Election Section

Vatey Seng is the bureaucrat you could have encountered in an Alameda County office, the mom you may have met at a high school open house, a neighbor you wave to from across the way. 

But few people know the horrors that plague the 44-year-old accountant originally from Cambodia. 

“I am forced to return to the hell that the Khmer Rouge put me through each night. The terror of my past always haunts me whenever I’m alone or asleep. ... The more I want to forget, the more I remember,” Seng writes in a recently self-published memoir: The Price We Paid: A Life Experience in the Khmer Rouge Regime, Cambodia, published by iUniverse, Inc. and available at www.iuniverse.com/bookstore. 

As the first rains of fall tapped the windows of the small Chinese restaurant where she was interviewed this week, Seng was reminded of the rainy season in Cambodia and of hard times there.  

But before the horrors overshadowing the rest of her life, there were happy childhood years in Phnom Penh. Seng’s mother was a housewife and her father was a military man. Growing up on military bases meant secure housing, healthcare and good schooling. Seng’s father had only a sixth-grade education and her mother had even less schooling; they vowed their children would be educated.  

Family life revolved around close ties with neighbors at the military base. But civil war in the first part of the 1970s culminated with the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s extremist communist party, bombing the base and killing most of Seng’s friends. The family escaped death by staying with relatives outside the base. 

In 1975 the Khmer Rouge came to power, enforcing a brand of communism that idealized uneducated, hard-working peasants and condemned the middle class, including teachers and government workers, as leeches of society. Peasants were the “old people,” who embodied society’s moral fabric. City people were “new people,” the root of all capitalist evil. 

Seng was 13 and in the eighth grade before the 11-member family—her parents, two brothers, four sisters, an adopted sister and a 96-year-old grandmother—were relocated to the countryside. They tried to go to their father’s birthplace, but the Khmer Rouge had other plans, moving them from village to village. 

Seng remembers living with a village family whose job was to spy on them. They wanted to know if her father had been a government worker. The house they lived in was built on stilts.  

“They just wanted to watch us, to see if we did anything wrong,” Seng said. “Every night, boys, 8-, 9-, or 10-years-old stayed beneath the hut and listened to our conversation.” 

To save themselves, the family fabricated their histories. The father became a former taxi driver and the children pretended they had never been to school. They buried family photos. During the day, Seng, her father, brothers and adopted sister worked. In one village, they helped construct a dam; in another, they worked in the rice fields. Seng remembers the 10-hour days and the cuts and bruises on her hands. 

One day, while transplanting rice seedlings, Seng, then 14, and the other “new people” in the village were called to a meeting. “It was the rainy season, raining like this,” Seng said. “That’s why I don’t like the rain.” 

The authorities called certain names. “They called my two brothers’ names, my name and told us they were going to transfer us to another village. It was too crowded here.” 

They were put on a truck to another village and a Khmer Rouge soldier told them that their parents would be taken to that village as well. They weren’t taken to a village, but to a military base where they found their parents. “My mom cried all the time,” Seng said. 

“I was so hungry and they gave us hot rice and dried fish,” which was unexpected. “I was eating and my mom whispered to me, ‘Do you know that they’re going to kill us?’”  

Seng struggled through her grief to continue: “We didn’t know what they were going to do with us. In that building, they took one family at a time—those people were government officials—they knew who they were, so they took those people before us.”  

The family waited. “I couldn’t cry,” Seng said. They focused on the well-known Khmer Rouge rule: “If they took people before midnight, it meant that they would kill those people. If it was after midnight, it meant that people would be O.K. We just watched the clock and it passed midnight, so we thought it was going to be O.K.” 

At 2 a.m., soldiers came pointing their guns at the families, ordering people onto buses. “The women and children were crying. We thought they were going to kill us.” 

Instead, they were taken to another village, about an hour from there. There were eight families, including a few friends of Seng’s father. One was a professor who was separated from the others and taken away….  

At this point in her story, Seng was overcome with grief and could not continue her story. “Every time I talk, I tell myself, ‘don’t cry, don’t cry, but I get emotional,’” she said. 

The family eventually was incarcerated in a “re-education camp,” where they stayed until the Vietnamese liberated that part of Cambodia in 1979. (Seng’s father was reported dead by the Khmer Rouge in 1976.) 

Liberation by the Vietnamese, however, did not put an end to the trauma. The Vietnamese interrogated family members about their history in a manner similar to the Khmer Rouge. “My mom was afraid it was going to happen again,” she said. 

The family escaped to a refugee camp on the Thai border and was granted political refugee status, based on the military career of Seng’s father. By that time, Seng had married and given birth to twin boys in the refugee camp. When the twins were two-weeks-old, the family was moved to a refugee camp in the Philippines, where they waited nine months for a U.S. citizen to sponsor their immigration. 

Life as a refugee in the United States was not easy. Seng, her husband and the twins lived in Revere, Mass. with a relative. Seng worked part-time sewing curtains for K-Mart at minimum wage, then found work as a housekeeper in a hotel, cleaning up to 16 rooms every day. Her husband washed dishes in the same hotel.  

They lived in an apartment building with other Cambodians, where the landlord would come every weekend and turn off the heat, knowing the tenants had no one to complain to over the weekend. Even worse was the brutal racism: On the way to the train station to go to work, white teenagers would beat the Cambodian men and pull Seng’s hair. “They’d tell us to go home back to where you came from.” 

The couple moved to Oakland, where Seng’s mother and siblings had a two-bedroom apartment. Nine people shared the home “but we didn’t feel crowded,” Seng said. “We were used to small spaces in our country.” 

Both Seng and her husband went to school and earned AA degrees from Laney College. Bigotry followed Seng to Oakland. New on her county job, she would answer the phone and sometimes did not understand what people said. And the caller would say something like: “If you can’t understand English, why don’t you quit your job!” Some cursed.  

“For the first month, I used to cry when I went home,” Seng said. But she underscores that racism is “just a small part of America. Most people are very nice.” 

She hopes to see some justice for the suffering and deaths of more than 1.5 million people in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. A tribunal is being planned under United Nations auspices in which some of the perpetrators are to be put on trial (though newspaper reports indicate financing difficulties may stall the project). 

“I read that those leaders don’t think they did anything wrong,” Seng said. “That really made me angry.” Those responsible “should be accountable for those people who were killed or died (of starvation and disease). I don’t want to see any of those leaders put in jail or executed. It won’t help. But I want them to realize they hurt people.” 

Vatey Seng will sign copies of her book at a dinner to benefit the nonprofit Friendship with Cambodia. The dinner, 5:30-7:30 p.m., on Sunday, Nov. 13, at the Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Hall, 1926 Cedar St., will include Cambodian dancing and singing, a slide show and crafts. Tickets are $25-$50. For more information call (541) 343-3782 or e-mail cambodiaedu@hotmail.com. 

Vatey Seng will sign copies of her book at a dinner to benefit the nonprofit Friendship with Cambodia. The dinner, 5:30-7:30 p.m., on Sunday, Nov. 13, at the Berkeley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Hall, 1926 Cedar St., will include Cambodian dancing and singing, a slide show and crafts. Tickets are $25-$50. For more information call (541) 343-3782 or email cambodiaedu@hotmail.com.?