reduced and recycled

We were getting some documents signed when I asked him where he was from. I couldn’t place him: he either had some Arab or Indian ancestry in his physical make up. He had sunken cheeks and bulging eyes, and hair befitting a man who’d spent years building up his business. He smiled and told me he was from Cambodia. His wife, sitting across from me, also smiled and told me they were both from that far away place.

It was only when I asked him when he had migrated to Malaysia that I learned that both he and his wife were former refugees from the Khmer Rouge. It was a startling revelation: I was sitting across two people who had been through Pol Pot’s regime, and its attendant culling of intellectuals, academics and various enemies of the state.

His wife had a faraway look as she told me about how she was taken from her parents at a young age, about 6 or 12 I can’t remember, and was forced to work in the fields planting padi and the subsequent six years spent in jungles. There were times, she told me, when they didn’t have food for a whole week, forcing many to brave the jungle in search of food. While his wife talked, he remained silent, looking away. He didn’t want to talk about it, he told me, because reliving those memories was horrible.

And yet, after a few minutes listening to his wife describe how Pol Pot’s supporters and soldiers always wore black, and how they were brainwashed into an unswerving loyalty to Pol Pot, he began to recount some of his own stories. He talked about a doctor who, for being a doctor, received his first and last late night visit.

“It’s like that,” he told me, “They will visit you one night, and then they will take you out into the jungle and–” he mimicked beheading, as if he couldn’t express that particular horror in words. “If they visit you at night, you were as good as dead,” he said.

“But who told on these people? I mean, did neighbours spy on other neighbours and reported them or..?” I asked. He seemed to ignore the question, and his wife described the soldiers, the ones who believed in Pol Pot and nothing else. “Kalau suruh mereka bunuh keluarga, mereka mampu. Ganas betul, no human feeling,” she said.

I was fascinated, and wondered for the hundredth time what it took to turn a man into an animal with no moral compunctions.

“How did you escape?” I asked. And they made it very clear: if not for the Vietnamese invading after the Americans left, they wouldn’t have escaped. They would’ve been dead. His wife told me how she was lost after the Vietnamese invaded, having been separated from her family. She finally found her mother, and I can’t imagine how that must’ve felt, while fleeing from the Khmer Rouge soldiers. They met some invading Vietnamese, led them to safety. Months later, they found themselves in a refugee camp somewhere in Thailand.

“Many died, many, many,” she said.

“Many died. My friends, family, everybody,” he said, “Malaysians are lucky.”