Serey Monty was 18 years old when I met her in a temporary refugee camp – two open fields bare of any roofs for more than six hundred people in the monsoon season – next to a Thai police station in the border village of Ta Phraya in 1978. She had crossed to safety less than a month before our long conversation. With characteristic Cambodian modestly and politeness, she dwelled only reluctantly on details of her family’s immense suffering that she thought might shock me and my interpreter. She would look up apologetically as if she wished to take the painful edge off what she said.