"First They Killed My Father" Author speaks at SLCC Wednesday
Quentin Wells
Issue date: 11/4/05 Section: News
|
At the age of 5, Ms. Ung and her family were forced to flee their home in
Phnom Penh by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army. To survive, the family split
up. Both of Ms. Ung's parents were later murdered and it was only years later, after the Khmer Rouge government was finally deposed, that she was reunited with her surviving siblings.
Her memoir of her family's incredible struggle through the genocidal agony of her homeland, "First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers," published by HarperCollins in 2000, is a national bestseller and recipient of the 2001 Asian/Pacific American Librariansl Association Award for Excelience in Adult Non-fiction Literature: Her second book, "Lucky Child," was published by HarperCollins in April 2005.
In 1975, Ung was the five-year-old child of a large, affluent family living in Phnom Penh, the cosmopolitan Cambodian capital. As extraordinarily well-educated Chinese-Cambodians, with the father a government agent, her family was in great danger when the Khmer Rouge took over the country and throughout Pol Pot's barbaric regime. Her parents' strength and her father's knowledge of Khmer Rouge ideology enabled the family to survive together for a while, posing as illiterate peasants, moving first between villages, and then from one work camp to another. The father was honest with the children, explaining dangers and how to avoid them, and this, along with clear sight, intelligence and the pragmatism of a young child, helped Ung to survive the war.
Her restrained, unsentimental account of the four years she spent surviving the regime before escaping with a brother to Thailand and eventually the United States is astonishing--not just because of the tragedies, but also because of the immense love for her family that Ung holds onto, no matter how she is brutalized. She describes the physical devastation she is surrounded by but always returns to her memories and hopes for those she loves. These remain with her as, one after another, both parents and two of her six siblings are murdered in the camps.
