Chapter 5 #5
Up to three million people. We would never know for sure.
The details were more qualitative than quantitative.
There were so many pictures. The piles of skulls, the killing fields, the mass graves.
Photographs from the concentration camps.
Dossiers stamped with red: political prisoners marked for execution.
I scrolled through pictures upon pictures until I was no longer processing what I was looking at.
I couldn’t get a grip on the idea that this had happened to my own family—that this chapter of history, which never made it onto any of my high school or college syllabi, was involved with me in any way.
I read on, trying to cram my mind with the details.
They killed 25 percent of the population.
One in four people. They forced thousands into labor camps, concentration camps, and political prisons.
They killed people for defying the regime.
They killed people for whispering discontent.
They killed people for begging for food.
They killed people for falling ill. They killed people to make up their execution quotas.
Sometimes they killed people for no reason at all; just the fun of it, because the blade was already moving, and it might as well find something to cut.
And they would have kept going, might have never stopped, except that they crossed the border and massacred a village in Vietnam.
They chased the villagers into pagodas and fired into the pagodas; then they chased the villagers into mountain caves, tracked them down with dogs, and threw grenades through the cave mouths.
The Vietnamese said no, quite enough of that, and invaded Cambodia, and installed a puppet government.
And that was the only reason why the genocide ended.
What was the point? I wondered. Executing political enemies, that was one thing. But this wanton, senseless slaughter—what did that achieve? What were they trying to build?
I asked the internet: What was the purpose of the genocide?
The internet said: The Khmer Rouge was trying to transform the country into a classless agrarian utopia.
Why did that require killing a fourth of the population?
To rid the country of reactionary thought.
Why didn’t the West do anything to help?
Because the West didn’t know. Because the West wasn’t looking. Because the leftists in the West, the only people who could have found Cambodia on a map, thought that the Khmer Rouge was carrying on a glorious revolution, and were cheering it on.
I LOOKED UP IMAGES OF CAMBODIA TODAY. MOST OF THE SEARCH results were photographs of Phnom Penh, which looked like any other modern Asian city: busy markets, a finlike skyscraper, a temple lit up at night.
Tourism promotions in oversaturated colors promised that Cambodia was very safe, and very lovely, to visit.
Tipping was welcome but not required. Tickets to the killing fields museum cost six dollars.
The best way to get around was by tuktuk.
I recalled vaguely that Cambodia was a Buddhist country, and that the Angkor Wat temple complex was one of the marvels of the ancient world.
I looked up photos of Angkor Wat: yes, very grand indeed, so many temples like pine cones, so many Buddha faces cut into stone.
I didn’t know anything else about Cambodia.
The only person I knew who’d ever been to Cambodia was Yuxiu, from class.
In fact, the only impression I had was that it was a country where some villagers were so poor they needed Singaporean high schoolers to build them houses, and where you had to dance across a field of bricks to shit.
THE NEXT DAY, I DIDN’T LEAVE THE BUILDING AT LUNCHTIME. I WAS worried about the air raid drill. We had received an email reminder from the program office earlier that morning that read:
今天下午1:30–2:30將舉行北部地區的萬安演習，請下午有課的同學在1:30前回到校園。
The annual Wan An air raid drill will be held from 1:30–2:30 p.m. today. If you have classes in the afternoon, please return to the department before 1:30.
演習期間會出現防空警報聲音；請若你待在戶外，請配合相關人員引導就近避難。
Sirens will sound at the beginning of the drill. If you are outdoors at that time, please follow guidance by the police to find shelter nearby.
I didn’t know where the nearest shelter was, and I didn’t want to be caught out slurping noodles when the time came, so I’d elected to just stay in the building.
I had no evidence for this, but I imagined that the public shelters were like London’s bomb shelters during World War II: dark, bricked-up places without toilets.
When the drill happened, I wanted access to a toilet.
I kept watching the clock. One twenty-nine.
One thirty. The email didn’t explain further about the logistics of the drill, but I thought surely an air raid must involve an ear-splitting alarm.
But I heard nothing, just the same muffled voices through the doors; rustling pages; pens scratching, laboriously copying out characters.
Minutes trickled by. Still nothing happened.
I considered going out for lunch, but I was afraid the air raid could still occur at any point throughout the hour.
What if the timing wasn’t precise—what if the 1:30 mark was just the start of the window?
I stood up to peer outside. Students were walking up and down the street just as they would on a normal day.
The air was silent. I felt insane. This was just like the morning of the earthquake—no one registered anything but me.
Was I the idiot for making such a fuss? Perhaps this was my American naivete showing through again—perhaps I, who had never lived under fear of invasion, was panicking over a threat that none of the locals took seriously.
But I looked up the drill on the internet, and it seemed this was quite a serious thing.
The threat of a Chinese invasion was always looming.
Defense ministers were always announcing the newest likely date of the invasion, shifting it back from 2025 to 2027 when it didn’t happen, but always within the next three to four years; military exercises escalating near the coasts; news reports of navy tankers and mounted machine guns.
This was real. Taiwan was preparing for something.
I thought about the things we considered normal in America: fire drills, tornado drills, school shooter drills.
Shooter drills were the worst, since the advice kept changing.
First it was to hide out of sight of the windows.
Then it was to barricade the doors. Then it was to escape out the windows.
Now it was “run, hide, and fight.” But nothing we did in America approximated preparing for a total war—for the occupation and devastation of our homeland.
“Lily!” It was Teacher Sun; her classroom was just past the computer lab. “Why aren’t you at lunch?”
“I thought there would be an air raid drill,” I said. “I didn’t want to be caught outside.”
“A what?”
I glanced down at the email, just to make sure I had pronounced it correctly. “The air raid drill?”
“The air raid drill!” Teacher Sun laughed. “Was that today?”
“Yes, they sent out an announcement.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that!”
She walked off before I could ask her what she meant.
I blinked at my screen. I was so woozy from hunger that the characters swam like squiggles before me, unintelligible.
I still didn’t know whether I was allowed to leave the building.
The longer I was here, the less I understood about anything at all.
SKIPPER APPROACHED ME IN THE HALLWAY AND SAID, “I HEARD your grandfather passed away.”
“Oh.” I hadn’t spoken to Skipper since before I left for Beitou. “Yes. He did.”
“I am very sorry for your loss.”
He used the same condolence phrase I had learned from Teacher Sun. I was impressed. I had never carried out a full conversation in Chinese with Skipper before. But Tingting was right—his Chinese was very good.
“Were there strippers at the funeral?” Skipper asked.
“What?”
Skipper explained that he had learned from Tingting that sometimes the Taiwanese liked to employ strippers at their funerals—literally, half-naked girls gyrating on top of cars.
The point was to attract a big crowd, because sometimes it mattered for Buddhists that a big, raucous crowd see the dead off to the underworld.
熱鬧 was the phrase that Skipper used: hot and noisy.
“I don’t think it was that sort of funeral.” I was trying to decide whether to be offended. “And I don’t think my gonggong would have approved of strippers.”
“Yeah, I figured.” Skipper rubbed at the back of his neck. “Sorry, I guess I was just trying to be funny.”
I felt a sharp pressure behind my eyes. I hugged him before I started crying. Skipper stood stiff in my arms for a moment, and then he lifted one hand and patted me on the back.
FOR MODERN TAIWANESE LITERATURE, I HAD TO WRITE A FIVE-HUNDRED-CHARACTER essay on an experience I’d had with suicide.
Of course, I didn’t have to write about my own suicide.
Friends or family or even fictional accounts were okay.
Suicidal ideation or attempts were also okay—no one needed to have actually died.
We just had to practice using the following phrases:
自殺: suicide
尋短見: to seek a short-term solution; euphemistically, commit suicide
愁悶: gloomy, in low spirits
Fortunately, I had plenty of material to work with. Over fifteen minutes, with much help from the dictionary, I typed: “My older sister, Jasmine, was once gloomy and in low spirits, and she tried to seek a short-term solution by ending her own life. Fortunately, she was not successful.”
For the term “successful,” I used 成功: the same phrase I would use in the context of getting good grades or meeting a self-help goal, so that when translated back, the sentence read more like “She did not achieve her ambitions of killing herself.” I wasn’t sure if this was appropriate, but I didn’t know a better phrase.