Reunion
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About this ebook
An American war correspondent, Tony Collins, and a former Khmer Rouge child soldier, Sam Rith, reunite after nearly thirty years. Tony helped the world-weary 15-year-old Sam start a new life in the United States.
Sam Rith arrived in America, sponsored by Christian couple. But Sam took more than a few wrong turns and ended up spending most of his youth locked up in an American prison before being deported back to Cambodia.
Back again in Cambodia and totally without family and friends, Sam found ways to do what he had always done best—survive. Reconnecting with ‘old friends’—Tony Collins and the Khmer Rouge cadre who’d made him eat a human heart—Sam opened a new chapter of his life working as a translator at the war crime tribunal. He translated the old horrors of wars, truths and lies for the international press.
Reunion tells an unsentimental, powerfully evocative story of friendship, desperation, hope and deception that are part of life. A memorable reunion of two men seeking redemption and finding that the past never dies. In post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Reunion explores friendship and survival, and how peace and justice remain unfinished business.
Christopher G Moore
Christopher G. Moore is a Canadian citizen and formerly taught law at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of nine novels featuring Vincent Calvino, and the winner of the Deutscher Krimi Preis, Germany's most prestigious award for crime fiction. He has lived in Bangkok since 1988. Both The Risk of Infidelity Index and Spirt House are published by Atlantic.
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Reunion - Christopher G Moore
Reunion
by
Christopher G. Moore
H
eaven Lake Press
Reunion
Christopher G. Moore
Smashword Edition 2012
Reunion is published by Heaven Lake Press at Smashwords.
Copyright © 2012 Christopher G. Moore
Author’s web site: http://www.cgmoore.com/
Author’s e-mail: chris@cgmoore.com
Jacket design: K. Jiamsomboon
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Reunion
Christopher G. Moore
I’d lost contact with Rith Samnang—his given name translated as Lucky in Khmer—after he was sent to prison in California. By that time he’d shortened and Americanized his name to Sam and used the American style of putting the family name after the given name. He was Sam Rith in America. Sam was never a regular correspondent. Dropping out of a person’s mind and life takes time, aided by long periods of silence. It had been a long time since I’d heard from Rith Samnang His old sponsor, George Anderson, had written me that Sam Rith had been deported to Cambodia after he’d served seven years in prison for armed robbery. After that I’d lost contact with the Andersons. If the truth be told, we may have agreed without saying anything that continuing to exchange emails about Sam was just too goddamn painful.
And the Andersons believed in God.
George and Laura Anderson felt that Sam’s prison time and later deportation were their fault, that his failure to adjust to a new life in America had been caused by something they had done or said, or should have said or done. Guilt triggers shame, the feeling that we could have and should have done more. Feelings emerge that make us doubt ourselves as the kind of person who does the right thing.
The Andersons of Sacramento, California—good, religious people—had sponsored Rith Samnang in 1984. That year he had turned fifteen years old. I sometimes wonder whether, if Sam had gone to the States when he was ten, things might have turned out differently. It is difficult to know. I’ve known of other cases where the kid arrived in America at five years of age and his life crashed and burned very much like Sam’s. The fact remains: although the teenage years are a troubled period filled with conflict wherever they are, a teenager who’d survived the Killing Fields, refugee camps, and relocation had to overcome things no ordinary teenager ever had to face. This isn’t to condone Sam’s robberies. He committed the crime, and he served the time. Isn’t that what Americans say is the way things are in the United States of America?
I understood the Andersons’ guilt over Sam’s problems. In fact, I don’t believe in any religion, but I’ve learned that you don’t need to be religious to share in guilt. In fact, non-believer’s guilt may be worse as