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A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of the Collin College. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.599.3142. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: July 10 All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be emailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Please submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Dana Schmitz, contributor; Sydney Portilla-Diggs, campus correspondent; Stephanie Hall, student correspondent; Nick Young, photographer and layout.
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Book Review -- 'First They Killed My Father'
By Mark Robinson
Cougar News Editor
“First They Killed My Father” -- Loung Ung
 It is a good thing that Loung Ung kept going. Any other seven-year-old would’ve surrendered to the seemingly insurmountable odds that a pre-teen faced in the Killing Fields of Cambodia during the terror of the Khmer Rouge. Ung didn’t.
Due to her courage and fight, she survived where about two million didn’t and is now a living testament of the horrors of despotism, war, power and unwarranted death. Without her, “First They Killed My Father” would not exist. Her speaking engagements would not permeate the hearts of those listening to her tales of woe and destruction at the hands of the Khmer Rouge between 1975-79.
When something as awful as a genocide happens, it is relatively easy to put blinders on and continue to look into the future. It is people -- survivors -- like Ung that force us to look back and deal with the past. When she was five years old, in 1975, Ung and her six siblings -- Meng, Khoury, Keav, Kim, Chou and Geak -- and parents were evacuated by revolting Khmer Rouge troops under the service of Pol Pot from their apartment in the capital city of Phnom Penh. As part of the new Communist regime, the cities were emptied, and families were relocated to the countryside for a “reorientation” -- a means of destroying the bourgeoisie, any Western ideals, materialistic means and a capitalist class system.
The Ungs are put on the road, a path that leads to destruction and death and to one of the most heinous and jaw-dropping episodes in the 20th century. “First They Killed My Father” is a distinct reminder that genocide and power wielded with a destructive force is not only relegated to the Adolph Hitlers and Joseph Stalins of the world. These horrific stories defy time and progress. As much as we like to think civilization has matured and some climbed to some precipice of human kindness, the Pots, Pinochets and Milosovics remind us that murder on a gigantic stage is very real, very now.
Ung and her family leave their home and consequently move from village to village until they settle in Ro Leap, a work camp in the southwest portion of the country. There, they starve and live in fear that authorities will discover the actual identity of Ung’s father, a high-ranking official in the Lon Nol government which preceded the Communist coup. Once this is discovered, it would bring about a swift execution of the father and the family. As the family is forced to work in the fields raising food for the Khmer Rouge army, food rations are low and the family suffers starvation and varying illnesses.
Interestingly, “First They Killed My Father” is written in the first person from Ung’s point of view, but not in retrospect but as she saw things when she was five years old and continuing as she aged. Much in the same vein as Harper Lee’s Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” This device prompted criticism from some who thought it would be outrageous for a five-year-old to appropriately remember events. Also, from a five-year-old’s point of view, facts can be skewed.
Accordingly, this is Ung’s precise purpose for writing it from her five-year-old perspective. She shows exactly how she (and just about anyone of her age) would react and reason as she is stripped of her lifestyle, forced into another, brainwashed and seen her family waste away into walking skeletons. The narrative has an urgency, youthfulness, desperation, rage and naiveté that would be lost had she written it from her perspective when it was published – a 30-year-old educated Cambodian-American who’d lived stateside for 20 years.
The narrative is stark and true. It is lined with the fears, hate and dark thoughts that anyone of her position would’ve had in the same circumstances. Systematically, per the plan of her father, the family is broken up. The oldest sons, Meng and Khouy, are sent to a separate labor camp. The eldest daughter, Keav, is sent to another farming camp.
The father is “arrested,” taken away and murdered under the auspices that he is to help get a wagon that is stuck in mud. Ung’s mother, Ung, her brother Kim and sisters Geak and Chou must survive without their reliable, resourceful father. Eventually, fearing for the family, Ung, Kim and Chou are told to pose as orphans and seek separate work camps so the Khmer Rouge can not trace them back to their father. Ung winds up at a Khmer Rouge camp, where she is trained as a child soldier and taught to kill using any number of weapons in preparation for an attack by the Vietnamese.
Dealing with death, complete exhaustion and starvation, a bitter hate and rage builds in a very young Ung. It is here that we see the author mature in a way that the peel of naiveté and hope are discarded and all that is left is flesh, a rawness that is calloused with each nightmare and every memory of her father and every night she falls asleep with an empty belly.
The Vietnamese do invade Cambodia, but not as the devils that the Khmer Rouge paints them as, but as liberators. Without giving too much away, Ung eventually treks to the United States with Meng and his wife where they start a new life -- a new beginning with food at every meal, with bright clothing, education, and surrounded by family and, more importantly, hope.
“First They Killed My Father” is a poignant memoir, enthralling with every page turned and every chapter ended. I can imagine the work flowing from Ung’s memory and the recollections from her family. It’s a story that almost writes itself. Ung had to survive. And for the edification of everyone, she did.
Five out of five paws
[PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION]
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