The worst thing a little girl should have to worry or be angry about is whether she can stay out later to play or whether she can sneak candies from a cabinet or whether someone moved her baby doll without her permission. In First They Killed My Father, five-year-old Loung Ung, much like Anne Frank and others who have endured long and harsh genocides, had her innocent worries changed into worries of survival that �mirrors that of millions of Cambodians� (author�s note).

This book is a chronological account of how Loung�s life changed after the Khmer Rouge came in and took Phnom Penh, causing her and her entire family to flee from village to village. She traded in her pretty dresses for the mandatory all black uniforms. She did manual labor. She had rice soup rations to eat instead of chili pepper doused potato noodles. She and her family had to hide her father�s association with Prince Sihanouk and the Lon Nol government but even after all of their efforts, her father was still taken under the guise of having to fix a broken ox cart.

Afterwards, the remaining family was forced to do their best to survive. They steal corn. They sneak mouthfuls of writhing live shrimp. They do whatever else they can to take away the hunger pains. Eventually, they split up in hopes of surviving. Soldiers were beginning to kill the family members of those they had assassinated. Loung�s mother felt this was their best chance at surviving. They would have only one more reunion before her mother and two sisters died.

Loung was trained to be a killer at camp. The starvation, beatings, attempted rape and mental cruelty she had already experienced would be enough to kill the spirit of any child and weaken them. Loung, however, was strong. Her need to survive was fueled by the hatred and revenge-seeking that should not exist in a child. The camp leader rewarded her violent and anti-social behavior with extra rations. When the regime was brought down and Cambodia was liberated, Loung escaped to America via Thailand in 1980 with her brother and sister-in-law.

Loung was a victim of a Cambodia that was poisoned underneath Pol Pot�s regime. It was 1975, during the Cold War and US involvement in Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge, the communists in Cambodia, were fighting the nationalist forces, evacuating cities, closing down factories, assassinating high-ranking officials and running concentration camps while trying to implement their own authoritarian rule. In their attempts, they killed nearly a fourth of the population before the Vietnamese finally defeated them in 1978. Her entire narrative was about her life during this and how it replaced her innocence with the struggles that are often seen during war, government upheavals and genocide.

The main purpose of this book was to inform the reader. Loung wanted to educate about the day-to-day experiences of a person during a time, as with Cambodia, that is usually skimmed over, summarized and depersonalized by more scholarly textbooks. The limitations of a textbook do not allow the candidness this memoir provided. "I eat the rest of the chicken with joy and sadness as I remember how Ma was beaten for trying to get some for Geak" (169).

As many memoirs do, this book gave a very personal view of an important time in the author�s life. Her use of present tense, first person and simple wording allowed the reader to easily experience the emotions and events. Her description and simplicity wove a story that did not need to be weighed down by forced wit and flowery prose. "I focus on it, realizing that this is the weapon that made Kim bleed, the same weapon that smashed into his skull" (139). Yet, as personal as the account was, the story itself could have been any one Cambodian child�s.

First They Killed My Father would be an excellent addition to anyone�s reading library. The candor, detail and accuracy of Loung�s experience during the Pol Pot regime were powerful and educational. The descriptions were enough for the reader to judge the feeling of the environment without the author telling the reader directly to hate Pol Pot as much as she did. With more historical accounts like this, many people would be more likely to gain firsthand knowledge of the world they live in. Learning about the various war experiences of others would allow more people to see the patterns and, perhaps, find a way to prevent unnecessary future occurrences.

~* August 07, 2003 @ 5:04 pm *~