My Promise to Chum Mey

Several years ago, I visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.; a sunken wall of polished granite bearing tribute to more than 58,000 hearts that stopped beating . . . far . . . too . . . soon. Born in the late 1950s, I was a child for most of the war, but every evening I would sit with my father while he drank his bourbon and watched The Huntley Brinkley Report. The news never seemed to change; soldiers with smudges of charcoal below their eyes in torn and bloodied uniforms carried their fellow comrades off the battlefield­—sometimes on a liter, sometimes draped over their shoulders—their feet dragging lifelessly behind. Every night, it was the same story.

Last month, I walked into S-21, (Tuol Sleng prison) in Cambodia. It is considered the most notorious of the 189 interrogation centers during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Nearly every wall is covered with black and white pictures. They are mug shots of the prisoners who were detained, starved, and tortured. The pictures are faded and curling at the edges, representing a tiny fraction of the estimated 1.5 to 2 million people who died in the war—roughly one quarter of Cambodia’s population. Everyone in Cambodia lost someone during the genocide, some lost their entire family.

My guide quotes heart-wrenching statistics including his own. Both his mother and his older brother were shot in front of him. His father was captured and later killed. My guide was just eight years old when it happened.

When I began writing about natural fibers nearly twenty years ago, I never imagined the paths it would take me down. Indeed, the full story is never about just the wool, or just the shepherd, or even the tiny silkworm. It is always part of a much bigger picture that often carries global implications. Less than thirty minutes from S-21 (via tuk-tuk and ferry) lies Silk Island; a poignant intersection between past and present. The women who live at the island’s silk production center are widows and/or children from the notorious killing fields.

To me, it feels disrespectful to jump directly into a story about Silk Island without offering further context to the history that led to the center’s formation, and specifically, my meeting with Mr. Chum Mey. When I spoke with him under a blinding sun inside the courtyard at S-21, he asked that I do him one small favor, “Please, tell people what happened. We cannot let them forget.”

I nodded and gave him my word.

Chum Mey was born in a rural village in Prey Veng province, roughly sixty miles southeast of Phnom Penh. His family owned two hectares of paddy fields and a couple of cattle. Although Mey was one of eight children, they harvested more than they could eat. But like many children in the village, he was never sent to school. By the age of ten, however, Mey was an orphan. His world soon became peripatetic, first living with an older brother’s family and then with an aunt and uncle. He continued working in the fields and selling vegetables in the market, but Mey wasn’t interested in either. He had always been fascinated by cars and eventually he talked his way into working with a truck driver, who trained him to become a mechanic. It was a passion and profession that would ultimately save his life.

Mey didn’t marry until he was thirty-three-years-old. He and his wife had two daughters and a son. He also had two garages with a total of sixteen employees. Finally, the tide had turned and Mey was prospering. That is until the Khmer Rouge began to tighten its grip and The Ministry of Transportation contacted Mey to come and work specifically for Chan Reangsey, a brigadier general and an uncle of the king. Mey sold his businesses and began working for a man who often traveled by helicopter, and was noted for carrying a whip instead of a gun. But he took a special liking to Mey, and by 1973 when the fighting further intensified, Reangsey sent Mey home to be with his family, promising him he would be called back when things calmed down.

Things didn’t calm down, they got worse—much worse.

In Mey’s autobiography, Survivor, The Triumph of an Ordinary Man in the Khmer Rouge Genocide, which he sells from a small table right there at S-21, he describes the morning when a cadre of Khmer Rouge soldiers dressed in black marched into Phnom Penh, ordering everyone to leave. They were accompanied by a truck loaded with weapons.

But no one wanted to leave—no one. The soldiers said Americans were planning to bomb the city. If they didn’t leave now, they would die. But the soldiers also promised the civilians they could return in just three days so there was no need to take food or clothing—it was a lie. It was all part of a master plan to de-urbanize Cambodia and install an agrarian society. It was a chapter taken from the Marxist handbook.

What follows is a story that Mey tells with unimaginable pain. His eyes fill with familiar tears as he describes gathering his wife and children, and a small bag of rice. They began walking out of the city with thousands of others, choosing a road that would give them better access to water along the way. But the road was already fettered with dead bodies, shot, and burned. Some could be seen floating in fish farms, that had already begun nibbling at the bloated corpses. The roadway was no different, some people drove right over the dead while others tried carefully to step around them.

According to Mey, the stench of rotting flesh was both intolerable and unending.

By the second day of the evacuation, Mey’s wife fell ill, and then so did their three-year-old son. By nighttime, the boy was dead. Mey borrowed a hoe from some people nearby and quickly dug the little boy’s grave. But in the morning, Mey and his family were forced to keep on walking, leaving their youngest child behind, alone in the dirt.

Eventually, as luck would have it, if one can indeed use that word under such egregious circumstances, a bus broke down by the side of the road. The Khmer Rouge got on a loudspeaker and asked if someone knew how to fix it? Mey volunteered, knowing that to curry favor with the opposition was better than not. He fixed the bus and by nightfall, Mey and his family were heading back to Phnom Penh. He was sent back to work as a mechanic, but not for a brigadier general with a big belly and a bald head, Mey was now working for Angkar (the communist party), fixing trucks, boats, buses and sewing machines—the very ones vital to making the soldiers’ uniforms.

“Because I was a mechanic, they spared my life.” Mey says, and for the first time the sadness in his eyes starts to soften.

Mey was arrested on October 28, 1978. The Khmer Rouge accused of him of working for the CIA or the KGB. They tortured him to get the names of his alleged network of spies. But there weren’t any names to tell. Mey’s so-called network consisted of cars, trucks, and a room full of broken sewing machines. But they beat him for twelve straight days, stopping only when his tormentors needed to rest. Eventually Mey gave them a list of innocent people. He couldn’t take the beating any longer.

Satisfied with the confession, Mey was kept alive because he also knew how to fix typewriters that were vital to documenting the confessions. Mey would spend his nights blindfolded and shackled to the floor. During the day, he was taken to a room to work on the broken typewriters. If not for that skill, he would have been dead.

On January 7, 1979, the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh. The rule of the Khmer Rouge was starting to topple. Mey and the remaining prisoners were taken to another prison outside the city. By chance, Mey’s wife was a prisoner there, working with ten other women in a watermelon field. Mey spotted his wife from a distance, she was holding their two-month-old-son. (Mey’s two daughters had long since disappeared after they returned to Phnom Penh.) He asked the guard if he could help his wife by holding his son? The guard agreed but soon, a Vietnamese truck pulled-up, firing shots everywhere. Everyone scattered, but Mey and his wife and baby managed to find refuge in a nearby pagoda.

By midnight, the soldiers found them. Once again, they tried to flee. They shot Mey’s wife in the back as she began to run. She was carrying their baby.

A small crowd of people has gathered around the table where Mey and I are talking. He is accompanied by a translator and a woman collecting money from the book sales. Part of me is fully engaged with his every word, while another part of me just can’t begin to imagine what he has endured—not for a moment. I briefly look up and see several posters behind the table, one is for a movie, “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,” an award-wining documentary about the Cambodian genocide. I look at the poster and then back at Chum Mey, and then back at the poster. Suddenly, my body shudders and I feel I might be sick.

A few years back, I watched that movie. For all the movies that leave my mind before I fall into bed, I recall with chilling detail watching the few survivors from S-21 meet with their captors. The men who had beaten them. The men who stuck electrodes inside their ear. The men who shackled them to the floor and made them defecate into an ammunition box, forcing them to lick-up any overflow. The film is more than powerful, it is haunting.

I look Mey directly in the eye, almost in the way you challenge someone not to blink first. I gesture at the poster and say, “I can’t believe it’s you. I just can’t believe it.”

Mey just looks back at me and nods, but the mood, at least, for me, has shifted. My heart is both aching and hollow. Like many people standing around the table, my tears begin to fall. I want to leave because it hurts so much to listen. But is listening not the very least I can do?

I purchase a copy of the book, but unlike most who shake Mey’s hand, I offer my hands up in prayer. He is taken aback by my gesture and asks to have my picture taken.

One last time I look into his eyes. He is ninety-two-years-old. He has a wife, six children, and a growing number of grandchildren. There is so much pain in his past, yet there is still so much love in his heart.

“Please, tell people what happened here. We cannot let them forget.” He reminds me.

And so, I have kept my word.