Two families in two different countries claimed this wild girl was their vanished daughter
Found in Cambodia, she could not speak to explain herself
In 1989, an eight-year-old girl vanished while tending to her family’s buffalo in northeastern Cambodia near the Vietnamese border. Her father, Sal Lou, searched with the chief of police for two years, but found no trace of of the girl.
Nearly two decades later, rumors began to swirl. A wild, naked woman had been spotted creeping into the village at night to scavenge for food. When Lou heard the story, he knew with absolute certainty that it was his daughter, Rochom P’ngieng, by then 27 years old.
She had been living in the wild for almost 20 years, he said.
Lou crouched in a clearing near the edge of the jungle where the woman had last been seen. After several hours, she emerged. He tempted her with rice and fish. When she finally approached, Lou claimed that she asked for her mother and walked upright.
A police officer interviewed by the French press told reporters, “She is strange. She looks half-human and half-animal. She is like a wild person.”
In papers all over the world, people would call her the “mowgli girl,” a reference to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book about a boy raised by animals. She was, according to a Japanese newspaper, “the most famous Cambodian woman in the world.” But as the years went on, there would be many reasons to doubt Lou’s version of events.
The feral child’s return to civilization is one of our most enduring fantasies, appearing across the globe and in everything from ancient mythology to modern children’s books. In these stories, the feral child is a powerful ambassador to civilization from a natural world we have lost.
But the reality was no fairy tale. The woman who emerged from the jungle was terribly incapacitated, developmentally delayed, and listless. Her eyes were vacant. She was mostly unresponsive, even to loud noises, though occasionally she smiled or laughed. She spent most of her time huddled in corners alone. Many would attribute her state to her years spent in isolation and the traumatic reintroduction into the human world.
At night, she tried to escape and her family had to restrain her. Perhaps due to experience with starvation, she ate heartily, refusing to allow people to take food from her, even going after food that had fallen on the floor. She was utterly incapable of communication beyond her basest needs. To signal that she was hungry, she would rub her stomach or cover her mouth when full. She spoke no Khmer, though she did occasionally babble to herself in a language of her own invention. It seemed impossible that this woman had ever walked upright or asked for her mother.
After she emerged, many reasonable people began to wonder how a girl in her condition could possibly survive in the wild for nearly two decades. As the Jonathan Watts explained in the Guardian, “her feet do not look like the feet of someone who has been walking for years in the jungle.”
People wondered if in fact this could possibly be this family’s daughter. The girl had been healthy and functioning. Other examples of feral children hadn’t been able to speak because they had been too young when they entered the while and had missed the “window” for language. Lou’s daughter was eight and spoke Khmer when she left, meaning she should have been able to regain language. This seemed more than just trauma — but something congenital.
To her family, there was no question that this was their daughter. They recognized scars on her body. “Of course she is my daughter,” said her mother, Rochom Soy. “I recognise her face. She looks like her sister. Now that she is back home, I sleep better and I have regained my appetite.” Her father offered to do a DNA test to prove that the woman was in fact his child, but when Watts offered to arrange this, he made excuses.
There were other factors beyond wishful thinking. “In this area some locals are prepared to pay money — a homage, they say — to a woman blessed by the spirit of the jungle,” Watts wrote. “Reporters are, more prosaically, simply asked for cash in return for interviews.”
Watts speculated that what actually happened to Rochom was exactly the opposite of the feral child fantasy. Rather than being a paragon of freedom, Rochom had been a captive. Indeed, many of the feral children mythologized over the years were actually tragic cases of confinement, children locked in rooms, chicken coops, or dog dens by alcoholic, abusive, or negligent parents. Watts noted that scars on her left arm could be those of a woman tied up, either as a slave or as a way to control a mentally ill person. “With almost non-existent medical facilities,” Watts wrote “it is not unknown for families here to keep people with mental illnesses on a leash.”
Almost a decade after Watt’s visit, there would be a second, startling twist. Another family claimed that in fact, Rochom was their long lost daughter. The father, a Vietnamese police officer who lived just across the border, said Rochom was mentally ill and had run away from the family in 2006. According to his story, this would mean Rochom had only been missing for a year — a more believable amount of time. Her Vietnamese father reported realizing she was alive when he saw her picture in Facebook posts. By this point, her Cambodian father had been dead for three years and Rochom was 39. She had been living with her Cambodian family for a decade.
Her Vietnamese father provided the necessary documentation to prove that Rochom was his daughter. In August of 2016, her Cambodian brother took her to Vietnam, where they handed her over to her new family. Rochom’s true history will likely never be known, as the girl never learned to speak and remains locked in silence.
