque production triggered by cell death.
In addition to the tales of incredible valor and persistence, the various ways their past traumas have finally caught up with these many brave refugees are detailed in the following survival stories of immigrants from Cambodia, China, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Laos, Somalia and Vietnam.
CHAPTER TWO: CAMBODIA
HISTORY
In 1863, the king of Cambodia placed the country under French protection; it became a part of French Indochina in 1887. The Japanese occupied the country in World War II; Cambodia became fully independent in 1953. After a five-year struggle, Communist Khmer Rouge forces captured Phnom Penh in April 1975. They evacuated all the cities and towns, ordering the people into the rural areas into slave labor camps. The Khmer Rouge was determined to turn the country into a nation of peasants in which the corruption and parasitism of city life would be completely uprooted. In 1977 and 1978 the violence reached a climax as the revolutionaries themselves turned against each other in bloody purges.
Before 1975 the Khmer Rouge tolerated the activities of the community of Buddhist monks, or sangha, in the liberated areas in order to win popular support. This changed abruptly after the fall of Phnom Penh. The country's 40,000 to 60,000 Buddhist monks, regarded by the regime as social parasites, were defrocked and forced into labor brigades. Many monks were executed; temples and pagodas were destroyed or turned into storehouses or jails. Images of the Buddha were defaced and dumped into rivers and lakes. People who were discovered praying or expressing religious sentiments in other ways were often killed.
Some of the greatest causes of death under the Khmer Rouge were hunger, disease, and exposure. Many city people could not survive the rigors of life in the countryside, the forced marches, and the hard physical labor. People died from the bites of venomous snakes, drowned in flooded areas during the rainy season, and were killed by wild beasts in jungle areas. Many fell victim to malaria. Others died in the fighting between Vietnam and Cambodia in 1978 and in 1979. Executions accounted for hundreds of thousands of victims and perhaps for as many as 1 million.
The Vietnamese invaded in December 1978 and drove the Khmer Rouge into the countryside. The Vietnamese occupied the country for 10 years, but there was almost 13 years of civil war. The 1991 Paris Peace Accords ordered a ceasefire, which was not fully respected by the Khmer Rouge. UN sponsored elections in 1993 helped restore some semblance of normalcy. The final elements of the Khmer Rouge surrendered in early 1999.
TRAINING FOR MURDER: THE KHMER ROUGE
Disturbing stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities began to surface even before they took over Cambodia in 1975. In March 1974, they captured the old capital city of Odongk north of Phnom Penh, destroyed it, dispersed its 20,000 inhabitants into the countryside, and executed the teachers and civil servants. The same year, they brutally murdered sixty people, including women and children, in a small village called Sar Sarsdam in Siemreab Province. A similar incident was reported at Ang Snuol, a town west of the capital.
Wilfred Burchett’s book, “The China Cambodia Vietnam Triangle” was published in 1981. He described how the Khmer Rouge children were recruited from the poorest of the poor in the mountains. Their indoctrination was that educated city dwellers were their enemy. They were convinced that their task was to track down and murder their country’s “class enemies” or eventually they would be killed themselves. Those who were enrolled in the revolutionary forces began their military careers at the age of 12. They were separated from their families and removed from their native villages to be indoctrinated in what Sihanouk called “a cult of cruelty.”
Pol Pot believed that getting the youth used to the “cruelty game” would result in these soldiers delighting in massacres and in waging war. They were taught to harden their skills by killing dogs, cats and other animals by clubbing or bayoneting them. The Four-Year Plan of 1977 to 1980, an Angkar directive stated, was the eradication of culture, art, all vestiges of imperialism, colonialism, feudalism and all other former classes in power. The Khmer Rouge carried out the directive and murdered classical dancers, musicians, doctors, technicians, engineers, students, diplomats, professors, journalists, light skinned people and people wearing glasses.
The Khmer Rouge killed two million fellow Cambodians in a four-year period of time. They delighted in their murders, feeling they were cleansing the land of undesirable elements. The Khmer Rouge had the enslaved nation of Cambodia (Kampuchea) working up to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Historically, captives from a war or skirmishes were considered by the Khmer Rouge to legitimately be property, slaves of the conquerors, and to be disposed of as desired.
The Khmer Rouge treated all the citizens of their own country that they had captured, as slaves. The slaves grew rice, which they could not eat or they would be killed. The many tons of rice grown were exported to China in exchange for guns and other weaponry so the Khmer Rouge could maintain a hold on their power. The Khmer Rouge felt that no knowledge about anything was necessary. Anyone could build a dam. They had their slaves carry sticks, rocks and dirt to pile up to make dams so that rice fields could be irrigated. But they had no engineers instructing them (they had killed them all) and the dams often washed away, killing hundreds in the wake of the floods.
The Khmer Rouge forced their slaves to build aqueducts but they had no surveyors or engineers to advise them as to the slope of the land and they often found, when it rained, water ran in the opposite direction than they had intended. Like the German concentration camps, they worked people to death, watching them become more and more emaciated, to save on food rations. The rice was for trading for guns, not for the slaves, who were often killed for grabbing a handful of rice
I LIGHT MY WAY
My name is Somboon. During the day when I go out, I take a flashlight with me. When I have appointments to keep such as with doctors, I have scheduled the appointment for the morning or sometimes in the afternoon. I never have appointments at night because I am afraid of the dark. I worry that sometime I won’t get back home before it gets dark. So that’s why I take the flashlight to light my way just in case I am out after dark sometime. In the United States a lot of streets have streetlights but you never know when you could find yourself in a dark place.
While I was growing up in Cambodia I went to school for four years and I learned to read and write in Cambodian. Now, I can still recognize a few words in Cambodian but for the most part I have forgotten most of what I learned. I can’t write anything anymore though I can still sign my name.
My husband and I were married a few months before the Communists took over Cambodia. When the Communists got closer to our village, we escaped to the city. In the next couple of years we had two children. The Communists eventually got to that city also and took over. When the Khmer rouge Communists first captured my family members they gathered us all together. They somehow found out that my sister’s husband had been a soldier. This was in spite of the fact that he had changed into civilian clothes. They killed him by shooting him between the eyes. My sister and several other family members were standing within a few feet of my sister’s husband when he was killed. Then the Communists forced my husband and I to return to our old village. From there we were all shipped off to different forced labor camps. My husband was sent to a different camp than me.
On the long march to the camp I saw a lot of killing and dead bodies along the side of the road. Soldiers and teachers were lined up and killed. I myself was tied up and taken to a place and asked a lot of questions. The ones who answered the questions wrong were killed. The ones who were suspected of being educated, or suspected of being soldiers who had fought the Khmer rouge, were killed. A lot of my family members were killed. Many of them I saw shot in front of me. Some of the murdered people first had holes poked in their ears. A rope was pulled through this hole. There would be ten or fifteen people on a rope, in a line, being pulled along on the rope. They would be led off into the fields never to be seen again, though the soldiers who had led the people off on the ear-rope came back.
In the camps we were forced to work up to 20 hours a day. We did farming. Sometimes we had to break up rocks in the mountains, load them into carts and the rocks were carried away to somewhere else.
I was pregnant when the Communists took over and after a couple of months I had another baby. The next day after I had the baby I had to go back to the field to work. My other two babies were age two and age three. There was not enough food to eat. Some of the older people were watching my children while I was working. My babies were eating leaves off the trees because they were so hungry. My two older babies were already talking. When I would come back from the fields they would come up to me with their swollen stomachs and beg for food but I had none to give them. In spite of the swollen stomachs they were very skinny; their little arms were like toothpicks.
One day I came back from the fields and my oldest baby was dead, starved to death. I was forced to go back to work breaking up rocks the next day and when I came back to the camp that night my second oldest child was dead. The older people watching my children said that before they died, my children had screamed for their mommy because they were hungry. I was trying to keep my three-month old baby alive but because I didn’t have enough food myself I had hardly any milk for my baby. Somehow, even through all that, my third child lived. A lot of children died of starvation during those times. When we were in the fields we ate anything we could, roots from trees, worms from trees and anything else to survive. I saw hundreds more die over the years in the fields. You could be killed for stealing food; being hit in the head with big sticks often killed people. We were often gathered together to watch the execution of those suspected of being traitors.
The Khmer Rouge wanted us to watch the execution of those caught stealing, as an example to the others. Other times people would be tied up, plastic bags put over their heads, and they would die of suffocation. I saw a monk being shot.
My husband and I were forced to continue to labor, still in separate camps, 16 to 20 hours a day for the Khmer Rouge for another three years after my two children died. Sometimes we were forced to work all night, working with lights. My only surviving baby was three years old when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge had killed millions of people and had invaded a lot of Vietnamese villages.
The Vietnamese Communists had grown tired of all the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. When the Vietnamese came, the Khmer Rouge took several of my family members and me with them and ran off into the jungle. When the Vietnamese troops finally caught up with us in the jungle there were battles. The Vietnamese shot everyone who was carrying a gun. The Khmer Rouge soldiers with guns ran off into the mountains. The Vietnamese took those without guns to a jail for a month until the Vietnamese were sure we were not Khmer Rouge soldiers.
A lot of the Khmer Rouge soldiers who were running off took their slaves along with them. They made them walk in a big circle around them. That way, their slaves would be the ones who stepped on the land mines or fell into pits with pointed sticks. In various ways the slaves were forced to act as a buffer zone. After the Vietnamese Communists questioned us then freed us we started to walk back to our old village. We thought we were safe after the Vietnamese Communists freed us. We found out that the danger was not over. My cousin was walking with some of our family members heading back to our village. She was young and excited. She ran over to talk to the Vietnamese troops who had freed us. She ran back and forth from our family to the Vietnamese troops. The retreating Khmer Rouge troops thought she was a spy and cut her throat. When we got back to our old village I found that my husband had also been freed and had gone to our village. I was reunited with my husband. It was the first time I had seen him for several years.
My youngest daughter was age three at that time. My husband and I stayed in the city for a while. The country was still in total chaos, in spite of the Khmer Rouge being kicked out. We didn’t have any equipment to do any farming; it had all been stolen, lost or destroyed. We would try to go out to the countryside and find some fruit and bring it to the city and sell it. We tried to live this way for about a year. We weren’t starving as much as when the Khmer Rouge was in charge but there still wasn’t enough to eat.
My husband would go to the border at times and get rice and medications from the U.N. who had set up operations to try to help the starving and sick Cambodians. Many people would go to the border and bring back food and medicine to family members in Cambodia. But one time my husband went to the border and didn’t return. I was alone again for five months. After so many years of fear, after I had reunited with my husband, I thought maybe it was finally over. But when my husband didn’t come back my fear started all over again. I had to find out what happened to him. I took my little girl and went to the border myself after five months. I crossed over the border and went into a refugee camp. I was again reunited with my husband who had already entered a refugee camp.
When I asked my husband why he hadn’t returned five months ago he said that he had been arrested and put in a makeshift bamboo jail. The Thai police or military hadn’t captured him. Nor had the Vietnamese Communists or even the Khmer Rouge captured him. It was a group of Cambodian soldiers. These were soldiers who had fought and had been defeated by the Communist Khmer Rouge in 1976. They had been hiding out in the jungle for several years. They thought that one day they would liberate the Cambodians from both the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge. They thought that my husband was a spy for the Vietnamese.
The Cambodian soldiers kept my husband in their bamboo jail for a couple of months until they decided he wasn’t a spy after all. These Cambodian soldiers had outfitted a small army by taking food from the people who had gotten it from the U.N. or the Red Cross. The people who had some of their U.N. and Red Cross food taken from them were told, “We will protect you and we will liberate Cambodia and this is what you must pay to be protected.”
Eventually, this group of insurgents did get back into power. In the ten years after the Communist Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia they did not go after these insurgents. The Vietnamese Communists knew that the insurgents were fighting the Khmer Rouge, who still caused trouble for the Vietnamese for many years. The insurgents did not go into the city and the Vietnamese didn’t go into the insurgent border camps that were led by Sihanouk, to fight each other. But if they ran across each other in the jungles, they would shoot at each other.
After my husband and I were reunited in the Thailand refugee camp my husband said that once he was captured and released by the insurgents he had been afraid to go back to Cambodia. He was afraid he would be captured again by someone and accused of being a spy for someone.
In the refugee camp we also had a difficult life. There was not enough food. We would be given dead fish that smelled rotten. Even so, in the refugee camp, during the six years we were there, we had three more children. We had two more children after we finally managed to immigrate to the United States in 1986, finally ending up with six children. But I never stopped thinking and dreaming about my two babies who died in the killing fields.
I have had emotional and mental problems since my babies died. I can’t think or talk about them without crying. I still miss my babies. They were able to talk to me when they died. I still dream that my babies are begging me to give them food. They are skinny and starving to death in my dreams. Sometimes my babies say, “Mom, come back to Cambodia.” They say this because they want me to be with him. I believe that there is life after death. I used to be a Buddhist but now I am a Christian. My dead children call me to go back to Cambodia to be with them because they did not go anywhere; their spirits are still there in Cambodia waiting for me.
I have told my dead children in my dreams that I cannot go back to Cambodia because I have a lot of little ones to take care of in the United States. They don’t care, they say, “You have to come back to Cambodia to be with us.” Sometimes I hear a loud voice saying, “Get on an airplane and go back to Cambodia.” The voice comes from outside my apartment. I run outside to see who is yelling at me to go back to Cambodia but there is no one there. There are other times when I am wide-awake and I hear things. I sit or lie on the couch most of the time. I will be up for only a few minutes at a time to go to the bathroom or get something to eat.
I will be sitting on my couch and suddenly think I am back in Cambodia and I hear far away voices that sound like the Khmer Rouge Communists talking about killing. My mother wrote me a letter from Cambodia just a few years after I came to the United States saying that the Khmer Rouge Communists were still around. They robbed and burned my mother’s village. They took food, clothing, rice and any money they found. The Khmer Rouge might live in a jungle-mountain hideout ten miles from a village. They would make a one-day trip to a village to rob and burn then escape back into the jungle. Many people in Cambodia during hard times had guns and would go around robbing people but it was usually only the Khmer Rouge who would burn down the villages after robbing them.
I often have problems remembering my children’s names. I will call out to them, “Hey boy,” or “Hey girl,” and they know whom I am talking to because I look at the one I want to answer me. Now whenever I eat any food I think of my two dead children who starved to death.
Now in America, sometimes I cook some food but most of the time my children do the cooking. Most of the time, I rest. The few times I do cook during the week it is usually rice. But whatever I cook, I usually forget to put in most of the ingredients such as salt and lemon grass. Or, I might put in too much salt. I’ll be cooking and think I need to go to the bathroom. Then I’ll forget that I was cooking and the food burns. My family members tell me, “Don’t cook,” because I am such a bad cook. They say, “We will cook,” but when I am hungry and I ask them for something to eat, sometimes they complain too much and say they are busy so I go cook. Also, my children cook American food like hot dogs, which I do not like. My children don’t like the smell of Cambodian cooking and Cambodian food because I use what they say is a foul smelling fish sauce to make soup.
Sometimes I wash dishes but mostly I am too tired to do this. Even when I do try to help out by washing dishes, after a couple of minutes I get too dizzy and I have to go lay down. I have fallen down many times already, especially when I try to stand up too long. My knees are weak. My left knee swells up and hurts after I have been on my feet for a couple of minutes.
During the years in the killing fields, though I survived, I was beaten many times. Now I have headaches, confusion and dizziness. I have to lay down a lot or it feels that I will fall over. I am resting most of the time. I have seizures. I know this sounds strange, but a lot of times my confusion is so great that I get lost in my own house. I will want to find the refrigerator to get some food but I can’t find it. When my children come home from school I ask them, “Where is the refrigerator,” and they take me by the hand and show me the refrigerator.
My children got tired of having to show me the refrigerator so they made signs for me, which have Cambodian characters. There is a sign that says “refrigerator” so when I see that sign I know it is the refrigerator. I can’t find the refrigerator without that sign. My children made another sign for “clothes” that my children put on the outside of a closet. There are three bedrooms in our house and my children put the right clothes in the right closets. My children put my name on the closet containing my clothes so I won’t have to go from one closet to another to try to find my clothes. Before we moved into a place with three closets we had just one closet, and everybody’s clothes were in this one closet. I could never find my clothes in that closet so my children put my clothes in a bucket with my name on it with the Cambodian character for “clothes” so I could find my clothes. I like the closet with my name on it a lot better.
Sometimes I sleep in my bed but at least half the time I feel more comfortable and safer on the floor. Last night I was asleep and dreamed an angel with a blue face came down and tried to wake me up. The angel told me, “Don’t sleep over there.” I woke up and had a hard time falling back to sleep because I was scared. Almost every night I dream I am in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge are chasing me, trying to kill me.
I dream I am running, trying to join my mother who I see off in the distance. My mother will be calling me. I run toward my mother but the Khmer Rouge suddenly show up and chase me, trying to catch me. They never catch me because I always wake up frightened and I cannot go back to sleep. In many dreams the Khmer Rouge are chasing my children and me; I am trying to hide my children. Only one of my six surviving children was born in Cambodia but in my dreams we are always in Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge are trying to shoot us.
My children have forgotten about Cambodia, I wish I could too. They are doing well in school. I am happy for them even though we grow more different each day and they don’t even like the kind of food I like anymore.
STRANGE FOODS FOR SURVIVAL
My name is Bill. That is the name I took when I became a United States citizen. When I was a child in Cambodia we had to show respect for my parents. There were six children, including myself. Out of respect for my parents we were not allowed to be taller than them. So if they were sitting down, and we needed to pass by them in the house we would have to get down on our knees and crawl by them.
My father was a high-ranking officer in the Cambodian army fighting against the Khmer Rouge Communists. The Communists won and took over Cambodia in 1975. The Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and finally stopped the slaughter in 1979. My father and three of my teenage brothers had been killed right after the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975. Since my father was a high-ranking officer, his family had to be punished so that’s why they killed my three brothers. I have seen the movie, “The Killing Fields,” and that movie did not even come close to showing the horrors that went on in Cambodia in those four years.
The Khmer Rouge was eliminating a class of people. Right away they killed anyone with an education. They killed anyone who was a high class individual or had money. They killed the people who had been part of the former regime that had resisted their take-over.
My mother and I were forced to go to a labor camp growing rice. My other two brothers, two who hadn’t been killed, were sent to other labor camps. You could get killed for anything in the labor camps. You could get killed for not working hard enough or fast enough. We were forced to work 16 or 18 hours a day.
There was not enough food so we were always weak and could not move very fast. You could get killed for trying to eat some of the rice you were harvesting, if they saw you do it. If you were of a light color, wore glasses, didn’t work hard enough or said something that the Khmer Rouge didn’t like, you would be killed. They killed educated people, doctors and foreigners, such as Vietnamese or Chinese who were living or working in Cambodia.
Sometimes if the Khmer Rouge soldiers were not looking, someone might be lucky enough to catch a rat. They would bite its head off while it was still alive and any of the people standing around would take a few bites, stuffing the pieces into their mouth and gobbling them down to try to stay alive.
One time my mother and I were in the fields and the Khmer Rouge got mad because I was working too slow because I was tired. They decided to beat me to death. My mother threw her body over mine and took the beating for me. The Khmer Rouge was impressed with my mother’s act of bravery and let her take the beating for me. Even so, I almost died from the beating I got before my mother covered me with her body.
Large numbers of people would be marched into the camps. They would be bound, meaning tied with their hands behind their back. Then hundreds of the bound people would be marched out to the fields. The next day when our captors were taking us to work in a rice field we would see hundreds of new bodies lying in the fields. The bodies were left to rot. Animals, often rats, fed on the bodies. The stench when getting near the bodies, sometimes for months, was horrible. This happened often, sometimes every night for a few weeks at a time. They used bullets to kill people if they had a lot of people to kill. But to save bullets, they often beat people to death using their rifle butts. Beating people to death took longer than a single bullet.
We slept in something like stables, on the ground. Sometimes we slept on dead grass. Sometimes when the people in the next little alcove came back to their sleeping place from the fields, the soldiers would come, tie them up and march them out and kill them. This created a state of terror. We never knew when they would be coming for us. We rarely knew why the people were marched out and killed. It was like a constant nightmare only you never woke up.
One time there was a family in the next alcove. Everyone was always starving. Everyone had gotten thin. A lot of people just fell over dead from illness or from hunger or other things. Maybe some just gave up. In this family, one of their children died. They didn’t tell the Khmer Rouge. They kept collecting the dead child’s ration of rice to feed to their other children. They cut pieces of their dead child’s flesh to cook and to feed to their other children. When these parents looked at the swollen bellies of their surviving children and heard them crying and begging for food they made the ghastly decision. That was to feed the flesh of their dead child to the still living children so that they might survive. But the Khmer Rouge found out one day about the deception. They became very angry and tied the hands of all the family, parents and children, and took them to the fields and killed them all. Maybe it was just as well because the memories of feeding their dead child to the living, if they had lived to be 100 years old, would never have left them.
The Khmer Rouge were an uneducated people who came down from the mountains to run Cambodia. They kept raiding Vietnamese villages near the Cambodian border and slaughtering everyone they found. After four years of murder by the Khmer Rouge the Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge fled back to the mountains. We were freed. We went back to our home village. When we got there we found that all of our possessions were gone and someone else was living in our house. So we moved into someone else’s house, someone who had not yet returned to our village.
Of course, so many were killed that we could have been living in the house of someone who would never return. My two brothers also came back to our village when the Vietnamese freed them from their labor camps. My brothers had been in different camps; I was the only child who had been with my mom. But back at our village it was still hard, there were no crops, food was scarce. We had been growing our food before 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took us away. Nothing had been grown in our fields for four years.
We knew the Vietnamese had sent the Khmer Rouge back to the Mountains. But we didn’t know if they would come back again, so we were frightened. We left our village and went to Thailand, where we heard there were refugee camps. We stayed there for two years and finally came to the United States in 1981.
That was 20 years ago that we came to the United States. I still have nightmares almost every night, but I have a job and I earn money. My mother has not done so well. She has high blood pressure; she has problems sleeping at night. She cries a lot when she watches TV or when she looks at the photo albums. She has nightmares. If she hears a sound at night she jumps up thinking the Khmer Rouge are at the door. She thinks they have come to get her and tie her up and take her to the fields to kill her. She saw hundreds of people killed in Cambodia. She is afraid to be left alone. She gets angry easily. She argues a lot. She is angry that she is not dead like her husband because if she were, she wouldn’t have to suffer any more. My mother no longer insists that I have to always be at a lower level than her. So, some of the old habits have been changed.
FORCED MARRIAGE AND RAPE IN KHMER CAMBODIA
My name is Khat. I was 18 when the Communists took over Cambodia. I was placed in a forced labor camp for single people. I was separated from my family but one of my brothers was sent to the same camp. I lived with the single women on one side of the camp; my brother lived with the men on the other side of the camp. We worked almost around the clock with only a few hours of sleep and we were given only starvation rations. I was not allowed to talk to my brother, though we were in the same camp. But, across the yard, I could see my brother sometimes. We could look at each other sometimes though we didn’t dare to wave at each other or talk. One day after we had been in the camp for a month, while I was looking at my brother through the fence the Khmer Rouge came up to him and beat him to death with their rifles. I watched him die. I could do nothing. I stood there wanting to scream but I knew that if I did I would be killed. I couldn’t breathe, my chest hurt. I fell down and some of the other women carried me to my bed. I lay there shivering in fear and anger. Then I started crying for my brother. I cried for a long, long time. Now, years later, the image of his blood splattering in the air and then on the ground still force themselves back into my brain and I cry all over again.
Often, people were killed as an example to the others. I later heard that the Khmer Rouge had discovered that my brother had been a soldier in the Army, fighting against the Khmer Rouge before they took over Cambodia. A lot of people burned their army uniforms and tried to hide their past when the Khmer Rouge came. But, the Khmer Rouge would torture people or give people extra rations if they told on someone. Someone had told them that my brother used to be a soldier.
In the camps, the guards would often take the women and force them to have sex. I was about to be raped by a Khmer Rouge guard when another guard saw what was going on and took pity on me. I was screaming and trying to fight him off. He was pulling my clothes off when the other guard came and argued with him and I didn’t get raped.
If I were too sick to work I would be allowed to rest just one day and then forced to go back to work the next day. People often died of starvation and disease as well as being murdered for no reason.
Besides watching my brother being beaten to death I saw many others murdered in the same way. I was almost killed once for eating a piece of fruit off a tree. I was very hungry. I was caught. They kicked me a lot and I was unconscious for a long time. When I finally woke up I was very sore from the beating and the kicks. The guards would not let me eat for the rest of the day. It was time for the people to eat but they kept me tied up until everyone else had eaten then they untied me and let me go back to my sleeping place still very hungry. I was lucky I was not killed for eating that piece of fruit. Other times I saw people being killed for what the Khmer Rouge called stealing fruit or other food. I lived through the four years while the Khmer Rouge ran the country.
I was just about to be forced into marriage by the Khmer Rouge, to someone in the camp, when the Vietnamese freed the country from the Khmer Rouge. I went back to my village and found someone and I got married. He also had survived the four years under the Khmer Rouge. We were both very thin. I’m not sure we fell in love but it was a strange and wonderful feeling to be able to talk to someone without fear of being killed. And it was someone I picked, not someone they were going to make me marry. But we didn’t feel safe and there wasn’t anything to eat so after awhile we managed to get to a refugee camp in Thailand. In a few more years we finally got to the United States. Almost every night I hear voices saying, “Take him away and kill him because he used to be a soldier.” They are talking about my brother and I see him standing there then they are dragging him away. When I first wake up shaking from the dream I don’t know if it was a dream or not. It takes me a long time to wake up enough to remember I am in the United States now and not in Cambodia any more.
BEGGING FOR FOOD BUT GETTING BEATINGS INSTEAD
My name is Mon. I was okay before the Communists took over Cambodia. I was married in 1970. In 1975 the Communists forced us to go to labor camps. Since we had children we went to a different camp than the single people. There was never enough food. I used to go beg for food every day from the Khmer Rouge village leaders. They would always beat me for bothering them. I still don’t know why I went back every day. Maybe it was because of my children. Their stomachs were swollen and they cried for food all the time. Maybe when I would go and get beaten unconscious every day I wouldn’t be able to see my dying children.
My friends would come later in the night, when the Khmer Rouge were sleeping, and take me back to where my family slept. There was so little food I became very skinny, just skin and bones. I became very weak from lack of food. I had to use a stick to walk. Even so, the guards would still force me to go out in the fields to work. When I would pass out and fall down in the fields from lack of food they would take me back to the sleeping area. At night, the Communists would sometimes hide people in your little hut to spy on you. If you said anything bad about the Khmer Rouge you would be executed.
Three of my children died of starvation in 1977 over a period of a few days. My wife screamed all day and all night. I was too weak to scream. After three of our children died the Communists sent my wife to one camp and me to a different camp. I don’t know why. My wife was allowed to take with her our only child who was still alive. I somehow stayed alive at the new camp. My brain was not working very well. I think if it was, I would have gone crazy thinking about my dead children. In 1979, the Vietnamese Communists freed us. I met my wife on the way back to our village. She had our son with her. When we talked to some of the other people who had been set free I found that everyone in my family had died. Some died of starvation or illness, some of diseases. My father, mother, a brother and a sister all died. My wife and I didn’t go back to our village. We went to Thailand to a refugee camp. It took us two more years to finally get to the United States.
In the refugee camp we had more children and more after we came to the United States. My wife gave birth to nine children all together; six are still alive. But when I got back together with my wife in 1979, she said I had changed. I would get upset easy. I forgot things a lot. Now, it is years later and my wife complains that she can’t get me to take a shower and that she has to tell me over and over to even get me into the bathroom. I tell her, “Why do I have to take a bath, there is nothing wrong with me,” but she says I smell. She thinks I am hungry when my stomach is growling. If she asks if I am hungry, I tell her, “No, I am not hungry.”
I have lost interest in eating. Nights are hard for me, that’s when I think the Khmer Rouge are coming to get me and take me back there again. I hear banging at the door but when I go to the door no one is there. Sometimes I try to help by getting the mail. But a little later when they say, “Where is the mail,” I have forgotten where I put it. When people ask me my name I tell them, “Daddy of Chay.” Chay was our oldest child. If they keep asking, “No, what was the name your parents gave you,” I tell them those names are not important because my wife calls me “Daddy of Chay.” I do admit that my memory used to be a lot better than it is now.
KHMER SLAVES USED AS HUMAN SHIELDS IN THE MINEFIELDS
My name is Sokham. My sister and I were born in our little Cambodian village. Before the Khmer Rouge Communists took over Cambodia in 1975 they used to make raids on the villages they thought might be backing the Royal Lao government. They wouldn’t stay long in these villages; they would come in and quickly kill a lot of people then leave. In 1974 we heard that the Khmer Rouge were coming so we all hid. I was age 15 and my sister was 13. It was night. The Khmer Rouge set fire to our village. I was crouching in the bushes next to my sister a couple hundred yards from the village.
Even at that distance there was a little bit of reflected light. My sister had a white shirt on so the Khmer Rouge were able to see her in the dim light and shot her. Blood squirted from her body and some landed on me, she fell down next to me. I had to stay hidden and quiet until the Khmer Rouge were gone or they would have killed me too. I thought my sister was not hurt bad but after the soldiers left I tried to get her to stand up and she couldn’t. That’s when I noticed she had blood all over her white shirt. I picked up my sister and walked deeper into the jungle. My sister was screaming and crying in pain. I kept telling her it would be okay. Then her screaming stopped and she became very still in my arms as she died. I still heard guns firing in the distance.