First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

There are books that teach you about history, and there are books that change the way you experience a place. First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung did the latter for me.

Loung Ung’s memoir recounts her childhood under the Khmer Rouge, beginning with the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. Loung was just five years old when her family was forced from their home, joining the vast movement of people driven out of Cambodia’s cities and into the countryside. What follows is her experience of displacement, hunger, forced labour, separation and devastating loss under Pol Pot’s regime.

I came to this book already knowing a considerable amount about the Khmer Rouge. I used to teach Social Studies, and Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were among the topics I taught my Year 10 students. Personal narratives were often part of the way I helped students understand what can otherwise become an almost incomprehensible collection of dates, policies and death tolls.

Reading Loung’s own story while travelling through Cambodia was something else entirely.

I read much of the book as Darryl and I travelled towards Kampot, through a landscape dominated by agriculture. Looking out at rice fields and rural communities while reading about the Khmer Rouge’s attempt to transform Cambodia into an agrarian society made an ideology I understood academically feel frighteningly tangible. As Loung described her family being forced from Phnom Penh and marching through the countryside, I found myself looking outside and imagining families walking through landscapes like those surrounding us.

The most challenging part of the memoir for me was also one of its greatest strengths: Loung tells her story through the eyes of the child she was.

She captures that young perspective brilliantly, and I found myself constantly conflicted by it. Loung can be extraordinarily naive and extraordinarily insightful, sometimes almost simultaneously. As an adult reader, I knew what was happening around her when she didn’t. I understood the danger behind events she could only interpret through the limited world of a small child. At other times, her observations cut through the situation with startling clarity.

That tension could be uncomfortable. I sometimes wanted an adult Loung to step into the narrative and explain what her younger self couldn’t understand. But doing so would have taken away much of what makes the memoir so powerful. We are not being shown the Khmer Rouge through the clarity of hindsight. We are experiencing a child’s attempts to make sense of a world that has become increasingly incomprehensible.

After I finished the book, Darryl and I watched the film adaptation. We did so the night before visiting Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former S-21 prison, and the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek.

That sequence of experiences mattered.

At S-21, it was the photographs of the children that affected me most deeply. By then, the children staring back from those photographs weren’t simply anonymous victims within a history I had studied and taught. I had spent hours inside one Cambodian child’s experience of this period. Loung’s story had given me a way into understanding what it might mean for a child to experience fear, hunger, separation and violence without having the adult framework to comprehend why any of it was happening.

Seeing those children’s faces after reading her story landed with an even more bitter blow.

First They Killed My Father isn’t an easy book to read, nor should it be. What I found most valuable wasn’t that it taught me the history of the Khmer Rouge. Much of that history was already familiar to me. Instead, it shifted the perspective from which I understood it.

I would recommend it not only to readers interested in Cambodian history, but to anyone interested in how enormous political ideologies and historical events are experienced at an intensely human level. For travellers to Cambodia in particular, I think there is real value in reading personal accounts alongside visiting the places where this history occurred.

For me, this book became inseparable from Cambodia itself: the agricultural landscapes outside our windows, the history I had once taught in a classroom, Loung’s childhood voice, and eventually the photographs of children at S-21.

I knew the history before I arrived. Loung Ung’s story made me encounter it differently.