Never Fall Down

Arn runs blindly through the dark woods and feels like he’s back in the Cambodian jungle. He walks until he gets to a highway and wishes a truck would speed by and hit him. He feels trapped between a new life he feels he doesn’t deserve and an old life he feels he can’t escape. Arn finds a motel and falls asleep on the floor until people yell at him to get out.

Outside, in the fog, Arn sees the people who have passed through his life: “I see my sister, my little brother; I see people walking to the mango grove—the old music teacher, the prisoner with hands tied behind—people that been shot, people I kill, all ghost, floating” (205).

Through the fog, he then sees a police car with flashing lights. Arn thinks he will take the policeman’s gun and shoot himself, but when the policeman approaches him, Arn throws his arms around him and tells him he wants to go home.

At home, Peter wraps Arn in a blanket. Arn tells Peter in Khmer that his heart is full of hate. He asks Peter why he has been allowed to live when so many others have died, when he has done so many bad things. Peter tells Arn that he is the chosen one, who will tell the story of what happened in Cambodia to help save others and save himself.

The chapter opens in 1984. Arn is twenty years old. Arn has been in the U.S. for five years, during which time he has learned English and graduated from high school. Now Arn is speaking in New York City in front of ten thousand people. Desmond Tutu, James Taylor and a reporter from The New York Times are among the guests.

Arn talks about his life before the Khmer Rouge and what happened after they came to his town. He talks about never being reunited with his family, whom he assumes are dead. The story begins to pour out of him, “about the kid dying from no food, the ax hitting the skull, the people calling to me from the grave” (210), and he begins to cry for the first time in ten years. After he finishes speaking there is silence, then thunderous applause, and he realizes the audience is crying with him: “And finally, the tiger in my heart, he lay down a moment and rest” (211).

The Epilogue describes Arn Chorn-Pond’s life after the events of the novel. He has been speaking about the Cambodian Genocide since 1984 and founded the nonprofit organization Children of War. His speaking has attracted the attention of celebrities like Sting, Peter Gabriel and Bruce Springsteen, and heads of state, including Jimmy Carter. In the 1980s and 1990s, Arn returned to Cambodia many times to visit refugee camps and negotiate for the release of prisoners still held by the Khmer Rouge.

Through Arn’s nonprofit work, he was reunited with members of his family and friends who survived the genocide. His sisters, Maly and Jorami, and his aunt had survived, though his aunt passed away shortly after their meeting. Others who survived include Kha and Siv, Runty, Sombo, and Koong. His sisters, Chantou and Sophea, and his little brother, Munny, did not survive.

Arn found Mek, his former music teacher, living on the street in his hometown of Battambang. In 1998, Arn established Cambodian Living Arts so that master musicians like Mek could travel the country and teach the younger generation traditional music that otherwise would have been lost. Arn’s adoptive brothers Sojeat and Ravi still live in the U.S. Peter Pond continued his outreach for Cambodia and eventually adopted seventeen Cambodian children.