Dark Shadows

In the winter of 1985, two teenaged boys meet in a big old farmhouse in Vermont. One is a doctor’s son named Adam, 12, who lives with his family in the 12-room house with its high ceilings and a secret door to the attic and a swimming pool in the backyard. The other is Soeuth, 15, a scarred survivor from Cambodia by way of a refugee camp in Thailand, to which he had escaped. Soeuth, who is to be the foster brother of Adam and his younger sibling Dave, stands in the front room facing his new family and their soda, potato chips and welcome banner, stoic and withdrawn, a child-ancient with a baseball cap pulled down almost over his eyes. He has been through an inferno--the forced-labor death camps of the Khmer Rouge--hanging on to life by silence and cunning and also by eating lizards, spiders, water bugs and rats, anything that moved. He is unable to remember his family name. “Only we get one cup rice,” Soeuth told Adam and Dave months later when they had pierced part of his shell, “so we go find animal. . . . Find what keep us survive.”

“Rats!” Dave shrieked, “Gross!” “No,” Soeuth said seriously. “Rat the best. Rat is fat. Good meat. Put on stick. Cook.”

“A Blessing Over Ashes” is the true story of an American boy’s growing-up with his “unlikely” brother Soeuth and their struggle to overcome a yawning cultural chasm, the kind of gulf that experience tells us can be reached across but never fully closed. It is rare for a writer’s first book to so successfully realized. Adam Fifield is a young journalist who lives in New York City and who also collaborated on “Rudy!,” the new and much-discussed biography of the city’s mayor. One can of course find flaws, but “A Blessing” is written at once with stark emotional honesty and singular authenticity. Also with occasional humor, the kind birthed by the pain attached to self-discovery.

This is a special book, maybe a great one. I believe it deserves a wide audience. But then, as a journalist who has been deeply involved in Cambodia and who is drawn to lost causes, I am also realistic. I have come to know that most of the people who buy books don’t have much interest in stories, no matter how special or lyrically written, that deal with bad things that happen to people in ruined little countries halfway around the world.

I should also explain that I have met Fifield and have followed his progress with interest. One reason he contacted me was that I, too, have a Cambodian “brother,” Dith Pran, who guided me through the war and then, like Soeuth, was sent to labor camps yet survived. One can see that Fifield struggled mightily to grasp Soeuth’s experiences and to get at the truth of their relationship. From my own Cambodian passage, I believe he succeeded as well as any Westerner can.

“When I was four,” he writes, “and spending my days in the sandbox or on the swing set or chasing my dog, Oscar, around the yard, Soeuth was seven and a child slave in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. For twelve, sometimes fourteen, hours a day, he planted rice seedlings along muddy rows of flooded fields. . . . All around him were acres and acres of other children, boys and girls, barefoot and bent toward the earth, shuffling along their rows, pushing their seedlings into the soupy water, sustained by a weary, collective rhythm of fear. . . . If it was not raining, the sun baked their backs and necks. Rain or not, their lower backs would flare with pain, from bending over all day, but if they stopped and stood up to stretch, they were whipped. Soeuth was whipped many times.”

“A Blessing Over Ashes” is also a very American story: of two boys coming of age in the New England countryside, one of them a haunted refugee from an upheaval that started with an American war--the Vietnam War, which spilled into Cambodia with Richard Nixon’s “incursion” in 1970 and then enveloped the entire country. For the next five years, the United States and its Cold War adversaries, using surrogate armies, visited bloody havoc all over Cambodia in a conflict that, though tangential, gave rise to the Khmer Rouge, triggered that country’s descent into darkness and sent hundreds of thousands of “lucky” escapees to strange lands as displaced persons.

So it was with Soeuth. Within hours of the Khmer Rouge’s victorious march into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, the Communists began their “purification” campaign, the centerpiece of their extremist agrarian revolution. (Soeuth and his family were living in a farming area in the northwest, outside the city of Battambang.) In grueling migrations, the Khmer Rouge army herded everyone out of the cities and towns into camps deep in the countryside, there to toil under the fist of Angka, “the organization on high.” Children were separated from parents and placed in youth groups, where they were indoctrinated to inform on all adults for any infractions of Angka’s crushing rules. Marriage was forbidden, except when arranged by Angka. Schools were shuttered, currency abolished, factories abandoned. Newspapers ceased to exist. Radios were taken away. Buddhist temples were razed, and the monks were either killed or put to hard labor in the fields.

Led by Pol Pot, their Maoist-influenced “Brother Number One,” the Khmer Rouge effectively sealed off the country, to keep the world from looking in. They marked for potential execution all Cambodians designated as not borisot (pure)--meaning all those with an education, those raised in population centers, those “tainted” by anything foreign (including knowledge of a foreign language), even those who wore glasses. Certain groups of people, say from a village or subdivision suspected of disloyalty, were given special identifying neckerchiefs reminiscent of the yellow Star of David. That was to make it easier to pick them out of a crowd or a rice field--for execution.

The Khmer Rouge had a slogan: “To spare you is no profit; to destroy you, no loss.” With that mantra, over the course of less than four years, at least 1.5 million Cambodians were “erased”--by massacre, torture, starvation and disease. That was nearly one quarter of the population, including most of the educated class.

In Vermont, in the early days, Adam groped for ways to communicate with an indrawn Soeuth, who seldom spoke and showed almost no emotion. Mostly he would disappear behind the closed door of his room. He left the environs of the house only to go to school. Adam was in sixth grade, Soeuth in seventh, in a different building. Nightmares would sometimes frighten Soeuth awake, shaking and sweating. He couldn’t be soothed but finally he explained: “Ghos--Mom, Dad--Ghos.” His parents’ ghosts. Adam recalls: “It was the most I had ever heard him say. His voice was low and gravelly, not the voice of a kid.”

Adam’s mother, after seeking guidance from the local resettlement person who had taken Soeuth to the Fifields, decided to create a Buddhist shrine in a corner of his room. On a fold out card table, she and Soeuth arranged sandalwood incense sticks in holders, two small vases of flowers, a salad bowl with an offering of grapes and bananas for the spirits and a jade Buddha, a gift from a missionary friend of the family. The nightmares stopped.

Soeuth’s mood lightened some then, and relations among the boys got better. Fishing had a lot to do with it. For the first time, Soeuth showed interest in a diversion suggested by his brothers. They gathered the worms and equipment and headed for the shallow river out back. Soeuth declined a fishing rod and reel. Instead he chose a towel, a kitchen colander, and some croutons. On the way, he picked up a rock. You can guess the rest: Adam and Dave never felt a nibble on their store-bought lines; Soeuth, stalking silently along the riverbank, caught crayfish, trout and bass with his hands. “He waited, squatting on the bank, rolling the rock in his palm, until a rainbow trout wiggled up and went to pecking at the crouton. His eyes fixed on the trout. He raised his arm and winged the rock. Plunk! The fish rolled belly-up, stunned by Soeuth’s rock. Tenderly, he fetched his prize and cradled the sick trout, soothing away the last few seconds of its life. In that moment, as this mysterious boy stood before us and made everything go quiet, I felt a sense that, for the first time in my life, I was attached to the world.” Soeuth took pleasure showing his American brothers his fishing secrets, and all that spring, the three fished with their hands and their croutons and their colanders. They would also dare one another to do outra- geous things. One day, Adam bet Soeuth a dollar he wouldn’t eat a crayfish live. Soeuth nodded that he would, but Adam thought it was a bluff and in his mind started spending the money. But then, “Soeuth reached into the colander and held up one of the squirming critters so Dave and I could see it. He then casually popped it in his mouth, its antennae wriggling between his teeth. As he crunched on its still writhing shell, Dave laughed until he fell to the ground.

Soeuth laughed, too. It was the first time we had seen him laugh.” Though Soeuth’s life improved as he came out of the shadows, the ghosts were never far away. He didn’t make friends easily and sometimes ended up in high school hanging around with the “out” crowd. A natural athlete, he starred as a near-master in his taekwondo class on Tuesday and Thursday nights. The skill served him well in making short work of the school know-nothings who would hurl taunts of “Chinks” and “Gooks” at him and the handful of other Cambodian and Vietnamese students. Considering Soeuth’s life under the dehumanizing Khmer Rouge, his striking back was a case of “never again.” In school, he was a whiz at math, showing uncanny gifts for algebra and geometry; he tutored Adam as the latter struggled. But English and other non-science subjects were cursedly difficult for him. One wonders if this was related to his constant feeling of not belonging, not having a social comfort zone. Math is the same in all cultures; language and history are different.

Behind Soeuth’s deep-set eyes, there was always something hidden, a dark world with no answers. One night, on the computer that the boys shared, Adam took his turn at the machine and saw that Soeuth had forgotten to eject his floppy disk. Adam pulled up Soeuth’s file. It was a school assignment, an autobiographical narrative of his early years. Adam, transfixed, couldn’t help himself. He locked the study door and began reading.

The first part told of Soeuth’s life in his Cambodian family, where “my dad would hit me, if I did something wrong. . . . To me, he was mean. . . . I was afraid of my father.” Then he writes of the war and of the fighting getting nearer and nearer to their village and of watching the planes drop bombs close by and, after the raids, of the bodies scattered here and there in the rice fields.

And then the Communists won the war and took control, and “the Khmer Rouge village leader took me away to a children’s work camp. . . . The camp was filled with little children from ten to fifteen years old. I was the youngest. Usually the Khmer Rouge waited until a child was ten years old to take him or her away. My father let them take me when I was six years old.”

He explains how it happened. “I had a fight with my little sister. Now I can’t remember what the fight was about. The fight made my father very angry, so he sent me to the camp. This wasn’t his fault, because he didn’t know what was going on. . . . My dad and I thought it was only for two weeks. I was very disappointed in my father while at the camp, but I couldn’t do anything except cry out loud. It took me two or three weeks to get my mind off my parents. The leaders make us work and told us: ‘If you work really hard, you will get to go home soon.’ So we work really hard. But day after day, you never got to go home. Finally, I realized that we were never going home again.”

Adam writes: “I stared at his disk for a long time and then went to bed but couldn’t sleep and wondered how my big brother could.”

As their lives advanced, the two young men headed in different directions. In the summer of 1988, before the start of his senior year, Soeuth moved out of the Fifield house and into a small rundown apartment in town. There had been long-standing differences, even arguments, with Adam’s parents, particularly his worried Mom, over Soeuth’s refusal to apply to college and his frequent late nights out, drinking beer or smoking pot at a friend’s house. He said he didn’t want a degree, just a job, an income. She felt he was drifting, which was one word for it.

But Soeuth was no slacker. He was, in fact, a dogged worker, holding down an array of summer and after-school jobs over the years. His goal was to become a certified auto mechanic. He had been tinkering with cars for a long time, and he was taking an auto-mechanics class in high school. When he graduated, in 1989, he worked full-time at the MacIntyre Fuel Co., cleaning and maintaining the trucks. Adam, meanwhile, graduated from high school in 1990 and went off to Bates College in Maine. Soeuth kept in occasional touch with the Fifields, but they knew little of his life--except that he was wandering from job to job and living in a succession of towns and accommodations: Long Beach, Tacoma, a rented trailer, a room in a friend’s house, a couch at another friend’s apartment. From a distance, Adam felt bad for his brother and sorely missed him but had no answers. Soeuth was still achingly searching for the place where he could fit in. As Adam relates after a brief meeting with Soeuth in Seattle: “I looked at my brother and he did not look at me and I wondered how he could take it, being cut adrift of all moorings, living in two worlds but belonging in neither--and I felt selfishly relieved that the stakes had not been set so high for me.”

Though Soeuth had long believed his Cambodian family to be dead, a particle of hope still nagged inside him, and he began writing letters to Cambodia. He had no address except the village, Kompong Chhlang. And he still couldn’t remember the family name, only the first names. So--on the envelopes--he wrote the name of the village and the first names of his parents and siblings and added this sentence: “Whoever sees this letter has permission to open it.” Inside, in the letters, he promised a sum of money to anyone who could locate his family. Soeuth wrote three such letters in 1990 and early 1991. He told no one about them, perhaps not wanting to appear to be pursuing ghosts. There was no response for a long time. Then one day in March of 1992, Soeuth came home from his job at Ryder Rental to find an envelope in his mailbox postmarked from Cambodia. The letter inside was from his father, written in Khmer, saying that the entire family--presumed by Soeuth to have perished a dozen years before--was indeed alive. A color photograph of the family was enclosed. And now he knew his family name: Kuth. “Your mother and I,” the letter read, in part, “were very worried about you. We had no idea of what happened to you. . . . About us, we returned to our native country. I had been sick for many years. . . . All together, you have five sisters and brothers. . . . When you receive our letter, don’t forget to send us your picture. Your brothers and sisters miss you very much. Before I say ‘Good Bye,’ I would like to wish you a peaceful life.”

There is much, much more to the story. Indeed, Soeuth’s discovery of his family’s existence is but the beginning of the second half of this striking book, whose gift lies in its fearless laying-open of the personal relationships of the true-life cast. Fifield keeps digging to the marrow, not to wound or to shock but rather to try to learn the essence of Soeuth’s life--and of his own. He goes to Cambodia with Soeuth to dig there, too--into the soul of Soeuth’s family and, by extension, into the pain of that little country. Those who read this story will not so easily be able to think again in the abstract, or from a safe emotional distance, about this other world and our very real connection to it.