Tek

The man with his arm around Johnny in this photo is Tek, who was our guide this week as we toured the temples and ruins of ancient Angkor in Cambodia, and I want to tell his story while it's fresh in my mind.

We were driving through rice fields, and Sarah (my mother-in-law) asked Tek how rice is harvested. He told her that the field workers harvest by hand. They walk through the paddies, grasp each tuft of rice grass with one hand, and cut it close to the water line using a curved, very sharp knife. They tie each bundle as they go and then collect all the bundles for threshing. Threshing is done by hand and foot. Then the rice grass is collected and put in haystacks for feeding the cattle and water buffalo during the dry season. The grain is dried and washed and dried again before it's ready to be sold.

Tek started to laugh. Whenever he laughs, he covers his mouth with his hand, like Evie does when she's about to pull a prank. "I'm a city boy, but I'm a rice farming expert," he said.

Tek was nearly 20 years old when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia in 1975. He had completed high school in a town where his parents had sent him to be far from the civil war's fighting, and he was preparing to start university studies. But on April 17, 1975, his life -- and the lives of the 7.3 million people then living in Cambodia -- changed abruptly. He went to the fields, he said, "like everyone else."

Tek was forced to leave his city and was assigned to a village, where he worked every day in the rice fields for "3 years, 8 months, and 20 days." Tek repeated that phrase -- 3 years, 8 months, and 20 days -- frequently during his telling. That's how long the Khmer Rouge was in power.

There was no breakfast. Lunch and dinner were bowls of rice soup, which was a lot of water with a few grains of rice thrown in. He was only allowed to eat lunch when his cow was spotless and had been led to its lunch and tied securely. Then Tek, covered in the mud of the rice paddies and the muck from washing the cow, was able to eat -- if the other workers hadn't already eaten all the food.

He was allowed to eat dinner only after the cow was spotlessly clean, a huge bag of grass had been cut and gathered and hauled to the cow for its dinner, firewood cut and hauled to the cow, and a smoky fire built to keep mosquitoes away from the precious animal. Only then did Tek get his bowl of rice soup.

Tek remembers watching soldiers haul away most of the rice he helped harvest. They left a tiny portion for the workers' soup. Not enough, he said.

The village leaders frequently gathered everyone together to remind them that they might be poor now, but soon everyone would have a house and a car. Everyone would be equal and no one would be poor. Tek said he would think to himself, "Maybe someone else will have a house and a car, but not me. I'm going to die."

Nearly 2 million Cambodians did die during that time. Remember there were only a little over 7 million to begin with. Tek said there are about 15 million Cambodians now, most of them very young.

Tek thinks he survived only because he was young and strong and worked hard. Anyone seen as weak or unhealthy was killed. Anyone whose cow was not meticulously cared for, healthy and fat, was killed. The village leaders told Tek and the others that one cow was worth 10 of them, because of the work the cows could accomplish in the field. Men were worth nothing, unless they were strong and productive.

Tek had been a city boy, and in the beginning things were especially difficult for city people. Tek didn't know why the rice they tried to plant floated to the top of the paddies instead of taking root in the soil. He didn't know how to get the cow to move forward, turn, or stop. He said he had a friend in the village who would plow next to him, so Tek's cow could follow his until Tek learned to control it. The farmers taught the townspeople to push the rice seeds into the mud and then use a finger to quickly cover the hole with more mud, so the seeds wouldn't float to the top.

Three years, 8 months, and 20 days. Tek said he kept his head down, worked as hard as he could, and "hoped that someone would come and save the Cambodian people." It was the Vietnamese who finally did. They toppled the Pol Pot regime on January 7, 1979, after a series of border disputes in which the Khmer Rouge claimed the Mekong Delta. The Vietnamese set up a puppet government in Phnom Penh, and Tek and his fellow workers were finally released from the fields.

Tek had survived, but now what? University was out of the question. Tek joked that his high school diploma made him the most educated man in Cambodia. Professors, administrators, and anyone else associated with higher education had been killed.

He was also a family man now, with two daughters born while he was in the fields. He had to support them. Despite his education and his English, which he says he picked up during the civil war before Pol Pot came to power, he found himself supporting his family by hauling coconuts and bananas to and from the markets.

And there was still a civil war going on. Pockets of Khmer Rouge and others opposed to the Vietnamese-backed government battled it out well into the 1990s. Tek showed us bullet holes around the gates to Angkor Wat. Nowhere was safe.

Tek was finally able to use his English and better support his growing family (he has 2 daughters and 4 sons) as the civil war wound down, when Western tourists began to flock to Siem Reap to see the temples of ancient Angkor.

I've written this as a stark account, but Tek laughed all through the telling of it. He laughed about the rice seeds floating to the tops of the paddies. He laughed about the way the rice soup made you have to run from the fields to pee. He laughed about the way the cow's swishing tail would cover him with mud as he plowed. He laughed about cleaning, feeding, and making a fire for the cow and about the way the village leaders would demand to know whose cow wasn't properly tied. "Is this your cow, Mr. Tek?!?" At first he told us people who disappeared from the fields -- a few every week -- were fired. Then he told us he never saw them again. And finally he stopped laughing and said, "No. They were killed."

Tek told his story on our last day with him, though some of his comments earlier in the week made me suspect he'd been in the "killing fields." It all came pouring out as a response to Sarah's question about the rice harvest. The experience -- listening to him describe the horrible things he went through and watching the range of emotion play out in his facial expressions and in the tone of his voice -- was surreal, and his story was stunning. I don't want to forget.