The Road of Lost Innocence (9 page)

For me, it’s normal to work seven days a week, but Pierre found it exhausting to keep L’Ineptie going. He needed a break. One time he took me to Kep, on the coast, near where his friend Jean-Marc worked. They met there, talked and drank all night, and next morning slept till noon, like French people do. Then with more friends we took a boat out to Rabbit Island, just off the coast. We all slept at the house of an old woman on the island. It was beautiful: the full moon over the water, just like it was on the banks of the Mekong in Thlok Chhrov, with the woven crab traps bobbing on the surface of the sea.

The sea itself was unfamiliar, and I went in with all my clothes on, like a Cambodian woman. I couldn’t even bear to look at the other women with us, who were wearing bikinis. The water stung my skin—it was not like river water at all—and it tasted salty. I wondered if people put salt into the water. To make it easier for people to cook, perhaps?

Another time, Pierre said it was time for a real vacation. He left L’Ineptie to a friend of his and told me we were going to Siem Reap to visit the thousand-year-old temples of Angkor. I knew nothing about them, I only knew that the silhouette of the Angkor Wat temple was printed on our currency.

We took a boat out of Phnom Penh and moved upriver to cross the great lake where the fishing people live out on the water in movable, floating villages. The trip took all night. In Siem Reap we stayed in a house rented by a friend of Pierre’s who worked for an NGO. The Cambodians who owned the house were very nice to me. They didn’t see me as trash picked up from the street—they saw me as the companion of a white man, somebody who deserved respect.

I was dumbstruck by Angkor Wat. The ruins were beautiful, but more moving to me was the way they were embraced and surrounded by thick forest. I had completely forgotten the forest, the huge trees and leaves of my childhood in the hills of Mondulkiri. Here were vast palaces and walkways with even vaster trees growing straight out of them, broad and gnarled, with vines almost as high as you could see, their roots making a towering frame around the carved stone walls. I felt a sudden sense of recognition so strong I could barely keep still. We couldn’t go everywhere we wanted to, because of the land mines, but I could tell that the forest was deep and strong all around us.

We spent about fifteen days visiting the temples. Pierre seemed to know all about them and lectured me on which king had built each one. I was amazed that I, a Cambodian, was so ignorant and he, a foreigner, was so knowledgeable. I asked him if he’d lived in Cambodia in a previous life. Pierre said that he had read books on Cambodian history and that if I could learn enough French I could read them too. I knew he thought it was a joke and that I would never be able to read
that
sort of French.

In Cambodia, there’s nothing unusual about three people riding on one motorbike, and Pierre hired a man to drive us around. Sometimes we had to get off and push the motorbike through the rutted paths in the thick forest. We went as far as Banteay Srei, a small-scale temple in red stone about twelve miles into the forest. As we drove back down the paths through the forest, I plunged into distant memories and buried sensations. I asked Pierre to stop for a while. He quickly grew restless, but I would have stayed there forever, remembering what a forest sounds like, the noisy birdcalls and the cool, deep smells.

Pierre decided that we should make the journey back to Phnom Penh by plane. I had never gone up in a plane before, and I didn’t trust the idea: I have never been able to understand how an airplane actually works. I spent the night thinking about it, eaten up by worry. By the time we got to the airport I was a complete mess, and when I saw the plane up close it looked like a metal bird—a tin can, some kind of joke. Pierre had to push me down into my seat and fasten my belt, which made me feel even more imprisoned. It felt like being tied down in the brothel. During takeoff and landing I was in a state of panic. When we arrived I was so green with nausea, I could barely stand up. I wondered if it is ever really possible to clear the past completely, or whether you will always be haunted by what has been done to you and what you have done.

In about February 1993, after L’Ineptie had been going for about a year, Pierre told me it wasn’t making enough money. Neither he nor I had ever run a business, and I guess we weren’t very good at it. And Pierre thought trouble was coming. The elections were being organized by the United Nations for May, and Pierre said nobody knew what would happen, whether the government would ever give up power and what kind of violence, even war, might flare up. Pierre said it was time for us to go to France.

I didn’t feel ready for this huge new change, but at the same time, I wanted to see all the things Pierre had talked about. He said the world was much bigger than I had ever thought. I could already speak a little basic French, so I thought it wouldn’t be too hard, and that if I went to France for a while I could come back and work as a translator or something. A lot of Cambodians were nervous about the political situation and would have leaped at the chance to get out. I could get a passport and a visa—but only if Pierre and I were married.

That’s how we decided to take the plunge—as part of the visa process. I didn’t want to get married at all. I don’t even like the sound of the Khmer wedding music. To me marriage was like a chain, a prison. In Cambodia once you’re married, your husband owns you.

After Pierre sold L’Ineptie he went to the French consulate to get all the forms we would have to fill out to be married and get visas. They all asked for my birth date, which of course I didn’t know. I told Pierre it was sometime in 1970 and he wrote “1 April,” because, he said, it was a kind of joke. It made me angry—I crossed it out and wrote “2 April” just to annoy him. I did the same thing with the date for our marriage to take place: Pierre wrote down “8 May,” which is a French holiday, but it was also the date of Pierre’s first, brief marriage to a Frenchwoman. That annoyed me too, so I struck it out and wrote in “10 May.”

For my name I wrote “Somaly Mam.” It was the truest name of all—Lost in the Forest—and anyway, Somaly was what Pierre called me. It had been years since anyone called me Aya, or just plain
khmao.
I called myself by the name my adoptive father gave me: his name, which I am proud to carry.

We went to the French embassy to be married. In those days the French embassy was an old colonial building with a red roof and jackfruit trees. It was impressive to be going there, but to me getting married was just part of the visa process. I didn’t dress up or invite anyone. At the embassy I answered questions and said what Pierre told me to say and then we signed the papers. Pierre dealt with most of it.

Afterward Pierre’s friend Thierry wanted us to have a little celebration. We ate in an Indian restaurant with some friends and then went to a nightclub that played mostly African music, for the Cameroonian peacekeeping troops. I remember how amazed people were when the first contingent of peacekeepers arrived from Cameroon, their skin so dark they looked like spirits. Pierre liked the music. He and his friends talked all night.

We left Cambodia a few days later. I took Pierre to Thlok Chhrov to see my parents and to talk to them. These days it was no problem to appear in the village in the broad light of day. Everything was different now that I was coming back to the village with money, and with a white man. Now everyone seemed to remember what close friends we had been as children, how sweet a child they’d always thought I was.

Father wasn’t glad that I was leaving Cambodia, as I knew he would not be, and I don’t suppose he was overjoyed to meet Pierre. He only nodded and said very little. I told him I would be back. My mother asked Pierre not to beat me, to love me and look after me; she asked him what my life would be like far away, in France. Pierre told them, “Don’t worry, your daughter can look after herself.” My parents both wept when we left.

Six days later we left for France. I had no idea what I might be getting into. A few days before we left, Pierre and I had a fight. When we left I was still seething with anger. I packed my suitcase and slipped a sharp knife inside it. If Pierre tries to sell me when we get to France, I said to myself, then I’ll kill him. You never know.

.8.

France

In the airplane, I struggled to stay calm. I’m a proud person and I didn’t want to show Pierre how frightened I was. We arrived in Malaysia, where we discovered that our second flight, to Paris, was delayed. The airline said they would put us up in a hotel.

To leave Kuala Lumpur Airport you had to use an escalator and I point-blank refused. There was no way I was going to step on this rolling metal serpent. Pierre was exasperated—he had to tug me onto it. In the streets I saw buildings higher than the tallest trees in the forest. Pierre said they were skyscrapers, and I thought he must mean it literally. Everything astonished me—it was all so modern.

Our hotel room was on the twenty-eighth floor, and to get there we had to take the elevator. When the doors closed, it felt like being in a coffin, shut in and panicky. From our hotel room the people down below looked tiny, like insects. I was terrified. Pierre went into the bathroom and ran a bath full of bubbles. He told me I would like it, that I should get in, but I wouldn’t do it. I had never taken a bath before or washed in hot water and I was afraid of the bubbles.

Then there was another plane. I was more blasé about the flight by now, though it was longer, and we stopped in Dubai. At the Dubai airport I saw how Muslims live—not the Cham like Grandfather was, but the real ones, with the women covered all in black like ghosts, shut away inside their own clothes, so close and hot in such a hot country. I felt sorry for them.

When we arrived in France we went straight to the house of Pierre’s Aunt Jeanine, in the suburbs of Paris. When we walked outside in the crisp May air I thought they had somehow put air-conditioning outdoors. To please me, Aunt Jeanine had decided to cook rice. In Cambodia we cook rice for an hour or more on coals, and it simmers slowly. When I saw her plunging little plastic packages into boiling water, I thought she was mad, and even more when after a few minutes she took it out and added butter. It looked awful, half boiled, half raw: swollen and much fatter than our rice, which is nutty and fragrant. Out of respect for the rice seedlings, I ate it all. I loved the ham, though, and the bread—the bread was marvelous.

Then Pierre took off for a couple of days. He said he had to go and see some friends and he disappeared. Jeanine was out most of the day, and I didn’t know what to do. I was too unsure of my few French words to go out, and I was afraid of getting lost. I thought perhaps my friends were right—Pierre did have plans to sell me. I told myself I had to be strong; I had to show Pierre what I was made of.

Finally, on his return, Pierre suggested that we visit Paris. We were in a distant suburb and had to take the train and then the metro. All these things were new to me, incomprehensible and disturbing. In Cambodia trains move at the speed of a walking man. This train raced at dizzying speed along two thin rails, looking as if it might slip off at any moment, and the metro was underground, hurtling through the dark earth lightning fast.

I had heard that Paris was the most beautiful city in the world, but I didn’t think so. There was hardly any green, and the city seemed choked and dead, with buildings tightly packed together. There was no space anywhere. Even the celebrated Eiffel Tower didn’t thrill me—it looked like a pile of old iron, nothing like the splendor or power of Angkor Wat. The most surprising thing was to see how people behaved with their dogs. There were dogs inside restaurants and apartments. Cambodian dogs live outside—to us, they’re dirty animals.

I also watched people getting money out of a sort of big box in the wall. So that’s how they do it, I said to myself. When they need it, people just go and fetch money from the box—what a good idea. I folded a piece of paper and slipped it into the slot. Nothing happened. Pierre laughed and explained about bank cards and the whole system, which seems extraordinary to me even today.

We went to stores and saw masses of pointy shoes. My Cambodian clothes looked dismal in comparison.

We were invited to dinner at the house of Pierre’s Uncle Jean. Pierre had warned me that his family was rather conservative. Jean came to fetch me in a nice car—Pierre was somewhere else—and put his seatbelt on. He gestured for me to do the same, but I shook my head to show I didn’t understand. I pulled the seatbelt when he showed me, but he had to latch it for me. When we arrived at his house, Jean got out and closed his door. I was still in the car and had no idea how to unfasten the belt. He mimed the action, but I didn’t know what to do, so he had to unfasten me himself.

I felt I had not just failed a test, I didn’t even know what the test was. At dinner the food was a mystery. Some of it was simply revolting. Fish in cream sauce that I had to force myself to swallow. I thought the cheeses smelled horrible. The French seemed to eat vast quantities of everything, especially meat. I could hardly believe how much they seemed to put inside themselves every day.

I was overcome by it all: the succession of dishes, the abundance of food, and the fact that people left food on their plates. They cut off the fat and left it; they left meat around the bones and didn’t even suck them; then they cheerfully threw it all away, along with the thick fish skin. We would have fed whole families in Cambodia just with these leftovers. In Thlok Chhrov we only ate meat once or twice a year, on special holidays. My mother would buy a half pound of pork for twenty people and chop it up very fine, as a kind of flavoring. We were grateful for every grain of rice we got.

That dinner went on for a long time. At one or two in the morning, everyone was still talking. Pierre didn’t translate anything for me. I was lost, jet-lagged, and hungry because I couldn’t eat the food. Everyone smiled at me, but there was no contact at all. I was Pierre’s little foreign savage, sitting at the end of the table without uttering a single word.

We went to Nice to visit Pierre’s mother. She had a yappy little dog, Tatou, who barked the whole time and ate from a plate at the table, which I found truly disgusting. The plan was for us to live with Pierre’s mother for a while, until Pierre found a job, but I could tell that she didn’t like me. To her I was a gold-digging foreigner who had seduced her son, and I tried to stay out of her way. Pierre was out most of the time, and I just sat in our room with no one to talk to and nothing to do.

I desperately needed to take French lessons, but we didn’t have much money. I had brought a French-Khmer dictionary with me from Cambodia and I asked Pierre to recommend a children’s book for me to read. Pierre told me I’d never manage it, but he bought me a copy of Joseph Kessel’s
Le Lion.
He was right—it was far too difficult for me. But I told myself I had to do it, and every night I wrote down words I had to learn.

Pierre went off to Paris to look for work while I stayed behind in Nice with his mother. One day I found a copy of the local paper,
Nice-Matin.
Looking through it, I came upon the classified section. I saw the word
“Emploi”
and looked it up in the dictionary—it meant “jobs.” I translated a few ads with the aid of my dictionary, and I saw that people were looking for cleaners and maids. I realized that even with little French, I might be able to find work.

I asked my mother-in-law how to get a job, and she took me to a temp agency and dropped me off. She didn’t care to help me, so I just walked in by myself. There were all kinds of foreigners inside. I explained to the director that I wanted to work. I told him,
“Je veux travailler,”
in a loud voice, and he got the message. He smiled broadly and told me I could start the next morning. I would be a cleaner at the Hôtel Hibiscus on the Promenade des Anglais.

That night, when Pierre phoned from Paris, I told him I had found work. He couldn’t believe it—that I would find a job before he could, without even speaking proper French. I was so happy about the salary. With 2,500 francs a month, I thought, I could begin sending money home to my parents.

The next morning my mother-in-law drove me to the hotel, and I carefully memorized the route into the center of town. When I arrived a Madame Josiane met me and gave me a dozen rooms to clean. She didn’t show me how, and I had no idea how to make a bed properly. I also didn’t know how to use the vacuum cleaner. It was like a long snake and roared at me—I was always frightened that it would suck up my feet or climb up my body. I had to make a great inner effort to control my fear of it. I was also puzzled by the variety of cleaning products.

That first day I didn’t even try to use the vacuum cleaner and I made the bed all wrong. When Madame Josiane came back she said, “Oh la la,” and laughed, and showed me how to do it, using sign language. By the end of the day, I could tell she was pleased with my work. I cleaned behind and under the furniture without being told, and I didn’t stop for lunch, as the other cleaners did—I didn’t even stop work to drink. And I never minded working weekends.

At the end of the month I got my first paycheck. I had only been in France for two months and I’d already earned 2,500 francs, a huge sum of money. In Cambodia that would be a fortune, perhaps a year’s pay. But what was I to do with this piece of paper, a check? Pierre explained that he would open a joint bank account for us, and I should deposit it there. That made me nervous. What if we divorced? Pierre could take all my money. I told him that I wanted to open an account in my own name, and he said, “You’re a real Chinese woman.”

I don’t have a habit of trusting men, and I never really trusted Pierre. Soon after we got to Nice, he went to see his ex-wife and didn’t come back until five in the morning.

Sometimes the hotel clients tipped me. I remember one elderly woman: after I helped her put away her clothes, she took my face in her hands and said,
“Mignonne.”
I didn’t know the word and asked her to write it down so that I could look it up in my dictionary. She thought I was pretty! I looked at myself in the mirror and thought she must be making fun of me.

After a couple of months of working at the Hôtel Hibiscus I realized that I could make more money at another hotel. The Hibiscus paid badly, and I had to work seven days a week. Also, some of the male hotel clients bothered me. I suppose they saw me as a little Asian girl who wouldn’t make a fuss. I didn’t want to put up with that kind of thing anymore and now I knew I didn’t have to.

I went to work at another hotel. The clientele there was mainly retired people who stayed for several weeks at a time. This gave me the chance to get to know them a little, and those elderly people were the ones who really taught me French. Some of them were very kind: they called me their “little Chinese princess.” I saw that French people lump all Asians together, but I didn’t mind it—Cambodians do the same with foreigners; to us they’re all
barang.

I like old people. They deserve to be looked after with respect. Sometimes, if their bones ached, I would rub their legs and massage their ankles. They appreciated that. They began joking with the hotel management that the pretty, pleasant girl was cleaning bedrooms while all the disagreeable staff members waited tables in the restaurant. So I was told to clean rooms only in the morning; at lunch I would wait tables.

I got lots of tips, but that made all the other staff jealous. They called me “Chink.” My orders were never cooked on time. Finally, after a few weeks, I cracked. I grabbed a knife in the kitchen and shouted at one girl, “If you keep going I’ll stick this in your belly.” I was surprised to realize that I knew how to say it. It didn’t make me any friends, but it brought me peace. After that they left me alone.

My mother-in-law was still hostile. I cleaned for her, and sometimes I offered to cook, but she didn’t like my food and never spoke to me much. It was always clear that she would prefer to be alone with her son—she constantly tried to drive a wedge between us. When I got home after work in the afternoons, I didn’t dare make myself lunch, even though I was always hungry.

I lost a lot of weight. One time she fed Pierre and me eggs and spinach and gave meat to her dog. I put up with everything, because according to Cambodian custom you have to put up with everything your mother-in-law does and not complain to your husband. A Khmer husband will always take his mother’s side against his wife, so it’s best to endure in silence.

But after we had lived in Pierre’s mother’s apartment for four months, some friends of hers came to visit. They had children with them—the kind who jump on everything and destroy stuff. I said to one of the little ones, “Don’t jump about like that. When the old lady comes back she won’t be happy.” To me this wasn’t any kind of insult. In Cambodia we say
“yeh”
for any elderly woman—it’s a term of respect. But in Europe nobody wants to face facts; you have to pretend they’re not old, even if they’re elderly. When my mother-in-law got home, the mother of the little monsters told her I’d called her “the old lady,” and my mother-in law was furious. She slapped me and locked me in my room.

She might have thought about how little French I could speak; she could have tried to understand. I was horribly upset. I explained everything to Pierre when he got back. To my surprise, he understood immediately and said it was time for us to find another place to live.