Remembering the Other 25th Anniversary
Cambodian ‘killing fields’ survivor writes family valediction in new book
By Janet Dang

When they killed my father I knew that it was real,” Luong Ung remembers. “I knew that it was never going to be back to normal.”

Ung was only six when her father was taken away by members of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. They said he would return the next day. Three days later, he was killed.

“In my mind, I always thought that my father was going to come back and resume a normal life.

“With both your parents around you,” she says, “you can always, always still have a little bit of childhood. When my father was killed, there was no longer a childhood. I was no longer a child.”

Twenty-five years after the one event that undoubtedly shaped most of her childhood, Ung, who is among those that survived the “killing fields” in Cambodia, has since written a book titled, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers.

Anywhere between half a million to 2 million Cambodians died between 1975 and 1979 when the Khmer Rouge overtook the country under Pol Pot’s leadership. The Khmer Rouge’s reign could arguably be one of the most notable genocides since World War II.

The guerrilla movement, using the destablization of Cambodia after the U.S. extension of the Vietnam War into that country, took the capital city of Phnom Penh in April 17, 1975. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the brutal killings.

Under the new regime, people were removed from their homes and put into the countryside for a massive re-education program. At the same time systematic killing of those associated with earlier governments began. Any man, woman or child who was seen as a threat, or who refused to obey orders was killed. Ung’s father was among those who lost their lives.

Ung, now 30, never sought to write a book about her experiences of losing her family and childhood to a civil war. She wrote it because she had to. After coming to the United States in 1980 at the age of 10, she struggled for several years to blend into a white community in Vermont, where she, her brother and sister-in-law re-settled and tried to occupy a “normal life.” Years of trying to obliterate memories of her war-ravaged homeland left Ung realizing that even while she had survived the war, she could not move forward unless she claimed her past.

“I can make sure I talk about it, write about it, or cry about it at my own place or [if] I just put it inside me and stuff it and stuff it, then it comes out at an inopportune time,” like if someone reminded her of her sister, or if the weather was particularly nice and it made her think of home, she says.

In a revealing and candid talk about her survival, Ung, who is of Cambodian and Chinese descent, shared private stories that shaped most of what remained of her childhood since the war. Half of her family—both her parents and two sisters—had been killed or died of starvation or disease. Ung wound up at an orphanage labor camp and was later moved to a military camp and trained to kill as a child soldier.

When she did make it to the United States, everything from the weather, to the food she ate, to the way other children viewed her as an exotic foreigner, made the transition almost unbearable.

“There was nobody like me. No other Asian kids,” Ung remembers, “they not only didn’t know Cambodia, they think Cambodia is all of Asia. They think Asia is somewhere in China.”

The summer she arrived in Vermont, her sponsors took her to a Fourth of July fireworks display with its thunderous explosions. “This, when I just came out of a war,” she says.

“This is Vermont. It is still the whitest state in America.” Ung says, and pauses to find the words to describe how she felt. Finally she adds, “It was very, very traumatic.” She lets out a chuckle at the understatement.

There was a point in her life when Ung became self-destructive, banging her head on hard objects just to “have amnesia,” though she won’t say that she did it because she wanted to hurt herself.

“It wasn’t to hurt myself as much as to forget myself,” she says.

Nightmares of being chased and killed continue to mar what’s left of the memories of her adolescence. And even when she tried to talk to a school counselor about her trauma, she would vomit.

“That’s not a good thing,” she says, and laughs again.

Her English teacher had told her that if she can’t talk about it, then write about it. So she did. She wrote about it every day in her journal since she was 16. These journal entries later became the first draft of her book.

Today Ung looks fresh, vibrant and determined. Whatever emotional scars she may have had remain hidden under a brimming smile and bright eyes. The book she has written is only a small part of her commitment to draw attention to the “forgotten war.”

Ung has been traveling, partly for her book tour, but more importantly for conferences in which she advocates for the abolition of landmines—which continue to kill and maim Cambodians—child labor and for a trial of Khmer Rouge leaders.

Writing, Ung admits, is not her profession, nor is it her passion.

“Writing is a tool,” she says matter-of-factly. By profession, she is the national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World. The speaking tours are ways for her to continue her advocacy work.

“The book tour, the lecture tours allow me to heal. In the end it’s very difficult to do. If I have the choice, I don’t know if I would choose to speak out,” she says.

But Ung says she has no choice.

“You either speak out about it or you do what you can to heal your own soul, or else it’s going to break.”

Though one of Ung’s sisters was the first to die, it was the death of her father, and then later her mother that left her with a permanent sense of loss.

“Losing a sibling is not like losing a parent,” she says. With her father around, “there was magic in the world.” When her sister died, she still had hope that things would return to normal. The death of her father, she later realized, “ended my childhood more than the war did.” Her book, she says, is less about war than it is about loss, “the loss of love, the loss of innocence, the loss of family.” It had been about a year after the Khmer Rouge invaded the country that her father was killed. But since the regime outlawed clocks, watches, calendars and other devices to tell time, Ung is not sure of the exact date.

Ung is the youngest of eight children. Her father was a prominent political figure in Cambodia—he was a former member of the Cambodian Royal Secret Service under Prince Sihanouk.

For the first five years of her life, she knew only of a protected and privileged lifestyle in Phnom Penh. But by 1978, both her parents had died, as well as two of her sisters. Ung and what’s left of her family had been living as peasants, subsisting on roots, leaves, small animals and insects.

When she was 8 years old, she separated from her family and found her way to an orphanage labor camp. She was removed shortly after to a military camp where children like herself were brainwashed and trained to shoot and kill as soldiers. For years, she says, she thrived on the hate and anger the Khmer leaders had instilled in her.

“Until I wrote the book, life consisted of two emotions: either you are numbed or you are enraged. You just hate. I hated the government, the soldiers who came to take my father with their guns,” she says.

“I never realized that there were many other emotions.” Even though the book had its events amid the tragedy of war, Ung says it was more than that.

“It’s mostly a book about love in that I wrote often about my parents, my family, my brothers and my sisters and that I was always thinking about them. And that their love for me and my love for them came through in the book.

“In the end it was my family’s love and sacrifices that kept me alive and not the hate that I thought made me so strong.”

It was for her family that she eventually completed her book. Ung says that she wanted the book to be read by her nieces who grew up in the United States not knowing anything about her family’s or her homeland’s past.

“I wanted to introduce them to their grandparents and aunts and relatives [who] they don’t know and [whom] they will never meet. To let them know that before we were in a war, before we were war victims, before we were survivors, before we were refugees, we had houses, we had food, we had music, we had beauty. I wanted them to know we had a very full culture. That we were not only defined by the war, that we had a life before the war.”