Nombre canónico: Yathay, Pin
Fecha de nacimiento: 1944-03-09
Género: male
Nacionalidad: Cambodia
Lugar de nacimiento: Oudong,, Cambodge
Ocupaciones: Ministère des Travaux Publics, Phnom-Penh (Ingénieur, | 19 75)
Biografía breve: Yathay Pin was born in Oudong, a village about 25 miles north of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Yathay’s father, Chhor, was a small trader, and his family, though not impoverished, was poor.

Yathay was the eldest of five children. His father had high expectations of him: Knowing that Yathay was an excellent student, Chhor sent him to a good high school in Phnom Penh. Yathay received a government scholarship after completing high school, and he went to Canada to further his studies. In 1965, Yathay graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in Montreal with a diploma in civil engineering. He went back to Cambodia and joined the Ministry of Public Works. He married his first wife soon after, and they had one son. His first wife and second baby died in childbirth in 1969. Afterward, Yathay married his wife’s sister, Any, and they had two sons. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge overthrew the Lon Nol government in Phnom Penh and began a regime of terror. The communist Khmer Rouge persecuted educated professionals and intellectuals and accused them of being bourgeois capitalists. Yathay and his family, consisting of eight members, were sent to work as unpaid agricultural workers in the countryside. By 1977, most of his family members had perished from malnutrition, overwork, or sickness. Yathay, who had managed to disguise his educated background for a few years, was finally betrayed by an acquaintance. Fearing execution, he made a run for freedom by walking over the mountains that separated Cambodia from Thailand. Yathay safely reached Thailand two months later; he had, however, lost his wife in a forest fire. From his Cambodian past, Yathay has one surviving son whom he fears is already dead. Yathay now works as a project engineer in the French Development Agency in Paris. He has also remarried and now has three sons.

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Stay Alive, My Son por Pin Yathay

Roundup of people from Phnom Penh was universal. Evacuating from the city with his family, the author looked around him at the crowds:
2000, Paperback, Cornell University Press
P.23-4:
"No one, it seemed, had escaped the roundup. One young man was carrying his sick father on his back. Women carried babies on their hips, the lame limped on crutches. Twice I saw patients in wheeled hospital beds being pushed along by relatives. Some people had small bundles of food or clothing, some carried a chicken or a duck slung over their shoulders, some had nothing but the clothes they wore. One little boy of seven or eight was wandering through the crowd, crying pathetically for his mother, staring up at every adult, hoping to see someone he recognized."

You could lose your belongings at any time from the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge. The author had an expensive watch that he had kept hidden during their enforced exodus. His wife urged him to trade it for something useful, noting truthfully that it could be taken away from him at any time. He traded it to a fisherman for two of his fishing nets.
P.52-3:
"When, back in the pagoda, I mentioned this to my father, he told me something else that gave me pause. In the boat, going up river, an old man had made some critical remark about the Angkar. When being reprimanded, he was searched. The Khmer Rouge discovered that he was carrying dollars, pocket after pocket of them, perhaps 10,000 dollars altogether.
The young Khmer Rouge soldier had brandished the wad of notes and yelled at the old man, 'you're keeping imperialist money!'
Then, with a determined lunge, he had thrown the wad of dollars into the river. Stupefied, the passengers looked at each other. Why not keep the dollars? The young man could easily have confiscated them. Apparently, he had no idea of the meaning of foreign currency and how the Khmer Rouge could benefit from it.
How many Khmer Rouge officers across the country, I wondered, were currently repeating this ignorant and self-destructive gesture of empty defiance? Were all the Khmer Rouge simply arbitrary in their behavior, with each man interpreting orders in his own way?"

The author had worked in a government department. He ran across a friend he had worked with, who in turn introduced him to an official of the Khmer Rouge. Little by little, the author approached this official, to try to find answers to the question of why was Phnom Penh evacuated? (R3sist0rs, take note:)
P.66-7:
"...'we know that it is dangerous to leave the cities intact, inhabited. They are the centres of opposition, and contain little groups. In a city, it is difficult to track down the seeds of counter-revolution. If we do not change City life, an enemy organization can be established and conspire against us. It is truly impossible to control a city. We evacuated the city to destroy any resistance, to destroy the cradles of reactionary and mercantile capitalism. To expel the city people meant eliminating the germs of anti-Khmer Rouge resistance'.... "

Moved from one place to another, Thay's family ends up in an area that the regime named veal vong. It was in a forest, and the New People, as the city people were called, were to clear the area to make a camp. If you look up Veal Vong on Google maps, you'll see that it is a totally developed City now, where once there was just forest.
P.83:
"... For several weeks after our arrival, thousands and thousands more, All City people in their tattered City clothes, all as distressed as we had been, filed past our huts, plunging deeper into the forest, to make new Fields as we were doing. We watched them in silence, as we had been watched on our arrival. Always the same poignancy, the same drawn and mortified faces, the same tears, the same little dramas as friends and families met and parted, never to see each other again. So many people, so many wracked bodies, so many unsmiling faces. I began to wonder if we were part of some gigantic extermination program, for the decrease in rations and the increase in forced labor could only lead to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths. If this was purification, it was purification by the survival of the fittest."

The Khmer Rouge found many ways to get what they wanted for themselves, while starving the refugees.
P.87-9:
"As conditions worsened -- the rice ration after several weeks was dropped to one can for six people each day -- a New economic system, barter, insured survival of a sort.
It appeared that three or four miles away, there were villages occupied by Ancients [the name for villagers], as well as many other camps established by newcomers like us. We had frequent contact with both Ancients and New People, for New People, supervised by Ancients, were often sent into the forest to cut bamboo. Columns of people would stream past our hut in the morning carrying cooking pots, with small bags of food at their waists, returning in the evening laden with bamboo. Often, a casual greeting would lead on to conversation, and thus contacts and friendships developed. The Ancients received rather more rice than we did, and in addition were allowed to grow their own food. And we, the city people, had possessions -- mainly clothes, but also jewellery, watches, the occasional radio -- that were of interest to the peasants, who were willing to exchange their rice for our goods. Regular contacts with passers-by ensured that everyone knew the relative values of their goods.
Strangely, it became clear that the Khmer Rouge were also feeding rice into this black market system, and profiting from it to acquire goods for themselves and their families. Where did all this rice come from?
Eventually, the explanation got around. The amount of rice to be distributed was calculated on the basis of the census carried out on our arrival. But the only people who knew the actual number of survivors were the Khmer Rouge themselves. They simply never reported many of the dead. Rice for those who had died kept on arriving. Thus, the worse we were treated, the more deaths there were, and the more rice the Khmer Rouge had for themselves."

Many family members of the author died from starvation. The baby of the family died, and when the older boy, from the author's first marriage, was sent out to work in a distant camp, news came back to them one day that he had died as well. Now the only child left in the family was sick, and Thay anguished over what to do to try to keep his family intact. He and his wife Any, left their boy in the hospital.
When people went to the hospital, it was because they were too sick to work. But because there was no medicine and no healthcare workers, they went there to die. He made plans to escape with his wife, and made the overwhelming decision to leave their son in the hospital there. They knew that he would die but they felt they had no choice.
They decided to try to make their way through the Cardamom mountains to the West, towards the border of Thailand. But it was dangerous terrain, Especially for people who had been starved for over a year. During their trip through the forest in the mountains, he lost his wife Any.
P.196-7:
"Night began to fall. We decided to sleep right there, regaining strength for the climb down the next day. It was a good campsite -- a grassy plateau, backed by trees, with a large Boulder that offered protection. We began to prepare our meagre dinner in the glow of the setting sun. I lit a small fire with some twigs and dry wood, near the boulder, leaving Eng [the only remaining member of the group that had left the camp together] to take care of the cooking. There was little danger -- the smoke disappeared into the tall trees above us. Any and I prepared our beds.
Even as we worked, a stiff wind sprang up, scattering a few Sparks from the fire. I told eng to be careful, to cover it with damp leaves so that the villagers didn't notice any sudden blaze. After eng had finished cooking, she broke the fire apart with a branch and we gulped down our rice soup.
We were about to lay down, when I suddenly saw flames licking at the dry grass around the fire."
They had to run for their lives, unable to beat out the fire. When they had gone a small distance, Thay's wife realized she had left their cooking pot behind. She ran back. Thay and Eng stayed there waiting for her to come back. But she never showed up, so Thay turned back in the direction she had gone. He got lost. Moreover, when he finally gave up looking for his wife, he couldn't find Eng. Now he was on his own.

I don't really believe in karma, and I know that a starving refugee had to eat food where he found it. But when Thay found a mountain tortoise, and turned it upside down to cook it in its own shell, I found that very cruel. He didn't say whether he smashed its head first, to keep it from feeling the agony of burning to death. Thay gets his fill, and stuffs leftover meat in his pockets.
P.202-3:
"The next day I left at dawn, intending to stop at noon in order not to lose my sense of direction. But the smell of the grilled meat so whetted my appetite that I stopped early, near a stream to refresh myself and to eat a little. I stretched out beside the stream, took my bag from my shoulder and pulled out a piece of tortoise to chew. After a brief rest, I drank some water and continued on my way.
All at once I felt better than usual. I seemed to be walking faster. I was surprised, and pleased that I was moving on towards Thailand so quickly. I had covered several hundred yards at this brisk Pace when I had a strange feeling, a sort of inexplicable uneasiness. The Ease with which I was walking was not normal. I thought for a few moments the tortoise meat must have given me exceptional strength. I climbed quite a steep slope, at a good pace, without even panting.
Then came a sudden appalled realization: I had left my bag beside the stream. I was not in the habit of taking it off for a short rest, and simply hadn't thought of it.
Well, it wasn't a catastrophe. I turned back to retrieve it. The stream was only about 300 yards away. I retraced my steps.
At least, I thought I did. I thought I recognized the way. I even found a stream and walked along it. But it was the wrong stream. I couldn't find the place where I had stopped. At countless turns, at countless large trees, and endless little ups and downs, I thought I knew where I was. Time and again, my intuition proved itself wrong. It seemed nightmarish, incredible, that I was incapable of retracing a path of 300 yards. But after 3 hours, I had to admit the bag was lost.
With it, I had lost my rice, my spare clothing, my can, and the bag itself which was useful as a pillow. Now I was stripped of almost everything."

Thay almost dies, and gets captured, before he reaches the border of thailand. But he does make it. His story is important, because he recounted the treatment under the Khmer Rouge to the world.
In his country, a renegade government sought to complete genocide against its own people. But they rushed it, so that in just over a year at least 1/3 of the population of Cambodia died of starvation and sickness.
Our own 3lite are doing this to us, but at a very slow pace. It began with The loss of our j0bs, making it so that we must fight each 0ther for sh1tty j0bs and thus, l0wer w4ges, and the crappy w4ges we receive allow us only to buy the che4p3st, most unhealthy f00d, was planned, turning us into f4t, s1ck people, who will need much he41thc4re that we cannot aff0rd, thus t4king all our m0n3y on the way to our d34ths.
So we have a constitution. So this is the way they do it, p4ced out over 80 to 100 years. So that the 3l1te can keep all the m0ney, all the r3s0urces that are left, for themselves.… (más)

Denunciada

burritapal | 2 reseñas más. | Oct 23, 2022 |

Stay Alive, My Son por Pin Yathay

Many narratives of the Khmer Rouge time in Cambodia are retroactive accounts by then-children. Pin Yathay was an adult with a family in April, 1975, which gives his account a different focus and flavor than, say Him's [b:When Broken Glass Floats|4372|When Broken Glass Floats Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge|Chanrithy Him|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165429618s/4372.jpg|8041] or Ung's First They Killed My Father. For example, Pin's analysis of events includes his understanding of the political climate of Cambodia at the time of the Khmer Rouge takeover. In addition, as an adult he is responsible not just for himself and his extended family, but also for his children, a burden not faced by child narrators. He and his wife Any are faced with a Sophie's Choice-like decision, one that, as far as I can tell on the net, still has repercussions today.… (más)