*First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers*
*by Loung Ung*
Nobody born in the early sixties or before would be unaware of Pol Pot and his bloody four-year dictatorship in Cambodia, during which he and his murderous party Khmer Rouge starved, tortured and killed 1.7 million of their 7 million population. Coming to power after overthrowing a corrupt right-wing government, this homicidal nut-case decided to make the country a self-reliant agrarian state. To achieve this, he kicked off a set of hare-brained reforms, rather like Mao Zedong's "cultural revolution" - only, he was doing it on steroids. People were driven out of the cities to the villages and forests to do agriculture using primitive methods, doing backbreaking labour on starvation diets. A lot of intellectuals, professionals and perceived enemies of the regime were tortured mercilessly before being executed on the infamous "Killing Fields".
Since I was taking a trip to Cambodia, I thought it would be appropriate to read some books on the subject. This title sort of jumped at me. It was available on Kindle, and I bought it immediately. I started reading it on my first night in Phnom Penh, and was never able to put it down. I toured the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields by day; and in the evening, I travelled across Cambodia virtually in search of food, shelter, security and just a tiny drop of humanity along with five-year-old Loung.
Loung's father, Seng Im Ung, works for the military police for the Cambodian government. So when the rebels win the civil war and invade the capital city, he knows he must flee for dear life along with family. So Seng, his wife, and their seven children (three boys and four girls) aged 18 years to 3 years, all leave Phnom Penh in a nondescript truck, keeping their identities secret. Young Loung is old enough to question the unfairness of the situation, but too young to understand how and why it came about. So she obeys her parents, trying to come to terms with her utter bewilderment.
> ‘I have to go to the toilet,’ I tell Ma urgently after dinner. ‘You have to go in the woods.’‘But where?’‘Anywhere you can find. Wait, I’ll get you some toilet paper.’ Ma goes away and comes back with a bunch of paper sheets in her hand. My eyes widen in disbelief, ‘Ma! It’s money. I can’t use money!’‘Use it, it is of no use to us anymore,’ she replies, pushing the crisp sheets into my hand. I don’t understand this. I know that we must be in really big trouble. I know this is no time to argue, so I grab the money and head off to the woods.
The paradigm shift is so sudden, it's totally surreal.
> Yesterday I was playing hopscotch with my friends. Today we are running from soldiers with guns.
***
They stay for a while with Loung's maternal uncles: but her dad has to keep on running to keep up his subterfuge of being a peasant. And as they move on, staying in different villages as newcomers, they are looked on with hostility and suspicion. Everyone has to do backbreaking labour, and most people excepting a few who wield power have to subsist on extremely meagre rations.
> Every minute of the day, my stomach grumbles as if it is eating itself. Our food ration has been steadily reduced to the point that the cooks are now only getting a small twelve-ounce can of rice for every ten people. My brothers’ food rations are so small that they have very little to give us when they visit. They try to come often, but the soldiers make them work harder, leaving no time to visit. The cooks continue to make rice soup in a big pot and serve it to the villagers. During mealtime, my family lines up with our soup bowls in our hands along with the other villagers to receive our ration. The cooks used to serve us rice gruel, but now there are only enough grains in the pot to make soup. When it is my turn to receive the food, I watch anxiously as the cook stirs the rice soup. Holding my breath nervously, I pray she will take pity on me and scoop my ladle of soup from the bottom of the pot, where all the solid food rests. Staring at the rice pot, I let out a breath of hopelessness when I see her take the ladle and stir the soup at my turn. Both hands tightly gripping my bowl, I take my two ladlefuls and walk to my shaded spot underneath a tree, away from all the others. I never eat my soup all at once, and do not want my own family to take mine away. I sit quietly, savouring it spoonful by spoonful, drinking the broth first. What’s left at the bottom of my bowl is approximately three spoonfuls of rice, and I have to make this last. I eat the rice slowly, and even pick up one grain if I drop it on the ground. When it is gone I will have to wait until tomorrow before I can have more. I look into my bowl, and my heart cries as I count the eight grains that are left in my bowl. Eight grains are all I have left! I pick up each grain and chew it slowly, trying to relish the taste, not wanting to swallow. Tears mix with the food in my mouth; my heart falls to my stomach when all the eight grains are gone and I see that the others are still eating theirs.
> ***
> Hunger, always there is hunger. We have eaten everything that is edible, from rotten leaves on the ground to the roots we dig up. Rats, turtles, and snakes caught in our traps are not wasted as we cook and eat their brains, tails, hides, and blood. When no animals are caught, we roam the fields for grasshoppers, beetles, and crickets. In Phnom Penh, I would have thrown up if someone told me I would have to eat those things. Now, when the only alternative is to starve, I fight others for a dead animal lying in the road. Surviving for another day has become the most important thing to me. About the only thing I have not eaten is human flesh. I have heard many stories about other villages where people have eaten human flesh.
Meanwhile all across the country, the killings start. Anyone who is perceived as a threat to the 'Angkar' - the ruling party - is tortured and executed. As Seng says: "Anyone can be viewed as a threat to the Angkar – former civil servants, monks, doctors, nurses, artists, teachers, students – even people who wear glasses, as the soldiers view this as a sign of intelligence. Anyone the Khmer Rouge believes has the power to lead a rebellion will be killed."
Soon, death is everywhere.
> I stop to look at one old woman. Dressed in a brown shirt and maroon sarong, she lies on the ground with her arms at her side and her head propped up by a small bundle. Her eyes are half closed, white hair strewn in all directions, and skin yellow and wrinkled. The young woman next to her spoon-feeds the old woman rice gruel. ‘She looks dead to me,’ I say to the young woman. ‘What’s wrong with her?’‘Granny’s half dead, can’t you tell?’ she says to me in annoyance. The longer I stare at her, the more my skin sweats. I have never seen anyone who is half dead before. Ignoring me, the young woman continues to feed her grandmother. One side of her mouth swallows the rice gruel while the other side drools and spits the food back out. I never thought this was possible. I just thought you were either completely dead or alive. I feel sorry for the old woman but am fascinated at the prospect of being caught between the two worlds. My fascination overrides my fear of her. ‘Are there any doctors or anyone who can help her?’‘There are no doctors anywhere. Go away! Aren’t your parents looking for you?’
> ***
> Under the summer sun, the stench of death is so strong in the village, I cover my nose and mouth with my hands and breathe only the air that filters through my fingers. There are so many dead people here. The neighbours are too weak to bury all the corpses. Often the bodies are left in the hot sun, until the smell permeates the surrounding air, causing everyone passing by to pinch their noses. The flies come buzzing around the corpses and lay millions of eggs on the bodies. When the bodies are finally buried, they are nothing more than large nests of maggots.
> ***
> The face looks as if it has melted, exposing the cheekbones, the tip of the nose cartilage, and teeth in a lipless mouth. Beneath decomposing lids, the eyes are sunken deep into the skull. The eyelids and mouth are covered with small white eggs, some already hatching to become maggots, which crawl and disappear into the skin. More maggots wriggle around on the lids and out of the open mouth. Long black hair sinks into the grass, becoming one with the dirt. The chest cavity is caved in beneath the black clothes, home to hundreds of the black-green flies feasting on the body.
Loung loses a sister to disease, and her dad is taken away one day, never to return. Loung's mother shoos her children away, asking them to split up and claim the status of orphans so that their identities are not revealed. So the family go their different ways, surviving one way or another until January 1979 when the Vietnamese soldiers invade Cambodia and put and end to the Khmer Rouge nightmare. Still, there are still more hurdles and trauma before the remnants of the Ung family meet up again. Caught up in a war between the Vietnamese and Cambodian forces, death and destruction are never too far away.
> By early morning it is quiet again. I can almost feel the shelter expand with air as everyone lets out a sigh of relief. Then, without warning, the whistle of a rocket flies near us and hits our shelter! The blast almost knocks the air out from my lungs. I reach for Pithy’s arm, then jerk my hand back as my palm touches something wet and sticky on her. My stomach churns. I turn to see Pithy lying facedown on the ground, quiet and motionless. The top of her skull is caved in. A pool of blood slowly seeps into the dirt around her head. Her hair is wet and matted with small bits of a tofu-like substance on her black head. Her blood and pieces of brain are still on my hand. Pithy’s mum screams for her, then gathers Pithy into her arms. I wipe her blood and brains on my trouser legs. In a panic, I get up and run after Kim and Chou out of the shelter, away from Pithy. Away from her screaming mother. Away from the sorrow that threatens to take residence in my heart.
> ***
> Stories about victims of the Khmer Rouge attack spread like fire. There were stories about a baby thrown in the air and speared with a bayonet; the body of one mutilated man lying naked on top of another; a man’s torso found in front of his house and the bottom half on someone else’s front door. There are bodies of men found with their chests cut open and their livers missing. The Khmer Rouge soldiers believe that eating the livers of their enemy will give them strength and power.
There is an end to anything, however - so, ultimately, the Khmer Rouge nightmare also ends. But the scars it leaves are permanent.
> Though the palm trees are heavy with fruit, I see no people climbing to get it. People say the Khmer Rouge buried corpses next to them and now the palm milk is pink like thin blood and the fruit tastes like human flesh.
***
This is a brilliant piece of work. It is very hard to read, not because the writing is dense, but because the subject matter is too depressing. But we must bite the bullet and go ahead, because in a world where genocide has become the order of the day, we must never forget.
https://vinodkrishnan.wordpress.com/my-travel/This made me realise why Cambodians eat insects like crickets, grasshoppers, and beetles—it’s not just a cultural thing, but something deeply rooted in history, survival, and resilience. During the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia was gripped by severe food shortages. People had no choice but to survive on whatever they could find. These bugs became a crucial source of protein and fat during those desperate times.
എട്ടുകാലി വറുത്തത്, തേൾ പൊരിച്ചത്, കൂറ വരട്ടിയത്...
Just Cambodia things 😎
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