Page 47 of Taipei Story

“I never heard about this.” The words came out more accusatory than I meant, though I did feel someone here was at fault for something. “You never talked to us about this.”

“Well.” My mother hummed. I couldn’t read her tone. She seemed so distant—like we were strangers to each other—and I knew then that I had done something wrong, but I couldn’t understand what it was. “It’s not a very happy thing to talk about.”

THROUGHOUT THE NIGHT, I CURLED ON THE COUCH IN THE DARK and I posed my questions to the internet.

Why did the Khmer Rouge go after the Chinese?

Because the Chinese were alien migrants, city people, the wrong class, and they had stolen lands and riches from the native Khmer.

Was this true?

It was complicated. Then again, the Khmer Rouge went after the Chams, the Vietnamese, and the native Khmer as well. So it was difficult to argue that the Chinese had been ethnically singled out for destruction.

How many people died?

Up to three million people. We would never know for sure. The details were more qualitative than quantitative. There were so many pictures. The piles of skulls, the killing fields, the mass graves. Photographs from the concentration camps. Dossiers stamped with red: political prisoners marked for execution.

I scrolled through pictures upon pictures until I was no longer processing what I was looking at. I couldn’t get a grip on the idea that this had happened to my own family—that this chapter of history, which never made it onto any of my high school or college syllabi, was involved with me in any way.

I read on, trying to cram my mind with the details.

They killed 25 percent of the population. One in four people. They forced thousands into labor camps, concentration camps, and political prisons. They killed people for defying the regime. They killed people for whispering discontent. They killed people for begging for food. They killed people for falling ill. They killed people to make up their execution quotas. Sometimes they killed people for no reason at all; just the fun of it, because the blade was already moving, and it might as well find something to cut. And they would have kept going, might have never stopped, except that they crossed the border and massacred a village in Vietnam. They chased the villagers into pagodas and fired into the pagodas; then they chased the villagers into mountain caves, tracked them down with dogs, and threw grenades through the cave mouths. The Vietnamese said no, quite enough of that, and invaded Cambodia, and installed a puppet government. And that was the only reason why the genocide ended.

What was the point? I wondered. Executing political enemies, that was one thing. But this wanton, senseless slaughter—what did that achieve? What were they trying to build?

I asked the internet: What was the purpose of the genocide?

The internet said: The Khmer Rouge was trying to transform the country into a classless agrarian utopia.

Why did that require killing a fourth of the population?

To rid the country of reactionary thought.

Why didn’t the West do anything to help?

Because the West didn’t know. Because the West wasn’t looking. Because the leftists in the West, the only people who could have found Cambodia on a map, thought that the Khmer Rouge was carrying on a glorious revolution, and were cheering it on.

I LOOKED UP IMAGES OF CAMBODIA TODAY. MOST OF THE SEARCH results were photographs of Phnom Penh, which looked like any other modern Asian city: busy markets, a finlike skyscraper, a temple lit up at night. Tourism promotions in oversaturated colors promised that Cambodia was very safe, and very lovely, to visit. Tipping was welcome but not required. Tickets to the killing fields museum cost six dollars. The best way to get around was by tuktuk.

I recalled vaguely that Cambodia was a Buddhist country, and that the Angkor Wat temple complex was one of the marvels of the ancient world. I looked up photos of Angkor Wat: yes, very grand indeed, so many temples like pine cones, so many Buddha faces cut into stone. I didn’t know anything else about Cambodia. The only person I knew who’d ever been to Cambodia was Yuxiu, from class. In fact, the only impression I had was that it was a country where some villagers were so poor they needed Singaporean high schoolers to build them houses, and where you had to dance across a field of bricks to shit.

THE NEXT DAY, I DIDN’T LEAVE THE BUILDING AT LUNCHTIME. I WAS worried about the air raid drill. We had received an email reminder from the program office earlier that morning that read:

今天下午1:30–2:30將舉行北部地區的萬安演習，請下午有課的同學在1:30前回到校園。

The annual Wan An air raid drill will be held from 1:30–2:30 p.m. today. If you have classes in the afternoon, please return to the department before 1:30.

演習期間會出現防空警報聲音；請若你待在戶外，請配合相關人員引導就近避難。

Sirens will sound at the beginning of the drill. If you are outdoors at that time, please follow guidance by the police to find shelter nearby.

I didn’t know where the nearest shelter was, and I didn’t want to be caught out slurping noodles when the time came, so I’d elected to just stay in the building. I had no evidence for this, but I imagined that the public shelters were like London’s bomb shelters during World War II: dark, bricked-up places without toilets. When the drill happened, I wanted access to a toilet.

I kept watching the clock. One twenty-nine. One thirty. The email didn’t explain further about the logistics of the drill, but I thought surely an air raid must involve an ear-splitting alarm. But I heard nothing, just the same muffled voices through the doors; rustling pages; pens scratching, laboriously copying out characters.

Minutes trickled by. Still nothing happened. I considered going out for lunch, but I was afraid the air raid could still occur at any point throughout the hour. What if the timing wasn’t precise—what if the 1:30 mark was just the start of the window? I stood up to peer outside. Students were walking up and down the street just as they would on a normal day. The air was silent. I felt insane. This was just like the morning of the earthquake—no one registered anything but me.

Was I the idiot for making such a fuss? Perhaps this was my American naivete showing through again—perhaps I, who had never lived under fear of invasion, was panicking over a threat that none of the locals took seriously. But I looked up the drill on the internet, and it seemed this was quite a serious thing. The threat of a Chinese invasion was always looming. Defense ministers were always announcing the newest likely date of the invasion, shifting it back from 2025 to 2027 when it didn’t happen, but always within the next three to four years; military exercises escalating near the coasts; news reports of navy tankers and mounted machine guns. This was real. Taiwan was preparing for something.