Memoirs - Tim Tea

I got permission from several World Literature students to publish their memoirs here. Each memoir combines a story about an adult's influence on the student's life with a story about the adult's own experiences, based on an interview. I found them an intriguing glimpse into my students' lives and histories - I hope you enjoy them too.

Timothy is an American senior of Cambodian ancestry; his father is a Khmer Rouge survivor.

Fish and Porridge

             When I was young I believed my dad was the greatest storyteller. In San Diego’s cold nights I would snuggle up in bed with my brother, and my father would come and whisper short tales to us as drowsiness lulled us to sleep. When the lights switched off and the room was drowned in reverential silence, my dad would begin speaking, and I would be slowly spirited away into the land of his words.

            “Tell us another one,” I would always ask when my dad finished a story. He would smile, hug me and my brother, and then tell us to wait until next time. And so I waited and waited, through the days and through the months and through the arches of the years, until eventually I grew too old for bedtime stories. I developed desires for independence, and with every passing season I came to believe more and more that my dad was already beginning to run out of stories to tell.

            Boy, was I wrong.

            I can’t exactly recall when it happened, but there was a point when my father became a storyteller again. I didn’t know why then, but my father was fierce when it came to the family. “Do not forget your family,” he once told me, “protect them, stay near them, never weigh your friends above them—friends will come and go, but you will only have one family.” The values of this message were hammered into me and my brother until they became something of a mantra for us. 

That was why, for as long as I can remember, my father would take the family out every week to partake in what he called “spending time.” As a kid I loved this, since it meant eating out at a place where the main dish was something other than white rice and Asian food. But as I entered my teenage years and nurtured my addiction to video games, “spending time” became less and less appealing to me. I wanted to spend all my time with my own friends—with the “cool kids”—whose parents gave them so much money and freedom. 

One day my classmates invited me to go to the movies to watch a newly released horror flick. Naturally I was stoked, and I rushed to tell my parents of my recent advance up the social ladder. My father was hesitant, but he gave me permission to go on one condition: I had to allow my brother to go with me as well.

This I met with a deep breath and an inward groan. “He’s gonna make things awkward and ruin everything!” I wanted to say. I bit back my tongue because I knew that a single breath against my father’s words could result in my disownment. Fortunately my brother really didn’t want to hang out with me or my friends, so that ordeal resolved itself quickly. I ended up going to the movies after all, but little did I know the same situation would haunt me through the years like a bad ghost.

Every time an invitation to hang out reached my ears, I was met with the same question from my father: “did you ask your brother?” Granted, my default answer was always “no,” but it reached a point when it became, “no, I do not want to ask my brother.” Being passive aggressive, I kept my mouth shut, knowing better than to push and prod the head of the household. Respect for the father was paramount; anything less was tantamount to cultural suicide.

That was the way things were with my father. I was taken to places I did not want to go and kept from places I did want to go. The divide between him and me was drawn in spastic clashes of contradicting wills. He wanted me to stay close to the family, I wanted to break free of it. Any sign of rebellion from me was quickly met with rebuke.

“Don’t go out with your friends today, stay with your brother.”

“Go back home. You’ve been out of the house too much.”

“Your brother is home alone. Just stay there.”

“Don’t keep silent all the time. Be giving, and be obedient.”

This continued week after week, month after month, until my lungs were so filled with unspoken words that they began to spill over into my actions. I became what my mother called mok tmor—a ”stone face.” A rough cultural translation would be that I turned into a brat, and my parents became cliffs against an ocean of pubescent rage.  

The effects of the stone face were not limited to my refusal to smile. My tolerance for my brother slimmed to such an extent that even the smallest annoyance from him would elicit a loud response from me. I began to spend more time with video games than with people. I would close off my ears to my parents' reproval, and I hid behind mental fortresses that I erected out of self-justification for my feelings. I deserved to be heard, didn’t I? I deserved a little freedom and liberty, right? Didn’t this life belong to me? My parents were old, they would never understand—or so I told myself.

One day, my father took me and my brother out to “spend time” with the family. Instead of going to the usual fast food chain restaurants my family frequented, my father brought us to a simple cafe. The entire place smelled of old coffee, and the furniture looked like something out of a retirement home. I was dismayed when the first dish served was a pot of gooey porridge with strands of strong ginger. Disappointed and unwilling to eat, I voiced an implicit complaint to my father.

“Pa, why are we eating here?” I asked.

My father narrowed his eyes through rectangular spectacles as if he was staring into my soul. He opened the pot of porridge and simply said, “Don’t be picky, just eat and be grateful.” This was when he began to tell stories again. Before I could make another remark, I noticed my father drop his shoulders as if there was a weight he wanted to release. Wrinkles formed across the seams of his face, and his eyes became wispy and distant, like he was in another place and another time.

Then he turned to me and my brother and gave us a long wistful stare. And I could feel it again, the nights in San Diego when he would tell us bedtime stories. The cafe became quiet and still, and time seemed to halt as my father began to spin his tale.

“Listen, a long time ago, when I was young… “  

I was surprised at what happened next. He didn’t tell us any of his old children’s stories. Nothing about what he said that day was meant for the ears of children. Instead of being a story about men becoming kings and princes who conquered the world, it was about a boy living in a time when his country was in hell. It was about a boy who saw more death than most people live to witness. There was no magic, no wonder, no brilliant sheen about the words that left his mouth. There was only a bleak chill that bathed my father in a new light. 

This was my father’s story, one that soon became my own.

           My dad grew up in the flats of a young Phnom Penh. He remembered vaguely of his days there—the days that preceded the revolution. For the most part he remembered his house being empty of parents and empty of plenty. My dad’s own father, an unfaithful man, eloped from my father’s mother—my Amah—soon after he married her. Amah was left with two children and bereft of any support a spouse was supposed to provide. That being said, my dad’s family was poor, so poor that he had to work in school in order to help Amah pay rent.

“Eang-ah, I will come home late today,” Amah would say on most mornings. My dad would then nod, chug down his last few bits of hot porridge, and grab his book bag along with a satchel filled with cookies and sweets. When break time came during class, he would take his snack bag and spread all of its contents over his desk. Some of the kids came to buy from him, others snickered and laughed at his deprivation.

My dad didn’t mind the derision of the other kids all too much. Not in retrospect. Whether you were rich or poor back then, you were soon going to suffer a storm of loss and poverty. That storm came in April 17th, 1975, and his name was Pol Pot. When Pol Pot and his communist army finally defeated Lon Nol’s forces in Phnom Penh, the people went rejoicing in the streets. Here were their saviors, they thought. Here were the men who were going to rescue them from America’s bombs. They did not know that Pol Pot would do to them what Mao did to China, or Stalin to Russia. Their celebration lasted only a few days before Pol Pot ordered a three-day evacuation of the whole city.

My dad, aged at a sprouting 11, was already in a province called Pailin at the time. Amah worked there as a miner and a snack seller, and my dad and aunt were assisting in any way they could. My dad remembered bringing rice and fish wrapped in banana leaves to Amah for lunch. The mines were dirty and smelled like musty eggs, and he always hated going there. But he knew that many miners died within weeks of work from water illnesses, so he continued his errands hoping that every day he gave lunch to Amah it would not be his last time seeing her.

While my dad was in Pailin, he thought he knew what it meant to be poor. He thought he knew what it meant to be hungry and to have nothing. But when the Khmer Rouge trucks finally came rolling into his village in Pailin, he began to realize just how wrong he was.

Soldiers dressed in black were unloaded off large green trucks. They wore red kromas and held large automatic guns. Even though the villagers were excited that the Khmer Rouge had arrived, my dad saw right off the bat that something was wrong: the soldiers were only children. Most of them looked like teenagers—some of them didn’t look any older than he was—yet they were striding through the village carrying firearms.

“Mak (Mom),” my dad whispered to Amah. “They’re my age and they have guns.”

Amah nodded but remained silent. Fear danced wildly in her eyes, and her stunned gaze was kept on the child soldiers. She already knew what kind of evil would occur when children are given guns. It’s only natural that when you give fire to a child, someone is bound to get burnt. But what about when you arm that child with a weapon of death? Naturally, people are going to die.    

What happened after the arrival of the soldiers was a blur of horror and misery that proved to haunt my dad for decades. Parents were separated from their children and forced to work until their hearts burst and their minds shattered. Children who were not given tasks to labor and take care of the young were reeducated and made into executioners. Anyone they found to be traitors to Angkor—the supreme state—were slaughtered along with their families. Infants belonging to “traitors” were dashed against tree bark. Men were tied to trees infested with fire ants as punishment. Executions became so overwhelmingly commonplace that the people were no longer surprised when their loved ones were taken to be killed.

My dad would sometimes see bodies strewn in disarray before him, their blood pooling into puddles along the road. He remembered falling into deep illness one time and ending up in a makeshift hospital staffed by children. The children mixed coconut milk and dirt for medicine, and my dad remembered waking up each morning to find friends he knew the previous night dead in their beds. He had no idea how he survived that ordeal, but he knew that many longed for the chance to go to sleep and never wake up like his friends.

My dad also remembered a great hunger that descended on the country. It was a perpetual hunger that turned his stomach into a chasm and shrunk his body into a ragged bag of bones. He recalled walking by, disoriented and famished, and catching sight of a single kernel of corn on the road. He picked up the muddy kernel and slipped it into his mouth, letting the food settle in his stomach before breaking down into tears. Hope was a fickle food back then, scarcer and thinner than anything else in the world.

Later on he went back to his village in Pailin where the officers weren’t as strict as the other provinces. He approached his sister Ay and grabbed her by the shoulders, taking out a piece of dried fish from his dirty pockets. “Here Ay,” he said, showing her his trophy. “I found it at another children's camp not too far from here. Take it, and let’s go together.” His sister simply stared at him with her dishevelled face and sunken eyes, her body looking no better than the dried fish my dad held in his hands.

“What about Mak?” she asked hesitantly. “She said she will come back soon. I have to find her when she comes back.”

My dad shook his head. “Mak isn’t coming back for a long time. What’s the matter with you? Aren’t you hungry? This new place has more food than anywhere else, and I could sneak us in.”

My aunt, obstinate in her loyalty to her mother, refused to move. No matter how much my dad tried to coax her, she insisted on staying where she was. Finally, in a bout of frustration, my dad stormed off with his piece of dried fish and left Amah and my aunt behind. He arrived at the children's camp where food was plenty (or as plenty as a bowl of hot water and a few grains of rice could be), but there was something that bothered him afterwards.

Every now and then he would picture his sister, skin and bones and deep in hunger, waiting back at Amah’s camp. What would’ve happened if he'd stayed? What would’ve happened if he'd shared that dried piece of fish with his sister rather than bowls of porridge with strangers? Maybe he’d be able to sleep easier at night. Sometimes his mind would wander past the dark depravity of his country towards the future—towards a world of unlikely what-if’s. What if the future held an end to the struggle? What if there was peace? What if he was able to survive with his mother and his sister?

What if he had his own family, his own son? That son would surely never know his kind of hunger and his kind of loneliness. He would be taught to care for those who cared for him and protect those who protected him. He would learn not to abandon the family, because that is one of the greatest mistakes one can make. But my dad was getting ahead of himself. He knew that was probably never going to happen.