Very often, when people are asked to recall genocides in 20th century, Jews Holocaust, Stalin's purge, Rwanda or the Cultural Revolution are the very first things come to mind. People rarely remember the Cambodia genocide (or they have never heard of) as it was always overshadowed by the Vietnam war with no or little media coverage. However, it doesn't mean this is any less painful. I admire Loung Ung for her dedication on telling the world what happened under the rule of Khmer Rogue.

I'm glad that I came across this book while searching for a perfect book on Cambodia history. The author takes us through this event through the eyes of a 5 years old child which make it much easier to digest comparing to any history book. Although this book doesn't elaborate the situation in terms of politics, it entices you to find out more by yourself.

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.)

This was a heart-breaking memoir. It was very difficult to read . . . but imagine how much harder it was to live it.

I’m teaching this powerful memoir in my advanced creative nonfiction workshop, and I’m reminded once again of how crucial it is to read and listen to stories from every corner of the globe. The perspective is of the author from 1975 until 1978, that is the time she was five years old and the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot took over Cambodia, and when the genocide that killed two million Cambodians finally came to an end. I cannot recommend this book enough.

Review-nya jadi curhat dan cerpen ngelantur di sini, hehe
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cerpen part 2
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PS: tengkyu Fel, untuk hibahan bukunya.

This book left me feeling more than a little haunted and reflective. I read this book while on the slow boat from Thailand into Laos, in preparation for my trip down to Cambodia in a couple of weeks time. Reading a first hand account of the atrocities that occurred under the Khmer Rouge in our lifetime was sobering. I had considered myself aware of the nature of Khmer Rouge regime, and knew on a superficial level what happened, but this book was a genuine eye opener on the impact on real families. Although a tale of a dark, horrific struggle for a young girl, a family and a nation, this story also left me in awe of a country who could endure all that they did, then rebuild and forgive. I'm in Cambodia now and am glad that I read this book. I would recommend to anyone considering a trip to Cambodia - have a read of this book to at least get a glimpse of Cambodia's history from not so long ago.

This book is very important to me because it represents the roots of my wife's family. Having visited Cambodia, having seen the pile of bones from the genocide, having heard her family's stories I can't help feeling a vivid pain for all the suffering the Khmer people have to go through because of Pol Pot. A magnitude not second to the holocaust and yet very much unknown to the most. I give this book 4 stars only because at times some passages are hard to read, but i recognize the very powerful and descriptive narratives that painted a clear picture in my head of how much suffering the author had to go through.

This was a powerful memoir of a child's suffering and survival during the horrific reign of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979. I will note that the author was given 100 pages of family history, etc, by one of her much older brothers, because there is no way a child that young would have remembered some of that stuff without help. She was 5 by the Asian way of reckoning age, but less than 4 1/2 by western reckoning when her middle class family was part of the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh.

I'm not going to describe all that happened, since it's something best learned by reading it yourself, but there are very disturbing scenes because it was during a brutal regime, and I would not recommend this for children unless a parent knows for sure that they won't suffer nightmares, etc, from reading it. I say this knowing full well that not all precocious readers are already emotionally equipped to read everything they are capable of reading. One of mine could have, and one of mine couldn't--the other wasn't a precocious reader.

Memoirs like this are so important and not really suited to a starred rating system.

What hit me the most was the author’s vivid account of the agony of starvation and how it is really used as a brutal tool of oppression.

3 stars

This book is written by Looung Ung - as a child - the child that ran from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during the Vietnam Conflict. Ung spent 4 years running with her family. A young child from a family of 7 children she had lived a wealthy life in Phnom Penh until the Khmer Rouge entered their city. During her flee to freedom her family was displaced and separated. She finally ended up in a refugee camp, on a small schooner with many other people and traveled to America to join one of her brothers.

On one hand having read the book Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison I understood more of what Ung was going through. On the other hand I believe that having read that book it also took something away from this book, causing me to rate it lower than I would have.

There is a movie directed by Angelina Jolie with the same name as this book.

Incredible.

The soul shattering story of the Pol Pot decimation of Cambodia / Kampuchea from the viewpoint of a 5 year old girl through to when she was 9 years old! That more powerful as the story is recounted from the viewpoint of a child and that more devastating for the ordeals her and he family, her people underwent.
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It's not the best written book, but that is as much its power as it is meant to be a child's voice. The underlying strength, fortitude and pure doggedness of the survivors is remarkable, as is how their diaspora have mostly prospered. If you know little or nothing about the Cambodian Pol Pot regime, here's a place to start with a ground level view.. literally.
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Thank you Loung Ung for sharing your story, and all your amazing work campaigning against land mines. 9 out of 12.