First They Killed My Father: Chapter 12 Summary & Analysis

Keav has been in Kong Cha Lat, the teen work camp, for six months when another girl arrives to tell Ma and Pa that she is very sick and in the hospital. Pa cannot leave work, but Ma is given permission to go.

Back at the hut, Loung imagines what it must be like for Keav at the camp: in barracks with eighty other girls, she has no privacy and can never show her emotions for fear of seeming weak. Once beautiful, her skin is ruined from the sun. Her legs look like sticks while her stomach is swollen with hunger. She has never held a boy’s hand. She works long hours doing the backbreaking labor of planting rice in silence every day, and misses her family greatly. Her stomach refuses to settle, and she begins to have terrible diarrhea. Only after multiple requests does her supervisor allow her to go to the makeshift infirmary. There she waits, though she knows there is no medicine and that the Khmer Rouge killed all the doctors.

Ma returns and says Keav has dysentery and will not live through the night. She was so weak she did not recognize Ma at first, and then kept asking for Pa. No one at the hospital cleaned her, so she lies on dirty sheets. Pa gets permission to bring Keav back to the village, and he and Ma go to get her while Loung again imagines her eldest sister’s mindset: she must be happy to see Ma but frustrated to be trapped in such a weak body that can no longer move. She wants only to see Pa one more time and is fully of “pure fear.” Ma and Pa return and say Keav had died before they reached the hospital, but the nurse had already thrown her body out to make room for the next patient. The nurse says they are lucky: a dozen other girls also died that day from food poisoning, but they could not locate their parents.

Loung asks Chou what happens when people die. Chou responds that they sleep for three days before moving on to be reincarnated, and Loung says she hopes Keav won’t be reincarnated here. Loung creates a fantasy to dull the pain, imagining that Pa reached Keav before she died and that she passed peacefully in his arms. Loung wonders if Ma, who often butted heads with Keav in life, regrets their fights about music and clothing now. Pa says they must go on as if nothing has happened if they are to survive.