“From the Killing Fields to the Blessing Field” taught me what I didn’t learn during the angst-driven years of that ugly war. The recently released book tells of the daily bombing runs to Cambodia by the U.S. from 1969 to 1973, with 115,000 bombing sites in all.
The American bombers were ferreting out the North Vietnamese hidey-holes. I never knew that. I only vaguely knew years later that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge massacred the more than 2 million Cambodian people who didn’t starve from 1975 through 1979, and I knew that because of a 1984 film called “The Killing Fields.”
The back pages of the book contain a chronology of Cambodia’s history from 1950 to 1999, developed by Yale University’s Genocide Studies Program. See the front 271 pages for a recounting of the love story of Seang Yiv, Vijila Prom and God.
‘God made me fast’
Yiv’s was an idyllic childhood. He lived in a home filled with love, though not much else most Americans would find essential. It was a quiet place that the Mekong River flooded each year, delighting a boy who could safely swim with water at a chest-high-to-a-boy height while under his house.
“God made me fast,” Yiv writes. He was fast at math. His skill with numbers led to a graduate school scholarship in France in 1972 and later to becoming an internationally known research scientist with expertise in both petroleum and pharmaceutical industries.
During that time, he also became a Christian, a pastor, a church planter and a leader of Cambodian Southern Baptists in the U.S. Yiv writes all this in his 302-page book, “From the Killing Fields to the Blessing Field,” published June 3 and available on Amazon in hardback, paperback and e-book.
The book also includes the story of the woman who would become his wife, Vijila Irene Prom, the city-bred daughter of a judge. She was three years away from high school graduation when Yiv left for France in 1972, but they didn’t know each other then. Two months before she was to graduate, the capital city she lived in was overthrown by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. That very day — April 17, 1975 — all the nearly 2 million residents of Phnom Phen, which had a swollen population due to people who had left the countryside because of the American bombing, were forced to leave the city with little more than what they could carry on their backs or bicycles.
Finding rest
Prom writes in the book of the harrowing challenges she and her formerly wealthy family faced during the first 3 1/2 months under the Khmer Rouge rule. She and her sister devised a way to kill themselves if they caught the soldiers’ unwanted attention. The following 18 months were miserable as the 18-member family spent the time escaping to France via Vietnam, Laos and back to Vietnam.
The book also recounts the couple’s salvation stories and how their complementary skills helped them plant and grow churches in Pennsylvania, Minnesota and California. Their cross-country travels included God-directed “buying low and selling high” their homes, which led in time to their $100,000 purchase of a 75-acre parcel of land in Georgia, which they parlayed into a 7-acre “blessing field” worth $3.5 million or more, today owned by the Cambodian Southern Baptist Fellowship of which Yiv is chair.
The Blessing Field — with its two spacious buildings, gazebos, water fountains and a figure-eight pond fed by a creek — provides a haven of rest and serenity for those who visit. Future plans include a three-wing museum to showcase Cambodia, especially its Christian past, present and people.
“From the Killing Fields to the Blessing Field” is an easy though powerful read.
It is laced throughout with references to God’s activity among His people, such as the biblical meaning behind ancient Chinese lettering. The book’s cover, which gives the sense of an ancient silk tapestry, is by Raksa Yin, an Asian Christian graphic artist. The book was copyedited by JoEllen Claypool, a pastor’s wife in Idaho with a ministry as a book coach.
