The Clay Marble

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1991

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapter 17-Afterword

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 13 Summary Summary

Reunited with her family and Nea, Dara insists that she owes it all to the “magic marble.” Nea speculates that its magic worked for her primarily because she was “brave and patient.” For the first time, she calls Dara “sister.” Sarun then informs her that he and Nea plan to marry. Dara is delighted, recalling that Jantu had predicted this union long ago, and had even mapped it out in their toy village at Nong Chan.

Excitedly, she asks Sarun when they can bring Jantu and the baby back from the hospital at the Khao I Dang camp. Sarun says that they will need a special pass to make the journey, and that this may “take time.” Nea protests that they must do it soon, so they can all go back to Siem Reap in time to plant their rice before the monsoons. Sarun scoffs at this, saying he has “more important” things to worry about than rice planting—such as the big flag-raising ceremony, which is only 12 days away.

It is clear to Dara and Nea that Sarun’s personality has changed since he began drilling with the army: He has become pompous and selfish, now talking only of war, weapons, and military parades. The girls worry that he will put off the return to Siem Reap until it is too late for them to plant their rice. Feeling the marble in her hand, Dara makes a bold decision: She and Nea will have to go behind Sarun’s back and prepare the ox carts for the trip. Once the carts are cleaned and loaded up with rice seed and tools, it will be harder for Sarun to say no.

Dara and Nea throw themselves into this arduous task and finish with little time to spare: just three days before the flag-raising ceremony, and five days before the big caravan leaves for Siem Reap. Now all that remains is for them to get Jantu and the baby back from the hospital at Khao I Dang. Privately, Dara thanks the clay marble for giving her the courage and willpower to defy her older brother.

Chapter 14 Summary

Sarun is furious when he learns what they have done, but Dara stands her ground, and warns him that unless he gets her a travel pass immediately, she will go straight to General Kung Silor himself. Sarun looks scared and does as she asks. He refuses, however, to go with the girls to Khao I Dang, saying he has finally been awarded the honor of sentry duty—meaning he can at last fire his gun at the “enemy.”

Dara and Nea walk the three miles to Nong Chan, then use their pass to board a Red Cross van to Khao I Dang. At first, Dara is awestruck by the clean, orderly appearance of the refugee camp, so different from Nong Chan, until she reflects that most of the people here have nowhere else to go. When she and Nea reach the hospital wards, they see many children who are sick and dying, mostly of malnutrition.

An orderly tells them that the fleeing Khmer Rouge burned the rice stocks of many villages so that the Vietnamese would not be able to use them. Jantu’s baby brother, however, is in good health, his foot completely healed. Seeing Dara and Nea, Jantu can hardly contain her excitement. When Dara tells her of Nea and Sarun’s betrothal, Jantu says, “Sometimes if we dream hard enough, those dreams can shape our lives” (125).

In the hospital ward, Jantu has made a friend: Duoic, a boy about her own age, who lost both his legs by stepping on a landmine in the jungle. He does not know where his family is, and sometimes wonders why he is still alive. Jantu scolds him for having such thoughts, continually urging him to be stronger and more self-reliant. As she bids him goodbye, she tries to hide her tears.

Chapter 15 Summary

As Dara, Nea, and Jantu walk the three miles from Nong Chan to the Khmer Serei camp, they take turns carrying the baby. Their talk turns to Duoic and their sadness at having to leave him behind. Jantu observes that life is not fair, and Dara thinks of how different life is in (for instance) Thailand, where no one has to worry about bombings, forced labor, or endless fighting. Jantu tells her that, like Duoic, she would want her loved ones to go on without her if something were to happen to her. Nea calls this “gloomy talk.” They come to a fork in the road, which worries them, since Sarun has cautioned that the other path leads to the base camp of “our enemies,” potentially one of the other anti-communist armies vying for control of the country.

They choose a path, which turns out to be the right one, but Nebut’s crying alarms the Khmer Serei sentries, one of whom is Sarun. Recognizing his voice, Jantu rushes forward and is shot in the side by one of the guards. Her wound is clearly life-threatening, but Sarun declares that it is too dangerous to drive her back to the Khao I Dang hospital in the dark—the following morning, after the flag-raising ceremony, will be soon enough. Dara has grave doubts about this, which she hides from Jantu.

Chapter 16 Summary

At the base camp, Dara’s mother bandages Jantu’s wound as best she can, and Dara prays to the clay marble for her friend’s speedy recovery. Her prayers are not answered, and at dawn, when Jantu opens her eyes and is able to speak a little, she has the glazed look of someone who “wasn’t going to try anymore” (138). Nea begs Sarun to take Jantu to the hospital immediately, but he sternly refuses, reiterating that he can’t possibly miss the flag-raising ceremony, which will be over in “only” a few hours anyway. Placatingly, Jantu tells Nea that she will be “fine.”

When she is alone with Dara, however, she voices her bitterness about the Khmer Serei and the other military factions, all of whom, she says, are “the same,” with their fanatical violence and glib phrases about freedom and revolution. It is all a “game” to them, she says, like soccer, except instead of balls, they kick the rest of “us” about. Most of the dying and injured at the hospital, she reminds Dara, are not soldiers but civilians—why do they keep shooting at us, she asks.

Convinced she is going to die, Jantu prevails upon Dara to be strong and to do whatever it takes to protect their families, which means taking them back to Siem Reap in time to plant their rice before the rains. Sarun will want to stay with the Khmer Serei, she warns, so she must stand up to him. Pointedly, she reminds Dara of the courage and resourcefulness she has shown already, such as when she walked all the way back to Nong Chan, and then to the base camp, to find her family.

Dara protests that it was Jantu’s “magic marble” that gave her the strength to do this and then asks Jantu to make her a “bigger” one that will have more magic. Jantu insists that there was never any true magic in the ball, that it came from Dara herself, because she believed in it. Now, she says, Dara must believe in herself, and make her own clay marble. Dara does not think she can do this, and seems close to despair. With a faraway look in her eyes, Jantu asks Dara to sing her and Nebut to sleep, which she does, dreading what soon may happen.

Chapters 13-16 Analysis

Together at last with her reunited family, Dara falls prey to yet another bait-and-switch: When Sarun informs her that he and Nea have become betrothed, she is at first delighted, since her and Jantu’s dreams seem to be coming true. However, it soon emerges that Sarun no longer shares their dream of growing rice back in Siem Reap. As Nea observes, he has “changed”: The young man who once rebuffed army recruiters, saying he wanted only to amass enough rice seed to replant his family’s farm, now talks only of weapons, combat, and the all-important “flag-raising ceremony.” What makes the latter particularly ominous is that Chnay has told her that many new recruits will be sworn in at that ceremony. Sarun has not yet enlisted, but with his new, coldly martial demeanor, it seems almost an accomplished fact.

Stroking the “magic marble,” Dara demonstrates Hope and Courage in the Face of Adversity once again. She takes matters into her own hands to ensure that the families’ dreams are not betrayed by her wayward brother. Knowing that Sarun, as an aspiring soldier, is in awe of Kong Silor, she wrangles a travel pass out of him by threatening to go to the General himself. With this, she and Nea can bring Jantu and the baby back from Khao I Dang in time for the two families to join the caravan for Siem Reap. Sarun, who has finally been made sentry, sees them off with some other guards, but their “reckless” postures strike Dara prophetically as more of a “threat than a protection” (117), foreshadowing Jantu’s wounding and death at their hands. Sarun has told them to avoid the “enemy” camp on the other trail—but, as later events tragically reveal, Jantu is correct that there are very few differences between the warring camps, as far as danger to civilians is concerned.

At Khao I Dang’s hospital, The Effects of War on Civilians are once again explicitly apparent. They see some of the human carnage of the civil war, which is mostly civilians, with a great number of children dying of malnutrition—compounding, for Dara, the insane waste of the Khmer Serei’s greedy misuse of the rice seed. A guide tells them that the deposed Khmer Rouge has been burning the villages’ rice stores in order to keep them out of the hands of the Vietnamese, a madness that further diminishes the difference between the two “Khmer” armies. As Jantu says later on her deathbed, the many factions fighting for control of their country are more or less the “same” in their shortsighted fanaticism and disregard for the plight of ordinary Cambodians.

Many of the hospital’s children are also dying of war wounds. Jantu’s ward-mate Duoic, for instance, has lost both legs to a landmine. Jantu once more demonstrates Friendship and Loyalty by doing what she can to restore his will to live by making him do things for himself (e.g., picking up his water bottle) so he will feel more self-reliant. She has also been doing this for Dara by way of the clay marble, though the younger girl does not realize this until later.

As the girls approach the Khmer Serei camp on foot, Jantu is shot and wounded by one of Sarun’s fellow sentries, embodying The Effects of War on Civilians in the most extreme and tragic form. Sarun, narrowly focused on the empty pageantry of the Khmer Serei, shows little concern for his fiancée’s cousin, refusing to drive her to the hospital until after the morning’s flag-raising ceremony. Sarun’s military-obsessed notion of family and loyalty is becoming as “cold-blooded” as the Khmer Rouge version. He no longer listens to the women in his family (Dara, Nea, or his mother), only to the Khmer Serei’s marching songs and their generically “glib” propaganda about killing the “enemy.”

Though weak and dying, the always-perceptive Jantu intuits that Sarun will not willingly take their families back to Siem Reap in time to plant their crops before the monsoons. If the families do not plant their rice before the rains come, they may be doomed. Jantu tells Dara that she must find within herself the strength to defy her brother, invoking the importance of Hope and Courage in the Face of Adversity. The clay marble, she says, was only a sort of trick to release Dara’s own inner strength: Its only “magic” was in what she brought to it. Dara, she says, must make the next one herself. Listening to her, Dara steps into the role of creator, and begins to mold her family’s future—and by extension, that of Cambodia itself.

The future of Cambodia, Jantu implies, will be rooted in its families, which, as she said much earlier, need to “grow” to replace the many who died under the Khmer Rouge and from the current chaos of the incessant civil wars. Women, the novel suggests, will be the primary architects of this national rebirth. As the dying Jantu drifts off, Dara sings her a lullaby from her childhood, one that Jantu’s mother used to sing: a song about home and dreams and “growing” rice. Like Jantu, she has become a nurturer, dreamer, and artist.