Tun took his daughter to Chhlong, his mother’s birthplace in Kratie. They were assigned a traditional wooden house on stilts facing east to the Mekong. The house was small but sturdy, with one big room in front and a long, narrow cooking area in back. His daughter’s favorite spot was at the top of the stairs, where she would sit in the doorway and search the currents for the Irrawaddy dolphins known in that part of the river. Once, shortly after they’d arrived, he took her on a boat at sunrise and they encountered a pod of the dolphins playing with the light bouncing off the water just meters away. The smallest one—a calf not much bigger than a bolster pillow—flipped and swam backward, seeming to wave gleefully to them with its stubby fins. His daughter was utterly delighted, the happiest she’d ever been since they left home. He couldn’t return to her everything she’d lost—their home in Phnom Penh, Om Paan, her childhood—but he could give her this momentary joy. So at sunrise before joining others at the rice fields each morning, they’d slide out in the palm dugout and wait for the dolphins.
In this way, they became father and daughter again, taking pleasure in the newness of their surroundings, the reassuring pattern of village life, the company of kindhearted villagers who noted his daughter was without a mother and he was without a wife. Some of the village elders remembered Tun’s mother from her youth, before she married and moved away to Neak Leung, and this knowledge was enough for Tun and his daughter to be regarded by the village cadres as peasants rather than former city dwellers, the less desirable class. Residents of Chhlong were charmed to see how this “widower” was so devoted to his only child, and how the motherless girl in turn seemed protective of her father. At work in the fields, they would sometimes spot her hugging him with innocent exuberance, and despite knowing the rules against familial affection, many could not help wishing their children might show them similar tenderness.
As the revolution intensified, with rumors of extreme hardship and starvation in other parts of the country, Chhlong was buffered from the most radical policies. Comrade So Phim, secretary of the East Zone that included this corner of Kratie, had a reputation for being lenient, seeing no need to enforce communal eating or revolutionary attire, at least not until much later. He was a hugely popular party leader, whom Tun first heard of when fighting in Kompong Cham, in an area east of the Mekong under Comrade So’s military command. It was this tenuous connection with a man he’d never met that would later prove perilous.
Since the first “purifying” campaign that stripped Tun of his rank, the Party Center had launched successive nationwide purges, each rooting out and eliminating tens of thousands of “traitors.” By April or May of ’77, two years into the regime, rumors of mass killings had become indisputable reality. Whole families disappeared from Chhlong, as others arrived, heaving like colonies of the undead, emaciated and tormented, only to be carted away again. Severe rice shortages plagued the country, most shockingly in the Northwest Zone, once the most fertile land. The Party Center blamed the bad harvests on “certain internal enemies” plotting to overthrow the Organization and undermine the regime. Entire communes came under suspicion, accused of harboring traitors, and villagers were massacred en masse.
Then, only three or four months ago, Comrade So, rumored to be among the accused, disappeared. Some said he shot and killed himself when the Party Center ordered his arrest. It was impossible for Tun to know with certainty. So much was kept from ordinary people, with impenetrable layers of secrecy woven around the Organization. He didn’t want to ask questions that would draw attention, or do anything that could brand him an enemy of the regime. Like all, he lived in terror from one day to the next.
One evening at the beginning of August, he was at home with his daughter. Together they had returned from the fields, the sunset magical after the rain, casting a shimmering rainbow over the water, so they thought they’d go down to the river to wash and possibly catch a glimpse of the dolphins. She’d stepped inside to collect a change of clothes for them each, and while waiting he scanned the river for bobbing heads or the flick of a tail. So absorbed was he in his search that he did not notice the three revolutionary guards approaching until they’d already surrounded him.
“The Organization summons you,” they said. Tun went completely cold. Those four unmistakable words were his death sentence, and to ask what crime might warrant such a punishment would only have provoked his execution on the spot. He recognized them as new guards, recently posted to his village, so he could not rely on familiarity. Instead he tried pleading, but his words came out muddled—“Comrades, my daughter . . . she’s only twelve.” She was still a child, he’d meant to say, and she needed him. Their response was equally obscure: “Yes, we know, and that is exactly your crime. Your own daughter!”
“Papa.” He heard her whisper from the top of the stairs. A bourgeois term. She hadn’t called him this in a long time. Since liberation, it’d always been “Father,” and, more recently, “Comrade Father.” He saw the fear in her eyes, heard it in her voice. He summoned what was left of his own courage and responded in kind, abandoning her revolutionary name: “Sita, my love.” If this was to be the last time, he wanted her to know what she’d meant to him. “My life—” His throat swelled. He couldn’t say more.
They ordered her back inside the house and pulled him away. He made no attempt to resist. By now he’d stopped thinking of his own life. If she was to survive without him, he mustn’t give them any reason to punish her. He kept walking without once turning back. The villagers would care for her. She was deeply loved. She would know who to go to.
At a crossroad outside the village, an oxcart waited for them. Tun climbed in, and the guards quickly bound his wrists and ankles, blindfolded him. He didn’t understand the need for all this—it would’ve been simpler to end his life with a bullet.