Free Alive in the Killing Fields by Nawuth Keat Page B

trying an escape. Chanya wants to stay here.”
    “What about Hackly and Chanty?” I asked her.
    “The more people we try to take, the more difficult the trip will be. Van Lan’s family wants Hackly and Chanty to stay with them, and I think that is for the best,” said Chantha. “And Chanya will be with them, too.”
    Van Lan said, “We will walk to Thailand, whose name means ‘Land of the Free.’ Do you know what ‘freedom’ means? We will have the chance to live every day without fear of the Khmer Rouge. We will be able to find work that we choose and that is worth doing. We will not be hungry. Vibol will have the opportunity to get an education, and to have a future. You will, too.”
    I had heard fantastic stories about Thailand, but I didn’t even know where it was.
    “Is it true that there are a lot of luxuries in Thailand—fine food like canned tuna, sodas, and cooking oil?”
    “I can’t make any promises,” said Van Lan. “We will go to one of the Thai refugee camps supported by the United Nations. From there, people move to countries that invite them to come. We think we can get a sponsor who will help us go to France.”
    We had so few belongings, it didn’t take long to get ready to leave. The hardest part was saying goodbye to Ang and to my younger brothers. I told Ang, “Someday we’ll meet again, and when we do, we will be in a place where we are free.”
    “We will not say goodbye. It’s ‘see you later,’” said Ang.
    Hackly and Chanty did not really understand what our going to Thailand meant. I didn’t fully understand what it meant, either. Van Lan told them the truth, assimply as he could: “We are going away for now, but we are always one family.” Van Lan’s family treated my brothers like their own children. They would be safe and loved until they were old enough to make choices about their futures.
    During the winter rains the saturated ground was almost impossible to cross, so we waited until the dry summer season of 1980 to begin our long walk to freedom. I was sixteen. We walked and walked, except when we could find a truck driver who would agree to give us a ride for a fee. At night, we slept on the ground.
    The Vietnamese soldiers did not want people to leave Cambodia. They wanted the world to consider them our saviors, and if Cambodians fled, then no one would believe the Vietnamese were “saving” us. Traditionally, Vietnamese and Cambodians had not gotten along very well. When the Vietnamese saw an opportunity to gain power in Cambodia, they took advantage of it. But compared to the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese were far better. They did not kill people simply because they felt like it.
    Along our route to leave the country, we would run across Vietnamese soldiers and use hand gestures to indicate that we lived nearby, since we did not speak Vietnamese. We carried almost nothing with us, so we looked like a family simply returning home from an afternoon’s activity, not like what we really were: people running away from their country forever. Without telling me, before we left, Chantha had sewn our valuables insidethe soles of our shoes. All she told me was, “It is really important that you always wear your shoes. Do not take them off. Do not lose them. Do you understand?”
    I understood.
    In the jungle, there was safety in numbers, so some escapees joined together whenever they could. As a large group, we felt less vulnerable to roving bandits. Individuals might join groups, and sometimes, whole families—or what was left of them—would try to come along, too. But we could not really trust anybody. A stranger might be friends with some Khmer Rouge still in the area. We kept to ourselves most of the time, minding our own business and hoping no one would bother us.
    Van Lan knew it was not possible for us to walk straight from Battambang to the border. If we heard that any Khmer Rouge were nearby, we changed our route. Van Lan decided where we would go each