Daily Telegraph, 6 October 2005

A survivor's return to the killing fields

A woman who fled Pol Pot's Cambodia as a child tells Elizabeth Grice why she has abandoned her comfortable exile in America

As a child labourer in the killing fields of Cambodia, it was Theary Seng's daily task to collect buffalo dung for fertiliser amid the stench of inadequately buried human bodies. The exercise was a welcome freedom from prison life and she describes this now as matter-of-factly as if she had been hired to pick apples in an English orchard. It was "a chore" and she would hum tunes to keep her spirits up.

Her three older brothers watched over water buffalo and every day had to pass a tree on which women's body parts - "new ones and old ones" - were hanging from the branches. When one young boy in the group tried to escape, he was shot by Khmer Rouge guards and left to die in the bamboo brush. Shackled prisoners with whom the children had shared rations in the evening would have disappeared by morning, herded into mass graves they had dug themselves the previous day.

It might be partly her lawyer's training that makes Seng sound so detached about these events, but a more likely explanation is that they came to seem almost routine and were eventually eclipsed by greater atrocities. Her mother, grandparents and four brothers were all imprisoned together. For five months, they shared a compound with a demented woman who became a prime source of amusement for the guards. One day , they tied her up and squeezed her head in a wooden coconut cruncher until her skull cracked.

"When I recall it now," says Seng, who was seven at the time, "it is like looking at a picture and seeing only the top of the frame. Sensing the anguish but not her complete face."  She says she can't be sure, but she thinks there was an eruption of laughter at this public execution.

On their last night in prison, two guards carrying ropes - wet to make them easier to knot - came for Seng's mother as she and her youngest brother, Daravuth were curled up asleep beside her. They didn't see her again. "We didn't know my mum had disappeared or been killed - the prison guards said she was just working in another location - but my brother and I woke hugging one another in a foetal position. I had the most surreal sensation that I was just a shell.  My soul had been purged from me. Body and soul were so clearly defined for me because one was missing. It was almost a spiritual experience. It is hard to believe a seven-year-old could have those intense feelings."

Today, Seng is a successful lawyer of about 35, small and neat with a glossy black bob and an air of fragile containment. She cannot be too sure of her age, or the date of her birth, because both of her parents perished under the Khmer Rouge - they were part of the exodus in 1975 in which 20,000 Cambodians died - and, in the prolonged upheaval and hardship, such details were lost.

Her survival is miraculous enough, but what makes her story different from others that have seeped out from this era of genocide is the degree of her outward triumph, material as well as psychological.

After prison, she and her orphaned siblings spend four years moving between various relatives in that state of permanent hunger and anxiety typical of life under the Pol Pot regime. They made a daring escape on foot to Thailand, and from there, after many months in refugee camps, Theary Seng, traumatised, uneducated, anorexic and unable to speak English, went to join relatives in Michigan.

"Everyone looked alike, male or female," she says." I couldn't distinguish between a man and a woman. Even though we had been exposed to foreigners, the fact that everyone was blonde and white was a shock. The cold. The buildings. The glitter of everything. It was a completely different world."

The culture clash was immense. She'd never known anything but war, and a materialistic, if peaceful, society was bewildering. The Christian Education Fund paid for her to be educated privately, so she was a poor, illiterate child in a rich school, unable to invite anyone home because she was too embarrassed - by everything from the pungent smell of fish sauce used in Cambodian cooking to the hybrid "Cambodianglish" they spoke. She became chronically depressed, watched too much television and got fat - a further source of misery. Integration was slow.

Counselling seems to have been out of the question, not because she wasn't tempted, but because she was too proud to see a psychologist. "It is just not part of our culture. My family would laugh at me. They would think it implied that they had done something wrong." Seng says her salvation was work - reading and calligraphy (she wrote out the entire Book of Psalms), but especially the study of law. "I had a lot of violence and anger in me that had to be battled out. I just knew that law would train me to make sense of the bungled feelings and turbulence inside." Now she has written a book about her experiences - and that, too, has proved cathartic.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in it is a description not of the killing fields, but of her strange meeting, 21 years on, with Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge former head of state she holds accountable for the deaths of her parents, her relatives "and the blood of 1.7 million Cambodians". By then, he was an old man, shrewd but also disarming, and she was a confident professional woman. "I stoon face to face with evil incarnate, my parents' murderer," she says in the book. Instead of revulsion, though, she felt a perverse sense of awe - "evil was not mad, but charming, gracious and grandfatherly".

But actually, her reactions sound more like those of a journalist meeting a long pursued interviewee: it was a very satisfying moment and she didn't want to do anything to make him throw her out. "It wasn't as if I was going to be the person to stump him," she says. "I wanted to show him I was a survivor of his Khmer Rouge, not a victim, but an equal. I felt morally superior. It allowed me to be calm and ask questions. I could have pushed for more direct answers, but that might have lost the conversation. I just wanted to hear him talk. To form an opinion."

The conversation was polite, surreal and on his part, evasive. Naturally, he denied all responsibility for the killings. "Do I look like a mass murderer?" he smiled. "I went away feeling: how can he live with himself? I don't think he is human any more." She believes Samphan will be brought to trial - something for which she has campaigned - and if he lives long enough, convicted, but that "we will not get the truth from him". Nor does she think Cambodians will gain any sort of collective closure from it.

As for Seng, her return to Cambodia suggests she is still trying to resolve things for herself. She returned in 2002 as a consultant to the International Republican Institute, leading up to the first multi-party elections, and has been back and forth as an activist several times. Now an American-Khmer (rather than Cambodian-American) she is living permanently in Phnom Penh in what sounds like a cross between a hostel and a fortress.

Cambodia is a crime-ridden, intellectually impoverished place - a legacy, she believes, of the violence of the Khmer Rouge days when the educated class was killed off. She has no privacy because to get to her second-floor apartment she has to enter through another house. There are no keys to her front door: it is padlocked from the inside. This, it seems is what it means to be a single woman living alone in Phnom Penh.

The very fact that she was "compelled" to return - she plans to start a commercial law firm - has meant sacrifices. She would like a husband and a family, but her Canadian-American boyfriend evidently did not see Cambodia as a career move. Other relationships have foundered on this issue. "Having been surrounded by a loving family - grandparents, aunts and uncles - I just can't imagine growing old alone. But whoever I marry will need to want to live in Cambodia with me."

In Cambodia, there are relatives on her father's side (he was killed when she was four) but her Westernisation has alienated her from them in unbridgeable ways. "Like it or not, they view me with dollar signs because they are extremely poor. I feel guilt when I spend a dollar on a can of Coke and they don't even make a dollar a day. There's just a major material gulf."

All her close friends are in America. It sounds as though contentment is a long way off. "I am often sad, but I am joyful. Joy is internal, whereas happiness is based more on external experience. There are moments of happiness where I laugh. But there is a lot of sadness as well."

Her professional friends in America are bemused by her return. No theatres, no concert hall, no international films. What is there for you? they ask. "I don't respond," she says. "I walk away or talk about something else. It's useless for me to respond. I just feel it is home for me."

'Daughter of the Killing Fields' by Theary Seng (Vision) is available for ₤12-99 (rrp ₤ 15.99) plus ₤1.25 p&p. To order, call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112