Hong never got to say goodbye. That’s among the many things that sets her off crying as we chat.
She never said goodbye to her mother in 1975 when she was forcibly separated from her family by the Khmer Rouge after they took power and ordered everyone to leave Phnom Penh to work in the fields.
She never said goodbye to the five brothers and sisters who were also sent away and who starved to death between 1975 and 1979.
She never had a chance to say goodbye to her father when he was hacked to death in front of her and her seven year old sister Bo by Khmer Rouge soldiers for falling out of a tree and breaking his leg, thereby making himself economically useless.
But most painfully, she never got to say goodbye to Bo after the sisters fled for their lives. An old woman who’d taken them in after the death of their father quickly divided them between two passing families one night, in fear that if they stayed together they would all starve.
The madness of the communist dictator Pol Pot and his agrarian revolution echoes everywhere in Cambodia today.
Hong and Bo (both right) with their family before they were forcibly separated from each other by the Khmer Rouge. Source: SBS
The cities were emptied. People were ordered into the fields to work.
Anyone who posed a potential resistance: intellectuals, professionals, educated people or political opponents were imprisoned or executed.
What became known as The Killing Fields saw more than 1.7 million people murdered, often in the most brutal ways imaginable after months of torture.
That much is relatively well known. What is less explored is the Khmer Rouge policy of separating families.
Husbands and wives were split up, children of different ages too. Pol Pot wanted there to be no rival loyalties to anything but the state. So people were sent off to different parts of the country to work.
Many never saw each other again. After the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979 most people returned to where they had come from to try to find their families.
But many were orphaned or too young to know precisely where they had lived.
Children were sometimes adopted. Others became refugees in Thailand or made it out to places like the United States.
Hong is one of the ‘lucky’ ones who made it out to America. Now around 50-years-old she lives in Texas running a donut shop.
There are thousands of Cambodians like her with no idea what happened to their families. Some assume they are the only ones left living, others just wonder.
There are no national systems in place to reunite them. But Hong has come to Cambodia, spending almost all her savings, to place all her hopes in a reality TV show that is transforming lives.
‘It’s Not A Dream’ is put together by a small team of young people at Bayon TV. They go out across Cambodia to film people recounting as much as they can remember about who they are and where they came from.
Every Monday they broadcast the appeals, and once every month carry out extraordinarily moving televised reunions. Hong discovered the show on YouTube and made an appeal.
Several months later she was contacted by the show inviting her to fly out and appear on the program – but they haven’t told her why.
By the time we meet a week before the show she is utterly fraught, unsure whether she’s there to make an appeal or meet a member of her family.
If it is a member of her family, is it her sister? Or some long lost distant relative she doesn’t even know about?
I, on the other hand, am slightly more ‘in the know’. The producer of the program Sokha Youk has taken me into her confidence and says this is going to be the best, most emotional program they’ve ever made.
Hong’s sister Bo is indeed alive, and living as a farmer in rural Cambodia.
Krishnan with Bo, as she prepares to be reunited with her sister on 'It's Not A Dream'. Source: SBS
When I travel out to see her the house is little more than mud bricks and sticks, with canvas. Her kitchen is an open fire, and forget about running water. It is all a long way from Texas.
Bo doesn’t remember anything about her childhood. The whole experience has been so traumatic that she has clearly shut the whole thing out.
But the man who took her in 40 years ago remembers it well. He has spent decades agonising about why he took in one sister but not both.
And he was the one who contacted ‘It’s Not a Dream’ after hearing Hong’s original appeal on the radio.
There’s a sadness to Bo that is truly heartbreaking as we talk. Like an amnesia patient, who feels there is a whole life she doesn’t know anything about. If only she could remember.
That’s the starting point of our film and I don’t want to give away any more.
Two sisters, separated by the Khmer Rouge 40 years ago, desperately seeking each other, with no idea what happened to their family.
Hong (left) in the TV studio, about to see her sister again after 35 years apart. Source: SBS
What happened over the next few days was one of the most moving things I’ve ever filmed.
It also begs a lot of questions about why in the 21st century, in the world of Facebook and the internet, so many people in this poor country are still lost.
