First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by loung ung

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

A heartbreaking and devastating story by Loung Ung. We really do not realise how lucky we are in comparison to some of the horrors others have lived through. This story will remain with me for a long time. Highly recommend.

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Mika_0831

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Na een bezoek aan de Killing Fields in Cambodja, wilde ik graag meer lezen over deze vreselijke periode in Cambodja. Online werd dit boek onder andere aangeraden. En wat een heftig boek zeg. Het boek is geschreven vanuit het perspectief van een 5 jarig meisje (Loung) en wat heeft zij verschrikkelijke dingen meegemaakt.

Ik zou dit boek zeker aanraden aan mensen die meer over Cambodja willen leren. Ik vond het mooi om te lezen hoe zij Phnom Penh beschreef voor het Khmer regime aan de macht kwam (ook omdat ik net daar was geweest). Daarna beschreef zij mooi soms vanuit haar eigen perspectief als kind en soms vanuit een alwetend perspectief, hoe de oorlog verliep. Hoe bruut de moorden waren die om haar heen werden gepleegd. Maar ook hoe mensen werden mishandeld, uitgehongerd en geïndoctrineerd.
Wat een verschrikkelijk stuk geschiedenis. En wat vreemd dat dit stukje geschiedenis in Nederland niet wordt behandeld op school. En wat verschrikkelijk dat mensen zulke dingen bij anderen kunnen doen, onbegrijpelijk…

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yanon

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

This book is a memoir of the experience of living under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, recalled through the eyes of a child who was 5 when the regime took power and 9 when the regime fell.

For me, the strongest part of First They Killed My Father was its beginning, as we get a sense of Loung's happy middle-class family life in Cambodia and then see that reality slowly whittled away by corrupted power into something horrifying. Her family, lice-ridden and starving, are forced into hard labor. Some fall victim to systematic killings. I could not stop thinking of how easy it is for one's existence to be completely transformed by a change in power. How fragile anyone's relative comfort might be.

The bubble burst for me in this book when Loung as narrator first goes "out of body" to imagine what another member of her family, stuck at a different labor camp from the rest of the Ungs, is experiencing near-death. That family member does not survive. Later, it is revealed that events happened in a totally different way from what she imagined. It is then that Loung states that she made up that fantasy to comfort herself about the death.

That bit of narrative trickery, however well-intentioned, took me right back to my college writing courses where we often discussed how to properly reflect truth in memoir. A nonfiction writer should never allow for holes to be poked in the reality of their narrative. I began to fixate on the fact that Loung was 5-9 years old for the entirety of these events, and that the siblings who experienced most of the events with her and could corroborate her story were barely older than she was. I began to wonder how she retained such detail from childhood. I began to question chunks of dialogue, anything more specific than general sensory memory or major occurrences. It doesn't help that these out of body imaginings are weirdly supplemented by anecdotes about how Loung had "psychic" experiences in Phnom Penh before the war, as if to justify the imagined passages.

Know I am not doubting that the events of this book happened, by any means. But I appreciated the fantasy tactic much more when she first prefaced those scenes by saying "this is how I imagined it" - in the case of the death of her father, for instance, which she (thankfully) doesn't witness. It is a rather moving image and illuminates his qualities that Loung so admired.

(A slighter nitpick with this book: there are a lot of typos and grammatical errors. The last thing you want in an emotionally charged moment is to not understand a sentence because there are redundant words left over from a change in sentence structure. Being a compulsive self-editor who writes first like she's racing to a finish line then has to clean up the mess left behind, I usually feel sympathy for this kind of thing. But it's a Harper Perennial publication and I guess I have big expectations for them.)

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VoltCollector

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

There are some things left unlearned from history books. You can read about the Cambodian genocide from many other sources that will explain the facts and statistics in the traditional sterile style that historic texts usually take. You can actually witness the places and things that history has left behind. And then, you can dive into personal accounts of history; how humanity struggles to survive during some of its darkest hours.
While I am usually a sucker for auto/biographical works for the above reason, I have never been held so captive by a book in all my life. I've read many other survivor accounts from other historical periods, but this one disturbed me to no end; such a young child, such horrible atrocities being committed, witnessed, remembered. I could never imagine walking in her shoes at her age. Her story will haunt me forever.
I found that as the hours passed after I began the book, I could not go to sleep without finishing the story, without making sure this child would make it out alright. Of course we know she does survive, how else would the book be written, but I read on as if her life depended on reading the very last word. I finished it just as the sun started to rise and spent those first beautiful rays in complete thanksgiving: how lucky are we, who have lived so well, to be able to learn from those who have not had that chance.

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MarianWizard99

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

Was recommended this a couple of years ago when I visited the killing fields in Cambodia. I cried through the majority of this book. Absolutely devastating story.

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defsoulmate

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

This book broke my heart into pieces...

I read this book for the Diversity in All Forms! book club. If you would like to participate in the discussion here is the link: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

"One of seven children of a high-ranking government official, Loung Ung lived a privileged life in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh until the age of five. Then, in April 1975, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into the city, forcing Ung's family to flee and, eventually, to disperse. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, her siblings were sent to labor camps, and those who survived the horrors would not be reunited until the Khmer Rouge was destroyed."

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LameID

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

تحكي أونج قصة نجاتها من جريمة إبادة جماعية، وهي بعد طفلة في الخامسة من العمر عندما بدأت مأساتها.

الجوع حقيقي في هذه الرواية، ومؤلم جدا؛ له مخالب تبطش، وأسلحة تفتك بالأجساد، وتعبث بالأرواح.

الجرائم التي تحدث حين تطلق يد الجنود أو الميليشيات من غير قيود مرعبة، وهذه الفواجع تتكرر على مر التاريخ. ليتني أستطيع القول أن الإنسانية تقدمت الان بحيث أصبحنا بمنأى عنها.
أفلحت أونج في توصيل معاناة النازحين في الإبادات الجماعية وكوارث الحروب من خلال سردها للنزوح المتكرر لها وعائلتها.

الراوية تتكلم عن تجربتها من وجهة نظرها كطفلة، ورغم أن حكم الخمير الحمر لم يمتد طويلا، إلا أن الأربع سنوات التي حكمت فيها جماعة الخمير الحمر كمبوديا كانت ذات نتائج كارثية على أونج وعائلتها بالإضافة إلى مليونين من الضحايا الذين لقوا حتفهم.
لا تتحدث الراوية عن الدوافع السياسية، وتدعنا نتخبط معها في فهم الدوافع لتفلح تماما في أن ترينا المأساة من عيون طفلة مشتتة، وخائفة، وساذجة، وفي أحيان كثيرة مقاومة وبشدة.
قوة الروابط العائلية، والحب، والكره، والاستغلال، والقتل، واليأس والأمل، والفراق واللقاء، والبحر والبر، والحضارة والهمجية، والجمال والقبح، لكل هذا وأكثر كان له نصيب في هذا الكتاب الصادم والهام.

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joodense

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 25,2025

I did not know much of what happened in Cambodia in the 1970s before I read this book. This book is a first hand account of a girl living during the reign of terror of the Khmer Rouge. This book isn't pretty but it is still one that is important to read.

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First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

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