Twelve-year-old Dara, the story’s narrator, hears the chime of a cowbell from deep in the rainforest. She is on an oxcart with her mother and older brother, traveling west to Cambodia’s border with Thailand. Sarun, her eighteen-year-old brother, has heard that refugee camps near the border are dispensing aid to impoverished Cambodians like themselves—not only food, but rice seed and other agricultural supplies. A bull-drawn cart emerging from the forest—the source of the chiming—seems to confirm this: It is loaded with plowshares, hoe heads, and big sacks of rice. The cart’s driver tells them that the Nong Chan refugee camp to the east has almost unlimited supplies: “They practically throw things at you” (11).

For over three years, Dara tells us, she and everyone she knows have been living in a “nightmare” of terror, starvation, and violent death—ever since the communist Khmer Rouge guerillas took over the country in 1975. Her own father was led away one night and executed in the forest, perhaps because he was educated, or possibly because he went hunting for snails at night to feed his dying mother. Dara has only the faintest memories of a “happier” time, back before the country’s ruler, Prince Sihanouk, was deposed in a 1970 coup.