Kum. Kum is a Cambodian word for a particularly Cambodian mentality of revenge- to be precise, a long-standing grudge leading to revenge much more damaging than the original injury. If I hit you with my fist and you wait five years and then shoot me in the back one dark night, that is kum.Kum-monuss. Ngor took the word for revenge and paired it with the word for people, monuss. "Revenge people." That's what they are, communist at the top and kum-monuss at the bottom.Why did the Cambodian people allow the Khmer Rouge to herd them into the countryside as if they were valueless animals, to work twenty hour days on ill thought out (if they were thought out at all) projects that they would never finish, moving along to the next and then the next, starved and brutalized and murdered? How did the the Khmer Rouge think this was going anywhere other than... Well, it lead to a whole lotta death, more brutal regimes almost exactly the same (new faces on top, is all) and then some of the old people back in charge in not-getting-on-the-news-much oppression and (for some) success rates to sweep under tourist postcards of the Angkor Wat. (It can't get better. They have oil.) And for what? Revenge. Revenge on who knows who anymore. Someone is always pissed. The same old story you see see every day in some history book or news page.Sihanouk, the royalist figurehead under French colonization who would bargain (at least it looked that way on the surface. The way it looks on the surface that the USA rushed into WWII to save Jews when it's told that way by middle school social studies teachers. The average guy on the street swallowed the prepared propaganda) for sovereignty from France and then get "elected" for a reign of rampant corruption. Pretty much The Godfather style of tributes, favors and protection money government. After him they had Lon Nol. At least Sihanouk stayed out of the USA versus Vietnam hot little mess going on next door. The USA stuck around to help out just like they did with Laos. Oh wait, they did no such thing. China was handing out money and weapons (but they'd never do that! Not to brutal dictators who kill civilians!) to communist wannabes that would eventually become the Khmer Rouge that would enslave a nation and kill off a quarter of the population. Not statistics like millions died years ago (I wasn't born when the Khmer Rouge were in power. It felt like it was yesterday reading it. Because it really is! It always is, somewhere). Fields of dead on dead and kum-monuss waiting to be born to replace them.BUT, they weren't really communists at all. There are theories that the unknown leader (his name wasn't known until 1977! The Khmer Rouge took over in 1975) Pol Pot was a deranged psychopath. There's a lot to be said for that theory. So some privileged kids went to college in France where they learned of something called communism. Sounds like a neat way to get power, tell yourself you're in the right and nurse like snake's venom to your breast all your old little hurts by authority figures. Maybe at first they were sick of the corruption of Sihanouk (Pol Pot's cousin and aunt were in his harem). But they were idiots and didn't think out any of the theories, or bother to see how badly they failed in Russia and China, and were failing in Vietnam. Same old story of table switcheroos. China and Vietnam had their groups going on and the Cambodian commies learned that the historical racism towards their darker skin brethren was still in play. They were given the shit jobs (literally the jobs related to shit) and they weren't cut out for that stuff. More than likely it had to do with the typical pyramid scheme function of communist nations. This is totally a pyramid scheme (life sure feels that way). The guys at the top collected from the guys at the bottom. But they still took the guns, and the tanks and the other terrorizing of a nation revolutionary equipment. Haing Ngor didn't know who Pol Pot was. He and the other Cambodians only heard "Angka". Everything was for "Angka". Sometimes it was a person, sometimes it was the nation. It was pretty vague, like an all-purpose entity to name drop when they couldn't be bothered with reasoning (which was always). If they thought about it themselves they'd probably get angry and shoot someone (that would stop their thinking! Brain...huuuurts...). The soldiers (most were teenagers or children. Children were also drafted as spies, the cchlop) and Khmer Rouge leaders in complete charge of their lives (for the joy of killing, if they weren't disillusioned sheep caught in the cog of the wheel of despair) weren't doing anything for a communist belief system. They didn't know what communism was. They would repeat the propaganda word for word (in mandatory meetings and unceasing songs. They had to listen to the same awful Chinese style music with propaganda messages on repeat while performing slave labor! If you are curious, search on youtube for 'Khmer Rouge music'. The songs are up there... I would have killed myself. Seriously, I've been forced to listen to Christian rock music). The leaders were in charge of their slaves for as long as it lasted. Most were later killed by Pol Pot (he had a lot in common with Stalin. Maybe he also took purging out of the handbooks). No, what Ngor saw was Chinese communism. What he heard was Chinese music. The killing intellectuals (doctor Ngor had to hide his true identity. When they new regime takes over he has to leave a patient on the operating table), moving everyone to the countryside to work. If you appreciate irony there's a whole lot to be found here. The Khmer Rouge said they were about building the nation to be totally self-sufficient and apart from the rest of the world? But everything they got they got from someone else. Everything they did was to spite someone else. (Is there a Cambodian version of cut off your nose to spite your face?) (My favorite bit of irony was when later, after the Khmer Rouge are hiding from the Vietnamese, the Western aid comes because people are moved by photos of the "starving" Khmer Rouge in the refugee camps. Ngor could identify who was KR and who wasn't because the KR were the well fed looking ones. Jesus!)Haing Ngor, like Pol Pot, was of Cambodian and Chinese ancestry (his father was Chinese). Pol Pot was like Hitler and Voldemort (he even gave himself a new name. Solath Sar must not have been as revolutionary as Pol Pot), part Chinese, and yet what he really, really wanted was to wipe out other races from Cambodia, leaving only the "pure" Khmer race. I'm still going with the psychopath theory. There was no reason for racial genocide. That's not reasoning. It sure as shit wasn't communism. There couldn't have been a regime less about the people than this one (never mind that they were eating well and enjoying the Western luxuries they claimed to despise). The people were the "enemy" (they called them "New" people as in "new" to the Khmer Rouge. Code word for slaves in an infuriating propaganda way like those forced meetings. The back-to-back nonsensical repeat speeches about an ant killing an elephant absolutely killed me). They didn't have the support of the people but no one knew how bad it was going to be. They spread bullshit tales of their "code" from occupied territory. So if the Khmer Rouge guerillas were torturing the populace out of revenge (most of their recruits were starving kids who suffered after the Americans bombed. The first recruits were pissed off about all of the corruption) why didn't the people fight back? There were a whole lot more of them than there were evil eyed teenagers with Chinese guns. The way that Haing Ngor tells it the Cambodians were like other Asian peoples and they were steeped (like a tea bag?) in a culture of deference to leaders, be it status of position, race (supposed inferiority to lighter skinned Asians such as the Thai) and authority. They were all about saving face, avoiding what you really mean, to not cause offense or, as they called it, "breaking one's face". I can't attest to this truth at all from any personal knowledge. I know it really isn't true what he said about Americans not looking down on people as if they were better or worse than them based on station in life. People have treated me better or worse based on how much my clothes looked like they cost (or when my southern accent marked me as a must be a racist to ahem also southern Floridians when a child. Hell yeah we have those problems here). Maybe it's (sometimes) more subtle but it is still there. However, I'll buy it as a general vibe as a textual feeling to Ngor's own experiences. Culturally speaking, the younger people had to bow their heads lower than their elders, never point their feet towards another when sitting, stuff like that. That doesn't mean it was in their hearts they felt it was how it SHOULD be. Habit and expected behavior can be enough, though. I still feel like I have to wave at older southern people when I couldn't be bothered to do so when I see a young person. They were coming off two governments where one would have to pay their own ransom to one jailer or another. Here were more people with guns in their faces telling them what to do. By the time they realized how deep the shit was, it was too late. Haing Ngor himself missed the chance to escape a couple of times because he couldn't guess what they were in for. Then they were undernourised (Sally Struthers could have used footage to extort money kinda malnourished), dying of dysentary and malaria (real doctors, if they lived at all, were not allowed to practice. A set up of no education, medicine, any benefit at all) and worked to death. If they didn't follow orders they were shot. It was more than a little bad. It could get worse and did. The thing about the Khmer Rouge is that they were always lying, getting the people's hopes up that they could eat the crops they slaved over. Were they lying because they also had no idea what they were doing? They wouldn't stay to harvest crops.The numbers aren't exact but most put it at around two million of the population (projected between 6-8 million people) killed. I mean, fuck. They couldn't have known how it would escalate. Young women taken to country prisons because they had sex. Other single women were forced to marry men they didn't know or like (it has been said that they would "inform" on those husbands to get rid of them) to "reproduce" for the Khmer Rouge. They were too underfed to have kids. The Khmer Rouge didn't know what the fuck they were doing. Someone suggested someone or some thing and then they got mad when their ideas didn't work. Pol Pot had no basis of reality at all. A fucking psychopath playing a psychopath game with real people.So the prisons. Haing Ngor didn't go to the special Pol Pot prison (I haven't looked this up yet but I should because it's totally in my area of interest) but he did get sent THREE times (no one else is known to have survived that three times) to one of the country ones and... Ngor prefaces all of these chapters with a warning for the faint hearted not to read on. I don't know how I feel about those warnings. His accounts are great for the fear that they had to live with as if it were another part of their bodies (rather an organ, replacing the heart for feeling and the brain for thinking). Anyone who went to these special places of extra special kinds of torment didn't usually live to talk about it, you know? I guess they demonstrated what he wasn't used to. That they were USED to it is what struck me. You can read about this stuff and start to think it sounds common. Or, worse, "Well, he didn't have it as bad as that guy did..." Like when comparing the famous Cambodian that Ngor won an Oscar for playing [Did I not mention that yet?]. Dith Pran's experience wasn't as bad as Ngor's. That hardly matters. It was awful. You shouldn't have to be USED to it, in any kind of way. One of the things they liked to do in the country prisons was chop out the infants out of the pregnant women's bellies. They had a collection of embryo's hanging from the treetops. The women did crimes like being married to a Lon Nol officer (allegedly). They tortured Ngor (they chop off a finger the first time because the rat bastard Pen Tip tried to er rat him out for being a doctor. In another instance of irony, under the Vietnamese reign Pen Tip will study to become a doctor! After numerous attempts of trying to get Ngor killed for being a secret doctor), they tortured lots of other people. One women is eaten by a pack of Cambodian animals kind of like a wolf called a chhke char-chark. Tied to the tree trunk next to Ngor. That's not even suppose to be the worst of the Khmer Rouge prisons? Well, shit. In a world (I'm doing my best movie trailer voice now. IN A WORLD!) where families were abolished (if they didn't already fall apart under the strain of separation and hunger), Haing Ngor and his wife, Huoy, grew closer than ever. Huoy saved her husband's life by giving him deliberately charred squash (did you know that eating burned food is an old-old school way to stem the effects of dysentary? This book is loaded with interesting survival skills on top of everything else) when she was so hungry (Sally Struthers!). It's not sap. They bickered but they were still a family, you know? Symbiotic, caring relating in that hell hole. In their courtship when he was a med student and she was going to be a teacher he would play manipulative mind games (fake jealousies of boyfriends he pretended to think she had to get her to show him devotion), cheating on her before they were really in love. Stupid shit and insecurity and immature people stuff. Sometimes people grow up. Haing Ngor is my kind of guy. This is not a memoir (I hate memoirs. Self serving and worthless wastes of print those are). You know that thing about Cambodians saving face? That's what makes this account so great. It's a hell of a story anyway, an insightful firsthand look into that heartbreaking and senseless pain under the Khmer Rouge. Why it happened, despite that it makes no sense at all that anyone would choose to do that to their own people. Why people went along with it. Why I think this has real value is that Haing Ngor broke away from that tragic cultural inheritance of saving face. He didn't try to make excuses or make himself look good about anything. This is what haunted him, this is what it was like for him, this is what he held on to what went around him. He recorded so much because he really did give a shit. It's that symbiotic thing that he and Huoy had going where they tried to live together as best they could. How do you live? He ate his own vomit, he kept quiet about being a doctor when a baby was improperly medicated under a Khmer version of a doctor. How the hell do you go about still being a person when what makes you a person is taken away from you? I don't think you can if you worry about saving face. How can you live with the desire of kum on your heart? I don't think he quite did. Huoy died giving birth to their baby. If he had had access to proper equipment (that no longer existed) he could have saved either his wife or the baby. The undeserved guilt he still placed on himself is equal to anything as tragic about his life. I don't wonder that he became a restless man with bloody ghosts on his trail ever since (Cambodia's current head is former Khmer Rouge, by the way, as well as others with positions). He didn't become a doctor again, although he expressed desire to do so. He acted in films (it seems pretty limited, although there wouldn't be a lot of high profile acting roles for Asians in '80s Hollywood), stood halfway in America and Cambodian worlds yet living in the long gone past of his nightmares. AND he was murdered in the '90s by Asian thugs who supposedly robbed him but they left all of the money. He had a substantial amount on his person they didn't look for yet they demanded the gold locket he kept hidden with a photo of his dead wife (he refused to surrender a photo in the face of guns years after he and his people surrendered all in the face of guns). Their guilty verdict was overturned (um of course the jury would be sympathetic but apparently that wasn't legal?) and then reinstated later. I wouldn't rule out connections to angry Khmer Rouge. He couldn't have made them too happy starring in a little film called The Killing Fields (costarring my favorite John Malkovich. I loved the story - ahem although I already knew it- of Malkovich saying to him in Khmer to kiss his ass and the statue was his [Malky was also nominated for Places in the Heart]). I've wanted to read Ngor's book since my teen years after I saw that film (coughs not because of Malkovich or anything). I should have done so sooner! Of all the shit that has always happened and probably always will what I really want to know is how people can still try to save face. There's no way to take kum and not get kum in return. They believe in kama (like karma). What goes around... It'd kill me to pretend it didn't happen.Now I will break the Khmer Rouge's face with Yo Mama jokes! (Seriously, nothing could be worse. Cambodians pray to their mothers to save their lives when in trouble.)Yo mama is so fat they rang her ass instead of the gong for meal times.Yo mama is so fat they got lost thinking her ass crack was the front lines.Yo mama is so fat they thought she was TWO 'new' people.Yo mama is so fat the Westerners thought they were in Japan when they saw her great big moon.Yo mama is so stupid she thought Pol Pot was a toilet.Yo mama is so stupid she thought "Me horny, me love you long time" was American for "Help us!"Yo mama is so fat her farts are the natural gas for all of Cambodia. Her right cheek is in Thailand so they are going to go to war for the rights.Yo mama is so fat she plays Godzilla with Angkor Wat.
In a word, harrowing. I visited the Killing Fields in the outskirts of Phnom Penh about seven years ago and it too is a harrowing place to see the results of what some Cambodians did so violently to other Cambodians. Unfortunately at the time of my visit I did not have the excellent historical background that Haing Ngor provides us with as he brings together the events of the past, internal political factions and the superpowers and their game-plays that simply overwhelms a whole population and rips apart a society of which Haing Ngor is part of.He trained as a medical doctor and not long after his graduation, the Khmer Rouge rebels began their sweep through the whole country. His family was prosperous and they lived a very comfortable life in the capital Phnom Penh. As the rebels advanced every component of the society the Cambodians knew began to be stripped away from them in a rapid decline and we are led through this by Haing Ngor's personal story and those of his family, friends and colleagues. At gunpoint he was forced to stop in the middle of a surgical operation that he was carrying out in the hospital, the whole population of Phnom Penh was forced to flee their homes, their families and their lives as they had known it. The abandonment of the luxuries of life, the destruction of housing, the collapse of the transport system, the ban on any sort of trading (food, goods, markets), the value of money vapourised, the destruction of anything associated with religion including the desecration of temples and statues, and the population was forced into the countryside to work as peasants as part of the "great revival of Cambodia without Western influences". There was an interesting comment by the author about women and how they would not commit the torture and atrocities that men did. As a mere male I had not thought about this before and I think he is correct. To the rebel soldiers these people swept away from the capital were soft and of low status which enabled the rebels to treat their prisoners/slaves with utter contempt. All work was manual work with long hours of labour and primitive hand tools. The projects they were forced to work on (canals, paddy fields, dams) were usually inadequately planned and often abandoned bringing more despair to the captives as they were then uprooted from their primitive base to another area where they had to start from the beginning again. Each week saw another level of society as we know it removed from them. Families torn apart, disease and no access to medicine or medical aid, inadequate food supply, sheer exhaustion from the demanding labour requirements, poor shelter, spying by traitors in their own compounds plus the fear of torture where death became a preferred option as an escape from the horrors they faced on a daily and hourly basis.Despite all of the above, if you are willing to work through the descriptions of the animalistic torture that was imparted on the population at large and have an interest in Cambodia and its history I can thoroughly recommend this book.
Do You like book Survival In The Killing Fields (2003)?
A Cambodian citizen under Pol Pot's communist regimeThis is the closest picture to hell I have ever read or heard about. This cambodian civil war (war between fellow-citizens) is nothing short of the ideal governance of a country by Satan himself. The amazing thing about this book is actually not the story itself but the fact that it is so well narrated by an eyewitness civilian, who besides, survives three episodes of torture among many other miseries. It is so naturally and realistically told that it provokes vivid impressions on the reader.I would like to discourage the view of the film "The killing Fields" as it's nothing close to the voice heard in this book and the facts narrated in it. The movie, more than tedious and flawed, is a poor contribution to the book. Political propaganda, anti-American resentment, and other hatred-filled reasons. The movie's authors -in my opinion- have insulted Haing Ngor by telling a completely different story and shifting the story's hero to the Washington Post correspondent. Nauseating!I'd like to comment on 3 lines of thought that the reading of this great book left on me.First (as you'll see in the quotes below) is the much-talked about role of intellectuals in society.Second, the ascetism of dictatorial leaders (communists or any other breed) that is well studied in The Revolutionary Ascetic by Bruce Mazlish.And third: A final and personal thought on the condition of human orphanage when separated from God.Interested at the beginning of the book in finding out how a victim and eye-witness like Haing would discribe this war, I found myself with a more down to earth picture, void of politics and cynicism: the portrait of the human soul."What amazed me most about Chea Huon was the change in his character. He was the first intellectual I had ever known. He was very smart. But if he was smart he couldn't possibly believe what he was saying to us now, in the dam dedication ceremony. [...] A story arose that Chea Huon left for the Thai border with his jeep and his bodyguards and bags of dollars and gold. I don't know if it was true, but it is possible.""Earlier on in the regime, couples who wanted to get married had to get permission from their village chiefs. (...) In prison I had seen lines of women being led away for breaking Angka's puritanical rules of behaviour.""But the Vietnamese went from one of us to the next, pointing their weapons and asking through interpreters whether we were Khmer Rouge. (...) I thought: Well, it's happening again. They say they are liberating us but they have tied us up. Just like the Khmer Rouge."
—JoséMaría BlancoWhite
Considering the events that occurred during this event in Cambodia, Ngor's story was very compelling. From his life in the country's capital to the countryside hiding for his life, the gruesome details made his story come to life. His story being full of very precise details of his struggles and what was expected of peasant-like Cambodian helped his story to become more understandable to me. He helped to prove that reality is not necessarily nice to everyone. Ngor's story eventually led to his freedom of the brutal Khmer Rouge, proving that having hope was possible. His compelling story definitely helped to understand the life struggles that one had to face on a daily basis.
—Thanada
A tragic but ultimately very human story. In many ways Ngor's story is even more horrific than that of Dith Pran, who Ngor played in the movie "The Killing Fields." That Ngor was able to survive not only the depredations that every Cambodian faced during that terrible time, but three separate imprisonments during which he was brutally tortured speaks to his sheer force of will and desire to live. But it's more than just his personal story. Ngor was a keen observer of Cambodian culture and the politics of the region, and he was able to explain the developments leading to the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia thoughtfully and in simple terms.It's fair to say Ngor never really was able to fully recover from the horror he endured - who could? - but that just makes his story all the more human. That he died in the manner he did is a cruel irony and reminds us how fleeting our existence really is. His story is one of a flawed but ultimately good man who devoted himself to the people of his country. Definitely worth reading whether or not you've seen the movie although it should be noted, this book is not for the faint of heart.
—Andrew Rosner
