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day the girl obeys her parents, and when the ceremony is over she is raped. What does a young girl in Cambodia know about sex? Nothing. I had already had sex, but I knew nothing about it. I didn’t know what the Chinese merchant had put inside me—only that it hurt—and I had no idea that this was what happened in marriage.
    I don’t think I was unusual in my ignorance. One time, in school, when we were in military training, a boy stepped over a girl’s back and she cried, because she thought she was pregnant. We were all like that. People told their daughters you got pregnant if you touched a boy’s hand.
    That first night my husband raped me on that platform several times, and when I resisted, he hit me. He grabbed my hair and smacked my head against the wall, then he slapped me so hard I fell down on the bed.
    When it was morning I had to get up and make food. There was no explanation—no mercy or shame. We hardly ever spoke to each other.
    I saw other people only when I walked into the village to buy food. I cooked grasshoppers, vegetables, dried fish, and he ate what I served him. If he didn’t like it, he hit me.
    That man—my husband—beat me often, sometimes with the butt of his rifle on my back and sometimes with his hands. With his fingernails, which he kept long and pointed, he gashed a deep scar into my cheek. He did it because I didn’t smile, because I wasn’t welcoming, because I was ugly, and because I was a death’s head—that’s what he called me.
    He was very violent. Many soldiers are. When he was angry I would try to breathe as softly as possible, so as not to be noticed, because anything could set him off. To frighten me, sometimes he shot at me with his military rifle. At first it worked, but I grew used to it. Inside, I felt dead. When he raped me, I would try to disappear.
    This was my life—another kind of domestic slavery. I never spoke to anyone about it. There were houses around us, with other soldiers and other soldiers’ wives in them, but you don’t talk about such things. Cambodians have a saying: You must not let the fire that is outside come inside your house, and the hearth fire must not be allowed outside. You don’t talk about what happens in your household.
             
    My husband was often gone, fighting the Khmer Rouge. The government couldn’t afford to lose control of the rubber plantations, so the region was crawling with soldiers. When he left, I would quickly run out of money for food, with no idea of when he’d come back. Going back to Thlok Chhrov simply wasn’t an option—Grandfather would only beat me, and I knew my husband would too, when he came back.
    Chup was separated in two parts—the village itself, and then, near the rubber plantations where I lived, the clinic and the military grounds. The clinic was always full of wounded soldiers and village people who were brought there when land mines exploded as they worked in the fields, blowing off their legs or hands. There were land mines everywhere. The Khmer Rouge laid mines, and the government soldiers laid them to stop the Khmer Rouge from moving around the plantations—maybe there was even unexploded matériel from the American bombing of Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War.
    Nobody wanted to work at the clinic, especially at night, even though you were paid almost thirty pounds of rice every month. Nobody wanted to handle body parts and dead people. But all I wanted was work—I wasn’t frightened of the dead. A dead body was like my body, no difference at all. Once or twice, though, I did step on a severed leg or arm in the dark—and I admit that was horrible.
    Sometimes when land mine victims came in, all we could do was amputate. If there was no anesthetic—and there often wasn’t—we tied the person down. There were doctors at the clinic, but they weren’t proper doctors—they were just medics who had learned their job under the Khmer Rouge. If they weren’t there, we