When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge Paperback Read Online Free Page A

Khmer! Yeakong chol srok Khmer! ” The Viet Cong are invading Cambodia! Her voice is itself a blast of terror.
    Chea’s hysterical warning makes me realize that the raging noise outside could be related to the word I had been wondering about: war . More than anything, I want to see my parents. Suddenly the light flips on, revealing my frightened sisters and brothers running around frantically, randomly—as disoriented as ants whose hill has been plowed under.
    I see my mother clutching my baby sister, Avy, and my father standing at the wall where he has just turned on the light. I run to stand beside Mak . My father reaches out to hold Chea’s shoulders. He looks into her eyes and carefully says: “Achea, koon , take your brothers and sisters with you and hide in the bunker by the pond. Hunch and walk low, so you won’t get hit by bullets. Hurry, koon Pa [father’s child]!”
    My brothers and sisters rush out the doorway, a small, traumatized herd of cattle. I clench my mother’s hand, and my body rattles with each echo of gunfire. Carrying Avy and holding on to me, Mak hurries toward the door. She can’t move quickly, for she is six months pregnant. Artillery explodes outside, and I scream and burst into tears. Mak shakes off my hand, then grabs onto it tightly.
    “ Pa vea! ” * She shouts to my father, who is running from one window to the next, sticking his head out and listening. “What are you doing? You’ll get shot! Why aren’t you careful? Help me with the children!” Mak is scared, and her tone frightens me even more than the artillery roaring in the night air.
    Pa shouts back, “I just want to know where the gunfire is coming from.”
    Mak bends toward me. Her words come as hard and fast as an auctioneer’s: “Athy, * koon , wait for your father here. Mak takes Avy downstairs.” My heart races when I see that she is scared for my father. After she hurries out, I cry, jumping up and down, anxious for Pa to take me to the bunker.
    Pa runs over to comfort me, snatches me down from the peak of my hysteria. He carries me to the open bunker, a hole in the sticky clay soil ringed with sandbags. Safe at the bunker, he can’t rest. He needs to go back to the house for Yiey Tot , his grandmother, who is blind and frail. He takes Chea and Tha with him to help carry her. Above the noise I can hear my great-grandmother’s groans.
    “Hunch, koon !” I hear Pa cry. “Don’t you hear the flying bullets? Don’t worry, Yiey , we won’t drop you.”
    I’m relieved when everyone in my family, including Aunt Cheng, Pa ’s younger sister, finally hides by the pond. Lying beside my mother in the cold night, I wonder if everyone is as scared as I am as the bullets whiz over us—a fierce hiss and invisible whisper, so quick you wonder if you really heard it. Flares erupt like lightning, illuminating the dark sky.
    So this is war. Will it ever stop?
    Finally the gunfire belches its last round. Silence and relief. Now we can go back home , I think to myself, ready to be freed from worries about war. I look forward to the morning. I want to forget the adult world that pulled me from my dreams and into a nightmare.
    What I don’t know is that there is a world outside Cambodia—a world that will affect me, my family, and Cambodia as a nation. I do not know who owned the guns that night—only that they were aimed at me. It will be years before I begin to understand the causes and effects of war, the political gamesmanship. But by then my family will have become flotsam caught in the heave and thrust of its tide.
    I look back now as a survivor educated in America. I’ve sought out answers to questions I raised as a little girl. Trying to make sense of what happened. Trying to understand the players in the Vietnam conflict and those who took advantage of the situation, pulling Cambodia—the pawn, they called it—into the whirlpool of destruction.
    The heavenly comet that we saw so long ago had more than one tail.