day 217

my mother is a landmine beaut

pt. 1

during the khmer rouge,
my mother was assigned to work with a group of children her age. they harvested apples and were starved. one day I gathered the courage to ask her about the killing fields.

she said:

one time, I had to pick bad apples from the good apples. they starved us for days on end. if they fed us, they gave us a little ball of rice. i was alone and i had picked an apple off the ground. it was bruised and it was almost rotten. i was starving. i was a baby. i took a bite of it, and a guard caught me.
he grabbed me by my arm and dragged me on the ground. all throughout the village. to humiliate me. just because i was SO hungry.

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my mother still cries whenever she talks about her childhood. i've grown up knowing not to ask about the history of my culture. i speak to my mother in broken english and broken khmer. we communicate through story telling and the expressions we make through our eyes. i only see pain sometimes.