(2 of 7)
By that time Kim Seng was already keeping a diary. He would begin his entries: "Dear friend, I turn to you in my time of sorrow and trouble . . ." On this particular night he took his diary and wrote how frightened he felt. In the morning his mother was dead. Kim Seng knelt at her bedside and prayed; then he asked a neighbor to bury his mother next to where his father lay, his father's body having been returned to the family. Kim Seng brought a shirt with him as a payment for this service.
The neighbor and his wife carried Kim Seng's mother to the burial ground, the boy walking behind them. Kim Seng was quite weak and thin. The neighbors buried his mother, burned incense, and departed. Then Kim Seng knelt by the grave and burned three incense sticks of his own. Finally he took a handful of dirt from each of his parent's graves, poured it together in his hands, and beseeched his dead parents to look after him. He then returned to the mobile team.
"Do you feel your parents' spirit inside you now?"
"Yes, it talks to me. It tells me that I must gain knowledge, and get a job. I would like to be an airplane pilot."
"Does your spirit still tell you to get revenge?"
"Yes," solemnly.
"So, will you go back to Cambodia one day and fight the Khmer Rouge?"
"No. That is not what I mean by revenge. To me revenge means that I must make the most of my life."
Kim Seng, now 10, sits at the other side of a kitchen table at the end of a long dirt-floor hut in Khao I Dang. He is visible down to the middle of his chest. The face is bright brown; the head held in balance by a pair of ears a bit too large for the rest—the effect being scholarly, not comical. Kim Seng has a special interest in France these days because he has recently learned that his older brother is there. He studies diligently, hoping to join his brother. He believes that knowledge makes people virtuous.
"What is this picture, Kim Seng?" The drawing is one of two he did upon first arriving at Khao I Dang. It is of three boys, stick figures, standing to the side of several gravestones. The background consists of a large mountain with a leering yellow moon resting on its peak. Perched on a tree is an oversized owl, whose song, says Kim Seng, is mournful.
"One day I left my mobile team to go find food for myself. I was very hungry. I met two boys, and together we came upon a mass grave of 30 bodies. The Khmer Rouge soldiers found me. I told them that I had gone for firewood. But they punished me. They bound my hands to a bamboo stick behind my back. I was tied up without food for several days."
The second drawing is of a bright orange skeleton with tears in its eyes and a grim mouth in an open frown. "I drew this after the death of my mother. I ate leaves then. That is why there is a tree in the picture."
"If you drew yourself today, would the picture be different?"
"Yes, very different. Here I have food. And there would be a smile on my face."