Introduction
One day, more than ten years after settling in America and struggling every day to begin a new life, I sat alone by a window watching a beautiful little bird pick up a tiny twig in his beak and fly away. I wondered how far that bird had to fly with those twigs, one by one, to make a nest. How hard he would work! How remarkable that this bird would be so devoted to his family! The miracle of family, family devotion and sacrifice was symbolized to me by that little bird and his labors.
Although I had lived every day of the past ten years with sharp memories of my past, I was suddenly flooded by sorrow. The realization that Papa did not exist in this place was suddenly, sharply, and acutely painful. I cried aloud for him and asked why I was here without him. I needed him. I loved him. Tears burst from my eyes and I knelt down and asked him for forgiveness for all the times I had hurt him with my selfishness and stubbornness as a teenager. I remembered resenting Papa for nagging at me when he gave me advice. I remember being angry and childishly covering my ears when he lectured me. I remembered muttering, “I am not young anymore, do not treat me like a kid!”
I remembered wishing I could live on my own without hearing his voice. I did not know what I did not know. The family values, advice, discipline, love and caring that Papa gave me did not make sense to me at that time, but suddenly, now, they did and I desperately wanted to hear his voice one more time. From that moment, I felt I needed to write him a letter as I felt his spirit still around me, watching me all the time to comfort me and ease my frustration and pain.
My letter to him began as just a few little scratches. Then, as I wrote, many memories – so long suppressed , returned and my scratches became 40 pages, then more than 100. My letter to Papa has become the story of my life.
The Bamboo Promise is my memoir to honor my family who were victims of Pol Pot and his monstrous Khmer Rouge (KR) during the Cambodian Genocide. While members of my large, extended family suffered and died in different areas of Cambodia, my immediate family spent their last miserable days starving to death in a lean-to, next to a bamboo patch, in Battambang Province, District of Preah Netr Preah[1]. As long as I live, bamboo will remind me of that God-forsaken place where I held my father as he tried to whisper his last words to me. Even though I will never know what he was trying to say, I have tried to guide the rest of my life by two principles that he stressed to me over and over as I grew up: “Don’t forget who you are and where you come from,” and “Education never can be stolen.”
Bamboo is my promise to Papa that when, not if, I survived the “Pol Pot time”, I would finish my pharmacy degree. I kept that promise to honor my father. This story, including the legends and history, is my personal history as I learned and lived it. It is what I saw, heard, felt, and learned. All the characters are real, although I have changed some names to protect the privacy of other survivors. I am neither a historian nor a political scientist. I am a survivor and the story I tell is how I and my family experienced the world during this terrible time and what we believed was happening. My hope is that young Cambodians and Cambodians in the Diaspora will read this and many more erudite texts to learn more about what happened to their country and its people. I hope they will become educated and understand how a radical, violent political movement, one bent on death and destruction, was able to consume over two million innocent souls, while the world stood by. It is only when you know why something has happened that you can prevent its re-occurrence.
The weaknesses in Cambodian society, in particular our sometimes blind and unquestioning obedience to our leaders, our failure to educate all our citizens, and our acceptance of a society based upon class distinctions rather than the value of all people, paved the road for Pol Pot and his angry and vengeful followers. Our neighboring countries and the rest of the world allowed it to happen for a variety of reasons – primarily, of course, self-interest.
This book is meant to share my own life experiences with the rest of the world. It is important that the world hears how Cambodians, my family and I included, lived through Hell. Cambodians were executed, starved, and tortured to death. Some survived, but were traumatized, and permanently scarred. The world could learn more from my experiences, to protect their own countries, and to not allow genocide to happen. My book means to educate the Cambodian people to learn the history of their own country as well, and not let history to repeat again. More importantly, my book shows how naïve we were to believe that nothing could happen to our country. My father, who had promised me that nothing would happen to us, to Cambodia, is the best example of this blindness. That is the price for ignoring the signs, and assuming that something cannot happen simply because you can’t imagine it.
When bamboo gets old, young sprouts emerge from the base and move out in new directions. They grow and multiply. Bamboo never dies; it just moves on, as we all must. We must move on, as wiser and more compassionate people who realize that all must take responsibly, to make our world a just and humane home for all of her people.