First They Killed My Father: A Daughter Of Cambodia Remembers (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
I feel bad I didn't love this book--maybe I've been jaded by too many tales of misery and atrocity. Or maybe it's just reading this so soon after Egger's What is the What about Sudan or for that matter after Vaddey's The Shadow of the Banyan, also about this period, this book has a lot to live up to. I admit I'm someone who finds it hard to just go with the flow of the practice of memoirs written with the immediacy of a novel. I just don't find it credible--especially in this case where it's written from the point of view of a very young child narrator. Ung was only five years old when the Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated her city of Phenom Pehn, less than eight when she was trained to be a soldier. The book is also written in the very literary fiction present tense, with events she didn't experience but could only imagine told through the gauze of italics. I wished at times she had told the story straight--it doesn't need to be tarted up. Or that like Vaddey or Eggers, she had written this as a novel, and not claimed this as memoir. Interestingly, Ung addresses some of these issues in her afterward about writing the book. She says she takes offense at those who feel someone so young would not remember--wouldn't even feel the trauma. She wanted to give voice to a child going through such experiences. She also defended the use of present tense. She said she originally tried to write this in the past tense, but felt that "by writing in the past tense" she was protecting herself. That she needed that immediacy. But I actually think present tense--unless handled very, very skillfully--attracts attention to itself, and so can be more distancing than the past tense.That said, this did give a day to day sense of life under the Khmer Rouge I didn't get either from the film The Killing Fields nor Veddey's novel In the Shadow of the Banyan. Part of that is because being partly Chinese, Ung experienced racism and had to hide her background, even her skin color, to avoid "ethnic cleansing"--giving her a different perspective than I've heard in other stories of this period. She spoke of the favor given to "Base People"--those native Khmer from the countryside who had been there for generations, as opposed to the "new people" driven there from the cities. And she certainly gave a vivid, harrowing account of hunger--from the physical effects to what it drives you to. Despite my criticism, this is definitely a remarkable story of survival.
I, literally, abandoned this book half-way through. I may not be an expert on good prose but I definitely recognize when I am NOT privy to such. This novel rests on the fact that it is an account of real events. A people's version of one of the "greatest-atrocities-of-the-twentieth-century." I don't intend to demean the subject matter here, but a lot of this book regurgitates, unquestioningly, a textbook understanding of the Khmer Rouge. The author blantly inserts generic socio-political backstory via her father's character and... dammit it's annoying! Most memoirs tend to really get under my skin. It is bad enough now that so many people hold this democratic notion that everyone has a story to tell. Sure, such may be true, but most people can't tell a story.* Even worse, as is the case here, is when the author has such a compelling story that it is virtually an individual right to recount the events and a moral directive that we appreciate the text. The imperative of most memoirs of this type is a reductionist, monolithic, unreflexive projective vomit of "facts" where only the "truth" is of value.** To be fair to this author, however, her writing is not as bad as a lot of memoirs. I'm giving her book two stars but I tend to be a harsh grader anyway. Just because I don't appreciate the book-as-written does mean that I am not engaged by horror and sorrow at what she has lived through under the Khmer Rouge.For something more didactic regarding Cambodia circa 1975-1979, read "Sideshow" by William Shawcross.Be careful, though, it's a little dated (yes, he refers to Cambodians as a "sensual race") and it also purports to be nonfiction. It doesn't suffer from some unblinking sense of entitlement, however. Shawcross is true journalist; an outsider to the story. He's not speaking from a point of unimpeachable privilege, he's not telling his story, but just a story and he's backing it up with research and careful analysis, as well as, managing to take out all the bullshit rhetorical devices.* no, I cannot write either (and, yes, I am bitter).** On this subject, I like "The Hazards of Memoir Writing" by Edward Said. Said responds to some of his critics about "erroneously" reconfiguring the past in narrative.
What do You think about First They Killed My Father: A Daughter Of Cambodia Remembers (2006)?
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.
—Apple
This is one of the most powerful books I've read. It's an autobiography of a young girl and her family during the oppressive Pol Pot regime. I traveled to Cambodia last year with only a faint idea of what the Khmer Rouge was and of what actually happened in that country in the late 1970s. Loung Ung's story is a story is one of survival. If it weren't, it would be too heartbreaking to bear.Under Pol Pot, people were forced to leave their homes in the cities and move into the countryside where they were to be "rehabilitated" as farmers where many died of starvation or were executed by the Khmer Rouge. It decimated the population. Today, forty percent of the population is under the age of 15.Cambodia is an amazingly beautiful place. The 1,000-year-old temples of Angkor are some of the most amazing structures ever built. The people of Cambodia are warm and welcoming. I am humbled by their strength.
—Spring
One of those "I know I have things to do but I can't put this book down" books! Tragedy described from a child's perspective that can be multiplied untold numbers of times from Cambodia to Darfur to other places where evil reigns, darkness is twenty-four hours a day, and most people either don't know or don't care...and I am afraid it is more the latter. Read this book and you will identify with William Wilberforce who said, "now that you have heard (read) this you may turn and look the other way, you but can never again say I did not know."
—Jerry
