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Hello, I saw an interview with Loung Ung on Booknotes, and decided to look into her story. In the interests of fairness, I checked out your site's "Statements" on the book. I found your exceptions to Ms. Ung's experiences to be superficial, petty and childish. You deserve to be commended. I've never seen so masterful an example of dodging the issue in recent history. Your expose never addressed the real issue of Khmer Rouge atrocities. Your objections fell into three categories: 1) Discrediting Ms. Ung's ethnicity and socio-economic status. Your attempt at character assassination was particularly laughable. If Ms. Ung isChinese or Cambodian or Khmer is immaterial to the fact that the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of her family members and millions of otherCambodians, regardless of their ethnicity. Your repeated corrections of Ms. Ung's references to her family as "middle class" ranged from vague allegations of her father's misdeeds (having policemen protect his daughter from Khmer Rouge terrorists?) to defending her family's murder because "they disproportionately benefited from the conditions that lead [sic] to the destruction of Cambodia." You even said the fact that they were given leftovers when scavenging for food made them "extremely fortunate"! They had been rich, so they deserved to die. 2) Calling into question minute details of her childhood memories. Whether the Princess' name was Monique or Monineath hardly makes her book "disturbingly inaccurate." Whether she and her sister played hopscotch in the streets of Phnom Penh or not doesn't change the fact that her life soon became a living hell at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Correcting her comments on the history of Angkor Wat is not exactly proving she "misrepresents and distorts Khmer[1] culture and history." 3) Focusing on meaningless details of her experiences. Whether it took her family one day or four to move from Phnom Penh to Kom Baul when the Khmer Rouge took over the capital is the dictionary definition of splitting hairs. Questioning whether they tried to pretend to be peasants to save their lives is more pettiness: it is NOT comparable to a New Yorker trying to pass himself off as a Mississippian, as in your expose. Criticizing the family for eating wild mushrooms which turned out to be poisonous could be interpreted as blaming the victim. Your assertion that the "Khmer Rouge had strict marriage guidelines and infringement of these rules in the manner Ung describes, even by soldiers, would have been dealt with quite severely" doesn't exactly assure me that rape and abduction by soldiers didn't happen. After all, millions of people were systematically worked and starved to death under the Khmer Rouge; it's not unthinkable, therefore, that the soldiers may have raped a few, too. I don't think the actions of the Khmer Rouge are characteristic of Khmer people or Khmer culture, so I wonder why you feel the need to deny the experiences of millions of victims of the KR. You want "more evidence" as opposed to messy memories of atrocities. Too bad Ms. Ung didn't get the badge numbers of the men who took her father off to execute him.
Peter Farrell
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