Survival in the Killing Fields Read Online Free

working very hard. Each house had its garden surrounded by a reed
fence, with vegetables and tobacco growing inside. Chickens clucked and pecked at the dirt, and roosters crowed at all hours. Mostly we bartered for rice, because we could get it more cheaply from
these villagers than we could in Samrong Yong.
    We walked all day, and I became strong and healthy. On the way home, I foraged for lotus plants, whose roots and seeds are tasty in soups; for water convolvulus, which is something like spinach;
and for
sdao
tree leaves, rather bitter-tasting, as many of the rural foods are. Whenever we passed through woods, my mother wrapped a few grains of rice in a leaf and placed it on the
ground as a gift to the local spirits.
    When I was about eight years old I was allowed to go out to barter on my own, without my mother. My favourite village was in a grove of sugar palm trees, which have tall, slender, curving trunks
and fan-like fronds on top. Every morning the men scampered up the sugar palms to gather nectar from the flowers. They boiled the nectar in vats for many hours to make a crude brown sugar that
tastes like molasses. They sold the palm sugar in the market, or traded it to me.
    They also made an alcoholic drink that was slightly bubbly and tasted like beer. They made their best-quality beer right up in the palm trees. One morning when I walked into their village the
men waved at me from the treetops. ‘Hey, boy! Hey! Ngor Haing! 1 Come up here! We’ve got something for you!’ I climbed up the bamboo
ladder. At the top, on a platform connecting several nearby trees, the men were sitting with loose, happy grins and glazed eyes. They were drinking fresh palm beer. I tried some. It was delicious.
I drank more. The hours passed. We were laughing and joking up there in the tree until I realized that I had to get down and didn’t have any control over my arms or legs. The ground looked
far away and small, like the earth under an airplane. They had to carry me down. No more bartering for me that day. I was too busy weaving around on the footpaths and falling over. When I got home
my mother scolded me and my father gave me a stern, angry look. He said I would never amount to anything if I spent time with the wrong people.
    I disagreed with my father. The country people had always been nice to me. But I was very stubborn then; if my father said I was wrong about anything, automatically I felt I was right, without
even considering what he said. That was my personality: If I hit my head against a wall accidentally, I would butt it again, to see if I could make the wall hurt.
    Medically speaking, I was hyperactive as a child. I had a short attention span and far too much energy. I liked sports. I loved fighting. My gang, from the western side of the village, was
always getting in fights with the gang from the eastern side of the village. If the eastern gang came at me when I was alone, I took my baskets off the hooks, waited calmly and got ready to swing
my shoulderboard at their shins. I wasn’t afraid. My fighting and playing displeased my father, who worked every day without a break and who expected me to stay home and help his business.
But the more he scolded me the more I stayed outside.
    It became difficult to meet my father’s gaze. My oldest or number-one brother, who was slow-minded, worked for my father all day long as an ordinary labourer, as faithful as a water
buffalo. My number-two brother, Pheng Huor, the smart one, was already keeping my father’s accounts. I was the number-three brother, with two more younger brothers behind me and three sisters
too. I wanted to help the family, but I didn’t want to work all the time. It was too much fun to play.
    When I was about ten, matters came to a head. The government of Thailand, Cambodia’s neighbour to the west, gave a large sculpture of Buddha to a monk in a town near my village, called
Tonle Batí. The monk was very old and eminent, the