First They Killed My Father is the first memoir in a trilogy describing a harrowing account of survival. It follows a young child’s story through the Khmer Rouge’s Killing Fields of the mid to late 1970s.
Loung Ung first published First They Killed My Father in the year 2000. This was just over two decades after the Vietnamese penetrated Cambodia and defeated the Khmer Rouge army.
For a graduate in Political Science, Ung did find this literary endeavour strange. On the other hand, she was determined to do two things. project her painstaking personal experience onto the collective human consciousness and to vanquish the myth that negates the sheer and agonising impact conflict has on a child’s life. This goal was bigger than Ung’s apprehension to write.
Indeed, for Ung, a four-year massacre that ended before her 8th year left an imprint. First They Killed My Father takes the reader on a journey through that imprint.
The Contents
The contents of this book are captivating. Admittedly, this was among the many impulse purchases I made at the beginning of lockdown. I was very eager to use the slower pace of life to get back into reading. Neither were the reviews written at the back of my copy particularly enticing to me. I had read many memoirs, novels, plays, and even poetry with a backdrop of genocide or the like.
The child’s eyes through which this memoir is written reveals the raw reality of a massacre that claimed two hundred innocent lives. This was through systematic starvation, physical and mental torment. It thrust many more into a bewildering mere existence.
Class differences
First They Killed My Father begins in 1975 in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. This was soon to become a stronghold of the Khmer Rouge as they rose to power at the collapse of Lon Nol’s government. The author is, at that point, at the tender age of five years old. She is a precocious child and speaks of her idealistic middle-class lifestyle. She lived in an apartment some feet high from the ground, a detail she conveys to the reader to give a sense of her privileged formal years and the disparity between the middle and working classes.
Ung’s privilege is not the type that leaves her wanting more from life. However, the genocide that she unexpectedly finds herself embroiled in does give her a sense of the poverty that had run in parallel with her formal years.
Father comes first
An initial couple of chapters introduce the reader to her family. It gives a vivid and poignant illustration of her love and admiration for her father (Pa), the childish quarrels but camaraderie between her and her siblings, and the inexpressive yet caring nature and elegancy of her Ma (mother). These formative chapters present Ung as a daring, inquisitive, and resilient child. She immerses herself within activities children of her class and gender are expected to abstain from. Ung nonetheless rebels after this.
The next few years that follow see Ung’s life change irrevocably and tragically change. Her family, amongst others, evacuate first by van and then by foot out of the urban Phnom Penh and into one village. They then attempt to seek refuge away from the claws of the Khmer Rouge. The relentless pain and trauma that ensue are encapsulated within the title of this first memoir, First They Killed My Father.
The tragedy
Although chronologically, the title may not seem accurate, it carries symbolic accuracy, because to Ung her father was a source of security and strength. When he is taken, hardly months after she loses her first sibling, this marks her journey to becoming the independent and unrelenting character she evolves into.
Loung Ung’s memoir relates her and her family’s searing a few years under the Khmer Rouge regime. During this, she suffers from separation from her loved ones at still an incredibly young age. It is temporal and permanent, physical, and mental. She also battles with unceasing hunger and malaise and experiences life as a child soldier.
Ung was barely five years older than she was when the war began. The reader is reminded of this when she reunites with her family and during her immigration to the USA via Vietnam. These experiences equipped her to come through as a much stronger individual.
The Killing Fields
Historically, this memoir carries much significance, as the Killing Fields is just one of many forgotten genocides of the late twentieth century. The genocide was later dismissed as a distant conflict in Asia. It shows the cruelty of communism that, under the guise of socio-economic equality, inflicted torture, and anguish beyond comprehension.
However, personally, what drew me into this book was its startling pertinence. There’s much to learn from Loung Ung’s story. The brute system through which the regime operated its ethnic cleansing lay bare for all to see. The reader realises the façade.
Loung Ung comes from a financially stable and educated family. Unfortunately, these were two features that made them prey to the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge’s communist ideology opposed anything that might have allowed one individual to earn more money than another. The seeking out of and shooting dead doctors, teachers, officials of the defeated government was commonplace. This shattered the illusion of financial stability offering security.
The politics
Her memoir questions the imposition of sanctions on countries with fascist states by comparably better-off ones. On the one hand, fuelling the conflict by providing weaponry. In addition to this, they also imposed sanctions on necessities like food and sanitary items. The measures that some of the most powerful states habitually take put them on equal footing with the oppressors.
The story looks bleak from a geopolitical and socio-economic standpoint. Ung’s story is telling on a much more intimate level. The child-like point of view she tells her story through is instrumental in demonstrating how pointless it is to commit genocide. For example, she explicitly expresses how she did not care what the ends of the people engaged in Killing Fields were.
The young child does not know the people routinely reducing her food rations. She didn’t know who was mysteriously stealing her loved ones. She only knew that she was starving. That first- it was the Angkar (Village Leader) and then Pol Pot (Prime Minister of the Democratic Kampuchea) who did this to her. For these two, she reserved an immeasurable loathing.
Ung has succeeded in taking the reader through this very personal and tragic experience. We suffer as she is separated from her beloved family and we feel her hunger when she is starving. Finally, we feel frustrated when she is forced to become a child soldier. First They Killed My Father is truly a masterpiece.