When Phon Sann, 71, starved in a Thai refugee camp, pregnant, she would sometimes walk to the edges of the camp, where food, like tiny potatoes, would be cooking for those who had the means to buy them, stand near the cooking smells, and inhale.
It would help a little– offering a modest sense of satiety to supplement the watered down rice that otherwise counted as her daily food.
Phon Sann Photo: Darin Kamnetz
When her husband, Soreth Phann, tells the story secondhand, he cries, just as he did when he realized what his wife was doing each day when she would disappear for a while. “It made me love her more.”
“The women in my family don’t crack,” says Soktevy Phann, 44, Phon and Soreth’s oldest daughter. She repeats this often.“They don’t ever talk. They don’t share a lot of stories– so you just have to pick things up.”
She occasionally picks them up, eavesdropping on her mom and her aunties in the kitchen. Many times, they’ll be chatting about something truly atrocious from their past, but they’ll mention them in the most nonchalant way.
And she knows: “My parents don’t want to remember a lot of these things.”
During Cambodia’s brutal and devastating civil war, which raged on for more than eight years between 1967 and 1975, followed by a genocide– where up to three million people were murdered by the communist party Khmer Rouge– Soreth’s father, a government official, was dragged from his home and killed when Soreth was barely 18.
