"The cost of war is a lifelong legacy borne by children"

Chanrithy Him may not be the most engaging writer (granted she's not even writing in her primary language), but this is a story everyone should read. Every bit as horrifying as WWII it is a story of loss, trauma, resilience and endurance. It's beyond my comprehension how some lives can be filled with such tragedy and it's astonishing what can be overcome. A dreadful piece of history we should continue to learn from.

I read this for class. I even heard "Map" talk about his experiences.

It's been several years since I read it, so I don't really remember all of it (hence 3 stars). But I loved the story behind the title, which is explained somewhere in the book.

Mình biết đến cuốn hồi ký này từ lúc dự định đi Cambodia, và sau đó đọc, và sau đó đi. Như nhan đề, nó kể về cuộc đời của tác giả sống dưới thời Khmer Đỏ, từ khi là một cô bé con sống sung túc, đến ngày PhnomPenh thất thủ, rồi lay lắt tới khi may mắn vượt biên sang Thailand rồi được bảo lãnh sang USA.

Chế độ cực quyền Cộng sản đỏ đã bóp nghẹt đời sống người dân Cambodia, bóp nghẹt cả thể chất lẫn tinh thần. Ở đó, thời đó, không có quyền được học và không một kẻ trí thức nào được sống sót. Ở đó không có tình cảm gia đình, không mẫu tử, không anh chị em, chỉ có đồng chí. Ở đó làm việc là để phục vụ cách mạng, làm đến chến thì thôi, không nghỉ...

Pol Pot mang lý tưởng chủ nghĩa xã hội theo hướng cực đoan, hệ quả là diệt chủng. Mình có ghé qua thăm Cánh đồng diệt chủng ở Cambodge, những hình ảnh mình tưởng tượng ra từ cuốn sách cộng với hình ảnh mình tưởng tượng ra từ lời thuyết minh, thật hết sức hãi hùng. Lịch sử đã ghi dấu những cuộc diệu chủng, hoặc lịch sử đã bị giới cầm quyền che đậy, nhưng tội ác của con người gây ra cho con người thì không thể xóa nhòa được trong lòng chính con người.

When Broken Glass Floats

Chanrithy, or shortly Thy, shares in detail the daily life under the Khmer Rouge. Famine, death, sickness and futile violence become common. To survive Chanrithy meanders between a rule-follower and a creative problem-solver to stay out of the hands of both the Khmer Rouge and death. Still, more than half of her family does not make it to the end of the regime. This serves as an incredible motivation for Chanrithy to survive, and to study English and medicine.
Her testimony tells about deep evil and yet the resilience of the human spirit through suffering and violence.

This is a memoir of Chanrithy Him, a Cambodian girl who was just a child when the Khmer Rouge began their takeover. The book is written from a child's perspective, so a lot of the material is presented in an innocent manner and without a lot of political detail. A lot of times, people view wars in the context of military numbers and casualties, troop movements, and politics. Perhaps it is easier to think of only those things than it is to consider what people on the ground in these towns are enduring. It must be simply horrible to live through the noise and uncertainty and danger. The images of death and torture that people are subjected to must certainly affect them long term. The author bio on the book says that the author went on to study post traumatic stress in Cambodians in the years after the war. This was not my favorite historical nonfiction book of the year, or even that I have read this month, but it was moving and thought provoking.

I started reading this book back in 2011, but stopped because it was so upsetting. I decided to pick it back up to finish recently, starting where I had stopped, which was apparently right before things became a bit less upsetting. This is a book that should definitely be read - it is powerful and well-written, but it is incredibly upsetting, depicting life for Cambodians when the Khmer Rouge took over. The story is one that should be known.

Normally, I can't wait to get to bed. I can't wait to lie in bed and read. The house is quiet, the kids are asleep, the tv is off - just quality time with a book. But when reading this book, reading wasn't always pleasant. This is really not a book you read to to enjoy it or to be pulled into another world and explore it. I read this in part because my boyfriend recommended it, in part because we sponsor a child in Cambodia and in part because I didn't know much about the Khmer Rouge and wanted to learn.
This is the story of Chanrithy Him and her family, her parents and seven siblings. This is her story of how it was growing up in a Cambodia, torn apart by the Khmer Rouge. What this family is put through is truly dreadful. There are passages where you just question how any human being is cable of inflicting such suffering on others - or how anyone manage to survive it all.
Chanrithy tells engagingly about how she and her family is forced to leave their home and find their way out of the city, ending up in various villages in the country as they move along. Very quickly her father is executed - being a man of learning, he was not wanted by the Khmer Rouge who sought to create a society where all was equal and where anybody with any education was a threat to be eliminated. After being forced to dig his own grave, her father is killed with a hoe ...
Her mother is then the sole caretaker of the family but most of the children are forced to work, sometimes being sent to work camps far away on their own and never given enough to eat. The lack of food and the very hard work naturally have an impact on their health, inflicting various diseases on them or causing rather minor diseases to become much more critical.
One of the hardest things for me to read was the story of how her three-year old brother lies in hospital, dying, and how all he wants - of course - is his mother. But she is too sick to be able to walk to the hospital to see him so he ends up dying without his mother visiting him - and when he has died, his sister takes his shirt off him because the family needs that for another child...
Also, the story of Chanrithy's other little brother who does survive the Khmer Rouge is heartbreaking since he is too young to really understand what's happening - but not too young to feel the suffering and the hunger - and is left too fend for himself all day when his older family member are working in the fields.
An execution of a pregnant woman is also a scene that stays with me.
Although we are all more or less desensitized to stories of human suffering, war crimes, and killings, the Khmer Rouge were so cruel that parts of this story really shocked me. And as if the physical suffering they inflicted on the people of Cambodia wasn't enough, they also tried to eliminate the culture by minimizing the importance of family, the polite ways of addressing others - and of course killing off anybody who in any way caught their displeasure.
One thing I was really impressed with in Chanrithy's memoirs is the fact that she does tell stories about some members of the Khmer Rouge who was kind and helpful, caring and friendly. She does share how some of them helped her in various ways - some of them just by being kind and showing some humanity.
This is a dreadful history of a truly tragic period of human history. I would like to conclude by saying something along the lines that if you don't know history, you are doomed to repeat it, but sometimes I fear that these various tyrannic regimes actually take notes from each other so that they constantly evolve and each new regime becomes even more horrible than the one before, capable of inflicting even more suffering.
Still, knowledge is a good thing - unless of course you are living in a country ruled by Mao, the Khmer Rouge or other regimes hating education and knowledge. For us, fortunate enough to live in countries where we have the freedom to do pretty much whatever we wish for, in some ways we have a duty to honor the people suffering in other countries by at the very least reading about their plights.

I think people are generally reluctant to give this book a low rating due to it's subject matter. Seeing as how the author actually experienced the atrocities she described it would be a pretty low blow to critique a book that is essentially her story as she experienced it.
However it needs to be said that the writing was pretty juvenile. The dialogue is really stilted and the characters were pretty undeveloped. A really complex situation was pretty much boiled down to bad guys vs good guys with the good guys being people in her family or who she befriended and the bad guys being all of the Khumer Rouge. I am in no way saying that the work she is doing and the writing of the book are not valuable.Both endeavors shed light on the atrocities ordinary Cambodians faced under Pol Pot which is important for people for whom this conflict seems too far , too long ago and too foreign to know about. Having said that, I think the book would have definitely benefited from some structural upgrades.

The descriptions of her family members were not very detailed or compelling. I always find it hard to endure descriptions of people that center on only the positive things about them. People are multifaceted and complex. Everyone, even the stoic matriarch would have had flaws or weaknesses that I think are worth mentioning because they are easier to relate to. In this case, I found it hard to relate to the author's family both because of the details she chose to share and the heavy use of romanized Cambodian through the text. This was unnecessary and distracting.

The main criticism I have of this memoir is that it fails to give a context to her experiences. The average person reading this kind of book probably lacks sufficient historical knowledge to be able to make sense of the events that transpired. I got a sense that the author wrote this work in a large part as a way to make sense of her experiences and give them voice so that she could make peace with her past. I think that is very valuable, but I couldn't help thinking that part of making peace is getting some perspective on what transpired. I felt that this work did not communicate that. It ended as abruptly as it started.

I would have loved to have more background on the rise of the Khumer Rouge movement, the role of the US and it's containment policy that lead to the war in Vietnam and well as the role of the neighboring countries like Thailand. This was necessary in that it would help explain the motivations of the revolutionaries as well as the resistance movement in Cambodia. Going forward, this would have helped contextualize her experiences in the refugee camps as well because Thailand's involvement was key to establishing trade, markets and a sense of normalcy for the Camboidian refugees living close to the border. It was not , however, a perfect relationship as many Thai people revictimized the refugees by trafficking them or treating them unfailrly as evidenced by several anecdotes from the story. Again I cannot speak confidently on this topic because it was not elaborated upon in any great detail and was not put into context.

There were so many parts of the book that I felt needed elaboration. She hinted at issues that would have made for a more compelling read. One example is the role of semi collaborators like the man who helped the author obtain food and who seemed to be empathetic to her plight. Who were these people? Were they the exception to the rule, or were acts of furtive kindness pervasive through the cruelty of the revolution? I have to admit I want to believe the latter but as Him didn't really say much about that aspect of her story other than to express gratitude, I have to read additional books on the subject.

Him also hints at the cultural legacy of the period and how transformative it was for the mentality of the people. This is crystallized when Him has the courage to stand up for herself in class when accused of plagarism. She notes that the revolution allowed people to step outside the Confucian hierarchies that had defined inter generational communication. Without the revolution, without having gone through what she went through she would have never talked to an elder in that way despite being in the right. Other times there appears to be a nostalgia, a comfort when people address her using traditional Cambodian greetings which always take into account the speaker's social position relative to the receiver's. I sensed there is more to this ambivalence about cultural shifts resulting from the revolution than Him addressed. But those can not be spoken about without acknowledging the complexity of the situation and of people's experience. These issues require a more detailed, informed analysis that the one Him provides the readers with in this book.

Without providing much of a context for the events she describes, Him works tends to put the reader outside the situation, like a person morbidly observing a car crash. I get that this recreates how it must have felt for the ordinary people involved, but it does little to educate the general public reading about it today. Without contextualizing her experiences, the book is just an array or tear inducing memories.

A heart wrenching, captivating personal account about the Khmer Rouge. Him's account of her and her family's life under the Pol Pot regime was vivid, extraordinary and brutal. I went through a rollercoaster of emotions and cried. A definite must read.

I was pretty clueless about the Cambodian genocide under the rule of the Khmer Rouge. We were headed to Cambodia a few years ago and a friend suggested this book. Don't read this book in public. I wept like a baby when I read of the torture and loss of this sweet little girl. She is actually close to my age and has lived many lives. I came away from this book not only educated, but grateful, sad, disgusted and amazed at the will to live. God does hear our prayers. Chanrithy writes with such power and so matter of fact--I think every teenager and up should read this--the Holocaust seems so long ago, yet this happened during the 70s. I would not recommend children read this book.