First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers Paperback – April 4, 2006

It has been more than 40 years since the black-uniformed columns of the Khmer Rouge rolled into Phnom Penh and changed the life of a 5-year old girl named Loung Ung forever. With the benefit of distance, it may be all too easy to dismiss the horrors of that era to a distant corner of memory, or to brush it off as a bizarre aberration of history. That would be a mistake. Communism as an ideology may be bankrupt, but the specter of Utopian extremism lives on. Many young men and women who flock to ISIS today are fired by the same misguided zealotry, the same disdain for common human decency in the name of a supposedly better world, that brought young men and women into the folds of the Khmer Rouge 40, 50, and 60 years ago. In fact, the parallels are chilling - like many leading figures of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban today, the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were by and large teachers. They wrote beautifully, if somewhat naively, of a return to innocent rural simplicity. They impressed their students with their erudition, simplicity of living, and apparent dedication. How can such earnest people do any wrong? Many will find out at the cost of their lives.Loung Ung's autobiography is a moving memorial to all the lives lost in that deranged quest for Utopia. In the eyes of the Angkar (the Khmer Rouge "organization"), liquidating the members of the old regime is but a necessary prelude to building a society of true believers. And if the Angkar believes that each hectare can yield 3 tons of rice (even though the best yield before the war was only 1 ton/hectare), then it must be achievable if everybody just works hard enough. The starry-eyed school-teachers of yesteryear who dreamed of an agrarian paradise had become totally out of touch. And with the absolute power they wielded, nobody was about to tell them otherwise. The result was mass famine as local cadres starved the people to turn in their production quota. As millions perished, the top leadership witch-hunted for "saboteurs" and berated their subjects for lack of revolutionary fervor.Ung's book is full of vivid descriptions and keen observations that bring the vicissitudes of that era poignantly to life. Many passages are naturally cinematic. These include:- Her idyllic family life in pre-KR Phnom Penh. The author was young, but her memory is sharp. Her colourful description of early 1970's Phnom Penh with its many exotic (to an American audience) sights, sounds, and colors is an adventure in itself;- The arrival of the KR in Phnom Penh. A moment of high historical drama, but perhaps the author was too young to remember the details. This is where Chanrithy Him's dramatic account offers some truly memorable moments;- Getting through the KR check points on the way out of Phnom Penh, as KR soldiers systematically rounded up all former members of the old regime. Most would be executed within days;- A widow who took refuge with the author's family, tenderly talking to the baby that she carried with her everywhere, refusing to accept that he was already dead; (p.86)- The ritual brainwashing of children at a child labor camp, with the clapping, the chanting of "Angkar!", the endless repetition of propaganda;- Loung's savage attack against one of her tormentors, a bully in the children's labour camp who despised her because of her light skin. Even as a 7-year old she dreamed of the day when she'd have the power to come back to look for the bullies and "beat them until she was tired". She vowed never to forget. Her sweet-natured sister couldn't understand why she wanted to retain such horrible memories. But as Loung explained, she needed the anger, the thoughts of retribution, to fill the bottomless sadness in her soul.I've always said that anger, or at least righteous indignation, is a much under-rated emotion. It needs to be controlled. It needs to be properly-channeled. But it's the juice that drives much social progress.Finally, a few observations about the author's family background. A few readers took offense at the author's perceived lack of sensitivity. Perhaps she took too much pride in her family's light skin, high status, and economic prosperity. Reading her account of her family's encounter with the villagers in the KR base areas, it's quite evident there was much class resentment and perhaps plain-old jealousy on the part of the country folk. Even to this day many villagers in the old KR base areas seem to recall that era wistfully - Pol Pot's cremation site seems to have become something of a shrine. No doubt the villagers didn't enjoy the regimentation, but it was a topsy-turvy time when poor people like themselves could feel superior to the city folk who probably looked down on them. Not that the Khmer Rouge cadres themselves were particularly holy, of course. Plenty were mere opportunists. The Khmer Rouge village chief who lorded over the "new people" ate better, dressed better, and was apparently not above trading extra food for gold at exorbitant prices. (Ironically his corruption probably saved some lives, because life definitely got a lot harder after Angkar tightened things up and sent more soldiers into the villages.) As for Pol Pot, the young Loung Ung knew almost nothing about him, except that he was "fat" in a country of living skeletons.A postscript: Those readers who are interested in how Loung and her siblings fared after the war may be interested in reading her second book, Lucky Child. While some readers may find the events in her later life less dramatic, I found it equally fascinating to read about her endeavors to come to terms with her past while trying to make a new life for herself in America. Like many children from similar backgrounds, she went through a phase when she attempted to cut all ties with her past (to the point of deliberately avoiding contact with her siblings) and plunged headlong into mainstream American youth culture. As she got older, she discovered that she could only conquer the ghosts of her past by embracing her roots, and to rise above her personal losses (and petty personal vengeance) by making them her life-long cause. While my own life experiences were nowhere nearly as dramatic as Luong's, there are enough similarities that what she wrote rang true to me and resonated. Well worth a read.

A beautiful, heartbreaking memoir from a tender perspective. This book was a vivid way to learn more about that difficult time in Cambodia's history. It allowed me to gain a more cultural and human insight than the more technical books in my library on the Khmer Rouge. Wonderfully written!

This is a moving and gut-wrenching story of the author’s flight from the Khmer Rouge. Her sense of fear of her family being discovered and outed as enemies of the state is palpable and is emotionally conveyed to the reader. I grieved with her at the loss of her family members.Her terrifying description of Pol Pot’s government seemed right off the pages of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Communism should have no appeal for those who see it crawl off the pages of this book. The loss of freedoms, the constant fear, the genocide, the suppression of faith, the mismanagement by the state at the expense of the people is painted perfectly just as the author lived it.Throughout the book, Ung grapples difficult themes of anger, hate, revenge, and justice. Here is a brief sampling:*** “This is what the war has done to me. Now I want to destroy because of it. There is such hate and rage inside me now. The Angkar has taught me to hate so deeply that I now know I have the power to destroy and kill.”*** “Nothing should be this beautiful. The gods are playing tricks on us. How could they be so cruel and still make the sky so lovely? I want to destroy all the beautiful things.”*** “My rage makes me want to live just to come back and take my revenge.”Themes of repentance, forgiveness, or reconciliation are more obscure, but the storyline screams out for them to be there. As a reader, I want them to be there.In the epilogue the author briefly describes some of her post-war activist work, she says, “As I tell people about genocide, I get the opportunity to redeem myself. I’ve had the chance to do something that’s worth my being alive. It’s empowering, it feels right. The more I tell people, the less the nightmares haunt me. The more people listen to me, the less I hate.” Her activist work is commendable. But while her activist work may be a salve for her own conscience, may feel right and may be therapeutic for her hatred, her themes of anger, hatred, vengeance, justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation ultimately go unresolved.Indeed, I don’t believe these themes can be resolved satisfactorily with karma. When admiring a particularly beautiful sunset just before the soldiers took her father away, the young Loung posed this question, “Maybe there are gods living up there after all. When are they going to come down and bring peace to our land?”The answer is that God has already brought peace in the form of his son, Jesus Christ. “For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith (Colossians 1).” Christ bore God’s wrath on the cross on behalf of all those who repent of their sins and believe in him. But for those who refuse to repent of their evil deeds and place their faith in Christ, God is storing up wrath for the day of judgment. Though he is currently forbearing his judgment that more may have time to repent, eventually justice will be meted out to the Pol Pot’s of this world whether they received it in this life or not. Vengeance belongs to God, He will repay.I’m glad Loung Ung wrote this book and I’m glad to have read it—not only for the historical account but for the empathy it gives to the suffering of others in the face of total depravity. I hope the Khmer people find the healing that they need—the healing that is fully satisfying.