Faculty Book Review--April/May 2003
Chanrithy Him's
When Broken Glass Floats
By Wendy Biddle
On April
15, 1975 the Communist Khmer Rouge captured Cambodia’s capitol,
Phenom Phen, and began the reconstruction of Cambodian society.
From 1975 to 1979, approximately 1.7 million Cambodians died under
Pol Pot’s regime. His goal was to create a medieval agrarian
society that would reset time at Year Zero “where there would be no
families, no sentiment, no expression of love or grief, no
medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no
holidays, no
music: only work and death.” Chanrithy Him, in her memoir, When Broken Glass Floats,
shares her story of growing up under the Khmer Rouge. Hers is not a
joyful story of a nine-year old in a loving, supportive family.
Rather, hers is the story of losing family, of losing love, of
bottling grief, of watching her mother and siblings die from
preventable diseases, and of living in constant fear. In the course
of four years, she lost half of her family, she lost her culture,
her faith in god, and at times even her desire to live. Chanrithy
Him’s memoir is not only testimony to her own survival, but also an
intimate and painful reminder of what the adult world imposes upon
children in wartime.
The Killing Fields, the 1984 Academy Award winning movie, revealed for Americans the horror of not only the Cambodian genocide, but also the US complicity through its support of the Khmer Rouge. It is a powerful movie to watch. But the images of violence, torture, death, and war portrayed do not compare to the experiences of young Chanrithy and her family. Her memoir pained me because hers is a child’s voice—one that should be innocent and protected. Page after page I was overwhelmed by her acute awareness of the danger she was in, of her daily life-and-death struggle, of her fear of random violence, and of being without her beloved family. I cannot fathom a childhood where one is accustomed to the sound of gunfire, or where one has mastered the art of catching mice and fishing for minnows just to have something to eat. Nor can I imagine a world where parents are helpless to save their malnourished, starving children, or where a child learns of her mother being buried alive. By the age of thirteen, Chanrithy had lived beyond her years.
Him’s memoir, while emotionally difficult to read, exemplifies the methodical workings of the Khmer Rouge and their attempt to reorder society. They eliminated the urban populations by relocating everyone to the countryside to work in crop production. They murdered the educated and the intellectuals. They purged the Cambodian people of any and all ties to the Western, modern world. And, most disturbingly, they dismantled the family unit. Him’s story began with the forced evacuation of Phenom Phen, the capitol city. Her family had moved there in 1970 to escape the US bombings along the border of Cambodia and Vietnam. However, the normalcy of daily life ended in April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge forced the two million residents of the city to leave in a slow-flowing river of humans, taking with them only what they could carry. They persecuted those who had worked for the government, they attacked those who wore glasses, they confiscated wrist watches, etc. That was the beginning.
Chanrithy, affectionately called Athy (pronounced Ar-tee) by her family, was the sixth of her parents’ ten children. They were a tight, close family. Her parents had devoted themselves to each other and to raising educated, honest, and respectful children. Athy and her family always used terms of endearment attached to their names, Mak, Pa and koon. After the Khmer Rouge came to power, she was shocked by the new law that required they must refer to their siblings and parents only as comrade. As this was an agrarian revolution, the rural ways of life and the peasants themselves were held up as examples for which all should strive. Athy was from the city and in her childlike way had made fun of the funny accents of the peasants. Her own class consciousness, and perhaps even elitism, made the sudden, violent changes under the Khmer Rouge even more difficult. Her way of life, what she and her family represented, were what the revolution was trying to erase.
As her family was relocated from their home to the work camp at Daakpo, and the several stops between, her encounters with the comrades of the Khmer Rouge reinforced for her the dramatic change in regard to the traditional family and social structures. She writes:
Family ties were suddenly a thing of suspicion. Control was everything. Social ties, even casual conversation, were a threat. Angka, the organization, suddenly became your mother, your father, your God. But Angka was a tyrannical ruler. To question anything—whom you could greet, whom you could marry, what words you could use to address relatives, what work you did—meant that you were an enemy to your new “parent.”[i]
The Khmer Rouge, while claiming the privileged position of parent for the Cambodian people, never assumed complete responsibility for the caring of children. What shocked me more than anything in this memoir was the constant lack of food and the resulting malnutrition, starvation, bizarre diseases, and death. Virtually everyone in Athy’s family who died, died from simple sicknesses that proper food and medicine could have easily cured. Chicken blindness, amoebic dystenary, edema, diarrhea, malaria, and infection were a constant companion to the Cambodian people in the work camps. Those who were sick were sometimes exempted from work, but were never given medicine or extra food to help them recover. Human life and labor were disposable.
The ability to grant food or withhold food, usually just rice gruel, gave the Khmer Rouge power over the people. They lured them to mass propaganda meetings with promises of fish soup. They manipulated children away from their parents’ work camps with promises of better food elsewhere. They destroyed a culture and a people by starving them into submission. They punished Athy by binding her to a stump for a day because she snuck away to collect sweet grass along the camp’s edge. At times, the food rations stopped completely. Athy writes:
Tadpoles. Crickets. Toads. Centipedes. Mice. Rats and scorpions. We eat anything. As we till the earth, we look upon bugs as buried treasure. . . . we ignore what we eat. There is no revulsion. Food is food. . . . Yet even the smallest creatures, the rodents, the insects, are becoming scarce. Some days, our meals for the entire day consist of boiled leaves. Our lives are reduced to a tight circle. Each day revolves around what we can find to eat for the following day. And until it comes, we think about food. All day. All night. Hunger owns us.[ii]
After one of Athy’s older sisters died from edema, and she then heard news that one of her aunts died as well, Athy comments, “Death is a constant, and we’ve all become numb to the shock of it. People die here and there, all around us, falling like flies that have been sprayed with poison.”[iii] That a child became so intimate with death and dying that she learned to shrug it off alarms me. This memoir not only opened my eyes to the horrors of the killing fields and the strengths of Chanrithy Him, but also to my own privilege in living in a society were we do not want and we do not suffer in this way. We are privileged in that we are not concerned with the basic necessities of our daily survival—food, clean water, access to basic health care. But in this privilege, we have removed ourselves from the stark reality that many have faced during wartime and still face today. Our privilege is also our burden for we can choose not to confront nor feel the depths of the darkest corners of humanity. As we come closer to war with Iraq, yes, our lives will change—on a day to day level, our gasoline prices will rise, and constantly in our hearts and minds we know our soldiers will be fighting and dying for us overseas. But we will still be able to run down to the grocery store to pick up some milk and bread. We will not want, and we will not suffer from a lack of our basic survival needs.
After coming to the U.S., Chanrithy Him began to make peace with her past by working with other Cambodian refugees with post-traumatic stress disorder in the Portland, Oregon area. Writing her memoir, perhaps, has also provided her with the necessary catharsis to embrace life as an adult when she was robbed, so violently, of a childhood. Whatever her personal motivations for writing this book, she shared with us her gift of survival. Her experiences, and those of the countless other survivors of genocide, need to be remembered so that we do not, ever, let this happen again to the children of the world. I leave you with her words:
In the end, I know only that war is inevitable in the world as long as leaders such as Pol Pot are empowered by their kind—and as long as those who can make a difference by doing good deeds choose to look the other way. Under those conditions, more human lives will be lost, and many more children will be parentless. The cost of war is a lifelong legacy borne by children.
And I know this: As a survivor, I want to be worthy of the suffering that I endured as a child. I don’t want to let that pain count for nothing, nor do I want others to endure it. This may be our greatest test: to recognize the weight of war on children. If thousands upon thousands of children will suffer and are suffering right now in the world, we must be prepared to help them. But it’s folly to look at the future without an eye to the past.[iv]