Lucky Child (36 page)

A week later, I sit in the lobby and try to calm myself. I haven’t seen Kim since I left Cambodia eleven years ago. As I massage the base of my skull, I search the slippery ridges of my brain for suitable excuses as to why I haven’t called or visited Kim in the four months I’ve been in France, since he’s only a three-hour train ride away. I glance at the clock on the wall—9:55
A.M.
Kim is only a few minutes away now. I get up and tuck my blue shirt into my black pants. When Kim’s car pulls up, I brace myself and exit my fantasy world to come face-to-face with Ma’s monkey.

“Loung.” Kim smiles widely at me. In his big brown T-shirt and blue jeans, Kim looks thin, almost gaunt. Suddenly I’m terrified. As he walks up to me, my stomach twists painfully and the pain in my neck makes me nauseous. My arms stay close by my side. I slowly turn from Kim to stare at Uncle Lim, Aunt Heng, and their eldest son Hung standing beside the car.

“Kim,” I greet him. “Uncle, Aunt, Hung, how are you?”

“Good, good.” Uncle Lim replies. “Let’s not stand around here. Let’s drive to Monaco.” Hung drives with Uncle Lim in the front seat while I sit in the middle between Kim and Aunt Heng in the back.

“Loung,” Aunt Heng begins. “Meng tells me you have to get good grades to keep your scholarship, so you’re studying all the time. You probably have no time to see anything.” I smile.

As we drive the winding cliff road to Monaco, I “ooh” and “ahh” on cue over the scenery. In between the scenic points, Aunt Heng fills me in on the details about the lives of her eight children. While she talks, Kim and I have little to say to each other, and the knots in my neck clump together to form a big aching ball.
I’m so sick of the Khmer Rouge having power over me,
I think.
I’m so tired of them taking away my family,
I want to scream. Slowly, I glance at my brother and force myself to remember him as the little boy who loved kung fu movies and made funny faces. I gradually begin to relax with him.

In Monaco, Kim, Aunt Heng, Uncle Lim, Hung, and I pass many hours sauntering in front of the world-famous Monte Carlo Hotel and Casino. When our feet grow too tired, we find a café. Over a big latte, Kim talks about his job making plastic eyeglass frames while I tell him about Meng and Vermont. When our feet are reenergized, we stroll by shops filled with riches beyond reach. As the sun shines on the flawless diamonds
in the glass cases and creates prisms of colors on our skin, Kim and I compare stories of arriving in a foreign country with nothing but the clothes on our backs, dealing with culture shock, and learning a new language. By the time we laugh at our shared dislike of snow and freezing rain, I’ve begun to separate him from the Khmer Rouge.

“Kim, how did you get from Cambodia to France?” I ask him as we sit down for a late lunch.

“It’s a long story,” he says. Then he laughs and adds, “It’s a bit like an adventure movie.”

“I love adventure movies,” I tell him.

As he eats his hamburger and potato fries, Kim recounts his story to me.

After Chou was wedded to Pheng, Kim quickly left the village and moved to Ou-dong, where he’d searched for a way out of Cambodia to join Meng and Loung. Then one night in 1985, six months after he left Chou, Dara, a friend of Kim’s, told him of his plans to go to Thailand. Dara then said that for three chi gold, Kim could come with him. “You pay the driver half in Ou-dong,” he said, “and when you arrive safely at the camp, they will go to your family for the rest. If you want to go, we leave tomorrow.”

In the morning, Kim brought nothing with him when he met Dara near their designated bridge, just as he was instructed. He had on an old brown shirt, faded blue jeans, and a pair of green flip-flops. Dara wore loose dark clothes and brown sandals. Around them, life was already bustling with people and vendors going about their business. Young girls walked by carrying baked spiders, and right behind them a man sold French bread in a wooden basket. A live, fat two-hundred-pound pig was tied to the back of a motorbike, its four feet jutting toward the sky. On a side street, young monks in their orange and yellow robes approached a store and waited quietly until someone came out and gave them spoonfuls of rice and vegetables. Once they received the food, they chanted a blessing to their benefactor.

At nine
A.M.
, a truck ferrying people from village to village stopped in front of them. Kim and Dara climbed aboard, talking to no one. In the sky, the sun moved slowly, burning through the haze and darkening their shadows.
Silently, Kim said his good-byes to Chou, Khouy, and the rest of the family. For five hours, as the truck wound along the red dirt road to Porsat, Kim stared at the vast province and knew that somewhere there he left Pa, Ma, Geak, and Keav. Suddenly, the blood in his veins pumped rapidly to his head, causing it to hurt. The road curved around hillsides, then finally flattened as the truck headed to their next stop, Battambang. There, Kim bought rice and fish and was quickly surrounded by amputees hobbling on wooden legs and begging. Soon the truck took the last twelve riders to a village on the Cambodian side of the Thai border. It was night when Kim and Dara climbed off the truck, their joints aching and stiff. As he stretched, Kim saw nothing but miles and miles of rice fields.

“Someone will come for you shortly,” the driver said and stuck out his hand. Kim gave him the money. The driver climbed back into the truck and left. For a few tense moments, Kim kicked at the dirt while Dara stared at the road worriedly. Both breathed a sigh of relief when a young man their age arrived.

“Come, follow me,” the guide told them. They followed him to an empty hut hidden behind thick trees and bushes. Minutes after their arrival, an elderly woman delivered a mosquito net, water, rice, and fish to them and disappeared. After they ate, the friends fell into a deep sleep. When the guide woke them, the sky was dark and clear, the stars twinkled, and the moon shone silver lights on them. Kim wanted to ask the guide for the time but didn’t.

“Put this on.” He handed them each a pair of old, dark, loose pants and a shirt. While they changed, the guide continued. “Don’t talk,” he said. “I will talk for you. I’ve told the men we’ll travel with that you’re my cousins from the city, here to learn how to work. We smuggle dry fish and other things to sell at the Thai border, and buy medicine to sell back here. It is illegal so we travel at night to avoid the police. You’ll both carry a bag so you’ll look like one of us.”

The guide walked them toward a group of nine men, all of them muscular and thin. He then slathered mud on his body and instructed his charges to do the same. Kim scooped a handful of mud and spread it on his face, neck, arms, and all over his clothes. The rotten smell made him want to gag, but the guide whispered, “Stinky mud is good mosquito repellent.”

The guide slipped a bag on Kim’s shoulders. Instantly, the straps dug into his flesh, causing him to stagger backward.

“Just follow my steps exactly,” the guide quietly told them. “We have to go fast and pass the Khmer Rouge territory before it gets light.” Kim sucked in his breath in fear at the mention of the Khmer Rouge territory, as he’d heard many stories of people who’d been kidnapped, butchered, and killed there. Guided by the moonlight, the group walked single file in silence. Time passed slowly, and with each step the bag grew heavier and heavier on Kim’s back.

“We are now approaching the Khmer Rouge territory,” the guide whispered to Kim and Dara. “For the next three hours, we have to be on our guard and be absolutely silent.”

Kim nodded and followed him. Above them, the moon dipped in and out from behind the clouds. The wind blew playfully, rustling the branches and leaves. Kim’s ears picked up all the noise and tried to decipher whether each sound was friend or foe. Occasionally, his mind wandered and dreamed of a future where he was living with Eldest Brother and going to cooking school.

Suddenly, a stench of putrid flesh assaulted Kim’s nostrils. The group was silent as they stepped over two dead bodies lying facedown in the path. Kim cupped his hands over his nose and mouth and held his breath, but marched on. A few feet in front of them, a dead cow with its front legs blown off obstructed their path. The guide carefully stepped off the beaten path onto a grassy patch of land. Kim followed his exact steps, his eyes only briefly resting on the cow’s protruding bones.

By the time the sky lightened, the group had safely made it through the Khmer Rouge territory. Kim’s shoulders felt like someone had pounded his muscles with a mallet. When the group stopped to rest, Kim dropped his bags and was lying on the grass when the guide approached him and Dara.

“You go with new guide.” The guide pointed to a thin man in his forties with gray teeth. “I hired two boys to take your bags. Thank you for carrying the bags.” He smiled and left with the group.

“I take you camp,” the new man told him. Kim and Dara nodded. “But day, night, sleep here.” The guide handed them each a package of rice and fish wrapped in banana leaves and took them to a hut outside the
village where they rested for the night. When the sun came up, Kim woke to find his shoes had been stolen. He and Dara followed their new guide in bare feet for two hours before they finally stopped. Kim looked up and his throat closed. Across the worn road, on the other side of a small field of grass, a six-foot-tall barbed-wire fence loomed into the sky and stretched around a camp where Kim imagined thousands of refugees lived in their makeshifts huts, wooden houses, and tents. To Kim, the camp looked like a magical lost city where hopes and dreams could be reborn.

The guide pointed to a barely visible trail. Kim’s eyes scanned the slightly crushed grass that led to some dense bent shrubs where there was a small crawl hole hidden under the fence. The guide then pointed out some red signs with skulls and bones in the field surrounding the trail.

“Stay on trail, no land mines,” the guide whispered. Kim nodded, his stomach turning.

For forty-five minutes they waited in the bushes by the road until a border patrol jeep drove by. The guide pulled his charges down lower into the bushes, but not before Kim saw one of the Thai soldier standing up, his hand on his rifle. When the roar of the jeep faded into the jungle roads, the guide yelled, “Run!” Kim leapt from his position, his heart pounding in his chest, his bare feet cut up by rocks and splintering wood. He ran. Once he reached the barbed-wire fence, he slid under it like a snake in the grass. When he climbed out of the crawl hole on the other side, he could not control his smile. Right behind him, Dara and the guide entered the camp in the same way. He felt so strong, as if his body could hop many times its height, like a grasshopper.

“Slow, act normal, like you belong here,” the guide cautioned him, and led Kim to a hut owned by a woman and her daughter. Now that his job was done, the guide disappeared with Dara. In a few days, one of the guide’s men would go to Khouy to collect the rest of their gold.

That first night, Kim’s dream of freedom was crushed as the sobering facts of refugee life were explained to him. When he left Cambodia, he hadn’t known that the camps were closing and that Thailand was accepting no more refugees. Yet each day, hundreds of refugees continued to arrive. Many were caught, put in jail, and then trucked to the border of Cambodia and Thailand. There, they were forced off the trucks by the Thai authorities to march across the Dangrek Mountains and fields littered
with mines, where starvation, disease, bandits, and Khmer Rouge soldiers lay waiting. Kim heard that many did not make it home and that many of those who did make it home faced shame and poverty. Oh, how naive he’d been to think that all he had to do was tell a refugee worker about his family in America and he’d immediately be allowed to join them.

Five months later Kim was still waiting for his passage to America. Protected by the woman his guide had introduced him to, he would often be forced to hide three feet under her hut, silently sucking in hot air through a porous bamboo bedpost, ingeniously lined up above the hiding place. The space was completely black and not much larger than the width of his shoulders. Locking his fingers together, Kim would pull his knees close against his chest. Above him, hidden under another three inches of dirt, a piece of thick plywood with a small circular hole in the middle covered Kim’s hideout. On top of the plywood sat a heavy bed with four bamboo bedposts. One of the posts was punctured with holes and positioned on top of the plywood opening. Straining his neck, Kim would place his nose at the hole and desperately inhale air, forcing himself to stay calm.

After fifteen minutes, he’d be completely drenched with sweat. He longed to massage his neck but he dared not move, too afraid to make the tiniest noise. Above him, half a dozen Thai soldiers marched through the hut, their feet heavy with military boots. The footsteps moved around the room to check behind the curtains, crates, and under piles of clothes in search of illegal refugees. As the Thai soldiers moved around, Kim concentrated on staying calm and totally silent.

“Let’s see your papers,” barked the Thai soldier in his broken Khmer.

“Here they are, lord.” The hut owner scurried over, her steps soft and quick. Kim pictured her presenting the papers, holding them out with both hands to show respect. He could hear three other pairs of foot steps, all quiet and soft.

“One, two, three, four IDs,” the Thai soldier counted. “Four refugees living in this one hut.”

“No one else is here,” another Thai soldier reported after he’d gone through the house.

“All right. Let’s move on.” As the Thai soldiers left without even the smallest of gesture of farewell, their footsteps shook loose the dirt, which
fell over Kim’s head and body like falling ashes. The dirt mixed with his sweat and melted into his skin, making him feel even more grimy. He longed for a shower but all he could do was wipe his hands over the mud.

The seconds stretched into eternity, until he heard no traces of the Thai soldiers’ steps. But still he knew he had another fifteen minutes of sitting in his hole just to be on the safe side. Kim imagined the sun setting over the camp where hundreds of thousands of fires were being built for cooking the evening meal. His stomach growled at the thought. How many more months would he need to hide waiting to live his dream of a new life?