Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna

It is April 17, 1975 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge have seized the city, after five years of fighting the American-backed Khmer Republic. While most cheered the victory believing that it was necessary to free themselves from American imperialism, they were not certain about the future.

Part One Goodbye, Phnom Penh

Cambodia, 1975. General Mey announces that the war is over. After five years of fighting the American-backed Khmer Republic, the Khmer Rouge have seized Phnom Penh.  Khim attempts to leave Phnom Penh Hospital with some medical supplies but he is stopped by soldiers who believe he is a CIA spy. He tells them his wife, Lina is about to give birth and that he needs to get home. When one of the Khmer Rouge soldiers, Comrade Kry sees that he's a doctor he tells Khim to go quickly. When his superior returns, the soldier tells him he released Khim because he was not a spy. The Khmer Rouge soldiers begin to evacuate the city.

Cousin Key stops by to see Vanny and Kongcha and their son Samay. While Key believes that the end of the war means equality and prosperity, Kongcha isn't so certain. He doesn't trust the communists. But Key believes the Khmer Rouge will prove they can govern Cambodia. Kongcha is worried about Vuthy who has come to their home with his family. Vuthy was a lieutenant in the Republican army and is hiding his weapons and uniform in the back yard.

After Key leaves, Vanny and Kongcha's neighbour Mey shows up looking for her husband and daughter. The Khmer Rouge have forced them out of their home, her husband beaten when he tried to reason with them. There was an explosion and then Mey lost track of her family. Meanwhile Kongcha's daughter Lina comes downstairs and tells her father and mother that the Houys next door are leaving because the Khmer Rouge are evacuating the city. Rumour is that the Americans will bomb the city. Kongcha tells her they will wait until Khim returns but will start packing. 

When Khim returns, he tells his family that things are becoming dangerous and explains how he was stopped because he was thought to be a spy.  Kongcha and Vanny along with Reth, Phara, Sokha, Koliane, Khim and Lina, along with Lina's parents, Vuthy and Durmay and her brothers and her sister Chenda and her husband Mori and their son, all leave Phnom Penh. As they drive out, they see everyone else leaving as well, and that stores are being looted. Khim and Lina with her two brothers, become separated from the rest of the group. Reth encounters his math professor, who tells him that the Khmer Rouge's claim that the city will be bombed by the Americans is not true, that instead the Khmer Rouge intend to relocate every one and want to completely reform society. Meanwhile the Khmer Rouge are telling everyone they must use the Monivong Bridge.

The two family groups  travel across the Bassac River and arrive separately in Ta Prom, on the Mekong River. There Khim is recognized by a man whose son he delivered and he offers them a place to stay. That night Lina gives birth to a baby boy they name Chan Veasna. Thankfully Lina and Khim manage to meet up with her parents, Kongcha and Vanny. and .Khim and Sokha return to Phnom Penh to find out if it's possible to return to the city and learn that the Khmer Rouge is asking all senior officials including doctors, managers and engineers to  return to the city. Although Sokha found the Khmer Rouge to be principled people when he was studying in France but now he's not so certain. While in the city, Khim and Sokha witness the Khmer Rouge murdering people. The Khmer Rouge broadcast that everyone else must return to their home villages to return to tilling the soil. 

That night back in Ta Prom, Khim suggests they travel to Battambang where his parents live rather than return to the Phnom Penh. They decide to take apart the cars keeping the wheels and the gas. They cross the Mekong River in three boats, arriving at Rakakong. They stay in the pagoda where there are many soldiers wearing black uniforms, the Khmer Rouge. There they are ordered to report to the pagoda office where they are told to write everything about themselves. The next morning they are ordered by the Khmer Rouge soldiers to get into boats that will take them to Kompong Cham. Kongcha is upset because he and his family do not want to go to Kompong Cham. However, before they get into the boats, a man intervenes, telling the soldiers that they are his family. When Kongcha asks the man why he would do this for them, he identifies himself as Rong who worked at the ice factory. Rong tells them that he intervened because every morning the soldiers leave with a boatload of people who are all former bureaucrats and intellectuals. There are rumours that the boat stops in the middle of the Tonle Sap Lake and returns empty. His nephew saw the boat being cleaned of blood stains. The Khmer Rouge are mass murdering all former bureaucrats and intellectuals.

Khim and his family cross the river and begin their journey to Battambang. On the other side they craft a cart with the car wheels and pull the two carts along the road. They also train their children to lie about what their parents did prior to the Khmer Rouge taking over. And they hide all their valuables and medications. On their journey they come to a village but find everyone dead. They honor the dead and then move on.

By mid-August 1975 Khim's family has reached the river near the town of Kompong Thom. Kongcha meets a former employee named Song who is now a member of the Khmer Rouge but he doesn't know whether or not he can be trusted. In the village of Sandan, they meet Khim's Uncle Vithya. Khim tells him they have been walking for five months and are travelling to Battambang, Vithya tells him they will never be allowed into the village. Instead the Khmer Rouge are rounding up people to send them into the countryside. Kongcha tells Khim and Lina to stay with Vithya, as they are going to try to negotiate with the revolutionaries. They meet Ming Vy, Vithya's daughter Nary, Dany and Phalla whom they met on the way and their cousins Bo and Thy. 

Vithya reveals that he too wants to travel to Battambang and that Bo has a plan. It involves sneaking through the checkpoint between 2 and 4am. However, the plan fails when several other family members don't wake them and Kongcha, Vanny, Khim, Lina, Vithya and his family are left behind. Vithya tries to present a fake permit but the Khmer Rouge do not accept it because it is not stamped. 

Part Two  Do Not Worry

They are arrested and Khim and Vithya's families are sent to a village to be "re-educated according to the principles of Angkar." Song who is assigned to help relocate those not from the countryside, takes them to his village of Roneam. In the camp they are told to forget the past, to forget cognac and expensive clothing. They will write the country's history by plowing! They are told that Angkar knows what is good for them, that Angkar will lead them to victory. For each member of the family, their life in the village is terrible. Lina tells Khim she wishes this were just a bad dream. Vanny's mother, Ma Som is declining in health, while Reth, Sokha, Koliane and Phara all struggle under the terrible conditions and awful food.

In the village of Roneam, children are indoctrinated against their parents, the adults from the cities are made to work in the rice fields, and there is almost no food except watery rice gruel. Men denounce each other, and disappear, either killed with axes or fed to crocodiles. 

Part Three A New Beginning

In 1978, as the situation in Cambodia becomes dire, the Vietnamese decide to invade and quickly occupy the country. Khim and others do not know what to do, whether they can flee or join the opposition forces joining up with the Vietnamese. Eventually Khim and Lina learn that the opposition forces have liberated their area. When the Vietnamese bring in rice, Khim is reunited with an old university friend, Samrong who tells him that his entire family has died. 

In March, 1979 in Phnom Penh, Khim is offered work at a hospital and a bag of rice, and he also is given the address of Kongcha's family. Samrong takes Khim, Lina and Chan to visit Khim's family in Battambang. At the local hospital, Khim meets his cousin Dani who is a nurse. She tells him she lost her entire family and he learns from his cousin Thim, that his father has died. He decides to accept the governor's offer of a job in the hospital. 

Shortly afterwards, Khim receives a strange parcel from Thailand containing a pair of shoes that are too small, a T-shirt that is too big and a spool of thread. Eventually Khim finds a note in the spool that tells him that his mother, brothers and sisters are in a camp in Thailand and that he and his in-laws are the only ones missing. His uncle tells him that Cambodia is still too unstable and that there is war with the Vietnamese. He urges him to cross into Thailand with the help of two smugglers, Sanko and Athol who are waiting at Mongkol Borey. 

Khim obtains a travel pass and manages to get to Mongkol Borey with the Vietnamese. There he meets up with his family. However, it takes the help of an old friend from medical school, now a warlord to get Khim and his family across the Thai border.

Discussion

Year of the Rabbit tells the story of one family's experiences under the Khmer Rouge as they imposed communist rule throughout Cambodia. The country had been a colony of France, finally achieving independence in 1953. At that time Cambodia was led by King Norodom Sihanouk. Although Cambodia was neutral in the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong's use of Cambodia as a haven for its soldiers and its supply lines, led the United States to bomb the country from 1965 to 1973. 

In 1970 a coup d'etat by Lon Nol, removed Sihanouk and led to the start of the Cambodian Civil War. Eventually the Khmer Rouge, initially supported by Sihanouk in the early part of the war, would win, overthrowing Nol and taking control of the country in 1975. Under their leader, Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge established a totalitarian regime: the cities were evacuated and the population forced into the countryside to work on farms. Ethnic minorities, intellectuals and former government officials as well as anyone who opposed the Khmer Rouge, were mass murdered. It is estimated almost two million people were killed. Eventually the Khmer Rouge were ousted by the Vietnamese who invaded the country in 1978. Elections held in 1981 did not provide stability as the government was not recognized internationally.  In 1991, a peace agreement resulted in Sihanouk heading up a coalition government.

Year of the Rabbit is the story of author Tian Veasna's family's struggle to survive during the brutal Pol Pot regime. He was born in Cambodia, in 1975, three days after the Khmer Rouge came to power. In 1980, he moved to France and after graduating from Strasbourg's Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in 2001 he returned to Cambodia to teach art. He wanted to portray what his family experienced in 1975 and so he returned to Cambodia many times to record the memories of family members.

There is no doubt that Tian Veasna's family's story is an important one that must be told, but using the graphic novel format may not have been the most effective means to do so. The story is complex with many characters and it was difficult at times to determine the identity of the different family members in some of the comic panels, as the story unfolds. However, the family tree at the front of the novel helps immensely as do the maps showing their journey and the pages explaining some of the Khmer propaganda, the structure of the Khmer government, and events such as the Vietnamese invasion.

Year of the Rabbit captures the terror of life under the Khmer Rouge. Veasna portrays many situations in which the Khmer Rouge brutalized their own people including Khim and Lina's family members. After fleeing Phnom Penh, Khim and Sokha witness a Khmer Rouge firing squad executing people. On their way to Battambang, Khim and his family enter a village where everyone has been murdered.  When they are relocated to the village of Roneam, the Khmer Rouge single out anyone with an education or who worked for the government. These people are then taken away to be murdered. Living conditions in the rural villages are terrible, with little food and hard labour in the fields. The prisons are even worse, where inmates are chained together and soil themselves. Lina's father, Kongcha dies in a prison where these conditions overwhelm him. No one knows for sure who they can trust and people denounce one another. Vithya denounces someone but when the man successfully proves he is mistaken, Vithya is thrown into a pit to be eaten alive by crocodiles. 

Despite the horrors, the account is filled with the many small miracles Khim and Lina's family experience. For example, when they are at the pagoda, a man who once worked for Khim intervenes, claiming Khim and his family are relatives. The Khmer Rouge relent and do not force the family into boats that would have taken them into the lake to be murdered. And ultimately, when the Khmer Rouge are deposed, Khim and Lina and many surviving family members are able to leave Cambodia and start new lives in other countries, although their experiences haunt them.

Year of the Rabbit is a novel that needs to be read by young readers. Besides a story of survival, resiliency and courage, it holds lessons in tolerance, acceptance and warns future generations what can happen when we stop striving to live in peace with each other and when we see differences as reasons to hate.

Readers may want to learn more about Cambodia and the Pol Pot regime: 

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum: https://tuolsleng.gov.kh/en/

Yale University's Genocide Studies Program: Cambodian Genocide: https://gsp.yale.edu/case-studies/cambodian-genocide-program

Book Details:

Year of the Rabbit by Tian Veasna
Drawn & Quarterly     2020
376 pp.