'There is still a lot of anger in me'

Author recounts horror of Cambodian genocide, desire to survive

Loung Ung said writing "First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers" was her "way of rebelling to the Cambodian soldiers and to the Khmer Rouge"

In this story: A struggle to forgive Educating others War against mines RELATED STORIES, SITES

By Lucy Sanchez
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- "The story was always there and it wouldn't go away," Loung Ung says of her experiences growing up in war-torn Cambodia. "My memory was never silent."

Loung's story is not one many people would want to remember. It's a first-hand view of the terror inflicted on her home country by the Khmer Rouge, the Pol Pot-led regime that killed 1.7 million Cambodians -- one-fifth of the country's population.

Like so many others, Loung's family was not exempt from the killing fields. Her father was a high official under an earlier Cambodian government, and therefore automatically suspect by the Khmer Rouge. After the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, Loung's family was pursued and captured; her parents were killed, two of her siblings died of malnutrition, and the rest of the clan struggled to survive in forced-labor camps and the military.

	EXCERPT
Excerpt: 'First They Killed My Father'

She turned her experiences into a memoir, "First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers" (HarperPerennial). The book, which was published in early 2000, is due in paperback in January 2001.

Loung has used her story as a way to get something back she felt was stolen away from her as a child -- her voice.

"In America there's a saying that children should be seen and not heard," Loung says in an interview. "In Cambodia, children should not be seen nor heard because you would not survive."

She deliberately wrote the book from a child's point of view, she says. "Writing a book in a child's voice was my way of rebelling to the Cambodian soldiers and to the Khmer Rouge. They're not going to silence me anymore. This gives me back that voice. I get to reclaim it."

"First They Killed My Father" doesn't skimp on the harsh details. The story follows the life of a child who once found pleasure in swinging her feet from a high chair and watches her grow into a vessel of hate trapped in a little body.

Her fancy red New Year's dress was replaced with a black soldier's outfit and a red scarf. Her dolls were substituted for rifles and farm tools. Her meals of garlic, chicken and potato noodles were reduced to scarce rations of rice balls. Ultimately, her innocence was surrendered to hatred and revenge.

"This is what the war has done to me. Now I want to destroy because of it. There is such hate and rage inside of me now. The Angkar (Khmer Rouge government) has taught me to hate so deeply that I know I have the power to destroy and kill," Loung writes.

Loung candidly admits in the interview that she still feels the hatred.

"There's still a lot of anger in me," she says almost apologetically. "I would like for it not to be there but I'm not there in myself yet where I can forgive. I'm not there where I can forget. I still miss my parents."

The horrors of her childhood were many. The Khmer Rouge was an agrarian regime that mistrusted every city dweller. Young Loung couldn't reveal her upbringing or she would be killed. Moreover, after her parents were killed, she was left to fend for herself. Every day was a desperate search for food; every day, she says, she had to make a conscious decision to live.

The army helped foster her anger. They placed her in a military training camp and rewarded her for antisocial behavior. "Every time I was violent with other children they would reward me with food," she told CNN in February.

Inspired by Maya Angelou's book "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Loung decided to come to terms with her once-suppressed memories.

"Maya put it out there," Loung says. "She said 'I am not going to be ashamed of somebody else's act of violence.' The soldiers should be ashamed, not me."

The Khmer government collapsed in 1979; Loung came to the United States soon after. It was here, she recalled, she realized she had the "power to make a difference."

One reason for telling the story, she says, was to educate others, especially her two American nieces, Victoria, 15, and Maria, 19.

"I've watched them grow up and study Russian history and American history," Loung says, "and they didn't know any Cambodian history. They didn't understand us. They're not going to get the story anywhere else and I just wanted them to know."

When she speaks, Loung also tries to get another story across: that of the land mines that litter the Cambodian countryside. She's a spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's Campaign for a Land Mine Free World, a program that won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.

The agency operates one of the largest rehabilitation centers in Cambodia, where thousands are still exposed to land mines. According to Loung, there are still more than 40,000 active land mines in the country, and each year about 26,000 people are maimed or disabled because of them.

"They are having a hard time surviving the peace after they survived the war," Loung says.

Loung admits she feels survivor's guilt, guilt for being here while thousands still struggle in Cambodia.

"It's raw. It's real. There's a lot of guilt knowing that I can get out. They don't have the option to come over here (to America)," she says.

Her activism, she says, is a way to pay tribute and remember those who died. She fights for them, Loung says, just as much as she fights for those still in Cambodia.

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Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation
HarperCollins

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