Word: seng
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...neighbor and his wife carried Kim Seng's mother to the burial ground, the boy walking behind them. Kim Seng was quite weak and thin. The neighbors buried his mother, burned incense, and departed. Then Kim Seng knelt by the grave and burned three incense sticks of his own. Finally he took a handful of dirt from each of his parent's graves, poured it together in his hands, and beseeched his dead parents to look after him. He then returned to the mobile team...
...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...
...Seng says the same thing. As does Meng Mom, a puffy-cheeked twelve-year-old dancer who toys shyly with the lavender sleeve of her shirt. She is silent on all topics...
...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...