when broken glass floats
When Broken Glass Floats opens with a heartbreaking scene set, not in Cambodia, but in rural Ohio.
In the early 1980s, during a visit to the home of her high school teacher, a resettled Cambodian girl was digging around in the garden when she unearthed an animal bone. This innocent discovery had a dramatic effect on the girl: She became absolutely hysterical. The episode drew the faculty’s attention to the psychological plight of Cambodian political refugees and, soon after, a rehabiliation program is set up and Chanrithy Him, the narrator, invited to participate. So begins the painful task of confronting her past; a process which culminated in this book. I had not heard of this memoir before and did not have any special interest in the topic. To be honest, I think I was mostly drawn in by its striking title, which caused me read with the expectation I would encounter a certain grusome image: An irrigation swamp or rice patty so coagulated with human blood that broken glass floated upon its surface. Only a few pages in I learned that the phrase actually derives from a Cambodian proverb about the sudden manifestation of evil—but the story that followed repaid my morbid curiosity with horrifying generosity. It’s only a slight simplification to point out that all historical memoirs have the same plot and everything depends on how it is told. This book is notable for its lack of historical and political context but in a sense that strengthens its final effect. Of course there is something to be said for a thorough academic analysis of the Khmer Rouge; but something too for simply witnessing its rampageous rise and fall through the eyes of an eight year old girl; sharing in her horrified confusion; her daily struggle for food; her heartache as her friends and family members are destoryed one by one by a blind inexorable force she does not and cannot understand. And there are some things which no amount of historical context can help to explain. What are we to make, for instance, of the sight of a dying foetus visibly struggling in the womb of a pregnant woman who has just been laid out with the back of a spade? Surely the only acceptable response is one of horrified incomprehension. It has been said of Anne Frank’s Diary that it is a more powerful indictment of the Holocaust than all the evidence of the Nuremberg trials put together. And not, of course, because it includes an erudite summation of modern European history but because its relatable ordinariness confronts the reader with the humanity of the Jewish victims of Nazism and puts a specific human face on an otherwise unimaginable atrocity. If Stalin was correct that, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic,” the antidote to that apathy of incomprehension is to do what this book does: Draw our attention to a single representative individual among the million. |
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