A Cambodian Odyssey
By Haing Ngor with Roger Warner
Macmillan, 478 pages, $19.95
The Cambodian holocaust transformed countless lives, none more astonishingly than the life recounted in this book. In April, 1975, Ngor Haing was a Phnom Penh doctor with a pretty fiance named Huoy and a Mercedes-Benz-ultimate status symbols in Lon Nol`s corrupt and doomed U.S. client state. A month later, he was a Khmer Rouge ”war slave” called Samnang.
By 1980, Samnang had done the only two things that counted in Pol Pot`s Cambodia. He had survived; he had escaped. Samnang now was one of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians packed into refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border.
His life up to then could have been the subject of a Hollywood epic. Just ahead, however, lay a second transformation no Hollywood scriptwriter would have dared to invent. Only a few years after finding himself a refugee in Los Angeles with $4 to his name, Ngor ”Samnang” Haing had become Haing S. Ngor, Oscar-winning Hollywood star. The film that won him the Academy Award, ”The Killing Fields,” was based on the experiences of New York Times war correspondent Sydney Schanberg and his Cambodian assistant, Dith Pran. No one who saw Ngor`s performance as Pran will ever forget it. But as Ngor points out, with that innocence of modesty survivors of such horrors sometimes have, ”. . . my best performances were over before I left Cambodia. And the prize there was much greater.”
For more than four years, he had acted the way you had to act to survive the Khmer Rouge. And the prize he had won was something incomparably more precious than the Academy Award he describes as ”a tall, heavy, gold-plated figure of a man with a featureless and enigmatic face.”
Ngor had won the enigmatic prize of life.
”I have been many things,” he writes at the beginning of this immense, important and revelatory book. ”A trader walking barefoot on paths through the jungles. A medical doctor . . . a Hollywood actor. But nothing has shaped my life as much as surviving the Pol Pot regime. I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That`s who I am.”
He means it, and this book shows it. Of its 478 pages, scarcely 35 deal with the Hollywood fame that probably will make this the most widely read book ever written on the Cambodian holocaust. Even Ngor`s descriptions of his film career all relate, in one way or another, to his overwhelming life concern-that he be an effective witness to the evil he suffered and survived.
At the beginning of a chapter called ”The King of Death,” he issues ”A WARNING: This chapter tells of the very depths of suffering that people like me saw and experienced under the Khmer Rouge regime. It is an important part of the story, but it is not a pleasant part. So if you wish, or if you must, skip this chapter and go on to the next one.”
Precisely because these accounts are so harrowing, the reader should ignore his warnings. These are the sections you must read, if you are to understand what people like Ngor and Pran survived and what millions of Cambodians did not.
There is another reason for reading them, however. As a writer as well as an actor, Ngor has a major talent for human characterization. In fact, after reading the book, it wasn`t the horrors he described that kept me from falling asleep. It was the description of his inquisitor:
”The King of Death was calm and sweet. `Please tell Angka (the Khmer Rouge organizationl the truth,` he told us. `If you do, you will not be punished. Angka never kills people unnecessarily, or kills the innocent. Those who tell the truth will merely be re-educated.` ”
It was his feelings for his wife, Huoy, as he was tortured, that kept me pondering Cambodia, life and this remarkable book until dawn:
”The crosses were upright, hanging from the goalpost crossbars. Smoke and flames rose from the fires around the prisoners` feet. The soldiers stood crosses behind each prisoner and began tying us up. I thought, I hope Huoy never knows about this. I didn`t tell her about the worst things of prison last time, about how they cut the poor woman open. I don`t want her to know. It would hurt her. She is so tender. She saved my life. I love her so much. If I am gone, who will take care of her?”
To his enormous credit, Ngor has insisted on trying to tell the complete story of his country`s catastrophe. As a result, a gripping human document has been transformed into an invaluable historical testament.
I don`t agree with every one of Ngor`s political conclusions. Nor does he get all his facts right. Contrary to his assertion, ample evidence exists of CIA support for the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk, which set the Cambodian catastrophe in motion. Nor does he mention the most shameful aspect of the American role in Cambodia`s continuing agony. This is that the U. S. government, clandestinely and indirectly, now supports the Khmer Rouge for the same reason it once opposed them-supposedly because these Marxist-Leninist mass murderers are resisting ”communist aggression.”
In the end, these flaws are irrelevent because no other work-scholarly, personal or popular-sheds greater light on what happened, and how it happened, in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Over and over again, it provides new understanding of such important historical events as the mass evacuation of Phnom Penh, and the uncontrolled chaos this ”totalitarian” regime brought to everything from medicine to irrigation. Over and over again, I found myself saying: ”So that`s how it happened!”
Ngor`s cultural and psychological analysis of how the supposedly religious and non-violent Cambodians both tolerated and participated in the Khmer Rouge`s wholesale desecration of their entire nation, religion and culture, in and of itself, would make this a landmark book. The human capacity for such action, in the end, may remain inexplicable. But Ngor comes closer to explaining it than anyone else has.
Even after they have read his observations on war and politics, general readers are more likely to remember Ngor`s account of the death of his wife and unborn child. Although he was a doctor, he could not perform a caesarean section because the chhlop-the Khmer Rouge child spy-watching him would have known he was a doctor, and all three would have been killed. Yet I found equally memorable his brief description of the niece whose life he actually does save, and whom he brings to the United States with him.
Once in America, the girl quickly forgets the Khmer language, assumes an American name-”Sophia”-and leaves him, to lead an individualistic American life. What the Khmer Rouge did not kill, the seductiveness of American life takes away. Once again Ngor is left alone, this time with his fame-as he once was left, alone, with his inquisitor.
”I miss Sophia,” he writes at the very end of this book. ”I live, for now, in my two-bedroom apartment with a balcony outside and a view of the towers of downtown Los Angeles in the distance. The walls are covered with awards I have received and pictures from `The Killing Fields.` ” Higher than the rest, in the position of honor, ”is a photograph of (my wife) Huoy . . . .”
Someday, Ngor hopes, he will return to Cambodia, and with Buddhist monks, ”hold a ceremony and build a monument for her next to the temple on the mountainside. We will pray for Huoy and her mother and my parents and family, and for all those who lost their lives. Then maybe their souls will be at peace. And maybe mine will be, too.”
In the meantime, he must make do with what his extraordinary ability to portray the darkest dilemmas of the human condition, both on film and in print, has won him-his life, his celebrity, his memories. The last sentence of this book reads: ”I will never be forgiven by my memories.”
This is the most revealing book about the nature of evil I have ever read. But it is also a drama with heroes and heroines-and comedy and laughter- in it. And it speaks volumes of Ngor`s passion for the truth that in a book full of immense historical events, as well as the deepest human drama, he finds time to bring to life with his usual deftness Pat Golden, the black American casting director who first discerned his remarkable gift.
Thanks to such people as well as his own genius for survival, Ngor, a man beset by horrors, also has become a human being doubly blessed.
He starred in the best film on Cambodia that has ever been produced. And now he has written the best book on Cambodia that has ever been published.
