Daily Telegraph, 6 October
2005
A survivor's return to the
killing fields
A woman who fled Pol Pot's Cambodia as a
child tells Elizabeth Grice why she has
abandoned her comfortable exile in America
As a child labourer in
the killing fields of Cambodia, it was Theary
Seng's daily task to collect buffalo dung for
fertiliser amid the stench of inadequately
buried human bodies. The exercise was a welcome
freedom from prison life and she describes this
now as matter-of-factly as if she had been hired
to pick apples in an English orchard. It was "a
chore" and she would hum tunes to keep her
spirits up.
Her three older brothers watched over water
buffalo and every day had to pass a tree on
which women's body parts - "new ones and old
ones" - were hanging from the branches. When one
young boy in the group tried to escape, he was
shot by Khmer Rouge guards and left to die in
the bamboo brush. Shackled prisoners with whom
the children had shared rations in the evening
would have disappeared by morning, herded into
mass graves they had dug themselves the previous
day.
It might be partly her lawyer's training
that makes Seng sound so detached about these
events, but a more likely explanation is that
they came to seem almost routine and were
eventually eclipsed by greater atrocities. Her
mother, grandparents and four brothers were all
imprisoned together. For five months, they
shared a compound with a demented woman who
became a prime source of amusement for the
guards. One day , they tied her up and squeezed
her head in a wooden coconut cruncher until her
skull cracked.
"When I recall it now," says Seng, who was
seven at the time, "it is like looking at a
picture and seeing only the top of the frame.
Sensing the anguish but not her complete face."
She says she can't be sure, but she thinks there
was an eruption of laughter at this public
execution.
On their last night in prison, two guards
carrying ropes - wet to make them easier to knot
- came for Seng's mother as she and her youngest
brother, Daravuth were curled up asleep beside
her. They didn't see her again. "We didn't know
my mum had disappeared or been killed - the
prison guards said she was just working in
another location - but my brother and I woke
hugging one another in a foetal position. I had
the most surreal sensation that I was just a
shell. My soul had been purged from me. Body
and soul were so clearly defined for me because
one was missing. It was almost a spiritual
experience. It is hard to believe a
seven-year-old could have those intense
feelings."
Today, Seng is a successful lawyer of about
35, small and neat with a glossy black bob and
an air of fragile containment. She cannot be too
sure of her age, or the date of her birth,
because both of her parents perished under the
Khmer Rouge - they were part of the exodus in
1975 in which 20,000 Cambodians died - and, in
the prolonged upheaval and hardship, such
details were lost.
Her survival is miraculous enough, but what
makes her story different from others that have
seeped out from this era of genocide is the
degree of her outward triumph, material as well
as psychological.
After prison, she and her orphaned siblings
spend four years moving between various
relatives in that state of permanent hunger and
anxiety typical of life under the Pol Pot
regime. They made a daring escape on foot to
Thailand, and from there, after many months in
refugee camps, Theary Seng, traumatised,
uneducated, anorexic and unable to speak
English, went to join relatives in Michigan.
"Everyone looked alike, male or female,"
she says." I couldn't distinguish between a man
and a woman. Even though we had been exposed to
foreigners, the fact that everyone was blonde
and white was a shock. The cold. The buildings.
The glitter of everything. It was a completely
different world."
The culture clash was immense. She'd never
known anything but war, and a materialistic, if
peaceful, society was bewildering. The Christian
Education Fund paid for her to be educated
privately, so she was a poor, illiterate child
in a rich school, unable to invite anyone home
because she was too embarrassed - by everything
from the pungent smell of fish sauce used in
Cambodian cooking to the hybrid "Cambodianglish"
they spoke. She became chronically depressed,
watched too much television and got fat - a
further source of misery. Integration was slow.
Counselling seems to have been out of the
question, not because she wasn't tempted, but
because she was too proud to see a psychologist.
"It is just not part of our culture. My family
would laugh at me. They would think it implied
that they had done something wrong." Seng says
her salvation was work - reading and calligraphy
(she wrote out the entire Book of Psalms), but
especially the study of law. "I had a lot of
violence and anger in me that had to be battled
out. I just knew that law would train me to make
sense of the bungled feelings and turbulence
inside." Now she has written a book about her
experiences - and that, too, has proved
cathartic.
Perhaps the most surprising thing in it is
a description not of the killing fields, but of
her strange meeting, 21 years on, with Khieu
Samphan, the Khmer Rouge former head of state
she holds accountable for the deaths of her
parents, her relatives "and the blood of 1.7
million Cambodians". By then, he was an old man,
shrewd but also disarming, and she was a
confident professional woman. "I stoon face to
face with evil incarnate, my parents' murderer,"
she says in the book. Instead of revulsion,
though, she felt a perverse sense of awe - "evil
was not mad, but charming, gracious and
grandfatherly".
But actually, her reactions sound more like
those of a journalist meeting a long pursued
interviewee: it was a very satisfying moment and
she didn't want to do anything to make him throw
her out. "It wasn't as if I was going to be the
person to stump him," she says. "I wanted to
show him I was a survivor of his Khmer Rouge,
not a victim, but an equal. I felt morally
superior. It allowed me to be calm and ask
questions. I could have pushed for more direct
answers, but that might have lost the
conversation. I just wanted to hear him talk. To
form an opinion."
The conversation was polite, surreal and on
his part, evasive. Naturally, he denied all
responsibility for the killings. "Do I look like
a mass murderer?" he smiled. "I went away
feeling: how can he live with himself? I don't
think he is human any more." She believes
Samphan will be brought to trial - something for
which she has campaigned - and if he lives long
enough, convicted, but that "we will not get the
truth from him". Nor does she think Cambodians
will gain any sort of collective closure from
it.
As for Seng, her return to Cambodia
suggests she is still trying to resolve things
for herself. She returned in 2002 as a
consultant to the International Republican
Institute, leading up to the first multi-party
elections, and has been back and forth as an
activist several times. Now an American-Khmer
(rather than Cambodian-American) she is living
permanently in Phnom Penh in what sounds like a
cross between a hostel and a fortress.
Cambodia is a crime-ridden, intellectually
impoverished place - a legacy, she believes, of
the violence of the Khmer Rouge days when the
educated class was killed off. She has no
privacy because to get to her second-floor
apartment she has to enter through another
house. There are no keys to her front door: it
is padlocked from the inside. This, it seems is
what it means to be a single woman living alone
in Phnom Penh.
The very fact that she was "compelled" to
return - she plans to start a commercial law
firm - has meant sacrifices. She would like a
husband and a family, but her Canadian-American
boyfriend evidently did not see Cambodia as a
career move. Other relationships have foundered
on this issue. "Having been surrounded by a
loving family - grandparents, aunts and uncles -
I just can't imagine growing old alone. But
whoever I marry will need to want to live in
Cambodia with me."
In Cambodia, there are relatives on her
father's side (he was killed when she was four)
but her Westernisation has alienated her from
them in unbridgeable ways. "Like it or not, they
view me with dollar signs because they are
extremely poor. I feel guilt when I spend a
dollar on a can of Coke and they don't even make
a dollar a day. There's just a major material
gulf."
All her close friends are in America. It
sounds as though contentment is a long way off.
"I am often sad, but I am joyful. Joy is
internal, whereas happiness is based more on
external experience. There are moments of
happiness where I laugh. But there is a lot of
sadness as well."
Her professional friends in America are
bemused by her return. No theatres, no concert
hall, no international films. What is there for
you? they ask. "I don't respond," she says. "I
walk away or talk about something else. It's
useless for me to respond. I just feel it is
home for me."
'Daughter of the
Killing Fields' by Theary Seng (Vision) is
available for ₤12-99 (rrp ₤ 15.99) plus ₤1.25
p&p. To order, call Telegraph Books on 0870 428
4112
