Daring (36 page)

I was excited to show him Temple Street. My seatmate had tipped me off about Hong Kong's vast outdoor kitchen hidden behind the public square. We gasped at the sea of bodies squatting on sidewalks and in the gutters and all up the side streets, countless families all cooking Mongolian hot pot over coal fires. Everyone dipped into the same pot and scuttled the morsels into their mouths quick as birds. Fortune-tellers moved between the makeshift tables offering to read bumps on one's head or released birds from cages to pick fortune cards. Sidewalk entrepreneurs fashioned false teeth and hawked snake venom for potency. To us, the only Caucasians in sight, the Chinese paid no mind. These were people fully enculturated in their own freewheeling style of street-corner capitalism.

Singapore and Malaysia were enthralling. But it was Christmas in Thailand that would change our lives.

Midnight of Christmas Eve passed in the confines of an airless plane while we awaited a delayed takeoff from Singapore. Clay was next to me slack in sleep. My daughter was half a world away. Eighteen years had passed since her conception. I remember thinking about that when I felt that month's clot drop; the blood apple of something like the three hundred and sixtieth ovum, falling, waste. A wind of emptiness seemed to blow through me. I began crying softly for what it was too late to have.

“Melly Kismis!” At three thirty in the morning we were welcomed into the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok by a Buddhist bellhop. Red satin bows were tied around the giant teak temple bells hung from the soaring lobby ceiling. We walked outside and down to a veranda over the
klong
, the wide canal, feeling embraced by the humid air and dizzied by the sweet rotted scent of jasmine. We discovered the Author's Wing, a genteel green-shuttered structure; its suites were named to call up the fateful attraction of the East to Western writers . . . Maugham, Conrad, Michener. A floor boy brought wild orchids, mangoes, and a split of champagne.

“This is the Colette room, in case you didn't know.”

Hours later, we awoke slashed by sunlight through the uncurtained glass. Christmas Day, Bangkok, on our backs running musky with sweat. Now what?

Then we were on the verandah, mesmerized by watching the great hippos of rice barges nuzzle through the
klong
, up to their noses with cargo, when Clay pointed out a story in the
Bangkok Post.

“Honey, this will interest you.” He passed me the paper.

“Maybe there's a child for you here,” Clay said.

Adoption was an idea as foreign to me as the hippo barges, but that was Clay and his leaps of imagination. I had been deeply moved by TV images of survivors of Pol Pot's genocide. After four years of forced labor and extermination by starvation for the crime of being educated, the survivors had to flee the 1979 invasion by the Vietnamese army. They kept coming that year, a surge of a half-million Cambodians, tuberous bodies with faces devoid of animation, minds frozen by years of trauma. By 1980, Cambodia was a land that had disappeared from Western consciousness.

Prior to this trip, First Lady Rosalyn Carter had invited me to join one hundred prominent Americans on her Cambodia Crisis Committee. We sat on gilt chairs in the East Room of the White House and discussed how to mobilize support to get Western rice and seed to survivors in the interior, past the Vietnamese political blockade.

On the verandah, now, I read the newspaper item again and shook my head. “We raised millions to bring starving Cambodians to the border after the Vietnamese invaded, and then what? We're leaving them to rot in holding centers?”

“Don't beat yourself up, honey,” Clay said. “Cambodia is ancient history to American TV viewers now.”

“Clay?”

“Hmmm?”

“We have to visit those camps.”

“On our last day in Asia?”

“What better to do?”

He looped an arm around my hips. “I planned not to let you out of the room.”

The lure of a last day devoted to your standard decadent Western pleasures held appeal for me, too, but as we crossed the Oriental's lobby toward the cool elevators, I broke away.

“Where are you going?” he said.

“To hire a driver.”

“I'll go with you.”

WE STAYED AN EXTRA DAY
to get the necessary permissions to visit a holding center at the border, Khao-I-Dang camp. The Thais were jumpy about allowing journalists into these camps, for fear that news stories would swell the already indigestible mass of human refuse from ten years of war in Southeast Asia.

After five hours on bumpy, mostly dirt roads to the border, we were admitted to a camp that was nothing like what we expected. Neatness and order prevailed. Thousands of thatched dwellings showed little carpets of vegetable gardens in front. International relief agencies were providing food, birth-control injections, even electrification for rock bands. This was obviously the show camp.

The UN director of the camp, Erkki Heinonen, a reedy Finn, was not pleased to receive us. “We cannot allow foreign visitors to see the children,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It could put ideas into their heads.”

“Ideas?”

“These are simple children,” he said, offering us tea. “They lost their families. The Khmer Rouge taught them the world is flat, nothing beyond the rice fields. Why give them ideas? Let them go back to Cambodia.”

“Haven't they endured enough?” I asked. “Couldn't some be resettled in the West where they could have new families?”

“None of these people want to resettle in the West.” The director was emphatic.

“All eighty-five thousand of the Cambodians in this camp are just waiting to go back to the horror of the killing fields?” I asked, incredulous.

“Some have already gone,” he said, dodging a direct answer.

I stalled long enough to ask about the three giant plastic bags stuffed under his work table with what looked to be letters inside. “Oh, those.” The director brushed off my question. “Resettlement fever. People write letters whenever they see some movement—a few children were accepted by France the other day.”

The director excused himself. Alone in the office, I bent down to examine the plastic bags more closely. They were coated with dust. Crammed inside were hundreds of letters written by refugees in the camp and addressed to embassies, mostly to the U.S. Embassy. Pleas obviously smothered before they were heard.

“There's a story here,” I said. Clay came up with the headline. “The People America Forgot.”

THE PLANE RIDE HOME
seemed interminable. I couldn't wait to get to a pay phone in the airport and call the editor of the
New York Times Magazine
, Ed Klein. I wanted an assignment to go back to Thailand. A few bags of unsent letters was hardly worth a story, but Klein didn't give me a total brush-off. I had some reporting to do. Every call I made referred me to a man who was said to know more about Cambodian refugees than anyone in the world: Peter Pond, a New Hampshire minister with an extraordinary family of five adolescent survivors of Cambodian genocide. A humanitarian hustler, he found me first.

“I thought we should join forces,” he said on the phone.

“I don't know much yet,” I said. “But the pipeline for resettlement seems to be shut down.”

Pond told me it was the new Reagan administration's policy. Because the United States had closed the door on Southeast Asian refugees, other Western countries were following suit. That left the fate of the child survivors in the hands of the Thai military. “The silent policy of the Thais is that these kids oughta go back and fight with the Khmer Rouge against the Vietnamese, never mind coming to the United States.”

“But they're still children, aren't they?”

“Mostly teenagers now,” Pond said. “They were held hostage by the Khmer Rouge for three or four years. Separated from their parents and trained as the future of the country. No intellectual training, school was the rice fields. Some were forced to carry guns at the age of eleven or twelve.”

“How many survived?”

“At least half died, but about three thousand managed to sneak across the border into Thailand. They've been in the camps ever since.”

My interest was growing far beyond the personal. This was not just a story, this was becoming a mission. I called Klein with more ammunition.

“Thailand,” Klein said. “That's a hell of an expensive travel budget.”

“I'll pay half.”

A week later, I was back in Thailand to write a story about the child survivors of Cambodian genocide—the pawns of war.

PANIC WAS SPREADING THROUGH
a different refugee camp, Sakeo, on the day I returned to Thailand. The first movement of refugees to a third country in a full year had taken place the day before. Rumor had it that this would be the last. As soon as I stepped out of the car, my pale face and red hair attracted a swarm of camp inmates. Hundreds of people pressed letters for the U.S. Embassy into my arms. I was trapped.

“Guide for you, okay?” A pair of muscular teenage shoulders appeared above the mass of short people, then a broad smile; he introduced himself as Nhep Sarouen and opened the crowd like a gate. Sarouen was hungry to speak English, forbidden by the Thai guards. He held out his battered English copybook and spoke in a hushed voice. “This my best friend, I sleep with, I play with.” In it, he had copied out an entire English dictionary.

“You America?” he asked.

“Yes, American.”

“America means freedom, something no one can smash out of our minds.”

“Do people here have serious hopes of going to America?”

“All people here very afraid they send back to Cambodia, Vietnamese kill them.” Sarouen looked over his shoulder at the Thai guards and sucked in his breath. “Take people, at night, in a truck to the border, no one see them again.”

Sarouen led us to the Thai commander's office. Children scampered beside us, their shy smiles followed by the traditional Khmer greeting, their fingertips and palms pressed together in the shape of a lotus blossom. Then they dipped their chins to their fingertips. They never looked me in the eye. I knew that Cambodian children were taught as a sign of respect not to look directly at grown-ups. That was what I found strange about the girl with hungry eyes. I was vaguely aware of her, a child of maybe ten or twelve, darting behind bamboo fences but following me like a deer through the forest. Her wary eyes kept reappearing, and just as quickly disappearing. I took out my Nikon.

The Thai commander received me, scowling. “No camera. Not stay long. We do not consider these people refugees. Illegal immigrants.” He motioned to a mustached guard wearing orange lipstick to bring tea. I asked the official if Cambodians were still fleeing across the border and into his camp.

“Camp closed,” he barked. “Border closed. Must put in your story!”

Sarouen led me to a sequestered area of the camp known as the Children's Center. It was under the supervision of volunteers from the International Rescue Committee. The young American woman in charge introduced herself as Margie de Monchy. She was prepared to use the full deck of her bureaucratic powers to keep me from interviewing any unaccompanied minors, as the teenage survivors of Pol Pot were called.

“But why? Don't you want publicity, to help them get out?” My official role now was the newspaper lady writing a story for the
New York Times.

Margie laid her cards on the table. “Look, these children see a
farang
and go a little crazy.”

“What's a
farang
?”

“A foreigner. Us—French, British, American—we all look the same to them. They write more letters. Then you get back in your plane and forget.”

I asked Margie if the IRC had been able to trace any of the children's family members who were still alive inside Cambodia. She looked at me wearily. “We've had a tracing program for almost two years. No hits.”

Using all the charm I could muster, I persuaded Margie that I would not forget. A story in the
Times
might put some pressure on the United States to open the doors again for resettlement. She relented. As I walked back through the camp to the car, I caught another glimpse of the phantom girl whose hungry eyes continued to follow me.

The next day four boys and girls were lined up for me outside the Children's Center. A diminutive Cambodian woman, Darvy, was assigned as my translator. By late afternoon the tragic stories of massacre, mutilation, starvation, and seeing half-dead bodies tossed into pits had left me numb. But I had not yet seen a child from an urban background. There was a delay; the child scheduled for that interview was not available.

The girl with the hungry eyes suddenly appeared. In the midst of the dust and chaos, she was perfectly groomed. Her black hair was freshly washed with the comb marks still visible; it ran down her back like a waterfall. Her miniature body was wrapped in a flowered sarong.

“She offers to substitute,” Darvy said. “She has twelve years, okay?”

“Okay.” This girl had something else, that indefinable gravity we call presence. I asked the translator to tell her it was all right to look at me. She did. I smiled. She did not. We contemplated each other for a long time. For the next hour, she never took her eyes off my face.

“Do you remember a happy time?” I asked.

Such a frivolous question caught her by surprise. Her face brightened to the innocence of a child—almost. “Yes, she has happy memories.” The translator painted the picture of an educated urban family who lived in a prosperous quarter of Phnom Penh. She and her brothers and sisters enjoyed picnics by the river and movies with their parents. Her grandparents had a gold-working shop. Her mother was part Chinese, which would explain her light amber skin. This made her family a prime target in July of 1975 when the illiterate peasant army of Pol Pot drove two million of the educated, urban populace on brutal marches out of the cities and into the war-wrecked countryside to do hard labor, deprived of schooling, money, or authority over their children.