Coming of Age In Cambodia

 

In the Shadow of the Banyan

By Vaddey Ratner

(Simon & Schuster, 322 pages, $25)

A fictional family's trials during the Khmer Rouge's four-year reign of terror, when the hunt for 'class enemies' became a genocide. 

August 26, 2012, 

The Wall Street Journal
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
 

For evident reasons, stories about genocide tend to be drenched in violence and death. That quality was reflected in the very title of the best-known work on the Cambodian genocide, the 1984 film "The Killing Fields." Nearly 30 years later, novelist Vaddey Ratner, a Cambodian survivor of her country's descent into a maelstrom of self-destruction, has taken a markedly different approach. For a tale about genocide, "In the Shadow of the Banyan" is unexpectedly quiet. Death is present, but its occurrence on a mass scale is only hinted at late in the novel.

During the Khmer Rouge's four-year rule, in 1975-79, Cambodia's radical communist regime killed between 1.2 million and 2.4 million people, perhaps half of them via execution. But instead of a tableau full of slaughter, Ms. Ratner offers an intimate account of the destruction of a single family during the Khmer Rouge's hold on power.

Ms. Ratner's tale is told through the mind and eyes of a young girl, Raami, who is 7 years old when the Khmer Rouge radicals sweep into the capital, Phnom Penh, and seize power. There are brief, elegiac moments at the outset, conveying the cozy, privileged life of Raami's family, which is descended from a princely lineage. Then suddenly, with the approach of artillery fire and the arrival of the victorious rebels, their world comes to a crashing end.

"In the Shadow of the Banyan" follows the wanderings of the girl and her family as they and other families are driven from one place to another, like cattle, by the revolutionary army. Between re-education sessions and farm labor, the families are divided and redivided as the Khmer Rouge constantly work to weed out "class enemies."

Raami's father, a noble-spirited poet, is among the first to be revealed through this process, his name unwittingly surrendered by Raami to a soldier who demands it. Afterward, her extended family argues over whether letting the regime know about his identity is a good thing ("They will realize soon enough who we are and give us some respect," a relative says) or an invitation to calamity. "Finally, Papa said, 'You didn't know.' His palm brushed my hair in that gesture he reserved for forgiveness when I'd done something wrong. 'It wasn't your fault.' "

Soon after, he is led away along with others who are presumably marked for elimination. This grim turn of events sounds one of the book's most endearing themes: Raami, who has been afflicted since infancy with polio, is stricken with a profound and abiding guilt over having revealed her father's true name to the soldiers. She will spend the rest of the story grieving over his loss, recalling his words and their love, and searching for him in glimpses of strangers. She begins to seek refuge in tales and legends drawn from Buddhist tradition, which inspire in her a kind of rapture.

At least five more of Raami's relatives and friends are destroyed over the course of the novel. As we witness their fates, we come to understand the nature of the madness that has engulfed the country. The leaders of the Khmer Rouge, now infamous figures like Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, remain invisible—and even unnamed—in the story, but Ms. Ratner's descriptions impart a clear and chilling sense of the headlong rush to create the imagined New Man once dear to radical communists.

Under Mao Zedong, China zigged and zagged, lurching now and again into periods of disastrous ultraleftism before easing back on class warfare and social engineering in order to repair the damage. During the Khmer Rouge's brief time in power, though, it was as if all of Maoism's radicalism, the model for Cambodia's, had been condensed and applied in a single go. This meant a war against landowners, the confiscation of property, and the destruction of people who were educated or had been exposed to Western culture—they were thought to harbor bourgeois thinking. It also meant wholesale indoctrination and a delusional bid to boost economic output, and hence national power, through increased agricultural output. Shouts one cadre: "All over the country, reservoirs, canals, ditches are being built so that rice can be planted throughout the year! Not just during the rainy season! Democratic Kampuchea is a powerful nation! The rest of the world will depend on our rice!"

The harder the revolutionaries push toward their goals, though, the closer the society edges toward collapse. Late in the book, Raami seems dangerously close to flirting with death—a vulture tracks the starving girl's movements as she steals unripe rice from a paddy. "I kept eating until my stomach started to bloat, until it hurt as if I had eaten a handful of pebbles. If that vulture was coming for me, I thought, I was well fed. I was ready."

Ms. Ratner says in an author's note, "Raami's story is, in essence, my story." When the Khmer Rouge swarmed into Phnom Penh, Ms. Ratner was 5 years old. Her father, like Raami's, came from Cambodian royalty and came from the intellectual class—and disappeared into the vortex of the regime's horrors. The novel's fidelity to real life gradually turns out to be a source of weakness. Though rendered in often lovely prose and marked by many emotionally wrenching passages, "In the Shadow of the Banyan" feels insufficiently imagined, almost like a diary.

What redeems Ms. Ratner's story finally, though, is the humanity that shines through in her storytelling. The attribute is on most affecting display in the author's depiction of a pure, unbroken love between daughter and father and in Ms. Ratner's portraits of the human will to survive.

Mr. French teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is writing a book about China's relationship with Africa.