A human interest story, not a hard-news story, and as such it interested Liz. She understood it. She had a displaced tremor of feeling for Mme Savet Akrun, sitting there so patiently with the sorrows of thousands resting on her thin, unbowed shoulders, asking, ‘Where is my son?’ Liz hoped very much that he was alive, but had to doubt it. How could he be, amongst the more than a million dead?

And if he were alive, searching for him would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. A needle in the haystack of the wide, wide world. She leafed through the pile of cuttings. Khmer refugees had spread to far corners of the earth, to Canada, France, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, even to Britain, to any country with the space and generosity to take them. They came from families fragmented over ten years by war and violence, and many of them did not know whether their relatives were alive or dead. Tracing was difficult, for the Khmer language was little known and hard to transcribe, and the spelling of names varied widely. Many had changed their names many times, for many reasons. For safety, for policy, to forget the past, because they carried forged papers. Where, indeed, was the son of Mme Akrun? Did she believe he was alive, or had she offered herself for this photo opportunity in a sacrificial spirit, as an emblematic figure for her nation?

Liz, until this moment, had not given much thought to the displaced people and refugees of the world. She had noted horror stories from the PLO camps, from the Afghan camps, from the Sudan. She had read of the Vietnamese Boat People. She had known of the existence of the Thai-Kampuchean camps, although she had not known they were so large. One of them, Site Two, with its population of over 170,000 people, was said to be the second largest Khmer city in the world, larger than Sisophon, larger than Battambang, nearly as large as Phnom Penh. Liz had, like many middle-class British citizens, given money to Oxfam for years by banker’s order, and had very occasionally, and against her better judgement, allowed herself to be moved to particular donation by a particular appeal for a particular catastrophe. She was surprised to find herself spending so much time gazing into the two-dimensional newspaper eyes of Mme Savet Akrun.

That same week Liz, her attention newly alerted to all things Kampuchean, was informed, along with the rest of the media-fed world, of a new atrocity in the west of America. An archetypal, all-American atrocity. A lone gunman in Darlington, California, had run mad and attacked an elementary school. He had killed five, and wounded dozens. Bad enough, one might say, too cruel anywhere, but the secondary wave of background information managed to compound the horror. For these children had been the children of Khmer refugees, who had escaped the terrors of their own country, who had escaped the Year Zero and the dreams of Pol Pot, and who had reached the land of the free. They had settled there, in the small town of Darlington, and they had been greeted with special schooling, special language tuition, special resettlement officers to advise them. And there they had died, in the school playground, amidst the smell of hot tarmac and jelly beans and popcorn, mowed down by a 24-year-old dressed in military fatigues wielding a Chinese-made AK47 assault rifle. He shot more than a hundred rounds at them. And then he blew out his own brains.