FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER
By LOUNG UNG
New York: HarperCollins Press 2000. 238 pages, $23
WHEN BROKEN GLASS FLOATS
By CHANRITHY HIM
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. 330 pages, $23.95
Felicity Wood
One of the most striking sights I saw at Angkor Wat in 1996 was children's graffiti. At the top of one of the temples, a child had drawn an army tank and helicopter. What was the story behind this child's drawing, I wondered. First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats, two books written by survivors of the Pol Pot regime, begin to answer my question.
Nixon's bombing of Cambodia in 1970 marked Chanrithy Him's fifth year on this planet and Loung Ung's first. Each author cites a different motivation to survive the devastation of her childhood. Him wanted to live to help people overcome sickness, while Ung wanted revenge. Today, they both reside in the United states. Chanrithy Him interviews other Cambodians for the Khmer Adolescent Project, researching post-traumatic stress disorder. Loung Ung is the national spokesperson for "Campaign for a Landmine-Free World," a program of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.
Ung's and Him's stories make the people who suffered under the complicated aftermath of Nixon's bombings as familiar as your own little nieces, if you can imagine them eating stolen fish guts heated in smoldering ashes or pushing corpses out of an eddy before collecting drinking water. The authors tell the story, on a personal level, of millions of Cambodian victims and survivors of the Pol Pot era.
After the bombings of 1970, the authors of these books continued their lives in Phnom Penh as relatively well-to-do little girls. Ung threw tantrums for bonbons in the living room. Him's father dispensed medicine for her asthma and shampooed the family dog, a collie. The bombings, intended to flush out Vietcong troops from Cambodia's border areas, provided the Khmer Rouge with a platform in their campaign for power. While Ung and Him watched their older sisters iron school uniforms or their mothers put on ruby earrings to go shopping, the Khmer Rouge developed a vision of a pure Cambodia, one uncorrupted by foreign influence. This vision excluded education, capital enterprise, foreign aid, and colorful clothes. The families of Cambodia were not prepared for the devastation to come.
Him, looking back, writes of the Cambodia of her early years,
. . . the same thing that has been going on in our childhood game of kick-the-can has been escalating throughout the country, on a grand, and dangerous, political scale. . . . Just as neighborhood children size up their teams, picking the strongest players, so the Khmer Rouge have been sizing up their allies. Who to pick? Who can run the fastest? Communist China? Russia? Certainly it cannot be France or the United States. In the midst of all this Cambodia has become the coveted tin can.
If Cambodia was the tin can, Him and Ung were helpless sardines inside. Both of their fathers worked for the Lon Nol government. The U.S.-backed Lon Nol allowed the bombings in Cambodia, a decision for which the Khmer Rouge brought him down. Anyone who had worked for his government was, to the Khmer Rouge, the enemy.
Him's father was a customs officer who also owned several bicycle taxis which he rented out to pedicab drivers. He was doubly guilty in Khmer Rouge eyes-for working for Lon Nol and for being a capitalist. Ung's family also bore a double crime. Her father was a policeman under Lon Nol, and her mother a "foreigner," originally from China.
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge invaded Phnom Penh and took over the country. The pampered children who started out complaining because they had to carry a rice pot learned over the next four years to lie and steal. They see their fathers taken away by soldiers. They experience their bellies swell up from lack of food.
Ung particularly, describes vivid horrors: corpses, near-rape, how she imagines her parents were killed. In one of the last chapters of her book, she describes her thoughts while looking at a Khmer Rouge prisoner at one of the refugee camps:
The prisoner glances up. He looks scared now. His eyes are squinting and his lips move as if to mutter something, but he decides against it and purses his lips shut. Sweat pours from his face, slides over his Adam's apple, and soaks his shirt. He bends his head, looks down at his feet again, knowing there is no way out. His government has created a vengeful, bloodthirsty people. Pol Pot has turned me into someone who wants to kill. . . . The old woman's hands shake as she raises the hammer high above her head and brings it crashing down into the prisoner's skull. He screams a loud, shrill cry, that pierces my heart like a stake, and I imagine that this, maybe, is how Pa died.
Despite the dreadful events described in the books, both First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats have a "and then, and then" feeling to them, much like a story from an eight-year-old. While themes run throughout-their love for their fathers, Him's determination to study medicine to help people, Ung's violent hatred for the Khmer Rouge-there is a lack of build-up, of climax and denouement to these books. Perhaps that is not to be expected of memoirs, particularly with protagonists as young as these. Him's book relies on footnotes and brackets to explain Cambodian terms in the text, while Ung's relies on the story itself to make these meanings apparent. Many of the chapters in Him's book begin with historical quotations from newspapers. While these are useful chronological markers of political events, they also interrupt the story.
It must have been grueling for these authors to systematically review their survival of the Khmer Rouge and to document it for us. I imagine them feeling better for it-and, at times, much worse.
Felicity Wood, formerly executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ho Chi Minh City, is now a graduate student in international development at UCLA's School of Public Policy and is writing a book about Vietnam in the 1990s.