For decades, Prof Sorpong Peou believed his father to be dead – executed by the Khmer Rouge. But a vivid dream and the insistence of a psychic have led the family to an emotional reunion in their home country, Cambodia. Peou, who is Chairman of the Politics Department at Winnipeg University, Manitoba, Canada, told his story to Winnipeg Free Press on Monday, followed by an interview on Thursday with Canada’s CTV morning news programme.
Sorpong Peou was just 17 and the eldest of seven children in 1975 when he saw his father, Nam, a government official, being thrown into a blue truck with others and driven away. At that time, the Americans had withdrawn, the Cambodian government had fallen and the Khmer Rouge had begun the systematic murder of its most educated citizens – two million in total – over a three-year period.
This was the notorious time, depicted in he movie The Killing Fields, which came to an end with the Vietnamese invasion in 1978. Nam Peou was one of the victims. He was thrown into a ditch and bodies piled on top of him, but miraculously he escaped. He was later recaptured and tortured, escaping once more into the jungle on the Thai-Cambodia border.
Nam Peou assumed the same fate had befallen his wife and children, and for the next 36 years they each assumed that the other was dead. Nam recovered from his ordeal, remarried and had six more children. Sorpong, his mother and six siblings, made it to a refugee camp in Thailand and travelled to Canada in 1982, settling in Ottawa and becoming Canadian citizens.
Sorpong Peou’s academic achievements began at Toronto’s York University with a PhD thesis on international security (now his speciality) and UN peacekeeping, with a focus on Cambodia. He later taught in Singapore and Tokyo before returning to Canada and Winnipeg University.
The story of the reunion begins with a dream that Sorpong had in January 2010, while in Tokyo, in which he walked and chatted with his father. In that dream, his father told him he was still alive. It made a great impression, but he felt it was simply an indication of how much he missed his father.
But then his brother visited an Ottawa psychic to get advice on a business matter. During the course of that consultation, the psychic asked, “Where is your father? Do you see your father?” The brother, who was just five years old when his father was taken away, explained that he had been killed. “No, no, no,” the psychic responded. “Something’s telling me now that your father is still alive.”
Sorpong describes himself as a spiritual man, but he had no belief in psychics. A sister was equally sceptical and decided to consult the psychic without revealing the family connection. She was also told her father was alive. So Sorpong’s mother also consulted the psychic and heard the same story.
The family decided to pay for another brother to travel to Cambodia in search of Nam. The first visit failed to yield a result, but the psychic said he should return. When he did so, with hundreds of posters of Nam Peou as he looked 40 years ago, he began scouring countless Thai border villages and former refugee sites. At one he was directed to an elderly man who, when he looked at a poster, remarked to the younger Peou that he had looked like the man in the picture when he was younger. But his family had died in the killing fields.
The man, aged 85, refused to believe that the Canadian he was talking to could be one of his sons. There was reason for doubt on the son’s part as well. This elderly man had a mole on his face and perfect fingernails. His father, however, had no facial mole and a life-long split nail on one thumb.
Slowly, however, recognition was established. The mole on Nam’s face had developed since the family’s separation, during a near-fatal illness. And, yes, he had a split nail on one of his thumbs, but the Khmer Rouge had tortured him by pulling all of his fingernails out, one by one. When they grew back, the thumbnail was no longer split.
Years of deprivation and torture had shattered the man’s memory but gradually he was able to recall events relating to his former family and “mutual doubt turned to mutual disbelief”. In long telephone conversations with his first wife and other family members in Canada he was able to relate things that only Nam Peou could know about them.
Sorpong’s mother has now moved back from Ottawa to Cambodia to be with her husband and his new family, along with one of Soprong’s brothers who owns a thriving seafood business in Phnom Penh and cares for them all.
Last month, Professor Sorpong Peou also went to Phnom Penh and once more embraced his father – “a truly gentle man who would not kill a fly, a devout Buddhist” – after a 36-year separation: a reunion that almost certainly would not have happened without a dream and the determined advice of a Canadian psychic.
The full story can be found here, and this is the link to CTV’s website which has a video of their interview with the professor.