An entrance to a Cambodian home covered in chalk drawings of crosses and skulls to ward off evil spirits.
Vitray's first memories are of the tent cities in Thailand where
Cambodian refugees found safety during the killing-fields era of the
Khmer Rouge regime. Vitray was one of the lucky ones, as his family
eventually managed to emigrate to America—to a Nashville ghetto plighted
by bullets and crack cocaine. At 24, he traveled to Phnom Penh to get
engaged. A handsome American citizen, he was quite a catch, so his
father arranged for him to marry Dain, his pretty second cousin. They
were happy for a while. And then the nightmares started.
Vitray was haunted with visions—bloodied bodies, tortured faces,
flesh torn from bones. Night after night the horrors returned until he
was too terrified to lie down. Then Dain began to change; she suddenly
seemed ugly and her serene expression began to look stupid and infuriate
Vitray. He began to hate her and the way she affected an American
accent and laughed in a high-pitched shatter of tinnitus-inducing
screeches.
Vitray was originally betrothed to another Cambodian girl before Dain—a
girl who, according to Vitray's family, was pretty angry that she'd
been snubbed of the opportunity to marry an American citizen. Vitray’s
sister Molika told me the rest of the story: “I never believed in curses
until I saw what happened to my brother. He was in love with Dain, and
then he suddenly hated her,” she told me. “Then he got sick with Bell's
Palsy. To this day, the doctors don’t know the cause, but people told me
that the family of the girl he was originally betrothed to put a curse
on him.” Read the full article here.
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