At first it is difficult to reconcile the photo of an 8-year-old Loung Ung with the 30-year-old author she has become. The young girl’s mouth, having tasted scarcely enough food during nearly four years under the Khmer Rouge, is despondent and stoic. Loung Ung, the adult, is relaxed and confident, an outspoken spokeswoman for the Campaign for a Landmine Free World.
Loung Ung, the adult, last year published “First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers,” a memoir detailing Pol Pot’s policies through the eyes of a child in the Khmer Rouge camps of Pursat province.
Interviewed in Phnom Penh, where she arrived Monday to raise land mine awareness, she said she wrote her book “as a way of pushing my fingers into someone’s eye.” Specifically, the eyes of the standing committee of Democratic Kampuchea; Pol Pot, its leader; and those who murdered members of her family.
“You tried to silence me, you tried to intimidate me, you tried to kill me,” she said, “and I’m not going to let you do that.”
Loung Ung survived starvation and Khmer Rouge cruelties. Her father, a police captain for Lon Nol, her mother and two of her sisters died along with more than 1 million Cambodians. Eventually she managed to find a better life in the US, after living in refugee camps. But her anger toward the regime never dissipated.
Land mines “are weapons of mass destruction, albeit in slow motion,” she said. “People like me survived the war, and now we’re dying during peacetime? It just doesn’t make sense.”
Her book has received attention in the US, something she never imagined, but she said that helps her advocacy work and helps her heal from her experiences. Monday, for example, she showed a delegation from the US and Canada around the infamous Tuol Sleng genocide museum.
“If you can’t change the past,” she said, looking at the barbed-wire fences still hanging at Tuol Sleng, “it’s better to try to change the future somehow.”
She will sign copies of her book from 4 to 7 pm today at the Foreign Correspondents Club.
