“I think I can go ahead and call this a success.”

Students packed the Spring Creek conference center to hear author Loung Ung.

Loung Ung, author of "First They Killed My Father" spoke at the Spring Creek Campus.

If the Spring Creek Campus Conference Center has ever been as full as it was Oct. 23 at 7 p.m., it would be a shock.

As noted by the quote above by Dr. Thom Chesney, vice president of academic affairs, to open the Book-in-Common program lecture, if attendance and interest by community members, faculty, staff and students was any indication, the program for 2007-08 was a success. More than 1,000 individuals attended the lecture.

Students lined every inch of the walls, aisles and areas in front of the stage to hear best-selling author Loung Ung speak as part of the collegewide program. 

All to hear Ung. She is the author of “First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers,” a memoir told by her 5-year-old self of the destruction and genocide by the Communist Khmer Rouge regime in her home country.

A 4-year period that saw the death of her parents, her oldest sister and her youngest sister, in addition to the two million others who fell beneath the fatal blow of the Khmer Rouge, forced Ung to grow up quickly. It probably wasn’t until she and her brother and sister-in-law were sponsored to move to Vermont to start a new life that she knew that she would live to tell the tale.

That’s what her lecture Oct. 23 was about -- Living to Tell. A vast majority of the people in the conference center were not even born when the Khmer Rouge was ousted out of power in 1979. Without her book and her dedication toward speaking about the most horrific time in her life, that 4-year period in world history might be a mere footnote.

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Probably what surprised many people listening to Ung speak is that it didn’t resemble a wake. Lectures about genocides and listening to someone talk about the death of four of her family members and having one’s life stripped away in a matter of days, don’t typically evoke ... laughter.

It seems over the past 20+ years, Ung did not forget how to laugh or crack a joke. She is, however, a woman on a mission. She’s a peace activist, she travels constantly on speaking engagements around the world and she is a strong advocate toward awareness about land mines.

Looking over the conference center loaded with people coming to hear her speak, she appropriately summarized the intention of the Book-in-Common program:

“I can’t believe my little book made it into so many hands.”

Most surprisingly is that she had sent the book’s manuscript to 25 publishers. Twenty-four turned it down. The fact that about 3,000 Collin College students read the book makes the program a success, but also makes her book, her survival a success. At the very least, 3,000 people in this gigantic world of 6.3 billion know what happened in Cambodia in 1975.

“As we gather here, war rages on around the world,” Ung said. “It’s easy as we are bombarded with these images to feel hopeless and that we can not make a difference. We can make a difference.”

Ung’s lecture is interesting because of her memory. She was criticized for her book because it retold the horrors from a memory of a 5-year-old, which was deemed by critics to be sketchy, at best. Ung retorts that she was recounting what happened as she saw it and that’s as close to the truth as you can get.

Her memory is very vivid. Detailed notes about her family, her father, going to the movies. Memories of her bell-bottomed brothers listening to 8-tracks and trying to grow Elvis Presley sideburns. Memories of school where she learned Chinese, French and Cambodian. Going to the movies in Phnom Penh, the city she lived in until she was five and sitting on her father’s lap with her fried crickets and drink.

“My father’s lap was my chair, his arms were my armrests and his hands were my cup holders,” Ung said. “Then that dream came to an end.”

In 1975, Ung and her family were evacuated from the capital city and forced on a three-day trek to the countryside, hopping from labor camp to labor camp. Eventually they landed at Ro Leap. It is here that her father was murdered, her oldest brothers sent away and eventually her and two other siblings were forced by their mother to leave, claim to be orphans and fight for survival.

“When the Khmer Rouge came in, Cambodia became a prison and all the people were prisoners,” she said.

She did survive, found her remaining siblings and was eventually taken by her older brother to the United States for a new start. She retells about visiting a Fourth of July celebration once arriving in Vermont and as the first firework exploded in the sky, having the past five years of gunshots and exploding shells fly back into her mind.

Ung remembers coming to America and wearing colors of red, green, orange and blue -- a reaction to having to wear all black under the Khmer Rouge. She retells about struggling with English and the culture shock of moving to Vermont, “the whitest state in the country.”

“For more diversity, I moved to Maine, the second whitest state in America,” she joked.

Ung also told the horrifying details of landmines and their continued problem around the world. She said there are 18,000 amputees in Cambodia due to existing landmines. In her home country, about the size of Oklahoma, there are still four to six million landmines still active, just waiting for someone to accidentally step on them.

If there was one large lesson in regards to Ung’s visit and lecture it’s this: Survival is not all about the past, but it is about the future. It is about laughing again, enjoying a fireworks display and affecting the coming generations.

Loung Ung signed copies of her book for students after the event.