Field of screams

NEVER FALL DOWN

By Patty McCormick

Balzer+Bray, 211 pages

Available at National Book Store

A young Cambodian boy watches in clear-eyed horror as the Khmer Rouge march into town and all the vestiges of a past life — family, friends, humanity, humor and love — are slowly stripped away in Never Fall Down.

Well, not all vestiges. Our narrator, Arn Chorn-Pond, now living in the US, became a semi-famous musician in the Khmer camps, a player of a stringed instrument called the khim, and despite the horror, he manages to inject some humanity, some love and some humor into his recounting of life during the Khmer Rouge genocide.  

The book, billed as a novel, is written by Patty McCormick, but the true-life story belongs to Arn, now living in New Hampshire, as he recounts the day-to-day suffering from 1975 to 1979.

Told in clipped English — the kind that sheds plurals and helping verbs and sounds a little generic — it’s a literary style that captures a young boy’s voice as he grows up in the mid-‘70s under a brutal regime. At first gimmicky, McCormick’s rendering of Arn’s English accent manages to effectively convey all the stripped-down emotions of life when life ceases to have conventional meaning, when its only worth is in its opposition to death. Like Holocaust survivors, Arn develops internal defenses against emotion, pity, fear, and even joy. All these things are looked upon with suspicion by the Khmer Rouge soldiers, who Arn soon learns are merely trying to avoid getting killed themselves.

Arn is 11 when word comes to the village: the Americans are coming, they will drop bombs, and everybody must march out into the countryside “for three days.” Three days stretches into weeks, months and years, of course, as Arn is separated from his brother, sisters and mother (they are sent to separate camps) and must give up his carefree pursuits — selling ice cream, stealing coconuts, and playing a game much like bocce, in which shoes are thrown instead of metal balls — in order to figure out how to stay alive.

The usual euphemisms are trotted out by the Khmer Rouge whenever someone is sent to die: a teacher is asked to “help push a cart out of a ditch” (he is never seen again); kids are sent “to the mango grove” or off “for medicine” and disappear completely. In time, even these niceties are jettisoned, as all personal thoughts, reflections and memories are driven out, replaced by an enforced love of “Angka,” an entity never seen by Cambodian civilians, but which refers to the secretive leadership of the new communist state. The Khmer Rouge wear black pajamas and rule with ruthless authority: intellectuals, artists and city people are deemed weak, lazy and unfit for society; they are watched carefully, and when cracks appear, they are said to have “bad character” and sent to die. Those deemed too light-skinned are segregated, sent off to nonexistent tasks, and never seen again (Arn covers his face with mud to appear darker).

Artistic expression is viewed with suspicion, but one group is allowed to exist: the khim musicians. Taught to play a stringed instrument with bamboo mallets that he has never touched before, Arn manages to escape almost certain death and becomes a celebrity of sorts as well as a savior of others.

But the reason Arn and the musicians are allowed to practice and perform daily soon becomes clear: their music covers up the sound of killing. The usual method — an ax blow to the back of the head — is just one of the sickening horrors that Arn recounts. (Arn is recruited to dump the bodies in a ditch and, at one point, urinate on the corpses.)

Another horror is a manure pile that covers the stench-filled corpses of human victims; another is a field where kids are sent to work tilling the land, and where bodies are sometimes buried. When one girl gets malaria and can’t work, the Khmer claim she has “disease of the consciousness.” Her brother looks for her one day; the Khmer laugh and say she is still working in the field: “Only now she fertilizer.”

Horrors accumulate, and it’s only Arn’s determination to survive that gets him through four years of war. He not only pleases the Khmer leaders by playing the khim well (a skill he learned from an older teacher who also ends up in the mango grove), he dances and sings, too. On the side, he steals handfuls of rice and gives them to kids and adults in the orchestra who look like they’re slipping under — but even this act of bravery and humanity is self-serving: he knows that others’ weakness will lead to his sinking as well.

Though it’s based on many interviews and research, Never Fall Down sometimes reads like a Steven Spielberg script: there’s a deft mixture of humor and horror, with a little bit of teen lovin’ thrown in, that can seem somewhat manufactured, like it’s straight out of a Hollywood coming-of-age story. But McCormick says she only filled in the “gaps” of details Arn can no longer recall. And to its credit, Never Fall Down doesn’t take the easy path of making Arn out to be a perfect hero or savior; he’s full of self-loathing and survivor’s guilt. Yet this never stops him from surviving.

The toughening takes place swiftly (“In one day, I used to dead body”), and it makes the narrator ask himself a basic question that Holocaust survivors also asked themselves: Why were they allowed to live when so many others died? In Arn’s case, it’s a bottomless capacity for adaptation. Seeing so many sick and undernourished children collapse on the march from their village to a Khmer village, Arn learns one simple lesson: “Never fall down.” Eventually Arn gains enough trust from the Khmer to be allowed to deliver messages on horseback from village to village. This leads him to get recruited by the Khmer army when Vietnamese forces enter the country. He becomes part of the “Little Fishes,” a group of kids trained to tote guns who are used as “bait” by the Khmer Rouge to trap the Vietnamese.

Arn’s escape from four years of hell comes when he slips through the forest and across a river into Thailand. There, he’s taken to a hospital and adopted by an American who brings him and two others to the US. Even there, Arn has to grapple with learning the language, deep culture shock, racial hatred towards him and his own pent-up violence (“I have tiger in my heart”). The only release comes when he finally learns why he was brought to America: to explain the horrors of the Killing Fields to a New York City audience that includes Bishop Desmond Tutu and musicians Peter Gabriel and James Taylor. It’s his greatest, most important performance yet. And afterward, the young man realizes he can go beyond simply surviving; he can now learn to live. (With his speaking fees, Arn went on to found Children of War to help other children held hostage during conflict and Cambodian Living Arts to preserve Cambodia’s native music.)

Though Cambodia’s horrors are well known to the world by now, Never Fall Down is a spirited account given a brave, multi-sided human face.