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Jack Milton/Staff Photographer
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Jack Milton/Staff PhotographerMeng was 6 years old and had sneaked out at night from her barracks in a Khmer Rouge forced-labor camp to visit her mother in a nearby encampment. Her mother had hidden a sweet potato in the embers of a fire, but when the famished girl tried to retrieve it, a camp leader seized her, smashed the potato into the ashes, then forced the charred mash into her mouth.
Meng was led away to be bound and beaten unconscious in front of other children as a warning to those who would break rules.
She survived the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. More than a million of her countrymen did not.
When Meng, 37, of South Portland, gathers with her husband and three sons at a friend's home Thursday to celebrate a traditional American Thanksgiving, her thankfulness will be as deep and sincere as that of the Pilgrims who inaugurated the celebration nearly four centuries ago.
"We are fortunate we are alive, and we are extremely fortunate to come to the United States," Meng said. "Nobody has the privileges we have, the advantages we have."
Meng's journey, which encompassed 10,000 miles and nearly three decades, has seen her go from a young girl facing starvation and brutality to an independent businesswoman in Portland, where she owns the Mitpheap Market on Washington Avenue.
Meng was born poor in Cambodia. She was 5 years old and her mother and father were making about 75 cents a day working for a construction company when the Khmer Rouge and their dictator, Pol Pot, took power in 1975. Meng and her family were told they had to leave their home city for three days because the Americans were going to bomb it. Some people refused and were shot.
Meng's family left with the black-clad Khmer Rouge, taking hardly any possessions and little food. There was no bombing, but they never returned.
Meng remembers walking for days, sleeping on the open ground at night. She wanted to buy something to quench her thirst, but her mother said there were no shops and that money no longer had any value. Shocked, Meng smashed her ceramic piggy bank on the ground. Paper money blew away and nobody moved to collect it.
Meng wears a cheerful smile as she recounts the images seared into her childhood memories. She prefers openness to her cultural tradition of reticence, she said, because storytelling is a gift to her children.
"To my community, I am a lady with a big mouth," she said. "If I don't tell my children, they won't know what I went through."
She finds it easier to describe her ordeal in English, the second language serving as a buffer against the full power of her recollections.
The government soldiers led them to a camp where the men were trucked away while the children and women were separated. Meng never saw her father again.
She lived in a barracks along with hundreds of other children, waking at 5 a.m. and spending all day weeding rice fields with a single break for lunch. They called it rice soup, but there was no rice in it, she said.
Meng was in trouble often, refusing to spy on her friends and on her parents.
"I guess I'm a brat. I don't take orders well. I don't follow directions. I talk back. I express my opinion, so I'm in trouble all the time," she said of her years in the camp.
The first time she was caught sneaking to her mother's barracks, she was warned that tigers would eat her. She was undeterred.
After the beating, however, when she was kicked and dragged by the rope that bound her arms, she was warned to never speak to her mother again. When they passed on their way to the fields, she would ignore her mother. To this day, she has not told her mother what happened after she was caught with the sweet potato, sharing it only with her counselor.
"The image of that haunted me every night," she said. On her first Thanksgiving...
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