NEW YORK,
"In the Shadow of the Banyan" is the first novel of Vaddey Ratner, 41. While the book is powerful as told through the eyes of seven-year-old Raami, Ratner's own story is more so.
Only five when the Khmer Rouge came to power, the author endured four years of forced labor and starvation before she and her mother were able to flee the country. Arriving in the United States by a tortuous path and unable to speak English, she ultimately graduated from Cornell University and only years later returned to Cambodia.
Ratner now resides in Potomac, Maryland, with her husband and daughter and talked to Reuters about the book and her experiences during a brutal period of Cambodian history.
Q: How much of your story is autobiographical?
A: "The overall narrative follows my family experience, the move from the city, the uprooting, the loss of loved ones, the starvation. I make my father a poet but in real life he was a pilot. The story is a closed narrative and the characters have to move the story forward. I had to collapse some characters into one, the same with villages and towns. I created a lot of fictional villages and towns and used the memories of where we stayed."
Q: Do you want vengeance? Do you feel any bitterness?
A: "I don't want vengeance and I don't feel any bitterness. If I feel anything, I mourn for those I lost and the act of remembering requires so much energy, I feel that is all I have to give. I don't have the energy for anger or vengeance, nor do I want to have it."
Q: Your father was a pilot and member of the Cambodian royal family. Did you reveal who your father was to the Khmer Rouge as the child does in the book?
A: "Yes, I revealed who he was. I said his name. I revealed who he was."
Q: Do you feel guilty?
A: "What I feel is haunted and I will never be free of what happened. I will always reflect on what if I had not said his name."
Q: Mae and Pok, the two peasants who took in the book's main protaganists as family, were very sympathetic characters. Were they based on real people? Did you ever try to find them?
A: "Yes, they were real people. They were the easiest to capture as I felt they just translated into English. I did not need to collapse any other people into them to make them in the book. They were as I remember them as a child. But I would not go back to those various villages. Even now, my heart goes aflutter at the thought of going back to those various villages. I would only be confronted with those various losses. What was redemptive about writing this book was I found something beyond those losses. For me to go back, I fear that."
Q: Is your mother still alive? How does she feel about her life?
A: "My mother is still alive. She is very grateful and fiercely guards the few things she feels she has. The peace and solitude she has now. We have so little left of our family, what she was able to build was out of sheer determination."
Q: How much do you tell your daughter? How old is she?
A: "My daugher is 12. My husband and I have an understanding with each other, maybe an extension of how my father spoke to me, when we are asked something we tell her the truth as much as she wants to know."
Q: Was writing the book an act of personal therapy?
A: "It was a strange kind of therapy. At the end of writing it, I realized the depth of redemption I feel. I had felt apprehension that I would have to relive a lot of the ordeal over again. I did not know for sure whether I would come out of it. But I also felt this was the story I had to write.
Q: What was the one personal anecdote in the book that was hardest to write? Why?
"Gosh, every single one of them. Each one dealt into a different dimension of loss. With the loss of my father, it is founded on loss that is unanswerable to this day. I don't know what happened to him. With my sister I felt even the certainty I felt was so absurd, that a disease such as malaria could have been prevented. I chose all of them (the anecdotes) to find some understanding. They did not appear at random. I struggle with them still." (Reporting By Nick Olivari; editing by Patricia Reaney and Paul Casciato)
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