The Clay Marble

Minfong Ho’s The Clay Marble is a 1991 young adult (YA) novel set in war-torn Cambodia around the year 1980, shortly after a Vietnamese invasion has freed most of the nation from the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, bringing an end to the Cambodian Genocide. Ho’s novel does not deal explicitly with the horrors of the Genocide, centering instead on the chaotic (but hopeful) aftermath, as a young girl and her family brave the perils of civil war in a quest to reclaim their former lives in their old village.

Ho, a Thai-American who joined the multinational effort to feed and aid Cambodian refugees in the early 1980s, based her novel on some of the children she encountered during this time, some of whom she says molded her a “clay marble” like the one in the story. Her novel explores issues of grief, loyalty, friendship, and the courage to defy authority—including one’s own family—in pursuit of a dream.

This guide refers to the 1991 Square Fish edition of The Clay Marble.

Content Warning: The young protagonists of this story have lost parents and other relatives to genocide, though these deaths are not described in detail. The novel also features graphic descriptions of an injured baby and the fatal shooting of a thirteen-year-old girl.

Plot Summary

In western Cambodia, a family makes its way in an oxcart through a forest, seeking the country’s border with Thailand. It is 1980, and the communist regime known as the Khmer Rouge has recently been toppled by the invading Vietnamese Army. After more than four years of isolation, starvation, forced labor, and summary executions, some partial freedoms (including freedom of movement) have finally been restored, and Cambodians are flocking to refugee camps at the country’s borders in search of foreign aid.

Dara, the novel’s narrator, is a twelve-year-old girl whose country has not known peace or stability since she was two: In 1970, Cambodia’s ruling prince was ousted by a government coup, igniting the Cambodian Civil War. In 1975, the victorious Khmer Rouge reorganized the nation into a network of brutal work camps, causing the deaths of over a million Cambodians, including Dara’s father, who was executed one night for reasons that remain unclear. Of Dara’s immediate family, only she, her mother, and her eighteen-year-old brother (Sarun) have survived. They are on their way to the Nong Chan refugee camp, where (they are told) aid workers will provide them with food and shelter, as well as tools and rice seed to replant their family farm.

At Nong Chan, they meet the survivors of a family from their own region of rural Cambodia: eighteen-year-old Nea, her mother, and Nea’s thirteen-year-old cousin Jantu, who has an infant brother she cares for; the rest of Jantu’s immediate family died in the Khmer Rouge camps. Dara and Jantu become fast friends, as do Sarun and Nea. In fact, Jantu and Dara have hopes that Nea and Sarun will marry, uniting the two families, so they can build a farm together near their old villages.

Jantu possesses an extraordinary talent for handcrafting, which she uses to create ingenious toys out of sticks, straw, cloth, and string. After a bully named Chnay destroys one of her toys, Jantu comforts Dara by molding her a special gift out of clay: a “magic marble” that, she says, will give her courage and guidance in times of trouble. Jantu also uses clay to mold a miniature village of homes, farms, and people to visualize their families’ shared future, one of peace and prosperity, once Nea and Sarun marry. This too is a great comfort to Dara.

One morning, the camp’s peace is shattered by sounds of bombing and shelling near the border. The intermittent war between Cambodia’s Vietnam-controlled government and the various rebel groups has erupted again, and Dara’s and Jantu’s families flee the camp, joining thousands of other refugees flooding into Thailand to seek shelter. However, not long into their journey, Dara and Jantu become separated from their families when an exploding shell scatters the crowd and injures Jantu’s baby brother. Jantu is urged by a Red Cross worker to accompany the baby to a hospital at the nearby Khao I Dang refugee camp. Dara, meanwhile, has no recourse but to return to the Nong Chan camp, where she hopes her family will come looking for her. Before she leaves, Jantu tells her to be strong, and molds her another “magic” marble, one that she says will be more powerful than the first. Dara keeps this marble in her pocket at all times, and later credits it with giving her courage and guidance when she most needed it.

Dara finds her way back to Nong Chan, but there is no sign of her family. The bully Chnay tells her that her family was there just hours earlier, but left when some soldiers told them it was unsafe. Chnay agrees to accompany her to a large army base a few miles to the east, where they are thought to have taken refuge. The base is commanded by General Kung Silor, of the anti-communist Khmer Serei army. Gradually, Chnay becomes Dara’s protector, and even steals food for her at the base, while Dara searches for her family. One day, Kung Silor himself catches them stealing roast chicken from the kitchen tent, and is impressed by Dara’s courage. He gives her a job in the kitchen, where she is horrified to see workers cooking precious rice seed to feed army recruits. She is also shocked to recognize her brother, who earlier showed no interest in joining the Khmer Serei, marching in formation. He has not yet formally enlisted, but seems eager to do so, which would ruin the women’s plans to replant their farm before the seasonal rains come. He shows little interest in bringing Jantu and her baby brother back from the Khao I Dang camp to help facilitate this, and his mother and fiancée cannot stand up to him.

Dara sees that it is up to her to ensure that the two families’ rice is planted in time. Without telling Sarun, she and Nea clean the two oxcarts and load them up with rice seed and farming equipment. She then pressures Sarun into giving her a travel pass so she can bring Jantu and her brother back from Khao I Dang. However, after Dara finds Jantu and the baby at the hospital camp, tragedy strikes: Just as they are returning, on foot, to the army camp, a nervous Khmer Serei sentry shoots Jantu. Sarun, who is part of the same guard detail, refuses the risk of taking Jantu back to the hospital in the dark, and she dies the next morning. First, however, she implores Dara to be true to their dreams, which means standing up to Sarun, who has been seduced by the Khmer Serei camp and its military culture. She tells her that the clay marble was never truly “magic”: It is Dara’s own inner strength and resourcefulness that has been guiding her all along.

Armed with this knowledge and heartbroken by the death of her friend, Dara wins her battle of wills with Sarun by threatening to leave (with Nea and the others) to replant the family farm without him, unless he abandons his plans of enlisting. Unwilling to be left all alone, Sarun relents. The planting is done just in time, and their families, now joined by marriage, have a successful harvest. Ten years pass, and Sarun and Nea now have three children. Dara has a daughter of her own, a toddler, whom she hopes one day to teach to make a clay marble for herself.