Thoughts?A daughter of Cambodia Remembers
Rachel Louise Snyder
On the April 1998 day that Pol Pot-leader of one of the world's most brutal genocide campaigns-died in Cambodia, the world cheered. One less madman to worry about. But Loung Ung, who survived his horrors and is now a leading activist for the elimination of the land mines that Pol Pot and others planted, shut the door to her Washington, D.C., office, slumped down onto the floor and howled into a pillow. "I went from crying uncontrollably to wanting to beat someone up," she says. "For two million people, for my family, for me, life has never been the same. He got to die of old age. But the bodies of his victims are missing, bludgeoned, rotted away somewhere."
A pale-skinned Cambodian of mixed heritage, Ung, 31, has lived in the U.S. since 1980, when she escaped from Cambodia on a fishing boat headed for Thailand with her eldest brother, Meng. They spent six months in a Thai refugee camp and were eventually sponsored by a church that brought them to Vermont, where Ung remained through college. Her memoir First They Killed My Father was published last year and details her experience during Cambodia's genocide, during which she lost both her parents and a sister to execution, another sister to starvation and dysentery, and was herself trained as a child soldier in a camp for orphans. The book offers a compelling account of a young girl who survived the brutality of Pol Pot, and turned her trauma into activism.
For the past four years, Ung has devoted her life and work to spreading the message about land mines, informing mainly college students about why they should pay attention to a world littered with them. An estimated 4 to 6 million land mines remain buried in Cambodia alone. Each time someone steps on one, Ung says, not only is a life lost or a body maimed, but Cambodian genocide survivors are reminded of the horrors that were carried out by Pol Pots Khmer Rouge. As a national spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans ofAmerica Foundation (VVAF), Ung travels widely to give presentations that draw from her own experience, as well as attest to the indiscriminate nature of land mines as a weapon system. "Loung's contribution to our anti-land-mine campaign has been profound," says Bobby Muller, a paraplegic veteran who founded VVAF and was injured during the war. "She has helped bring the destructive power of land mines into American homes and American lives, and that has boosted our funding for de-mining programs in Cambodia and elsewhere. Loung offers a personal vision to an otherwise amorphous, big-issue campaign," adds Muller, who, through VVAF, also cofounded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 with ICBL Coordinator Jody Williams.
From the outside, Ung appears to have weathered her awful first decade in this world quite well: she is confident, successful, and charming. But unlike most Americans, she has not a single family photo in her small, two-room apartment in D.C. The few items adorning her walls-several scarves and wall hangings-come from Cambodia, as if in the absence of family mementos, she has substituted things that could have once belonged to her relatives.
"People expect me to be fully healed," she says from her office at VVAR On a shelf behind her are mock land mines, with names like bouncing berries, which she uses when giving her speeches across the country. "But it's never going to go away. Every time I watch a talk show, they talk about their problems for a minute and then they bring in a therapist, everyone applauds, and it's over. But after the applause, you're still there with yourself ... I have levels of fear that make me hyperventilate."
Ung lives in a sort of bicultural chasm, bracketed by her native Cambodia on one side, and the U.S., her home of 21 years, on the other. In some ways her book, which she thought might bridge this gulf, has served only to widen it further, since threatening e-mails denouncing her experience and her Chinese heritage have cropped up. The charge is familiar-with a Chinese mother, Ung and her family were never considered pure Khmer, an ethnic label that was idealized in Cambodia under Pol Pot and still is today in some circles. Though Ung mostly ignores the attacks and says she does not want to speculate on who they came from, she realizes this doesn't erase them. "Cambodia is my first everything," she says, leaning on her desk in a black, high-necked Asian dress. "I feel like America is my place to stay, but Cambodia is my soul, my home, and now to have some people tell me I don't belong; it's painful. It's like, `What do you need to be in order to belong?' There's a part of me that feels really homeless."
It is difficult sometimes to reconcile Loung Ung, typical U.S. urbanite, and Loung Ung, genocide survivor. She has a long-standing group of friends who, like her, are snappy and career-minded. She roller blades, listens to rock CDs, and reads literary fiction. She dresses up for Halloween and celebrates Thanksgiving with her brother's family. Though she can speak about ordinary matters like politics and history, Ung finds the use of small arms, methods of torture, and the pathology of violent acts more "comfortable" topics of conversation. She also can't help but eat each meal as if it were her last; she always has a pot of rice cooking in her kitchen. She can't bring herself to watch war movies, but she loves campy horror flicks. She stopped believing in god when her father was killed, and has recurring dreams that someone is trying to kill her.
Ung could so effortlessly pass for a carefree thirtysomething that it can be easy to forget all that she has lived through, until she tells you what a body that's been floating in water too long smells like. Or the rare moment when she allows herself to speculate on how her parents might have been killed. "People say that [my father] probably went through a confession center. At that time, Cambodians killed people with a hammer to the head because ammunition was too expensive . What you don't hear, your mind makes up," she says, then blinks as if to reroute her mental trajectory.
Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge took power from U.S.-backed Lon Nol (at the end of the war in Vietnam) and systematically killed as many as 2 million Cambodians-one in five-through starvation, torture, execution, and forced labor. Ung and her family initially survived by moving from village to village, scavenging for insects and dead animals to supplement their meager diet. They worked 12- and 16-hour days in the rice fields; Ung remembers hunger so profound that she picked single grains of uncooked rice from the ground. Two years into the war, soldiers took her father. Her sister Keav starved to death, and in the hopes that the rest of the children would survive, Ung's mother Ay Choung sent them to separate orphanage camps. Shortly before the end of the genocide, Ay Choung and Ung's youngest sister, Geak, were killed.
LIFE AS A CHILD SOLDIER
A Book Excerpt by Lou ng Ung
"IT'S TOO BAD YOU'RE NOT A BOY," MET Bong says. "The camp you are going to is for the stronger children. There you will be trained as a soldier." Her face beams with pride.
"I am happy to go," I lie. Chou stands beside me with her head down. "Chou, you're older than me, stop being so weak," I whisper as we hug. Chou cries harder, her tears wetting my hair. Met Bong breaks our bond and tells me it's time to go. Though my heart aches, I do not look back.
The new camp is almost identical to the old one. There are about eighty girls, ranging from ten to fifteen years old. I have yet to turn eight. We are supervised by another Met Bong, who is just as zealous a believer in the Angkar [the Khmer government] as my previous supervisor. On my first night, boys and girls gather around a roaring bonfire to listen to the latest propaganda. Having heard it many times, I know when to break into the obligatory claps and screams. "The Youns [a racial slur for Vietnamese people] have many more soldiers, but they are stupid and are cowards! One Khmer soldier can kill ten Youns!"
"Angkar! Angkar! Angkar!" we scream.
When the speeches are over, five girls sing and dance for us. Though they sing of blood and war, the girls smile. Their hands move gracefully in unison, their bodies sway and twirl to the music. Afterwards, they hold hands and giggle. Laughter has become a distant memory. Chou and I used to laugh and giggle, taking Keav's clothes out of her drawers and playing dress-up. At fourteen, Keav was beautiful and stylish. She inevitably came home and caught us. Screaming and yelling, Keav swatted our bottoms as we ran out of the room.
At the camp, all of us are invited to dance. My feet move to the beat of the drums, my arms sway to the rhythm, and my heart is light and joyful. After the dancing is over, the new Met Bong comes over and says, "You are a good dancer."
"Thank you," I reply softly. "I like to dance."
"I want you to join the dance troupe," she says. "We're putting together shows for the soldiers."
"I would like that very much." After she leaves, I cover my hand over my mouth, stifling a scream. Me! A dancer! New clothes! Fake flowers in my hair! For the first time since the takeover, I feel young and light. The reality, though, is more painful. Every morning, Met Bong forces our hands to bend backward, creating a beautiful curve.
The New Year passes without any celebration or joy. The January breeze turns into April heat and I am one year older. I am alone here, even though I sleep in the same hut with eighty girls.
I have never seen Pol Pot. I know little about him or why he killed Pa. I do not know why he hates me so much. In the night when my defenses are down as I stand guard over the camp, my mind flashes from one member of my family to the next. "No," I tell myself, "I have to be strong." But I miss Pa so much it hurts to breathe. It's been almost a year now since I held his hand, saw his face, felt his love.
"Oh Pa," I whisper to the air. As if answering me, something rustles loudly in the tall grass. I hold my breath and look around the compound. My heart races. They are coming at us! My finger squeezes the trigger and the shots go everywhere! The rifle jerks back, hitting me hard against my ribs. "I'll kill them! I'll kill them!" I scream.
"There's nothing out there!" Met Bong screams at me. "I said shoot when you see something real, not ghosts," she says as laughter erupts from the girls. "Don't forget about the bodiless witches," a voice calls out.
Many claim she's only a myth-- the bodiless witch. At night when these witches go to sleep their heads separate from their bodies. Dragging their intestines along, they fly around to places where there's blood and death. That night I clutch the gun tight to my chest, my finger resting on the trigger, alternately aiming at the sight of the Youns and up in the sky for the witches.
Excerpted from First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung. Copyright (c) 2000 by Loung Ung. All rights reserved.
Ung emigrated with her brother, Meng, in 1980 after bribing a fisherman to take them away from Cambodia. Meng had managed to hide some of their mother's jewelry, but in the end, it only brought enough money for two of the remaining five siblings to escape. Loung, they all decided, was young enough to have a chance for a life, for an education; Meng, as the eldest, could best care for her. Her sister Chou and two brothers, Kim and Khouy, stayed behind with the understanding that Meng would send for them once he was established. But 15 years passed before Loung and Meng saw them again, and an additional five before Kim moved to Vermont to live with Meng.
When she arrived in the U.S. at age ten, Ung tried to wipe clean the previous five years of her life. She never wrote to her siblings left behind in Cambodia. She never called. She never read their letters. She didn't realize her sister had five children until she returned to Cambodia for the first time in 1995, on her way back from the United Nations' Beijing women's conference. During that visit, she felt such intense fear because of flashbacks from her childhood that she refused to leave Phnom Penh in case she needed to flee the country quickly. "There's tremendous guilt in all of this, and shame and sadness," she says, "but if something needs to be done for Cambodia, I'll do it. My whole life is just about being redeemed."
Meanwhile, "surviving" is a word Ung uses to describe almost every facet of her life. The war, obviously, but she also describes "surviving" a new country, where the number of minorities in her town could be counted on a single hand; or having "survived" learning English, or "survived" high school. "As an adult, I question my instinctual desire to survive," she says. "Why did I want to live so much? Why did I do the things I did to survive? I don't know."
After college at St. Michael's in Vermont, Ung got a job working with domestic violence victims, and that experience was what finally moved her to confront her past. "Domestic violence showed me how strong women are .. and in a sense allowed me to see women as a whole and not just as victims," she says. "It's what really gave me the strength to go back and deal with my past. I often view domestic violence as just another form of war. It's all about power and control. It's all about the perpetrator having the power, oppressing, torturing the victims. I saw a lot of parallels to my past. Just putting it all together like that was really shocking."
In 1997, Ung was about to enter graduate school when she was introduced to Bobby Muller. He asked her to work for him, to put a face to the problem of land mines. Ung, who felt ready to help her native Cambodians, changed her plans overnight.
Still, there's a burnout factor, and Ung sometimes finds it hard to live up to the public expectations to do more, to work more-to write another book or take part in the upcoming tribunal for Khmer Rouge leaders who committed war crimes. "People say I'm wasting my potential," she says, "but my potential for what? Self-destruction? What about my potential for a happy life?"
She once wanted no part in the war crimes tribunal, but she now concedes that she would like to be involved, though how is another matter. "The government is arguing that this tribunal will reignite a threat of civil war, and though my mouth and mind might protest, I'm going to get on that plane and leave while others cannot," she says. "Part of me might want to stay there, but I know I'll leave. There's big guilt in that."
For Ung, the reconciliation between her Cambodian roots and her new life as a survivor living in the country that bombed her homeland has evolved slowly. "When I first did the lecture circuit, I was full of rage," she says. "I went out to blame, to point fingers, to ask, `Why did you let this happen?' But in the process I met incredible people. We can't condemn a whole population for the actions of a few." Ung still admits, however, that in a lingering state of homelessness as a U.S. citizen yet a native of Cambodia, she occasionally mixes up pronouns, wavering between "us" and "you" bombing Cambodia. She glances toward a poster in her office of a prosthetic arm holding a daisy. "I've always said the Chinese and Cambodian parts [of me] are equal, 100 percent of each," she says. "American, it's hard to say."
[Author Affiliation]
Rachel Louise Snyder is a freelance journalist based in Chicago.
Mac's Articles, Pt. 9 - A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
Mac's Articles, Pt. 9 - A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
SSource: Copyright Liberty Media for Women Aug/Sep 2001
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