The Clay Marble

A prodigiously gifted and strong-willed thirteen-year-old orphan, Jantu becomes the agent of change who allows Dara to discover her inner strength and self-worth after years of trauma and servitude under a totalitarian regime.

Jantu is generous, warm-hearted, and creative, and tenderly looks after her baby brother, the only surviving member of her immediate family. She is also a student of human nature who instinctively helps others to discover their own talents and strengths. From her first appearance, when Dara meets her at the Nong Chan refugee camp, she is clearly someone who goads others into standing up for themselves: Right away, she tests Dara with a slighting remark about her looks, and laughs approvingly when the younger girl rises to the challenge. Later, at the Khao I Dang infirmary, she encourages a disabled boy to be more self-reliant, since she knows that he will not always have others to look after him.

Jantu also demonstrates some piercing insights into the violence that has long plagued their country, describing it as a sort of endless “soccer game” between vengeful or power-hungry men, with no real consideration of the devastating toll on families, especially women and children. Her insights inform Dara’s growing political consciousness, giving her much of the strength and certitude she needs to stand up to her brother.

A virtuoso at modeling toys, dolls, and panoramas out of clay and other found materials, Jantu seems at first almost a magical being to Dara, who reveres her. Jantu is a dreamer, but her dreams have a very practical side: As she tells Dara, the future always begins with a dream. Her clay models help the younger girl visualize a possible future—specifically, a large farm back in Siem Reap, where their two families, united by the marriage of Sarun and Nea, live together in prosperity and happiness.

Sensing Dara’s lack of self-esteem, particularly in the face of her own remarkable talent and self-assurance, she crafts the younger girl a perfectly round marble which she says is “magic.” This marble becomes a source of solace for Dara, as holding it in her hand always seems to give her strength and peace of mind when she needs it most. Later, when Jantu is dying, she tells Dara that the marble is only “clay,” and that the “magic” was only in its making: Now it is time for Dara to mold her own dreams and make her own magic.

Dara’s eighteen-year-old brother, who begins as a sensitive, generous provider for his fatherless family, highlights the seductions of a militarized culture, especially in times of war.

In the early chapters, Sarun, who has recently rejoined his family after escaping from a Khmer Rouge labor detail, seems devoted to his mother and sister and fully shares their dream of restarting the family farm, which was brutally collectivized during the communist regime. It is he who relocates the family from their village in Siam Reap to the Nong Chan refugee camp, to take advantage of the foreign aid pouring into the country at the Thai border. As Dara recounts later: “I remembered my brother’s face, how flushed with hope and wonder it was, when he had shown me that first handful of rice seed as we approached the Border” (102). At the camp, he is quickly smitten by the lovely Nea, Jantu’s cousin, and pursues a shy and somewhat awkward courtship of her, leading to a betrothal that promises to unite the two families in a big shared farm back in Siam Reap.

However, the Cambodian civil war is still far from over, and as the government’s shelling of the border intensifies, Sarun, his mother, and Nea take refuge in a military camp run by the Khmer Serei, one of several resistance forces seeking to overthrow the Vietnam-installed government. Here, Sarun is immersed in the military culture of parades, anthems, propaganda, and infantry drills. Soon he has volunteered for guard duty, and talks excitedly of a “big flag-raising ceremony” in which he will play a small part (116). More and more, his allegiances and ambitions seem to center on the army rather than on his family, whom he now regards dismissively. His personality has changed as well: He carries himself with a new pomposity and aggressiveness, and displays an uncharacteristic selfishness, as when he takes all of the banana fritters for himself. Dara worries that he will not allow them to return to their village in time to sow rice before the monsoons.

When one of his trigger-happy cohorts mistakenly shoots Jantu outside the camp, Sarun seems largely unmoved. He refuses to take her to the Khao I Dang hospital until the morning; when, as a result, she dies, he defiantly announces his decision to enlist rather than become a farmer. Sarun’s transformation from a sensitive family man to a callous, would-be cog in an insignificant militia seems to crystalize everything the dying Jantu said about the corrupt culture of war—and its macho “game” that crushes civilians (especially women and children) underfoot. Devastated by the loss of Jantu, Dara finds herself hating her brother, and makes up her mind to defy him in order to save her family.