The Many Lives of Haing S. Ngor : Doctor/Actor Turns Author With Autobiography That Recounts Barbarism in Cambodia

The tiny, two-bedroom apartment just east of Chinatown is not the sort of place one expects to find a best-selling author, much less an award-winning actor. Blistering plaster and threadbare carpets complement furniture best described as “serviceable.” Only a large temple rubbing from Angkor Wat and a wall covered with awards bespeak the occupant’s origin and accomplishments.

Dwarfed by a statue of a standing Buddha, his 1985 Oscar for best supporting actor is accorded no special place of honor. It stands, almost as an afterthought amid a jumble of less valuable mementos. But the apartment is not without treasures.

“I still have my wife’s clothes that I brought out from Cambodia,” Haing S. Ngor says, standing on a chair to rummage through a cabinet above his refrigerator. The box he is after contains clothes from “the Khmer Rouge times.” A green sarong, ripped and frayed, a yellow hammock big enough for two and a single blouse. One by one, Ngor carefully unfolds, then silently stares at these frail links with the past.

“I carried these out of Phnom Penh,” he says with a smile, holding aloft some unused corduroy trousers. “My friend, Som, had an identical pair. We saved them to wear once the Khmer Rouge were defeated. But he was executed and I . . . ,” Ngor stammers, “I . . . never got back home.”

Five years ago, Ngor, a Cambodian refugee earning $400 a month job counseling at the Chinatown Service Center, was plucked from obscurity and given a lead role in called “The Killing Fields,” a movie whose graphic depiction of life under the Khmer Rouge brought home to many Americans the full horror of the Cambodian holocaust.

Ngor’s portrayal of New York Times interpreter Dith Pran earned him an Academy Award. But in the wake of his instant celebrity, Ngor says, he realized that the critically acclaimed film had one major flaw: its happy ending.

“Pran escapes and is finally reunited with his family in New York, but his is just one story,” Ngor says. “What about the 4 million Cambodians who died? They remained in the killing fields along with my wife and family.

“Life under the Khmer Rouge was much worse than what we were able to show in the movie. I realized I could never be content until America knew the full truth about the killing fields. I wanted to describe the horror of being ruled by communists who enjoy killing so that Americans, who know nothing about bombing and torture, might appreciate their own freedom more.”

“Haing Ngor, a Cambodian Odyssey” is the fulfillment of that vow. The autobiography is a chronicle of terror; an odyssey that begins in a tranquil nation at peace and ends with the brutal extermination of Cambodia’s Buddhist religion and culture. It is also an overnight success. Published last week, the book is already in its third printing, and Warner Bros. has optioned the story for a television movie.

Though some might deem his surroundings austere, Ngor is quite comfortable. “No one ties me up anymore, and I can walk outside without having to worry about bombs,” he says, reclining beneath a bank of laminated tributes from various cities and motion picture societies. “A decade ago I was in danger of starvation. Now my only worry is getting fat.”

Though he claims to be content, Haing Ngor does not seem capable of complacency. At least not on the subject of Cambodia. When discussing his broken homeland, he burns with an intensity common to sole survivors who have passed beyond the realm of common experience.

“Of the 350,000 Khmer refugees living along the Thai border, 60,000 are homeless children,” Ngor says.

“The children need food and medicine if they are to survive. At present, their skin is their clothes, the jungle is their house and paddy straw is their blanket.”

After winning his Oscar, Ngor left the Chinatown Service Center to publicize the plight of Cambodian refugees. Since then, he has spent almost two-thirds of his time collecting funds for Cambodian relief. His goal is the construction of a hospital at the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp on the Thai-Kampuchean border where he worked as a doctor after escaping from Cambodia. Toward that end he donated most of the royalties from “The Killing Fields,” plus more than $150,000 subsequently earned on the lecture circuit. Acting fees from “Iron Triangle,” a Vietnam War movie Ngor recently filmed in Sri Lanka, are pledged to the cause. So are the eventual profits from his autobiography.

Over the coming four weeks, he will travel from London to Bangkok, then back to Geneva and Paris on yet another talk-show tour. Between trips to the border and benefit fund-raisers, he will play the role of successful author.

If he seems born to the part, it’s because he’s had plenty of practice adjusting to dramatic incarnations. “I was a barefoot trader in the jungle who became a scavenger trying to survive before I became a refugee and Hollywood actor,” he says.

Actually, Ngor, 40, is a physician who before the fall of Phnom Penh divided his time between the government’s military hospital and a lucrative private practice. A chauffeured Mercedes took him to work each morning. Evenings were spent at French bistros along Phnom Penh’s Monivong Boulevard.

That style of life ended abruptly in April, 1975, when the victorious Khmer Rouge ordered the inhabitants of Phnom Penh to leave the city. With a few possessions hastily piled atop his Vespa, Ngor and a few nurses from his clinic joined an exodus of bawling orphans, soft-palmed merchants and invalids forced from the hospitals. The elderly and wounded were the first to collapse. Others simply lost the will to live.

Family Commits Suicide

“A shiny new Peugeot with a family inside drove directly into the (Mekong) river and was carried slowly downstream,” Ngor remembers. “A man in the driver’s seat, a woman beside him and children looking out the back with their hands pressed against the windows. All the doors and windows stayed closed. Nobody got out. We just stared as the car settled lower and the waters closed over the roof--a rich family committing suicide.”

Though Ngor had lost his home and livelihood, he was luckier than most. At a small village west of the Cambodian capital he located his family and fiance, Huoy. For them there would be no period of reconstruction. According to the Khmer Rouge, citizens of the defeated republic were “war slaves,” chattel to be used, or abused, according to the whim of Angka, the dreaded, anonymous “organization on high.”

With gold, rice and clothing salvaged from the ravaged capital, Ngor began trading for other necessities. But as the months passed, minimum comforts gave way to malnutrition and disease. Food and basic medical care could have reduced the level of infection, but the communal kitchens of the Khmer Rouge provided only rice gruel, and doctors were one of the professions the communist government marked for extinction.

To supplement the family diet, Ngor began to scour the countryside for wild roots. Observed by a Khmer Rouge spy, he was sent to prison. One finger was severed as punishment.

Barbaric Acts

“A number of women were tied to trees, accused of having been married to soldiers of the Lon Nol government,” says Ngor. “One who was pregnant denied the charge, even after her fingernails were ripped out. Her interrogator cut the clothes off her body, slit her stomach and took the baby out. Never had I seen deliberate killings before, carried out by professionals, in front of terrified spectators who knew that their own turns to die would come soon.”

Ngor’s second visit to the rural prison resulted in more inventive torture. Accused of being a doctor, he was crucified and left to hang over a slowly smoldering fire.

“I swayed there back and forth while the hair on my legs shriveled and burned. Their purpose was not to burn us, but to prolong and intensify the pain of being tied to the crosses. At dusk when the wind stopped, the mosquitoes came out. After four days without food or water they let me down.

“Are you a doctor?” a faraway voice asked. “A captain?”

“No,” I whispered. “Give me water. Then shoot me.”

Though he prayed for death, Ngor survived. But his was a life without joy, a living nightmare in which the only constant was the slow decay of the bonds that had made people human.

In the summer of 1976, Ngor returned from the fields to find a teen-age soldier guarding a group of elderly captives. “See the enemies,” he shouted like a carnival barker. “Angka caught them stealing food. See them now and learn from their example.”

Father a Prisoner

“I was wondering how their dinner rations would be distributed when I noticed that one of the captives was my father,” Ngor’s autobiography recounts. “He turned his face and looked sadly into mine. It was like looking into a tunnel, seeing my father’s eyes widened in sorrow and fear. He signaled me to go. Numbly, I obeyed.”

Three days later, Huoy and Ngor prayed for his father’s departed spirit. “I prayed that my father be reborn away from Cambodia.”

Two weeks later Ngor’s brother and his wife were taken away with their hands tied. He never learned why. They never came back. “We lit the same candles, which were already burned down to stubs,” he recalls. “There were only two of us to pray for their souls. We wondered who would light candles for us.”

Khmer Rouge barbarism eliminated more than a generation of Cambodians. Education and competence were its principal targets. “Cambodia had more than 500 doctors at the end of the war. After four years of Khmer Rouge rule we had 40. The number of teachers declined from 13,000 to 3,000.”

Among the latter group was Ngor’s wife, who died during child birth from malnutrition and the lack of basic medicines, while her husband, a doctor, stood by helplessly.

“I pressed Huoy’s belly down, trying to force the baby along, while the midwife attended the birth canal,” Ngor writes. “Seng Orn (the midwife) could see the top of the child’s head but she didn’t even have forceps.

“I ran to the Khmer Rouge headquarters, panicking as the hours slipped past, my universe falling apart. They could not understand why I insisted my wife have a Caesarean section. They did not know what it was.”

‘Please Save My Life’

When Ngor returned to his hut, observed all the while by an adolescent communist spy, Huoy asked for something to eat. “I need food! I need food,” she cried in her last moments. “Please save my life. I just need a spoonful of rice.” There was none. The barren plain, once the richest in all of Southeast Asia, lay fallow, plucked clean of every plant.

“Before she died, I swung her onto my lap and held her in my arms,” Ngor writes. “She looked up at me with her great round eyes, and they were full of sorrow.”

When not acting or raising funds for Khmer refugees, Ngor returns to the bamboo and thatch clinics that voluntary relief agencies have established on the Thai side of the Cambodian border. There Ngor, a licensed gynecologist, provides the type of medical care denied his wife.

If his pace seems frenetic, it’s because he feels time is running out.

“It’s important to save the children,” he says. “My generation already is gone. If these children disappear, the entire Cambodian civilization will vanish along with them.”