When Broken Glass Floats

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2000

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-11

Chapters 12-14

Chapters 15-17

Chapters 18-20

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 15-17

Chapter 15 Summary: “A Letter”

After the Khmer Rouge flee, Athy and her siblings travel along with many other people, looking for food. They are reunited with their aunts, their father’s youngest sisters, who ask them to travel to Phnom Penh with them. However, the aunts and their families decide to leave immediately, and Athy and her siblings are still trying to gather enough to eat.

When the siblings resume their travels, they cannot find their aunts. They rest in a small village, where they are awakened in the night by gunfire, probably the Khmer Rouge battling the Vietnamese. They stay in the village for three days gathering rice, and each night the sound of gunfire gets closer and closer. They travel to the next village, Chhnoel, and stay there for almost a week, gleaning rice from the fields. They camp next to Meng, a friend of Ra’s from the labor camps, and her family. The Khmer Rouge deliver a letter to the village, warning everyone to leave or they will be killed.

The people in the village don’t believe it; Athy and her family decide to stay as well. The next day, however, Athy and her sister Ra hear gunfire while searching for food and realize that Chhnoel is being bombed. They find Map, who had stayed behind to play with the other children, but are separated from Ry and Than, who had been searching elsewhere.

They rest outside another village but are awakened by Meng, whose entire family was slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge. She only survived because she was hidden by the dead bodies of her family. A PARA soldier, a member of one of the anti-communist groups fighting the Khmer Rouge, rescued her. This experience traumatizes Meng, who shares the story with Athy, Ra, and Map; however, Athy wishes Meng had kept her descriptions of the Khmer Rouge’s brutality to herself, and she prays “that Ry and Than didn’t return [to Chhnoel] to look for [them]” (261).

Chapter 16 Summary: “The Exodus”

Athy and her siblings travel to Sala Krao village and reunite with Ry and Than. Some Vietnamese soldiers, who flirt with Athy’s sister Ra, protect them. Than befriends an older man in the village who allows them to stay under his house, as protection from the Khmer Rouge’s attacks.

Every day, hundreds of people travel past the village headed for a refugee camp on the border between Cambodia and Thailand, and Athy decides to make waffles to trade for processed rice. Soon other people are also selling things, and a small market springs up on the roadside; people trade for food, and some pay with pieces of jewelry hidden from the Khmer Rouge. As more and more people sell things, Athy and her siblings make less profit, and Athy decides to go with a friend and her mother to the market near Thailand to purchase things to sell; Than and Ra have already made the journey.

The journey is dangerous. There are attacks by the Khmer Rouge as well as ordinary thieves, and some of the fields through which they travel are littered with landmines. Eventually, “thanks to everyone’s calmness and meticulousness” (269), they make it through the many obstacles and to the New Camp.

Chapter 17 Summary: “The New Camp”

At the New Camp, Athy reunites with Ra and Than, and meets Vantha, a friend of Ra’s. They set up a business exchanging gold for Thai money; Athy weighs and assesses all the gold that is brought to them. Soon they are ready to move to a different camp, and Than returns to fetch Ry and Map.

Once Ry and Map arrive, Ra announces she will marry Vantha, and they adopt an orphaned Cambodian girl whom they name Savorng. The move to a different camp in Thailand is postponed, and the Khmer Rouge attack the camp where the siblings are staying. They flee into the forest, and a few days later are picked up by an army truck, which takes them into Thailand. Athy “bid[s] good-bye to the spirits of [her] family. Good-bye, Mak. Good-bye, Pa…Chea….We have to go….” (283).

Chapters 15-17 Analysis

This section alternates between moments of happiness and moments of sheer terror, which illustrates just how precarious Athy’s life still is, even though the Khmer Rouge have left. For example, Athy and her siblings are delighted to be together, free to go where they want. They settle into Chhnoel to find food, but just as quickly as they get settled, the Khmer Rouge attack the camp.

This alternating pattern of order and chaos continues. The family settles in a new village, where Athy begins selling food by the side of the road. She and Ry enjoy their flirtation with the Vietnamese soldiers, and Athy even has time to spend jumping rope with another girl her age. However, she must leave the village behind and travel closer to the border to continue supporting herself and her family. At one point they must cross a clearing, an open space where they are more vulnerable to attack; they must also traverse fields riddled with land mines.

Things seem stable for a time at the New Camp, but then the Khmer Rouge attack, and the family must once again run for their lives. Whereas in prior sections the danger was clearly from the brutal rules established by the Khmer Rouge, here the danger is sudden and seemingly random.

The chaotic nature of this period of Athy’s life symbolizes how the Khmer Rouge’s practices and beliefs have reshaped her world. For example, before the war, Athy’s sister would have needed parental permission to marry; now such cultural practices have collapsed, not just because their parents are dead, but also because many of those practices now seem irrelevant. Similarly, though Athy is shocked when she hears a woman pray to Samdech Aov, the former king of Cambodia, whom Athy thinks of as just “a man, maybe once a king, but not a god” (281), this reflects how Cambodian culture is in a state of flux following the Khmer Rouge’s reign.

Athy and her siblings thus represent Cambodia as a whole in this section. There is no clear leader, and no one really knows who should be doing what or where they should be going. They are symbolically carried along by the crowds in this section, first heading toward Phnom Penh, then making their way to the border, and finally heading into Thailand and leaving Cambodia behind. A series of gains and losses mark this journey, demonstrating the stark changes the Khmer Rouge wrought on Cambodia, both physically and spiritually.