On 20 December 1978 in Reay Pay, a village in the province of Kampong Cham, a rumor went around our camp — the korngchalat — that a battle was raging between Khmer Rouge soldiers and Vietnamese troops along the Cambodian-Vietnam border.
The korngchalat had been my world since I was 21 years old in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge had marched through Phnom Penh…