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DAD WILL NEVER FLY A KITE FOR ME FOREVER
Sorya Sim
When I was young,
my father used to fly a kite for me. But now I don’t have him anymore. Last
year, I gazed through the window, watching other fathers flying kites for their
children. It was the time when people were playing with kites at Independence
Monument in Phnom Penh. At times I saw national police try to stop the people
from playing. Some of my friends said the park should be protected for its
beauty, while others argued that the players should be free to use it. The
argument droned on, but I turned away quietly to another window, where I
recalled my mother’s words telling me that my daddy loved me very much, as I was
the last child and that occasionally, he was so interested in flying a kite for
me that his sarong would slip. Now I am thirty-two. I can still remember his
face and the place where we played with kites, all still clear in my memory. The
place was called Baraing Village, a
provincial town in Battambang.
The day I realized
I would have no more chance to play with a kite with my daddy again was the day
when my mother caught my hand firmly, her other hand holding a basket of areca
palm fruits. I was the shortest of the children there. It was so crowded that
the paths could not be seen. My mother told me my father was enraged by the way
the Khmer Rouge soldiers had forced him to stop using his motorbike, and that
she had tried to calm him down. My father decided to take the wheels off the
motorbike and convert them into a cart for carrying and storing personal
luggage. The motorbike body was left behind in the vicinity of Ta An School,
located on thee Sangke River approximately ten kilometers from Baraing Village.
We had reached Snao Village, and my father had been quiet since the motorbike
had been taken. He had stopped
eating much, and was beginning to be very sick. While I was blowing away cotton
as a game, I heard my mother shouting in panic, “Your father is dead!” My mother
recounted how my father had died shortly after a physician removed a syringe
from his body.
I do not want to
see the game of kite flying any longer, as it makes me so mournful that I cannot
work, thinking of the happy life with my parents that the Khmer Rouge deprived
me of. Nothing can remedy the loss of happiness in my life and my family. In my
capacity as a researcher of the history of Democratic Kampuchea, I only want to
help my father’s soul to rest in peace, and identify those who were the genuine
leaders that got him killed-to record the true history and work towards justice,
so that the genocide will never return.
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