This year's Cambodian New Year rings in the Year of the Pig, and it's a time for great joy, laughter, prayer and gratitude. Smiling faces and happy people everywhere should, by all rights, come as a puzzling surprise to anyone recalling this same occasion just 32 years ago.

April 17, 1997. The first day of the Cambodian New Year three-day festival that year. Ask any Cambodian over the age of thirty-five who was in Phnom Penh at the time about the day and most will have some version of the same story ...

The morning started out bright, and with plans for the day underway in every home that followed centuries-old traditions. Families were preparing for visits to relatives or an influx of guests in their own homes. Children played in gardens as parents made preparations for the long-awaited events of the day.

Soon, however, loudspeakers were heard as trucks driving though neighborhoods announced that the city was about to be bombed and that everyone must leave immediately. They were told to take only the most essential of items with them, and that they would be returning in three days.

That was how it began. The country became Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot ran the show, and a quarter of the population of Cambodia died between then and the Vietnamese takeover of the country in 1979.

The horrors of the time are well documented. The former high school, S21, is now a genocide museum offering photos of victims by the thousands. Killing fields litter the country, slowly and consistently offering up bones from the mass graves the Khmer Rouge found so efficient. Everyone recalls the message to the people: To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.

One of the hundreds of images now forever engraved on my soul is of a tree at the Choeung Ek Killing Field near Phnom Penh. A sturdy hardwood, it stands today as evidence of a brutality almost unimaginable ... it's the baby-killing tree.

To conserve ammunition, bullets were only used when other methods of killing weren't optimal. Ammo would be wasted on fragile children, so hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little ones were picked up, then swung with great force, their heads bashed against the trunk of this huge tree. To this day, there are baby teeth imbedded in its bark. This was most often done with parents watching, all the better to torture them.

The Khmer Rouge years brought horror beyond belief, and there is virtually no family in Cambodia untouched by the time. Every person in Cambodia alive at the time was either some level of perpetrator or a victim. Everyone.

There is no sane explanation for what happened, and because of that troubling truth the Cambodian people have no doubt that it could happen again. Many keep a bottle of poison handy in the house just in case, as any who lived through that time knows that the greatest act of love would be dosing their entire family before the torture could start again.

And yet ...

This year they celebrate the Year of the Pig, and they celebrate it well! The streets of Phnom Penh are filled with joyous throngs of water-tossing, hopeful, smiling people. Blessings fly like butterflies overhead and the warmth of the Khmer people touches everyone lucky enough to share their holiday.

What amazing country! Confusing, most certainly, complex and more than a little uncomfortable to incorporate into a history so reasonable by comparison, but amazing, nonetheless. Like an endless maze, Cambodia draws you in, keeps you turning corner after corner looking for answers to questions that come faster and furiouser the further in you go, the harder you look.

And how lucky I am to have Cambodia in my heart, my soul and my children. The little bit of me that is now Khmer has somehow made me more human, and for that and so much more I'm forever grateful to the country, and to its people.