“I think how the world is still somehow beautiful even when I feel no joy at being alive within it. ”

I finished First They Killed My Father. It was an incredibly powerful book – powerful in storytelling and powerful in meaning.

Though Loung becomes desensitized to the violence and death all around her, the reader does not, and every description of every wound, every dead body, is a shock. It horrifies me, not just the description, but that this little girl saw all this, saw a man get his head bashed in, felt the blood and brains of her friend, smelt the overpowering stench of decaying and burning flesh. To read about it is horrific enough, but to experience it – just thinking about someone else experiencing it is so sickening. At the end of the book there is a small note from the author, where she tells about how she came to write the book. She explains how she knew she had to write it in a little girl’s voice, because that was who she was when it happened. She also forced herself to write in the present tense, because though it was more painful for her, the past tense would have distanced not only herself but the readers as well from the pain, and it is the pain that makes the story so powerful, along with the hope. Loung spent the four years of her young life hating the Khmer Rouge, wanting to kill them all for what they did to her family. But slowly, she comes to realize that hate will not help anything, it won’t change anything. When she watches the execution of one Khmer solider as a child, at first she shares the crowd’s rage and call for revenge, for blood. But as she watches the solider slowly die in pain, she starts to see him as a person. She wonders if that is how her father was killed, by the same type of vindictive bloodthirsty people, and she feels pity for the soldier, realizing he is just a person as well. But she still has not reached the point of letting go of her hate completely, because she reasons that it is “too late” to stop the execution, too late for all the people the Khmer Rouge has hurt. Eventually Loung learns to let go of the anger, but before she can come to terms with the pain, she spends many more years in America trying to block out her past. But she couldn’t move on until she dealt with it, and it was when she began to work with Campaign for a Landmine-Free World that she was able to feel better, knowing she was helping by telling her story and raising awareness. Her hope, which had been crushed time and time again in the four years of Pol Pot’s rule, always came back, and she began to rely again on hope instead of anger to keep her from giving up.

I am also reading 1984 right now, and as they are both sort of about dystopian societies, there are many similarities. One similarity is in the propaganda. In the children’s solider camp where Loung was forced to live, the Met Bong in charge gave nightly speeches of propaganda about the mighty Khmer Rouge and the evil Youns. Where she used to spout out praise for the Angkar, as the leader and source of power, she then changes her speeches, praising Pol Pot in place of the Angkar. It seems like suddenly it is Pol Pot who leads the Khmer Rouge, brought them to power, and rules the country. The children switch from chanting “Angkar! Angkar!” to “Pol Pot! Pol Pot!”. It is Pol Pot who now receives the credit for every accomplishment by the Khmer Rouge, and Pol Pot who is more greatly respected, and feared. This is similar to 1984, when the allies in the war switch, and suddenly every poster and every news bit had to be rewritten to account for the change in allies. And of course, this in turn is similar to Animal Farm, and the sheep that bleat the propaganda blindly, without noticing when drastic changes have been made. That is happened in real life, this propaganda works and is effective in hoodwinking people, that’s a scary thought.

I will probably have to wait a few days to gather my thoughts when I’m not so busy so I can write more about this book, because it really deserves it.