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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (June 2, 2017)
Street Roots • June 2-8, 2017 News Page 5 FORGIVING, from page 4 As tempting as it was, suicide was not Cambodia into a network of barbaric prison an option. Khmer like labor camps, forcing families apart and Rouge soldiers out of the cities to work on communal farms made it clear they and build infrastructure. would torture and Workers were not allowed possessions or kill all the family contact with their families. They were members of anyone expendable cogs in a machine, worked to who took their own death and frequently tortured or executed for life to escape the trivial missteps. killing fields. Cambodians starved to death beneath trees “I was forced to full of ripe coconuts and oranges. In the newly work 13 hours a day, communist and heavily militarized Cambodia, every day, 365 days a trees belonged to everyone, so their fruits year, for almost 5 were off-limits. years,” Kilong said. Due to his boyish looks, Khmer Rouge His spirit and his soldiers initially thought Kilong was much body were broken. younger, and they placed him in school with As a child he had little children. spent more than a year studying under a As Kilong recounted Buddhist monk in the temple near his home, life under the Khmer but under the Khmer Rouge, he lost all faith. Rouge, he said up until But at the time, he said, the only thing on about 15 years ago, he his mind was figuring out how to survive each couldn’t get through his day. story without breaking The two daily meals under the Khmer T h e E i m e r B o u g e sh®»W into tears. Rouge were typically porridge containing h a w k ille d at the w r y In 2009 he revisited water and two spoonsful of rice. many painful memories least. T h e y destroyed say There were other times when workers from his life under the fa ith In hum anity, a n d yet would squat, 10 men around a single small pot Khmer Rouge in his of stew. It would be mostly water, with a few here I am, W hen you go brutally candid vegetables and maybe one fish tossed in for th ro u g h so m e th in g lik e autobiography, “Golden nutrients. that? yow east twrst oat to be Leaf.” Starving and eager to eat, the men were a re a lly b a d person, o r yo a The book led to a forced to wait for a whistle. Then it was a free speaking tour where he ca n tarsi oat to be a decent for all, each man for himself as he attacked told his story to the soup. person^ yon have a o h o lo e /4 audiences at Columbia Kilong’s mother traded some salt to get University and him a large copper spoon. Massachusetts Institute “She got it on the black market,” he of Technology (MIT). explained, because under communist rule, “I didn’t know there was no trade and no commerce. anything until I read his “That’s corruption,” Kilong said book,” his older sister, sardonically. “That’s evil, that’s a crime. You Sivheng Ung, told Street get up, work, contribute, and there is nothing Roots. “I just cried and there’s a lot more else.” things too that he didn’t write in the book.” Aside from the clothes on his back, that She said he doesn’t like to talk about the spoon was his only belonging. Half the handle murders he witnessed when he was placed was removed so he could plunge his hand to with the children. She said the Khmer Rouge the bottom of the pot and try to retrieve some would kill people for trivial transgressions, vegetable pieces after the whistle blew. such as stealing a coconut, by crushing their Kilong learned to secretly hunt rats, bats, termites, snakes and bees to supplement his skulls with a hammer. They would make the children watch so diet. Those who didn’t often starved to death. they would be easier to control. Before the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign “Some of the kids cried, because they miss of terror ended, both of Kilong’s parents and their parents; they run away, they get caught, his grandparents would be dead. He was laboring in a rice paddy when he they get killed,” she said. Kilong wasn’t kept in the school for very received news that his beloved little sister, Ali, long as it became apparent he was older than and his nephew, had both died on the same the other children during lessons. He had a day - his nephew in the morning and his seventh-grade education, and it was difficult sister in the afternoon. for him to contain his knowledge among He was not allowed to leave the killing children learning the alphabet. fields to attend funerals, nor does he know Once his age was discovered, he was sent where his parents’ bodies are buried. to what he described as the “Navy Seals” of In all, nearly 2 million Cambodians died from starvation, execution, disease and the labor forces. Cambodians who resided in cities, such as overwork during the Khmer Rouge genocide. Kilong and his family, were handed the Kilong saw his sister not long before her harshest work assignments, and as a young death, and he described her appearance in his man, he was in the hardest-worked book. She was 11. “I noticed her legs, bare from the knees demographic. He built roadways and dams, working with down - dry, cracked, stained, and barefoot. about 400 other prisoners. They were divided Her entire body was covered only by an old ragged sarong rolled at the waist, leaving the into groups of 10, each group with one leader and three subgroups. Each subgroup had its top of her body naked. From behind, through own leader with a second in command as well. the exposed dry, rough skin, I could see her vertebrae and the backside of her rib cage. If “This is how they control you,” he said. I hadn’t been so weak from hard labor and “You breathe, these two people know, and malnutrition, I could have picked her frail then this other person knows, and it gets body up with one hand,” he wrote. escalated to the top.” In January 1979, Vietnamese Army defeated the Khmer Rouge, liberating Cambodia from one oppressive regime and replacing it with another. Kilong was reunited with several of his surviving sisters. Upon returning to Battambang, they found their family home had been demolished. In its place were squatters’ shelters. Eventually Kilong escaped to Thailand with his older sister, Sivheng, and her boyfriend. It was an adventure he recounts in detail in his book. They were shot at, held hostage and had run-ins with bandits and Khmer Rouge soldiers in exile. But eventually they made it safely to a refugee camp. They registered as a family, lying about Kilong’s age. They claimed he was born in 1964 because they were told this would make immigrating to the U .S . more likely. He was 15 all over again. They flew to San Diego that same year when a family there agreed to sponsor them. It was the first time Kilong had ever been on a plane. About six months after arriving, they took a Greyhound bus north to Portland, where they moved in with the brother of Sivheng’s boyfriend. Kilong thinks he was about 20 at the time, but he was enrolled as a sophomore at Washington-Monroe High School. For the previous five years, he’d had no education. He didn’t speak English and couldn’t multiply or divide. When he first arrived in the U .S ., he See FORGIVING, page 7 A t top, m ug shots o f K ilo n g (far right), his sister Sivheng U ng a n d a friend, Vann M ealy Metta Touch, are taken at a refugee camp before im m igrating to the United States. Above, K ilo n g at age 10, poses with his father, K ilin Ung, in fro n t o f a 12th century temple in Cam bodia in 1970. The day before Street Roots sat down with K ilo n g Ung, he received a copy o f this photo from his cousin, whom he h a d n ’t spoken to in 30 years. H e had no idea the photo existed. Under the K h m er Rouge, it was a capital crime to keep photos, but his co u sin ’s fam ily kept this photo hidden d u rin g the genocide.
