A Survivor’s Return to the Killing Fields | Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Pehn, Cambodia

It’s still beyond me that my loving husband had gone through five horrifying years of the Killing Fields when he was just a kid… and survived it all. Imagine a 7-year-old boy in a remote village in Cambodia with nothing but a piece of tattered shirt — replaced only once every 12 months— to cover his emaciated body and nothing at all to protect his already-calloused feet. He was a buffalo boy who greeted mornings with grumbling noises in his stomach and delighted at the sight of snails and snakes, which he often referred to as his “perfect protein-rich meal”.

He had no concept of a normal childhood but perhaps seeing villagers tortured and hacked-to-death seemed pretty normal to him, as he knew nothing else other than that (maybe except ebbing memories of his privileged pre-war life, but he must have forgotten by then).

It was his first time to go back to Cambodia. The year was 2007 and I was still nursing Daniel in my belly— I was too pregnant to join the trip. The trip was long overdue but he never thought about it before. He went back with his parents, both survivors of the war, and expected little from it. They originally just wanted to explore Angkor Watt, the temple I’m dying to see and take photos of– with him, of course.

So he and his parents came face to face with remnants of the past, housed in a museum in Toul Sleng, which robbed him five years of his life as a child. It was never an easy homecoming as he saw what was left of bodies that didn’t make it during the war. He confessed to dragging his feet inside the museum, and, at one point, preferred to be silent in one corner and eventually cried like a child.

At the same time, my husband is grateful– always has been — of his life. The memorial museum will always remind them that life is still beautiful after what seemed to be an endless battle for survival.

As for me, I can only write about his experience and I can only imagine what it is like to be in his shoes.