When Broken Glass Floats

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge take Phnom Penh. Over the radio, Athy and her family hear instructions to post a white flag outside their homes. To do otherwise will be considered rebellious and lead to punishment. Athy’s father ensures all his neighbors hear and follow the instructions, recognizing that the Khmer Rouge will likely retaliate against the whole neighborhood otherwise.

The next day Athy and her friends go to school to see if the bombing damaged it. They are horrified to see hundreds of dead soldiers who had used the school as a bomb shelter, shocked by the “piles of blood-encrusted, decaying body parts, and green swarms of hungry flies gorging on open wounds” (60). Athy is careful not to let her family know what she has seen, but they are too caught up in the chaos as the Khmer Rouge soldiers pour into the city to even notice.

Athy’s father tries to appease the Khmer Rouge soldiers, many of whom are suffering from malnutrition and starvation. He takes them vitamins, though they are very suspicious of him. The next day the soldiers begin enforcing evacuation orders; Athy and her family, along with millions of others, are forced to leave their homes and march a few miles out of the city, supposedly to avoid American bombs.

Athy’s father wants to take his family back to their home village of Year Piar, and he tries to remain optimistic, hoping that life under the Khmer Rouge won’t be as bad as he feared. They stop at a relative’s house in Srey Va, and the family stays there while Athy and her father travel alone to Year Piar. However, as they travel deeper into the provinces and see the poverty and desperation of people who have been under the Khmer Rouge’s control for some time, Pa’s hopes begin to fade.

Athy and her family settle in with her father’s family; her mother’s family soon joins them as well. The family has a brief respite from terror but soon realize how much their lives have changed. Athy’s father is put to work digging ditches, and her mother helps tend the rice paddies. Athy and her siblings are also forced to plant rice.

They quickly realize they are being watched, however. Athy’s grandfather was once a wealthy landowner and has always been regarded with suspicion by the Khmer Rouge. There are spies, “chhlop,” who report the family for having a radio. Then Athy’s father and other men are taken for reeducation. Athy’s mother later attends a meeting with the other men’s wives, and they are asked if they want to rejoin their husbands. Mak refuses, saying she wants to stay and work.

When Mak sees a man wearing Pa’s shirt, she gets suspicious and soon discovers that he and the other men were executed:

They were taken to a remote filed outside Year Piar to be executed. Upon their arrival, they were unloaded off the oxcarts and forced to dig their own graves. After they finished, the Khmer Rouge cadres tied them up, then killed each one with a hoe (92).

Mak learns that Pa “fought back while being tied up,” calling the soldiers “liars and traitors. They killed him right away” (92). The wives who said they wanted to join their husbands were also executed.

In addition to this brutality, the Khmer Rouge issue new rules daily that cover everything from how to wear hair to the terms children must use to address their parents. Furthermore, Athy’s family are constantly interrogated by the Khmer Rouge about the whereabouts of Athy’s uncle, a former pilot who fought against the Khmer Rouge and who left before they took over Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge turn the family’s friends and neighbors against them, telling them that Athy’s uncle was the one responsible for bombing their village.

Conditions continue to deteriorate, and Athy realizes that her mother has begun begging for meals so that the children will have enough food, which is rationed by the Khmer Rouge. Finally, Athy and her family are ordered to leave the village. They are loaded onto boxcars to be transported somewhere. Athy remembers a line from a song: “Chivith choun reang choun pleang. ‘Life sometimes has drought and sometimes has rain’” (104). Athy realizes that this is their “time of drought” (104).