(3 of 7)
He is asked to do a self-portrait. He moves to a long table under a window at the far end of the hut. An elder provides him with paper and crayons, and he works in silence. The noise of the other children has abated momentarily, the only sound being an occasional squawk of a late-rising rooster. Soon the boy presents his work, which is not a self-portrait at all but a bright blue airplane with green doors, green engines, and a red nose and tail.
"But where are you, Kim Seng?"
"I am the pilot in the window." He points himself out enthusiastically. "We are flying to France."
Khao I Dang is one of two main refugee camps set up by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees at the eastern edge of
Thailand. From there the refugees will be resettled. Some will return to Cambodia in an attempt to rejoin their families. The camp sits at the foot of Khao I Dang Mountain, a high, craggy hill where thousands of Cambodians have hidden in the brush before making their escape runs down into the camp. One day, the children fear, the Khmer Rouge will come hurtling down that slope to recapture them. It will not happen for a while yet. It is the end of the monsoon season. The air smells of hot mud. The sky hangs low, like a gray fishnet over the straw roofs.
The camp looks more like a Cambodian village than a refugee holding center, perhaps because some families have been here so long, awaiting resettlement, that the place has naturally taken on an ancient form. The only blatant signs of modernity are the blue mushroom-shaped water towers, the laterite roads and the rehabilitation center, a larger hut where molds for artificial limbs lie stacked on shelves like loaves of white bread. The people mill about the wat, their Buddhist temple. Their gardens are crowded with tomatoes, scallions, cloves, lemon grass and "Cambodian traditional"—marijuana. Squash wobbles on the latticework between the huts. A barefoot woman carries an armload of morning glories. Beside the roads grow needle flowers with pointed petals of burnished pink, and mai-ya-rab, a tiny fern (a weed really) that shrinks away at the human touch, but after a while restores itself.
Nop Narith is Kim Seng's size and age. He has shaggy black hair and great buck teeth that gleam in a smile. He holds his left arm below the table. Narith had polio when he was younger, and the arm is withered. Both his parents are dead.
"When the soldiers came to my house, they took our whole family away. Me they took to a mobile team. I never saw my parents again. But I have a photograph of my father. My father was worried that I could not take care of myself. Yet I feel guarded by his spirit. I dreamed that I saw him, and he promised that his spirit would protect me. In the dream he told me to gain knowledge and to take revenge on his killers."
"Do you seek revenge against the soldiers, then?"
"Yes."
"What do you mean by revenge?"
"Revenge is to make a bad man better than before."