Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor Read Free Book Online

government service, came to the door. I greeted him respectfully and he showed me to a small room down a side corridor. There was a blackboard on one wall.
The two younger Kam girls were sitting at a table. At another table was another girl, a cousin, who had come to Phnom Penh from her home in Kampot Province.
    I stepped to the blackboard and without any of the usual courtesies began asking the girls why they were having trouble with their exams. I paced back and forth, trying to discover how much or
little they knew, asking one question after another. I had to be impartial and correct with them – the door to the hallway was open, and everything we said could be heard throughout the
house. But I also didn’t want to be excessively polite as Cambodians often are, hiding excuses behind the mask of politeness, allowing failure for the sake of keeping face.
    The girls didn’t know much about the sciences. The Kam sisters, in particular, hadn’t grasped the concept of chemical valences. So I stepped to the blackboard, drew a table of the
elements, and began explaining how chemicals combine. Three evenings a week it went like this, reviewing basic concepts, steadily making progress. I began looking forward to these sessions more
than to my other classes. There was always a glass of tea waiting when I arrived, placed there by the cousin from Kampot. Her name was Chang My Huoy: Chang, her family name; ‘My’
meaning beautiful; and ‘Huoy’ meaning flower in Teochiew, the Chinese dialect most widely spoken in Cambodia, the same dialect spoken by my family.
    Once I started teaching those girls I couldn’t change my behaviour. I was strict with them. They were polite to me. They called me
luk,
a form of address with a meaning like
‘sir’ or the French
monsieur.
All the same, while lecturing them I sometimes felt self-conscious, like a man who accidentally sees his reflection in a mirror as he is walking
down the street. Not much to look at, I thought. Acne scars on my face. Glasses. Sneakers. Unfashionable haircut. I looked like what I was, an unpolished bachelor who lived in a temple.
    ‘So if you put carbon, hydrogen and oxygen together to make sugar, how will they combine?’ I heard myself saying. I called on the girls for the answer. One of the Kam girls looked in
her notes in confusion. The other had the wrong answer.
    Chang My Huoy raised her eyes directly to me and said in her quiet voice, ‘It would be C 12 H 22 0 11 ,
luk
teacher, for sugars like glucose and
sucrose.
    ‘Correct,’ I said, ‘though those three elements also combine with others to form an entire class of organic compounds, the carbohydrates. Most edible plants, like cabbages and
yams, are composed of carbohydrates along with proteins and minerals. If you burn these vegetables, the same thing happens as when you burn sugar. You drive off the oxygen and hydrogen, and what is
left is carbon.’ I found myself babbling on like that without quite knowing why. Who cared about chemistry? I didn’t. They didn’t care either. I wished there were a way to take
better advantage of being in a room with three attractive young women. I had learned something about women in Phnom Penh, though probably not enough.
    Of these three in the class, My Huoy was the most conscientious. She was also the most shy. She never said an extra word, but she phrased what she said precisely, while her two cousins whispered
and giggled. She wore Chinese-style pajamas. Ordinary house clothes. Her pajamas – Huoy’s, I mean-were white with a tiny pink floral pattern. Though her cousins were pretty, Huoy, with
her light, flawless skin and large, round eyes, had something special about her, a grace and gentleness, and something else I couldn’t put a name to, though I tried to, late at night, unable
to sleep, in my room under the monk’s quarters. During the break halfway through the class, she asked if I wanted more tea, and at the end of class she brought