Revisiting horrors, seeking a lost brother

SPEAN KRONG, Cambodia -- At age 10, Bunrath Math was taken from his family and ordered to forget everything he'd ever known. Forced into slavery, he was beaten, whipped and starved. After almost three years, he regained his freedom, only to learn that his parents and four sisters had been killed. Two of his siblings survived.

But the fate of his younger brother, Peu, 7 when he last saw him in 1976, remained a mystery.

Bunrath is now a 38-year-old social worker living in the Olney section of Philadelphia and a leader in his community. Peu is the sibling Bunrath knew least but is haunted by most. A vague image of the quiet boy flickers in his head - a slight kid who liked to run.

"What if he's wandering around? " Bunrath thinks. "He could be out there looking for me. "

Last summer, to put ghosts to rest, Bunrath made a trip back to his homeland. Dozens of Philadelphia Cambodians - the fourth-largest settlement in the country - take this trip every year. Though many are impoverished, they put aside what they can, scrimping on comforts, so they can travel back. In Cambodia, they search for the missing and journey into a past that is never resolved.

From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot's Maoist-inspired Khmer Rouge revolutionaries transformed Cambodia into a massive labor camp. They banned religion and money. They separated children from parents. They slaughtered teachers, lawyers, doctors, civil servants, monks, artists and ethnic minorities. Offenses such as wearing ornate clothing, speaking a foreign language, even showing emotion were punishable by death. Nearly a quarter of the country's population, as many as 1.7 million people, died from execution, starvation, overwork or disease.

The Khmer Rouge were toppled by Vietnam in 1979 but continued to wage a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese-installed government - made up of Khmer Rouge defectors - until 1998. That's the year Pol Pot, the architect of all this brutality, died quietly in a jungle hut near the Thailand border.

No one, not a single person, has been held accountable for these crimes.

But that monumental unfairness, always in Bunrath's thoughts, would not distract him now. His path lay elsewhere.

He had not told anyone in his mother's hometown of Spean Krong that he was coming. He stepped out of the air-conditioned car into a cocoon of humidity. Now a Westerner, in khakis, T-shirt and Teva sandals, he was surrounded by a dozen people, any one of whom could have been him, had he not escaped 23 years ago. Wearing sarongs and checkered krama scarves, the villagers, shouting and smiling, enveloped him.

*

In the 1960s and early '70s, Bunrath's family spent their summers in Spean Krong. They lived in Phnom Penh, 100 miles to the south.

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge occupied Phnom Penh and emptied the city of its more than two million inhabitants in three days. Bunrath and his family were forced to march north to Spean Krong. Among a crush of thousands, the Maths - mother, father and eight children - walked for seven days, toting bags of clothing and rice. Bodies lay along the road. "My father just pushed us forward," Bunrath said.

His father, a slim, serious man, knew that if the Angka - the Khmer Rouge organization - discovered he was a government architect, it would be his and his family's death sentence. So he told soldiers he was a carpenter. One night he even destroyed the family photo albums in the cooking fire.

For 12 to 16 hours a day, in a Spean Krong labor camp, they harvested rice, dug irrigation canals, and built dikes. They ate rice gruel during communal meals; some days there was no food. At mandatory night meetings, they were told it was Year Zero and to forget their past.

Within a few months, Bunrath, his brother Mok and sister Thoury were all sent to different labor camps. The youngest brother, Peu, went with Thoury. Bunrath's mother and father and four other sisters - Sarin, Saroeuth, Kneab and Sina - remained in Spean Krong.

During a lunch break in 1976, a young Khmer Rouge guard, about 14, pulled Bunrath aside. "They took your parents," he said. "You better run. "

That night, the sympathetic guard helped him escape, using a lit cigarette to signal when it was safe to leave.

For the next month, Bunrath hid in the jungle, living off bananas and fish he caught in bamboo traps. Eventually he made his way northwest, to his father's childhood village of Kralanh, about 100 miles away.

Kmao, 4, was the daughter of Bunrath's sister Sarin. On the night they came for Sarin, Kmao ran to the house of Grandma Tai, a village matriarch. Grandma Tai clutched the child and begged a Khmer Rouge guard to spare her. But the guard was unmoved. He pried Kmao from Grandma Tai's arms and carried her, wailing, into the dark.

With a tentative smile, Bunrath gave a traditional greeting - praying hands at his face - to Chea, a cousin he had not seen for 24 years. Tears trailed down her cheeks. She hugged Bunrath tightly.

As the rain rapped on the tarp roof, Bunrath, Chea, and a dozen others gathered to share their stories. Neighbors stood in the drizzle to glimpse his American glamour.

They craved details about his life in the United States. After years in Thailand refugee camps, Bunrath was placed in Pittsfield, Mass., in 1984 by a resettlement agency. For two years he attended Georgetown University, moving in 1994 to Philadelphia, where he finished his college degree at Temple. He planned to get a master's degree in social work at the University of Pennsylvania. Though unmarried, he said, his life was good.

Then he told them why he had come: Did any of them know what had happened to his brother Peu?

They glanced at one another. No, they had heard nothing of little Peu.

Among the group was a wizened woman with black teeth who had been a Khmer Rouge leader. Though Bunrath once suspected she had been involved in his sister Sarin's death, he greeted her warmly. In this land of shadows and nuance, it was his practice to be kind to everyone. After all, here survivors still live side by side with their families' murderers. Kindness would be his revenge.

With sweeping gestures, the woman told Bunrath she had tried to save Sarin but had been powerless to do so.

Bunrath watched her and smiled politely.

"There are a lot of killers still walking around that village," he explained later. "I don't know who's who. It's like walking through the jungle and not knowing where the tiger is. "

About a half-mile away, on the edge of a rice field, stood a 10-foot-tall, white-and-gold-painted memorial called a burial stupa. Bunrath's sister Thoury, who now lives in Fall River, Mass., had paid to have it erected last year so it could house the family's remains. Most Cambodian Buddhists believe that, without a proper burial ceremony, the spirits of the dead wander the earth in suffering.

But first the bones must be found - a formidable task. Many killings took place at night in remote locations. Most bodies were dumped anonymously in mass graves. And, in a country where almost a quarter of the population was exterminated, bones are everywhere, mingled with the mud and trash of everyday life, unprotected and crumbling.

Bunrath's cousin Chea said there was a good possibility that his parents, and maybe some sisters, had been taken north to a town called Staung.

Bunrath had heard of this notorious killing field. As many as 150,000 people had been clubbed, stabbed or shot to death there.

It would be his next stop.

*

The car turned off the highway between rows of tamarind trees that suggested the entrance to a grand estate. Ahead lay a Buddhist temple and school, on the very site where so many had died.

Bunrath trudged up a red clay path leading to a huge stupa, which featured windows on six sides. Visible inside each window, stacked haphazardly, were hundreds of skulls. Some lacked teeth or whole jaws; others had holes in their temples.

He had come looking for his family's bones, hoping their spirits would speak to him.

In the stupa's shadow, a half-dozen children scribbled in workbooks as a saffron-robed monk instructed them. The monk's assistant, an old, bowlegged man, offered to show Bunrath around. Trailed by the children, who happily abandoned their lessons, Bunrath followed a dirt path to freshly tilled soil.

The old man said this vegetable field was once a mass grave. Then he pointed to a tall, gnarled tamarind tree. "This is the tree where they killed the babies," Bunrath translated, his voice low. "Took them by the legs and smashed them. "

After the Vietnamese ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979, the old man said, he came to see the tree. Its bark was dark with blood six feet high.

Bunrath placed his palm on the tree and closed his eyes. The creaking of crickets filled a swollen silence.

"I can hear them crying," Bunrath said.

Back at the stupa, he lit incense sticks and knelt before the skulls.

*

If you are a foreigner, driving around Cambodia can seem like a hallucination. The national highways were shared by cows, dogs and chickens, taxis, oxcarts, improvised vehicles, and motorbikes carrying whole families. Along the shoulder, young women sold roasted crickets and deep-fried tarantulas. In a remote area, a Mercedes-Benz hubcap hung from a tree 20 feet off the ground.

As the car trundled along, Bunrath talked about his plan. He would pick up his older brother, Mok, in Kralanh, their father's hometown, and then head to the city of Battambang. A village west of there, Snoeng, was the last place his little brother Peu had been seen.

That was in 1978, when his sister Thoury had given the boy to an elderly couple. Thoury, then about 20, had cared for Peu since they had been separated from the rest of the family. First sent to Pailin province - a Khmer Rouge stronghold - they eventually were relocated to Snoeng. Thoury later told Bunrath that Peu had been sick and starving and she hadn't known what to do. The elderly couple said they would adopt the boy. All she remembered about them was that they were from Snoeng and were "old people" - the farmers the Khmer Rouge favored over "new people" from cities.

"She didn't get the name," he said, frustrated.

At Snoeng, Bunrath wanted to send out a radio announcement and distribute flyers door-to-door in as many villages as possible.

As he approached Kralanh, Bunrath recognized clay dikes he had helped build during the Khmer Rouge regime. The car barreled over a bridge, which he recalled scurrying underneath in a furtive attempt to catch fish.

Prompted by these memories, he began to sing a Khmer Rouge revolutionary chant but trailed off midverse. Then his driver, belting out the notes, picked up where Bunrath had left off. Soon they were both singing a song they had learned long ago as child slaves.

Bunrath translated: "Before the revolution we lived like cat and dog. But now, because we are liberated by the Angka, we are free. We live like somebody in heaven. "

Bunrath's sister Kneab, about 9, would feign sickness so her captors would not make her work. A leader told her one day she would get to go home soon. Kneab was brimming with excitement, telling everyone the news and giving away all her clothes. The guards came and took her in the night.

At Kralanh's dusty main intersection loomed a garish billboard. It depicted three hands thrusting an AK-47, a grenade and a pistol toward outstretched hands. The message to still-armed citizens: Turn in your weapons to the government.

Bunrath was looking for his cousin Saroeung, who owned a local restaurant, but she recognized him first. Soon he was sitting in her open-air shed, sipping a Coke. Saroeung sent someone to fetch Bunrath's brother Mok.

A half-hour later, Mok stepped off a motorbike and glimpsed his American brother. A wiry man with a gaunt face, Mok blinked, as though he had just walked into blinding sunlight.

"He's overwhelmed," explained Bunrath, who approached his older brother slowly. The two looked nothing alike: Bunrath, a confident, college-educated, healthy American; and Mok, timid, and weathered from the sun. Bunrath led his brother to the back of the restaurant.

Bunrath and Mok had reunited in this town in 1980. They joined a haphazard village militia, protecting the area against the return of the Khmer Rouge and the harassment of Vietnamese troops, with weapons left behind. They hunted pigs with AK-47s and ate whatever they wanted.

At cousin Saroeung's restaurant, Mok relaxed. At 48, he was the kind of man who gave money to anybody who asked for help. But he had also squandered more than $4,000 that Bunrath had sent him over the years, and had gambled away a house that Bunrath and their sister Thoury had helped him buy.

That afternoon, the two brothers went to see a nearby former labor camp where Bunrath had been forced to work. They stood at the lip of a large crater, about 16 feet deep and 40 feet across. Then Bunrath scrambled down the slope.

He remembered how, 28 years ago, people deemed traitors had knelt here and been struck in the head with a club, hoe or iron bar. Then the bodies had been burned.

Bunrath had been ordered to scoop up the ash and cart it to rice fields for fertilizer. He had worked 12 hours a day in intense heat and unforgettable stench.

Now looking at a drift of garbage that covered one slope, Bunrath said bitterly: "This is how much Cambodians have respect for the dead. "

After a moment of silence, the brothers walked back toward the center of town. They fell into a companionable rhythm they had known ages ago, in the militia.

That old companionship had ended at a crossroads in 1981. Bunrath had heard that refugee camps in Thailand were gateways to a new life. He asked Mok to go with him. But Mok wanted to stay. There was a girl in Kralanh he hoped to marry. The two stood in the road for a while. And then Bunrath, 14 years old, walked on, heading for a new life and away from the only family member he had found.

*

In Kralanh, Bunrath summoned family and friends to his cousin's one-room plank house. He unzipped two large suitcases and handed out dozens of pants, T-shirts, shorts, sweatshirts, coats, and three bottles of cognac his cousin could sell.

Cambodian Americans who come back home are viewed as wealthy and expected to share that wealth. Even though his salary allowed few frills, Bunrath handed out $4,000 in all, but he didn't mind. The act of giving helped to dispel the grief of so much death.

The ghosts of his family hovered close by. Because his brother Peu's story was unfinished, he became an apparition of many faces. Any man might be Peu, if only Bunrath had the words to pull him out of the shadows. Clues could be anywhere, if only Bunrath were vigilant enough, had imagination enough, to see them. This responsibility freighted his every step.

Bunrath told everyone about his search for Peu. Sara, his cousin's brother-in-law, was a muscled man with elaborate tattoos to protect against bullets and black magic. He advised Bunrath to forget about flyers and radio announcements. Instead, he should seek out "old people" because they might have encountered Peu.

Sarin was Bunrath's second-oldest sister. On the day of her death, she sang a song to a friend. "Sister, I will not see you again," the song went. Sarin was defiant until the very end. The executioner, a fat man with a flat nose, was having trouble killing her with a club. So he chopped her into pieces. When he went home, his clothes were soaked in blood.

Bunrath couldn't wait. He decided to visit the village of Snoeng right away; that's where Peu had last been seen.

It was raining, and the car slipped and thumped along the soupy, rutted road. Sitting in the backseat, Bunrath ticked off the fates that could have befallen Peu.

"If he didn't join the soldiers, either he joined the Khmer Rouge, got killed, stayed around to be a farmer - or he could have become a refugee and been sent to the U.S.A. or some other country we don't know about. "

Bunrath had tried many times to summon memories of his brother, but always they were blurry.

"He was a tiny boy," Bunrath recalled. He gazed out the window, as if he might spot Peu among the banana trees. "He had full lips. . . . People were always complimenting him about his lips. "

Shirtless boys were playing in a puddle. Peu could have been one of them once.

In Snoeng, the car stopped in front of a roadside stand where a gray-haired woman sold fruit and cigarettes. She told Bunrath that a random hunt wouldn't get him very far in this area. Try the police chief, she suggested; he had residential records.

Bunrath knew that former Khmer Rouge could still hold positions of power. So he planned to approach the police chief cautiously.

The faded police headquarters was pockmarked from bullets. Behind the building, cross-legged on a long table, sat a hefty, cherubic man wearing an olive-green uniform and a holstered pistol. He greeted Bunrath buoyantly. This was the police chief.

Nearby, a woman tended a steaming cooking pot. The chief spoke into his walkie-talkie, and within 15 minutes, five deputies arrived with stacks of long yellow books, the Registers de Residence.

Bunrath's reserve quickly disappeared around the amiable chief, who chuckled contagiously.

For the next two hours, Bunrath thumbed through the registers. The name Peu appeared several times, though most details didn't match.

Excited chatter surged when a deputy mentioned that he knew a man who fit the exact circumstances Bunrath had described: an orphan boy who had come from Pailin and been adopted by a couple from Snoeng.

This man's name was Chin. The deputy had fought with him in the Cambodian royal army, battling the Khmer Rouge. Chin was married, he said, and had children.

Bunrath stared at the deputy with wide eyes.

"I have a really good feeling here," he said.

Contact staff writer Adam Fifield at 856-779-3917 or afifield@phillynews.com.

The Characters

Bunrath Math (BOON-ROT MOT), 38, social worker

Mok (MOCK), 48, his brother

Peu (POH), his missing brother

Thoury (TOO-ree), 54, his eldest sister

Sarin (Sa-RIN), Saroeuth (Sa-ROOT), Sina (SEE-na) and Kneab (Kuh-NABE), Bunrath's murdered sisters

Kmao (Kuh-MAO), 4, Bunrath's niece

Chea (CHEE-ah), Bunrath's cousin

Saroeung (Sa-ROONG), another cousin

Sara (Sa-RAH), Saroeung's brother-in-law

Chin, a man adopted by a couple from Snoeng

Coming Tomorrow

Searching on: Bunrath Math follows a lead to a faraway hut, a mysterious man, and the end of his journey.

A genocide tribunal: After 25 years, inching toward a justice that some doubt will ever come.

How This Series Was Reported

Staff writer Adam Fifield traveled to Cambodia with social worker Bunrath Math for three weeks in June. He interviewed more than 170 people, including more than 40 in Cambodia, more than 80 Cambodians in Philadelphia, more than 50 experts, advocates, city and government officials, and national authorities on Cambodians in the United States.

His writing on Cambodia also draws extensively on work he has done on the subject since 1996. His book A Blessing Over Ashes: The Remarkable Odyssey of My Unlikely Brother, about his Cambodian foster brother, was published by William Morrow in 2000.

Information about Bunrath Math's sisters and niece comes from the accounts of villagers with whom Bunrath spoke in Cambodia.

* World Bank survey of 800 firms in 2004.