"The chief told us the Angkor would take care of us and would provide us with everything we need. I guess the Angkor doesn't understand that we need to eat."

So I don’t know if this is a book of literary merit, it’s a national bestseller…

The book is sort of combination of an autobiography and an account of a historical event, so you get to learn more about the history of a country while still reading a story, with characters and a plot etc. – basically my perfect idea of a novel. 

It is basically nonfiction, but embellished into a kind of storytelling, so the events are real but all the dialogue and details have most likely been embellished and added on to, since I doubt the author could remember every word of every conversation from when she was five. But I really like the way it was written. It is written from the point of view of the author as a young girl, limited in the sense of not knowing what will happen next, even though the author does know since all this has happened in her life. What’s interesting is that it partly sounds like a five year old speaking at times, disconnected and confused and in-the-dark about complex issues, but it also uses “big words”, more sophisticated than a five-year-old’s vocabulary would be, like “permeate” and “concave”. Though this could be seen as errors in continuity, I find it interesting. It would probably be difficult to describe all the scenes using such a limited vocabulary, and the combination of the simple and the advanced give the story this unique tone, that makes it all the more frightening and heart-wrenching to read. A five year old’s perspective on serious adult problems told with both “children” and “grown-up” words, creates this crudely mature tone of the story. It reflects in a way the stunted physical growth of the girl contrasted with her forced rapid mental maturity, having to grow up way too quickly. 

            This one scene stood out to me because it related to what I was learning in Death and Dying at the time. The author, the girl Loung, being too sick from starvation to work in the fields, occupies her time by watching the villagers bury the dead. Whole families are dying because of starvation, and the rest of the village is too weak to bury them all quickly. Loung watches as they dump whole families into mass graves under the huts of the dead, as maggots and flies and the “stench of death” fill the village. Loung admits that a disturbing scene like this would have “terrified” her, but that now, she has seen it all so often, she feels “nothing”. This is sort of like what is happening today, as I learnt in Death and Dying. People are becoming desensitized with death, because they see it so often in media, in wars, etc. Loung, having lived a privileged life, had hardly ever even seen poor people before the change in government, let alone a dead or dying person. They now surround her on all sides, and in such a short time she has had to adjust to accept this as part of her life now, and deal with it. Death can no longer be ignored, especially since she herself is so close to it. But while she is numb to the dead in a way, it still consciously follows her every thought. Being close to death, she both has had to accept it as a normal part of every day life, and be aware of its impending doom every second to strive to stay alive. It is a concept almost impossible to understand to one who has never had to experience it. Death threatens her from many sources, starvation, diseases, and every neighbor, who would sell her family out and murder them all if they knew who they really were. So while being around the dead constantly has desensitized Loung, it has also heightened her awareness, knowing she could very well be next. 

            Another scene that stood out to me related to Hamlet, in a few ways. Lacking food, Loung and her family, and the rest of the village, continually search for new sources of food, from leaves to bugs. Chong, a widowed neighbour, discovers that earthworms are safely edible and abundant. Loung, who has eaten crickets, raw rabbit, blood soup, and worse, is horrified at the idea of eating earthworms. What horrifies her is the thought that earthworms eat corpses, and so eating an earthworm would be like eating the flesh of a dead body. At six years old, you wouldn’t expect her to know this, but unfortunately, she has seen enough maggot-infested dead bodies to be able to clearly visualize just what the earthworm, and by extension she, would be eating. This is just like in Hamlet, when the circle of life is explained in that a fish eats a maggot, a human eats the fish, and then a maggot eats the human. Loung, who watched as corpses of men, women, and children were tossed into graves, could not overcome this idea, which is really the heart of life. It also relates to Hamlet in that the neighbor, Chong, after the death of her husband and children, goes insane, similar to Hamlet and Ophelia at the deaths of their fathers. She is distraught, going through cycles of hysteria at the thought of her children, and periods when she talks to them as though they are still there. Hamlet does the same with his father’s death, believing he is seeing his ghost. 

I haven’t finished the book yet, though it is difficult to put down, so I will only write about a few key scenes that stood out to me, though really every scene is significant enough to write about. I cannot wait to finish it, so I can put all the different threads of thought and ideas together.