ChicaMarya

To avoid summary execution, Mr. Dith hid that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant.   Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.

In November 1978, Vietnam, by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.  The Vietnamese made him village chief. But he fled when he feared that they had learned of his American ties. His 60-mile trek to the Thai border was fraught with danger. Two companions were killed by a land mine…

When I first  heard about the Killing Fields, it was from reading a book that appeared in 1985, “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.”  There was a film made based on this book, the Killing Fields.  While horrifying because it is based on the genocide that Dith Pran lived through, it is both historical and inspiring to have read about one who has suffered so much, lost so much, and had the fortitude to not only start over but help change the world by surviving.  Without Mr. Dith and Mr. Schanberg, and without Mr. Dith’s survival, the story of Cambodian genocide by the Khmer Rouge may never have been so eloquently communicated and the world educated about what happened there.

In the 60’s, in a different country, the Cultural Revolution also suppressed, tortured and imprisoned many of China’s educated citizens.  For anyone who thinks the Cultural Revlolution in China was only about wearing Chairman Mao jackets, they are seriously unaware.  Nien Cheng was a survivor of those years, and her experiences are recounted in Life and Death in Shanghai.  While graduate school business students are not required to read books regarding cultural and national history and issues, I often think they should.  When I was in business school, our international business ethics course provided rich materials and cases that only began to open the door to the complexities of cultural nationalism that every nation, including the United States, “owns.” 

When I took International Marketing, we were all assigned several different countries to develop a general marketing plan for a specific, assigned product.  Fortunately one of my team members was just as interested in understanding the culture and social moires of our “country” as I was, and we did well in our analysis and product presentation, despite that fact that it was not a European nation.  One of the things that struck me was that in general, if the country was not a western European nation, remnants of EuroCentric focus that most US citizens have clearly showed.  What was appalling was when one group, which was assigned China, came out with “Chairman Mao Beer” and came up with a ‘celebratory campaign’ honoring the Cultural Revolution.   How clearly off the mark they were.  I hope they either learned more about that period of time and what it did to segments of the educated Chinese population, or stayed away the field of International Marketing.