As an American girl in my mid twenties, it would be an understatement to say that I am naive about the world.  I have grown up in my middle class family, completely sheltered from life outside the US.   I have never felt the unimaginable pain of starvation or seen the horrors of genocide and it is very unlikely that I or any other American will ever experience them.  The closest I will ever get to this level of hardship is in the autobiographical book called First They Killed My Father by the author Loung Ung.  Loung Ung tells a story about her life in 1975 Cambodia after the communist regime called the Khmer Rouge takes over the Cambodian government.     

Loung Ung starts off as a happy, spoiled, middle class 5 year old child when the Khmer Rouge roll into her city, Phnom Penh, and force all the city dwellers to evacuate and migrate to labor camps.  The Khmer Rouge looked down upon people with money and citizens who were of foreign decent, like the Ung family who were half Chinese.  Loung’s world is then turned upside down as she witnesses death and starvation on an unprecedented scale.

It is hard to imagine starving, but Loung has a way of describing the feeling of slowly dieing from lack of food as well as what people will do just to survive, “We have eaten everything that is edible, from rotten leaves on the ground to the roots we dig up.  Rats, turtles, and snakes caught in our trap are not wasted as we cook and eat their brains, tails, hides, and blood (81-82).”  Loung mentions that she is so hungry; she would eat her beloved family dog if it was around.  This thought ashamed her but made it all the more apparent how much she had degenerated.

People in the US think that the only Holocaust to take place was the one in Nazi Germany during World War II, but Ung’s story brings light to the genocide that goes on relentlessly across our globe.  Even now as I write this people are suffering from cruel governments and starvation.  Loung’s book reminds us how uncivilized the world still is and makes it clear that those who say we have come a long way since  Hitler slaughtered the Jews are just as naïve as I am.

Comments: