Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

We started with her own story. In the early seventies, Phaly Nuon worked for the Cambodian Department of the Treasury and Chamber of Commerce as a typist and shorthand secretary. In 1975, when Phnom Penh fell to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, she was taken from her house with her husband and children. Her husband was sent off to a location unknown to her, and she had no idea whether he remained alive. She was put to work as a field laborer with her twelve-year-old daughter, three-year-old son, and newborn baby. The conditions were terrible and food was scarce, but she worked beside her fellows, “never telling them anything, and never smiling, as none of us ever smiled, because we knew that at any moment we could be put to death.” After a few months, she and her family were packed off to another location. During the transfer, a group of soldiers tied her to a tree and made her watch while her daughter was gang-raped and then murdered. A few days later it was Phaly Nuon’s turn to be killed. She was brought with some fellow laborers to a field outside town. Her hands were tied behind her back and her legs roped together. After she was forced to her knees, a rod of bamboo was tied to her back, and she was made to lean forward over a mucky field, so that her legs had to be tensed or she would lose her balance. When she finally dropped of exhaustion, she would fall forward into the mud and drown. Her three-year-old son bellowed and cried beside her. The infant was tied to her so that he would suffocate when she fell: Phaly Nuon would be the killer of her own baby.

Phaly Nuon told a lie. She said that she had, before the war, worked for a high-level member of the Khmer Rouge, that she had been his secretary and then his lover, that he would be angry if she were put to death. Few people escaped the killing fields, but a captain who perhaps believed her story eventually said that he couldn’t bear the sound of the screaming child and that bullets were too expensive to waste on executing her quickly, so he untied Phaly Nuon and told her to run. Her baby in one arm and the three-year-old in the other, she headed deep into the jungle of northeastern Cambodia.

She stayed there for three years, four months, and eighteen days. She never slept twice in the same place. As she wandered, she picked leaves and dug for roots to feed herself and her family, but food was hard to find, and other, stronger foragers had often stripped the land bare. Severely malnourished, she began to waste away. Her breast milk soon ran dry, and the baby she could not feed died in her arms. She and her remaining child just barely held on to life through the period of war.

By the time Phaly Nuon told me this, we had both moved to the floor between our seats and she was weeping and rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, while I sat with my knees under my chin and a hand on her shoulder in as much of an embrace as her trance-like state would allow. She continued in a half whisper.

After the war was over, Phaly Nuon found her husband. He had been severely beaten around the head and neck, resulting in significant mental deficit. She, her husband, and her son were all placed in a border camp near Thailand, where thousands of people lived in temporary tented structures. They were physically and sexually abused by some workers at the camp and helped by others. Phaly Nuon was one of the only educated people there, and knowing languages, she could talk to the aid workers. She and her family were given a wooden hut that passed for comparative luxury. “While I went around, I saw women who were in very bad shape, many of them seeming paralyzed, not moving, not talking, not feeding or caring for their own children,” she said. “I saw that though they had survived the war, they were now going to die from their depression.” Phaly Nuon made a special request to the aid workers and set up her hut in the camp as a sort of psychotherapy center.

She used traditional Khmer medicine (made with more than a hundred herbs and leaves) as a first step. If that did not work sufficiently well, she would use occidental medicine when it was available, as it sometimes was. “I would hide away stashes of whatever antidepressants the aid workers could bring in,” she said, “and try to have enough for the worst cases.” She would take her patients to meditate, keeping in her house a Buddhist shrine with flowers in front of it. To seduce the women into openness, she would begin by taking three hours or so to get each to tell her story. Then she would make regular follow-up visits to try to get more of the story, until she finally got the full trust of the depressed woman. “I wanted to understand very specifically what each one had to vanquish,” Phaly Nuon explained.