Copyright Gregory Beals, all rights reserved.
Non-fiction
A black and white photograph of my father, my mother and I stands on the night table next to my bed. My father is dressed in a dark suit. His hands are folded. I wear a dinner jacket. My mother sits between us. She has doe eyes. I look at myself in the photo. Then I look at my father. I can see my lips in his. My cheeks are like his. I am four years old. We are in a restaurant. It is my first time in New York — the night before we are to take a boat to France.
I am struggling to remember him. It is odd this feeling. Vital parts of his history – the texture of his hands, the sound of his voice — are lost. He has been dead for 25 years now. I hold on to the photo. I try to remember when it was taken. I remember the ship we boarded the next day. It was called the S.S. France and that evening mom and dad snuck out our room while I slept. I woke up and searched for them. I remember the olive light of the ship’s hallways — the narrow corridors that led through doorways to more hallways that like some closed circuit, arrived to the ship’s ballroom. I recall my mother and father dancing there. They danced their way across the Atlantic. They waltzed, the black man in the dark suit and the white woman dressed in white. It was the early 1960s.
My father, Alfred Beals loved to waltz. That dance was part of the persona he created in opposition to his past. What vision was he attempting to enact? How did he re-dream his life? I think of his beginnings. By all accounts, my father, Alfred Beals, shouldn’t have been born. My grandma Susie was only 12 years old when she became pregnant with him. When she relinquished him from her body after hours of difficult labor, Dad wasn’t breathing. The mid-wife slapped him several times and he still didn’t breathe. But then my great grandmother covered his mouth with hers, and pushed the wind from her lungs into his. “My grandmother told me that she kept breathing and breathing until I started to breathe too,” my father said. Dad was born on March 30, 1913. Birth was his first act of survival.
As a boy, I’d sit at the foot of my father’s bed and he would tell me about his childhood in an east-Texas sawmill town called Orange. When he told me stories about his past, our childhoods became a kind of singularity. Dad, Great Grandma Ford, Grandma Susie, his Uncle Walter, and his Uncle Willie lived in a three-room shack. Uncle Willie was the one responsible for feeding the family when my father was young. One of the neighbors was a chicken farmer who had a shotgun and a marksman’s eye for trespassers. Uncle Willie’s solution was to pull up one of the floorboards to our family’s shack and lay down a hook with some bread on it. He’d then take the hook and dangle it from beneath the house. Eventually one of the neighbor’s chickens would come under the house where it would be snatched up. Then he’d put the floorboard down to cover his tracks. Uncle Willie called it “fishin’ for chickens.”
The shack had no plumbing. There was an outhouse out back that the neighbors shared. Sanitation men with long black boots came each week on a mule-driven cart to clean the manure. “One day the mule got spooked and made a few steps backwards,” my father told me. “And all this shit in that cart, all that shit from all our neighbors came spilling out. Boy, these men were head-to-toe in neighborhood doo-doo. They were swimming in shit boy, trying to get out of that ditch but they kept on slipping back in. They were hollering, ‘Help me! Help me!’ But nobody was going near. We were too busy laughing until the tears ran down.” He would say “shit,” and I’d laugh until my sides hurt. The scatological nature of his stories made me feel somehow privileged. “Boy, we didn’t feel bad for those men,” he said. “They were respectable people and you know everybody has to swim in some kind of shit.”
My father believed that you should laugh at your troubles and laugh with people who had troubles like yours. Hardships could be made fun of if you share respect. But there were also violent recollections that could never be fully conquered, only passed along from mouth to ear to mouth to ear. One of his first memories as a little boy was watching a young man riding on the running board of a large automobile as it trundled down an old dirt road. The teenager was riding on the side of that car when a white man on a horse asked him why he was still in town. “He told him that there was no train today but he was trying to leave town now,” my father said. “But that white man said, ‘too late nigger,’ and shot him in the head. For the next three months me and my friends would sit by the road, thinking of ways to kill that man.” My father told that story and in my mind it felt like a movie. He took danger and fear and imbued it with a magical quality that was couched in the language of adventure.
I was never afraid when he told me about the violence he endured. In fact, I felt safe. My father understood that surviving was as intimate as it was transgressive. You couldn’t tell stories like that unless there was a space inside that was comfortable. His accounts about how he came through reassured and affirmed us both.
Dad said that one of our relatives was also lynched. I am not sure what his name is but I know that he was my grandmother’s uncle and that his murder was a turning point for my father. My grandmother’s uncle had worked as a butcher in Orange. He was very good at what he did and he began to take business away from another butcher who happened to be white. It didn’t take long for the lynch mob to come. Initially at least there was a standoff between my grandmother’s uncle and the white butcher. It lasted just long enough for my father and some other members of the family to leave town for Chicago. My father could not have been more than 11 years old when they fled.
The lynching had an odd effect on Alfred Beals — it freed him. It was horrible, of course, but it freed him. My father spoke about arriving to Chicago where for the first time he lived in an apartment building that had electric lights. He’d turn on the lights then run outside to stare at them. He couldn’t believe it.
Dad grew addicted to travel. It was a re-enactment of his escape. He left Chicago for a while and went to Mexico where he worked as a chauffer. Then he gambled from one end of the country to the other. He bought a purple Cadillac. (Dad was color-blind. Purple and canary yellow were the only two hues he could recognize.) He won money, started a grocery store with his winnings, then bought an apartment building and was successful enough to travel even more. He traveled First Class to Buenos Aires, to Rio, Rome, Lima, London, Istanbul, Paris. Everyone thought he was a movie actor or an athlete. In New York, once, I remember a boy came up to him asking for his autograph. Dad signed it Mickey Mantle.
“Thank you, Mr. Mantle.” The boy said.
“Who’s Mr. Mantle?” I asked.
He looked at me and smiled.
My father died when I was 15 years old. Burglars had broken into his supermarket on several occasions, and he decided to spend several nights up guarding the premises. He had a routine that he told me about. He’d take out his 9 mm. before opening the door to the store. Then he’d go to the safe, open its door, then get behind it so he could use it as a shield. For several days he spent the night at the store, came home for an hour of sleep, then returned to work. One day he came home, went to sleep and just died. He always said he wanted to die in his sleep just like his Grandma Ford. The store was sold off to creditors. The apartment building was sold off to creditors. A friend of the family paid for the funeral because we didn’t have the money to bury him. Now it was our turn to live on without him.
It strikes me now that he could only safely look back on himself after he had traversed one horizon or another. It was as if the life he lived after having become a successful businessman was a kind of fantasy life, not to be taken seriously. When we went to a new country, my father would invariably stop at the place where poor people lived. He would regard their habitations then look at me. “Boy, if I came from here, this is where I would have grown up,” he would say. “This is where you come from.”
What are the ways in which we attempt to continue on despite adversity? Years after my father’s death I ended up working as a journalist writing for the New York Daily News, Newsweek and as a contributor to the Boston Globe and Newsday. I found myself drawn to stories that were strangely similar to the ones Alfred Beals told me when I was a child. They pulled me out of myself. They were not my father’s stories but there was a similar sense of bravado and blues humor despite occasional sadness and longing. They made me feel the force of possibility and hope in places where one normally finds despair.
I write this from a church shelter where the victims of New Orleans have gathered. They arrived to Sheikana Glory Full Gospel Baptist Church in droves after Hurricane Katrina and Rita cleaved its way into the Gulf Coast. One woman arrived with 30 members of her family. Another came on a stolen city bus after being raped on a rooftop. A refugee from Vietnam who became homeless after the storm has begun to teach the group her native tongue. A mother and son who are mentally disabled and abandoned by their extended family have found a sense of home in this place, which has become its own little community. When he is not constructing showers or trying to find people work and housing, the minister listens to their stories. He reminds them of the power of testifying in the face of disaster, of holding on to a faith more sturdy than any home. He understands that telling a story of how one made it through carries with it a capacity for hope, for wonder and for belief in the power of redemption and regeneration. Indeed, surviving is only a form of passage.
The experience of these people has rubbed off on those around them. For one woman who worked at the church, their arrival has brought relief from her suicidal thoughts. Even the pastor finds himself transformed. He explained to me tearfully how he had always thought of his calling as a performance to be -delivered from behind the pulpit. “I feel more like a minister than I ever have,” he told me. “I feel as though I my life is more the way Jesus intended. Not a life of talking but a life of doing good works. I have never in my life felt as capable as I do now.”
As I listened to the hurricane survivors of New Orleans, I felt the reverberations of other people’s tales. The evacuees in the church talked of how during the worst days after the storm they lived through their imagination. One woman spoke of the beauty of dragonflies on flooded streets. Another talked of the stars at night. They told me their stories and it wasn’t strange when I thought of my friend Jorge Watts from Argentina who loved tangos. In 1976, security forces arrested him for opposing the military junta. Jorge said that when the cadres tortured him, he felt strangely lucid and spiritually connected to the life of his one-year-old son. Those who wanted him disappeared sought to reduce him to nothing. They played the radio as they tortured him because in their minds his existence was as significant as a chair or a table. He listened to the tangos and they would take him to his family. Throughout the experience he told me that in his mind he was dancing tangos with his wife and playing with his one year old. If the lexicon of terror was disappearance and nothingness, Jorge found the language of survival in family and connectedness.
Someone once said: “the eyes are the organs of asking.” When you have inherited a love of the road, you feel a kinship in the eyes of others. My eyes were always asking even in the furthest corners of the world whether my father and I were somehow related to people like the ones I met in this church shelter, an Argentine café — not through blood but through the experience of survival and wonder.
I have read the narratives of struggle and redemption in the Odyssey and the Book of Job. I have seen the survivor’s gaze on the faces of refugees from the Indonesia tsunami, from Somalia’s terrors, from Congo’s violence, Syria’s consuming war, from war in Ukraine. I have heard the stories of victims of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. I have spoken with people who saw an atomic bomb explode not 6 blocks away from them and lived to tell about it. I have listened to testimony from victims of torture. They all spoke of their passage through hardship in a language of intimacy unique to each. They talked of the creation of a magical space that enabled them to continue. A grandmother breathes life into a little boy. A mother saves her daughter from the rubble of an explosion because she recognizes the color of her shoes. A 10-year-old Syrian girl finds dignity while living with a bullet lodged just above her cerebral cortex. I listened to them and I found their lives were never singular and never separated from other people’s lives. Their histories were never secluded from history itself.
But their history and experience always seems to exist as a kind of world beneath the world. That is to say, people who endure the worst often have an understanding of events that contrasts dramatically with state-sanitized versions of the past. As with many lynchings there is no record of the murder of my grandmother’s uncle. Nor is there any record of the murder of the young man who my father saw shot leaving town. In fact, there is no record of my father’s birth. Silent pasts abound beneath the surface of official versions. “Whoever controls the past controls the future,” George Orwell once said. Indeed, the struggle for collective memory is the struggle for how a culture will be defined and who will get to define it.
If the removal of painful memories would bring them peace, most survivors would gladly comply. But memory is a silent intelligence at work in the back of the mind that defies banishment. What cannot be said becomes the shadow of that which is spoken. “Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work,” writes psychiatrist Judith Herman. “Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.”
And so survivors must develop strategies to survive even their survival. They reckon with their experiences by moving back and forth between life in the present, and a powerful often dangerous past. Both are replete with longings for a sense of home, narratives and counter-narratives about the nature of what they have endured and how their experience fits into that of the larger society.
The survivor’s tale, like the blues, reflects a part of living that all of us to one extent or another must endure. We all will suffer setbacks. We will bury those we love. We will witness the slow decline and decay of our bodies. We will come face to face with the deepest questions of our own mortality. And if we survive it is because we have exercised the capacity to re-dream our lives. There are those who might argue that to look at survival is to be fixated by sadness. I think the opposite is true. Often, people who continue on, are forced for to master their best selves.
The summer after my father died my family had nothing but $200 in the bank. My mother decided that if we were to fall apart we would do it traveling enjoying life the way we did with my father. We jumped into the car, filled up the tank and headed off to Colorado. We ate spaghetti from the can and slept by the side of the road. I was 16 then and I remember my big treat was watching a rodeo and drinking a can of beer. The trip was a turning point for us. We made it to Colorado and back and somehow all of us, especially my mother, felt more capable. We knew that we would be alright.
The following journey is different from the one I took as a teenager, but somehow it fells no less significant. To walk clear-eyed through the lands of survivors of some of the worst our globalized era has to offer is to pass along a chain of human recognitions whose strength exceeds any melancholy or longing. These links are not acts of will. They are more a state of our humanity — as real and as natural as the swaying of the trees.
The Power of The Ball
Kyle Guy on the poetry of Baskeball
Hold the ball in your hands. Feel the pebbled texture of its perimeter. Feel its weight, 1.375 pounds. Grip the ball. Sense its mass — its hollow interior. Dribble and listen to the percussive sound against the wooden floor. Press down hard on the dribble and the sound sharpens, becomes high-pitched. Relax your dribble and listen. The sound is softer, lower-toned. The lethargic bang, bang, bang reverberates throughout the gym, into your hands and from there to your thoughts.
Think of the ball while I tell you a secret. Most players know this but very few will talk about it. When I tell you, I wouldn’t blame you if you thought I was crazy. But I am going to tell you anyway because I know what I am about to say is 100 percent true.
A basketball radiates its own energy, its own force. There is, unmistakably, a power—a power of the ball—alive and electric, waiting to be unlocked.
When the ball gives you its strength, you can dribble it as if tethered to your very soul. Someone could slap you in the face, and the ball would still act like it’s on a string, reading your intentions even before you’re aware of them. You move it; it moves you. Your teammates touch the ball, and it hums with life, their fingerprints charging it like static electricity. Someone throws a bad pass, and with the power of the ball, it doesn’t matter. You catch it, smooth as breath, with the precision of an archer’s arrow finding its mark.
Catch it. Slap that ball. Suddenly you and your teammates are running at full speed while everyone else is caught in molasses.
You can shoot backwards and when you’re connected to the power of the ball, it’s going in.
You can shoot blindfolded. When you have the power of the ball, it’s going in.
The other team can try to freeze you out with a half second to go and you need to shoot three consecutive free throws to win. You can be so nervous you want to vomit then and there in front of tens of thousands of fans and the millions who are watching you on television, streaming you onto their laptops or cursing you as their gaze heats up their cell phones. They can Tweet away that you have the most punchable face in America. But when the ball gives you its power, that nervous that you feel is a good nervous because no matter how much the other team wants you to choke, no matter how much they are trying to freeze you out, no matter how many thoughts and prayers they may launch into the ether for your failure – you know something that they don’t.
All that energy they send your way belongs to the ball now. It hums with it. And in your hands, that energy transforms into a force so natural, so precise, it feels inevitable. The ball will guide you through turmoil. Every desire they have for you to fail only contributes that much more to your success. What they want — it’s just not going to happen.
Those free throws. They’re going to drop like pearls into water as still as mercury.
Drop.
Drop.
Drop.
Listen to the ball. Hear the song it sings when it touches the back of the rim, sliding into the basket. In the NBA, the sound is amplified by microphones. In college, it’s acoustic, raw. Listen to the sneakers shriek against the floor as your body pivots at 45 degrees toward the hoop. The ball reaches not just into your hands but into the sinew of your muscles, into the rhythm of your pulse. In that moment, your body is no longer your own—it’s an aircraft poised for takeoff.
The ball doesn’t merely demand your conscious effort. It demands your unconscious mind—your reflexes, your instinct. On the court, you’re making split-second calculations, more than you can count. Think of speed chess, but multiply it by a thousand. That’s the flow of action and reaction, the rhythm of movement between you, your teammates, and your opponents.
When you have the power of the ball, those calculations transcend instinct. They become poetry. The ball writes its story, and you’re the ink. Your movements, the squeak of sneakers, the echo of the gym, the swish of nylon nets—it all becomes part of the ball’s unfolding narrative. It’s something epic. And in the game, that story, that poetry, unfolds over and over again.
Feel the way your body moves away from your opponent, who knows, in some deep part of himself, that he’s beaten. Feel his desperate recovery, the too-much energy he exerts, the vulnerability exposed in his overcompensation. He can’t catch you, so you shoot. He’s moving too fast, and you stop, sharp, the soles of your shoes shrieking against the waxed wood. He flies past, helpless, as if realizing too late that he’s run a red light.
The motion is flawless. Your wrist snaps downward, fingers curling like you’re stealing something sacred out of a cookie jar. The ball arcs high, the seams spinning in a precise rhythm, cresting at its apex before descending, slipping through the nylon strings with the softest sound—a sigh of wind through leaves. It is a kind of magic.
That moment, when your opponent knows he’s beaten, becomes etched into your DNA. The better he plays, the sweeter it is. Your body remembers it, yearns to replicate it, like an algorithm etched into your cells. The ball doesn’t just show you the way; it becomes the way.
And when you have the power of the ball, statistics mean nothing. That’s why they call it March Madness. Madness, because on any given day, at any given moment, the ball can overturn the world. One shot can rewrite history, make legends out of nobodies.
And when you have the power of the ball, statistics mean nothing. That’s why they call it March Madness. Madness, because on any given day, at any given moment, the ball can overturn the world. One shot can rewrite history, make legends out of nobodies.
I’ve been in games where we had a 98.5 percent chance of winning—and lost because the other team had the power of the ball. I’ve also won games where our odds were less than one percent, where only our mothers and fathers still believed in us.
On the court, you see things evolve in ways no camera or replay can capture. The guy who never shoots threes suddenly can’t miss. The unshakable defender falters against a player whose average is mediocre at best. The power of the ball heightens awareness, sharpens connection. It sets the court ablaze, turning a team into a wildfire that consumes everything in its path.
I used the word magic earlier. But this is not a story about hocus pocus. I go to church. I believe in God, the Bible and hard work. So no, this is not a story about enchantments, dumb luck, specters or Harry Potter and his wand. This is not a children’s fable, or a ghost story, because I am no ectoplasm. Getting the power of the ball is not like winning the mega millions or learning that you’ve inherited a fortune from some long lost relative. Nope. It’s something that you and your teammates have to build. And it has to be built on multiple dimensions – it requires selflessness, positivity, faith and above all, a connection that weaves together the time and space within the game that only others with the power of the ball can sense.
Here’s the truth: to claim the power of the ball, you must first lose—lose in ways you don’t expect, ways that cut deep. You have to lose profoundly, over and over, until loss becomes something more than defeat. It becomes a teacher, stripping you bare, sharpening your focus, and revealing the quiet, hidden seeds of victory buried in failure.
Loss isn’t an end; it’s a beginning. You come to see that there’s no such thing as loss, not really. There’s only focus. Only the ball. Only struggle. And if you’re willing to pay attention, the ball will guide you, showing you how to turn even the most miserable moments into something worth keeping. You’ll take that moment, not with bitterness but with reverence, and you’ll frame it, hang it on your wall—a reminder of what it gave you, of what it made you.
At Virginia, we lost, and in losing, we learned the unforgiving lessons of defeat. We were Goliath—entitled, certain of our place—and we fell. But in that fall, we found one another. We began again, rebuilding piece by deliberate piece. And when we returned, we didn’t just win; we rose beyond winning. We transcended.
This is the power of the ball: to connect, to transform, to teach. It’s not just a game. It’s a story—yours, mine, ours—unfolding with every dribble, every pass, every shot. And in its story lies its greatest truth: the ball, like life, is a reflection of all that we are and all that we can become.
Phnom Penh.
Phnom Penh.
Arn and I watched the rain from a sweaty cafeteria, talking about the peculiar habits of our dead fathers. Mine never ate at the dining room table. He came home from his grocery store and took his meals in bed, calling his three children to gather around for a night of blackjack or baccarat. We used food stamps collected from customers as chips and ate black-eyed peas, steak, or pork chops on paper plates. He dealt the cards and told us stories: how he grew up with only two pairs of pants—one for today and one for tomorrow; how the family traveled from Texas to Chicago to escape a lynching; the first time he lived in a house with electric lights; his first knife fight; and Nat King Cole.
Arn’s father loved music. One of his earliest memories was of being placed on the stage of the basat opera that his father ran with his four wives in Battambang. There were Apsara dancers and singers everywhere in and around the old wooden house. After the spring rains, they performed in the countryside. The troupe rumbled along in an old pickup truck, while his father followed on a blue Vespa. His father’s peculiar trick was to stand on the motorbike seat while still driving, take down his pants, and pee. It was effective publicity for the arriving theater, but Arn told me that his father peed from the motorbike because it gave him a peculiar pleasure—a mix of freedom and technical expertise.
We talked for hours. My father died when I was 15 years old, of a stroke induced by overwork. Arn does not know his own age and couldn’t tell me how old he was when his father passed. But he remembered the funeral—how he was too small to see into the coffin and how a man had to lift him up. He saw his father’s hands, pinned together by sticks meant to give the appearance of prayer. We talked until the daylight faded into dusk, and our voices grew quieter as the darkness arrived. “I am still a child,” he finally told me. “I still live my life around the things that happened to me when I was a little boy.”
I first met Arn Chorn Pond at a dinner party I hosted for a friend. He arrived about an hour late to the little wooden house just off Norodom Street where I lived, apologizing a mile a minute. There were several musicians at the party, and after a bit of prodding, Arn admitted he played multiple instruments and loved to sing. Then he dreamt aloud about making a feature film—a musical love story set during the period when the great temples of Angkor were built. He said it was just one of the things he wanted to do in the coming years. He wanted to start a television station. He wanted to start a radio station. Of course, I took this kind of ambition for insecure bravado.
In truth, Arn had been waylaid by history. He reckons he was about nine years old when the Khmer Rouge interned him at a Buddhist monastery called Wat Aik, where he was forced to participate in the cadres’ atrocities. Three years later, he fled into the jungles of northern Cambodia with nothing to eat and only a sidearm for protection. He tracked monkeys and ate their discarded food. He survived on insects found on the forest floor. When he finally stumbled across the Thai border four months later, delirious with malaria, he was taken to a refugee camp. He survived and somehow made his way to America. Now, he was back home, living with his half-sister and her husband.
Among other things, genocides are wars against memory, and Cambodia’s was no exception.
When the Khmer Rouge came to power in April 1975, they promised that the past would be wiped from people’s minds like chalk from a blackboard. The new state would be a collectivized, agrarian utopia. A history of defeat—the country had been invaded by Thailand and Vietnam, colonized by the French, occupied by Japan during World War II, and bombed by American B-52s during the Vietnam conflict—would be purged.
The Khmer Rouge called their government Ankar (“the organization”) and targeted urban dwellers, students, intellectuals, professionals, teachers—all those with a relationship to the written word. These “new people” were identified, stripped of their humanity, and destroyed through execution, forced labor, or starvation. Soon, the dead piled up. The regime’s failures mounted, and Ankar began to devour itself with purges and counter-purges. In just four years, the country became a mass graveyard for 1.7 million people.
When it was over, people were caught between the fact of memory and the need to forget. The struggle with remembrance did not come from a desire for “truth” or “reconciliation.” As the nation hurtled from an era of atrocity into one of globalization, very few wanted to remember. To remember was to confront the many reasons they were afraid, poor, uneducated, or unable to compete. It was to face the full weight of what had been sacrificed.
The loss spanned several generations and will span several more. Memory invoked a space of nauseating terror that could safely exist only as something unspoken. The unmentionable lingered everywhere—in politics, in villages, and in cities. It did not oppose what was spoken but, like a shadow, accompanied it.
But everyone remembers. One cannot escape it.
A village elder told me that memories of Ankar come to him in dreams as a looming darkness. An old monk said he dreams of empty bowls of rice. At night, Arn dreams he is running from the cadres. He runs toward a group of children and is shot. Everyone remembers.
Yet they have transformed their memories. They have become a new kind of “new people”—ones who have declared new lives. They carry on in the space between who they are and who they were. They have assaulted memory with clear-minded dreaming.
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Arn traverses his past with music. He plays a klim—a dulcimer-like instrument resembling a Japanese koto. He was about nine years old when an old man at Wat Aik taught him to play. The cadres there had already killed several musicians before realizing they needed songs to feed the vanity of the party leaders. The old man taught Arn and one other boy for several hours each day. When the lessons were complete and Arn could play competently, the cadres killed the old man. They claimed he had been “sent off,” but Arn knew he had been executed. Arn was then made to perform revolutionary songs for the cadres, who, in turn, gave him a gun and declared him a child soldier in Pol Pot’s army. Arn played, and the music created a space where something resembling sanity could reside. Nowadays, Arn spends his time finding work for master musicians who survived the Khmer Rouge.
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There is no mention of survivors like Arn in Cambodian schoolbooks. In fact, there is no mention of the genocide at all. In primary school, students study history up to the Angkor period. In secondary school, they study history up to the Second World War. Teachers make no reference to the period between April 1975 and 1979—it is simply a void. History begins again in the 1980s. At the country’s newest cultural school, the curriculum depicts the post-Khmer Rouge period in terms of the arrival of the “happiness family.” In schoolbooks, this is represented by a mother lying on a sofa watching television, children playing with a dog, and a father talking on a cellphone.
Cambodian politics is remarkably pliable. Memory has been alternately de-emphasized, suppressed, or manipulated for various reasons connected to a multiplicity of forces. For one reason or another, every major political actor in the country has embraced senior members of the Khmer Rouge. Currently, only two leaders of the government that nearly destroyed Cambodian society are in jail. The rest walk the streets freely.
A few weeks after we met, I called Arn to tell him I would be traveling north to his home province of Battambang.
“I’m in the movie theater,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”
He explained it was a horror movie about a Cambodian woman who could command the nation’s snakes—he called her “the snake lady.”
Two hours later, he returned my call, canceled his appointments, and told me he would take me to his hometown himself. The next day, Arn, his sister, and I drove down a dusty red road that stretched toward Wat Aik and the killing fields just beyond. On the way, we stopped to pick up his stepmother, who lived in a little shack next to a dilapidated rail line. The tin walls were decorated with pinups of Thai movie actresses, Hindu and Buddhist deities. Before the Khmer Rouge arrived, she was a star in the opera. After Pol Pot was ousted, she survived by working as an astrologer and palm reader for shantytown dwellers.
The road to Battambang held secrets discernible only to those who knew its intimacies. We passed through the dust, looking beyond the road’s stony edges to various places where Arn’s family had witnessed Khmer Rouge atrocities—nine out of his twelve siblings perished under the regime. Arn’s stepmother and sister retold the tales of those times, their stories punctuated by the forced laughter many Cambodians use to mock the past.
“Remember when the Khmer Rouge almost raped you for singing a man’s song?” the mother said to the sister. Together, they began to sing the song: “I thought you were a virgin./Why have you tricked me so.”
“Remember that time they almost shot you for teaching the children to sing the opera?” said the sister. The mother laughed. “Yes, they had me tied up to that pole for two days. I never was much of a singer.”
We paused at a local cafeteria, a collection of dilapidated tables and chairs. When the food I paid for arrived, Arn’s stepmother and sister looked at the servings of chicken with wide eyes and mouths agape, like children. A car accident occurred outside—a truck had swerved to avoid a little girl crossing the street and flipped onto its side. They glanced at the scene briefly, then returned to their meal, speaking in Khmer, their words growing louder and more punctuated with laughter.
We arrived at Wat Aik during the stifling midday hours. The fine silence of the temple compound conjured myriad recollections. Memories arose through the heat and bright sunlight like ghostly fragments, and as they did, Arn’s voice took on the tone of a child. It shifted from past to present tense, his words matter-of-fact, as though he were talking to himself.
At first, he recalled the silence the Khmer Rouge tried to impose. It hovered, muffling the sounds of birds and insects.
“No talking. No. No talking,” Arn murmured as he walked.
But it was a false silence—interrupted from without and within. When he played the klim, the music grew like thick vines inside his head, shielding him from the outside.
“I would play, and sometimes I thought I was in heaven,” he told me.
The music became a sound of asylum, protecting him from the laughter of cadres mocking their victims, from the cracking of skulls beneath their “special hammers,” a sound he said was like breaking coconuts.
As he spoke, it seemed he was revealing an evil so profound it had long been unspeakable. Out of the 600 or so children who came to the camp, perhaps 20 survived. He talked about being raped, of the smell of feces and vomit so overwhelming his olfactory glands gave out as a defense mechanism. He described a little girl the Khmer Rouge chased through their quarters—how they grabbed her hair, bickering over who would eat her spleen. He was forced to hold the naked victims while others stabbed them with bayonets. Whether dead or alive, he buried them. He said he could still hear the screams of the wounded cursing him from beneath the earth.
Arn walked away from the monastery, gazing at a cardamom tree where, late one night, he had gone to steal a banana and found a six-year-old eating a corpse.
“The boy always seemed sick during the day, but at night he would slip out,” Arn told me. He reported the boy to the cadres, who were angry he had the strength to eat the dead but not to work during the day. They killed him that afternoon.
The grief was etched into Arn’s narrow face, visible in his bulging, watery eyes and nervous fingers. As he spoke, it was clear he sought neither exculpation for his own acts nor justice for the violence inflicted on him. He spoke because he understood that behind every horror lies the power of survival—a power that connects humans to one another. Each time he cried, he reconciled with the spirits of the dead and connected with those of the living. With every word, his existence became both more threatened and more affirmed.
That evening, we ate dinner in town. Arn’s mother and sister told me stories of the camps, joined later by Arn’s friends. Each story was as horrible as the last. I tried to listen, but my head began to tingle, as if a blister were forming inside. The sickening heat wrapped around me. I could no longer eat.
I looked out at the landscape and saw it as a vast cemetery. The land farmers plowed was littered with the fossils of the dead. I thought of the man I had seen earlier that day, plodding behind an ox near the temple. He said the turning of the earth sometimes brought bodies closer to the surface. He had grown accustomed to laboring atop the dead.
I began to feel faint. Back at the hotel, I stumbled up three flights of stairs and spent the night trying to vomit away the sickness in my head. Arn knocked on the door, but I didn’t answer.
The next morning, my head still spun, but walking and eating were easier. Arn, groggy from nightmares of running and being shot, asked how I felt. I began to laugh.
“You’ll be okay,” he said.
The ride back to Phnom Penh was punctuated by storms sweeping across the rice fields, cooling the air. We ate bags of tangerines as Arn sang basat operas and talked about movies. A song came on the radio. I didn’t understand the words, but the melody soothed me, and I began to sing along:
“Do re mi / Do re mi son la.”
As we passed a pickup truck filled with strangers, my thoughts turned to my father dealing cards. I reached out into the cool rain, and they reached out too, touching my hand as our vehicles passed.