Deion Smith
10/25/2010
World Literature Magnet, 4th
Novel Re-View Essay
The Escape Route:
A Review of First They Killed My Father: a daughter of Cambodia remembers by Loung Ung
Trials and tribulations in life are what shape people into who they are or who they will become. In her, novel Loung Ung describes her suffering from the horrible events in her life due to the unprincipled rule from the communist in Cambodia. This is a true story of genocide during the mid 1970’s during the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rogue. In Ung’s First They Killed My Father the power of the Khmer Rogue’s rule is described through her childhood memories.
As a child she lived in the city of Phnom Penh with her family who had a middle class income, her father being a high ranking general in the army (non-communist). This put her families’ life in jeopardy during the genocide of Cambodia, being that her father was a high ranking official in the opposing army. “He would risk being persecuted, branded a traitor, and perhaps even killed”. (Ung 12) They are forced to flee their home and go anywhere but where the Khmer Rogue is. They pretend to be a farming family for a while, knowing that they don’t stand a chance in surviving as a middle class family they will be surely killed. After a while they are forced to live in a work camp. In these work camps they got little food and worked all day long, to her a small child it was horrible. It seems as though as soon as they got used to it her brothers were kidnapped and her father was taken and executed. It was so hard for her to take in emotionally. She grew an eternal hate for Pol Pot from then on. “I feed my rage with images of me dragging Pol Pot’s dead body through the mud” (Ung 108). Her sisters were all split up between different work camps over the country. Her sister Keav died shortly after leaving from food poisoning. Her mother was executed as well when they were trying to take her sister Geak from her mother’s arms and she wouldn’t let go so they shot her. She had to suffer all this before she even hit puberty. This was all an example just to show how much power the Khmer Rogue had over the country, and this is when she realized she had to escape or suffer the fate of her family members.
Later as she gets older she is taken to a camp to be a child soldier. She has to witness many hands on executions. While traveling, she finds her sister Khouy in a Khmer Rogue hospital. She told her of her dream to leave the country. They end up getting a house boat and live on the water. So they planned to escape the country on their boat. In 1980 after five years of mental torture she makes it to a refugee camp in Vietnam. From there she escapes to America, where her life begins and is continued in her second novel. From there she went to school in Vermont and wrote her memoirs and became a human rights activist. With her motivation she escaped the powerful reign of the Khmer Rogue communist.
Her life is an example that anything is possible. She was determined to be free from the wrong-doing of her government and get out to tell about it so it could be changed. The dedication and strength it took to escape from a government was tremendous, but she did it. She had to let go of her past and think about her future, her free future.
