Word: dang
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Seng, now 10, sits at the other side of a kitchen table at the end of a long dirt-floor hut in Khao I Dang. He is visible down to the middle of his chest. The face is bright brown; the head held in balance by a pair of ears a bit too large for the rest-the effect being scholarly, not comical. Kim Seng has a special interest in France these days because he has recently learned that his older brother is there. He studies diligently, hoping to join his brother. He believes that knowledge makes people virtuous...
...What is this picture, Kim Seng?" The drawing is one of two he did upon first arriving at Khao I Dang. It is of three boys, stick figures, standing to the side of several gravestones. The background consists of a large mountain with a leering yellow moon resting on its peak. Perched on a tree is an oversized owl, whose song, says Kim Seng, is mournful...
...golden age-the period of Angkor Wat with its five peaked towers and massive stone gods. But fundamentally, Cambodia has remained a village nation, and the values of Pol Pot, not to mention his horrors, must have seemed as shocking as they were terrifying. The children in Khao I Dang have simple values. They have been taught to honor the land, the country, their dead ancestors, their parents and their village...
...like Sokhar, they say nothing. Sokhar is eleven now, was eight when she first came to Khao I Dang. She too did a drawing when she arrived, but unlike Kim Seng, she did not explain it, and in fact said almost nothing at all during her first two years at the camp. Sokhar is well fed, and soft-featured, though "in Cambodia I met with starvation." She has crying fits still, but is beginning to talk. It is difficult, however, to speak of her drawing, which, while primitive, requires an explanation...
...most of the children are in the theater tent now-the "Khao I Dang National Theater"-milling and chattering with expectation. Then the bright pink curtains part, showing a backdrop painting of Angkor Wat. The xylophone plays the water-drop music. The dancers enter. The boys strut, the girls cock their hands and heads and do not smile. They glow with color, their dark brown skins set off by the deep blues, reds and greens of their sarongs and sashes. They do four dances, starting with a hunting dance in which a small boy brandishes a spear and tries...