Although I'm encouraged to see the initiative shown by the Khmer Institute in
advocating study of the Cambodian history, I'm disappointed to see the
stance adopted with regard to Loung Ung's book, "First They Killed My
Father." The Khmer Institute is not merely negative: it is venomous.
The term "analysis" implies an objective critique: a commitment to scientific
method, a determined attempt to find the truth. The Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Richard Feynman once discussed the difference between good science,
and bad science: "It's a kind of scientific integrity... Details that could
throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them...If you
make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must
also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that
agree with it... the idea is to give ALL of the information to help others
judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to
judgement in one particular direction or another."
The Khmer Institute's analysis ignores a great deal of evidence that would
indeed cast doubt upon their interpretations. Most of the "errors" cited by
the Khmer Institute are trivial and irrelevant to the central theme of the
book, and at times the Khmer Institute's "evidence" is demonstrably wrong.
There are also failures of reasoning: the Khmer Institute's claims can't be
deduced from the "evidence" cited to support them. On other occasions, the
content of the book is misrepresented, and on still other occasions the Khmer
Institute's own position is inconsistent, shifting from one side, then to the
other in an attempt to discredit the book.
The tone of the analysis is anything but objective. Much of its rhetoricis
insulting, even slanderous. Loung's father is likened to "a German commander
who lived extravagently while so many others suffered during World War II."
The KI analysis even seems to imply rather vaguely that he was a murderer.
His death is callously dismissed with the comment that "victims such as her
father do not seem to be so completely innocent." Such insults are not merely
cruel, they're irrelevant: The book is about Loung Ung's personal
experiences. It is not about her father. Do the authors of the analysis think
that a five-year-old girl should view her father's murder with indifference
because he had two cars, and therefore might have been corrupt? Even the
title of the Khmer Institute's report seems to be intended as a casual insult
to Ms. Ung. The analysis is called "First They Killed Her Sister," because,
the authors note, "... the reader interestingly finds out that it is actually
the author's sister who first dies under the Khmer Rouge." Of course, this
"argument" ignores the fact that Ung's sister died of illness, unlike her
father, who was murdered; and it ignores the fact that the word "First" is
need not pertain to chronology: First also refers to primacy, or to utmost
importance: First, above all else that the Khmer Rouge did, they killed my
father. If, as the Khmer Institute claims, they "do not deny Ung her personal
tragedy," why does the very title of their essay denigrate the significance
of her father's murder?
An objective analysis would consider different possible explanations for
seeming inconsistencies, but the authors of this article have not done so.
For example, the Khmer Institute (KI) flatly states that Ung's description of
a trip to Angkor Wat is "completely fabricated." The KI's own admission that
there is no clear reason why she would lie does not stop them from branding
her a liar just the same. The trip probably could not have taken place in
1973 or 1974 as Ung states, but it could well have taken place earlier. But
rather than assuming that she is simply mistaken about the precise date of a
trip taken almost thirty years earlier, the KI simply states bluntly that she
is lying. As further "evidence," they note that a photo in the book is not
Angkor Wat. Yet Ung never states that it IS Angkor Wat, nor does she state
that it was taken on the same trip she describes: the photo is captioned as
having been taken on a trip to Angkor Wat, which is different than being
taken AT Angkor Wat.
The Khmer Institute also implies that Ms. Ung is lying when she recalls
playing in the street before the Khmer Rouge arrived. But children play
during wartime just as surely as they play during peace. Other accounts of
the civil war in Cambodia corroborate this: Pin Yathay's "Stay Alive, My
Son," for example ("As the children ran off to play with their cousins in the
garden, the women began to prepare some food." - p. 7), or Time Magazine's
description of the capital less than a week before its fall ("Despite the
ever-present danger from random Khmer Rouge rocketing, children still sing in
the streets in the early evening and decorations are going up for the
Cambodian New Year, April 13." - Time, April 14, 1975).
In analyzing Ung's account of the evacuation, the Khmer Institute makes a
number of dubious contentions. The Khmer Institute takes issue with Ung's
account of the evacuation, suggesting that it should have taken only one day
to walk to Kom Baul, 25 miles from Phnom Penh, especially considering that
the family had the use of a truck. The absurdity of the Khmer Institute's
claim should be obvious to anyone who has ever walked long distances with
small children, and it should be even more apparent to anyone familiar with
the conditions during the evacuation of Phnom Penh. Moreover, the use of a
truck would make no difference at all: the few roads out of the city were
clogged with two million people, all forced out at the same time. In many
locations it was almost impossible to move for long periods of time. For one
of my friends, merely crossing the Monivong Bridge - a distance of only a few
hundred yards - took nearly an entire day.
Similarly, the analysis claims that an account of using money as toilet paper
is "improbable," saying that "many people" believed the Khmer Rouge would
soon allow people back into their homes. Perhaps "many people" did believe
them, but many others did not, and it would take no particular foresight to
realize that Lon Nol currency - practically valueless even under Lon Nol -
would be totally worthless under the new regime.
The Khmer Institute also claims that it was unlikely that the Ung family
would have claimed to be peasants - in spite of the fact that the KI notes in
their own analysis that "The Khmer Rouge certainly would have killed her and
her family if they knew of her father's employment with the Khmer Republic
and her family's past wealth..." Why, then, is it difficult to believe? And
if Ung is mistaken... if in fact her father claimed to be a cyclo driver
instead of a rice farmer, does that in any way alter the nature of the book?
The Khmer Institute dismisses Ung's fear of rape during the Khmer Rouge
period, claiming that the Khmer Rouge policies "in many ways actually
promoted or were based on the notion of gender equality." Again, however, the
authors of the KI study ignore other testimonies that support Ms. Ung. In
"Children of the Killing Fields," Thida Mam describes the murder of her
friend by a Khmer Rouge that she was forced to marry, and Mam writes that "I
was fearful that this might be the night I'd be taken away, tortured,raped,
and killed..." (P. 14). And in the same book, Roeun Sam describes the rape
and killing of a close friend by Khmer Rouge soldiers: "The soldiers were so
angry, I was afraid I would be next. Three men came and stood at my feet.
They threw a pair of dirty green pants covered with blood in my face. Then
they threw a bra and a black shirt covered in her blood. 'Here. If you have
compassion and empathy for her, you can go with her.' They were drunk. They
were like animals." (P. 80)
Several of the Khmer Institute's other "refutations" are unsupported by
anything at all. For example, an incident in several members of Loung's
family meet at an infirmiry is called "so implausible as to make it out of
place even if the book was publicized as fiction." To begin with, the KI
erroneously states that "all her family members" are present. This is not
true: Loung's brother Khouy is not there. Ung herself notes that the meeting
is a remarkable coincidence: yet the KI seems to discount it for no other
reason than the fact that it is a remarkable coincidence.
Similarly, the KI even denies the validity of Ung's own emotions, claiming
that her descriptions of how she felt at the prospect of being adopted is an
"over-dramatization," as though they are more qualified than Loung Ung to
describe how it feels to be an orphan.
On other occasions the Khmer Institute seems to have completely missed the
point of some of the book's passages. For example, the authors claim that Ung
is "completely erroneous" in stating that the Khmer Rouge forced children to
change what they called their parents. The authors base this claim upon the
fact that the terms the Khmer Rouge forced children to use ("meh" and"poh")
were already used by most children. The point is not that the terms were
CHANGED. The point is that the use of the chosen terms became MANDATORY. Most
American children call their parents Mom and Dad; would my opinion be
"completely erroneous" if I objected to a law that made the use of the terms
"Ma" and "Pa" a capital offense?
While most of the points raised by the Khmer Institute are completely
trivial, there is one issue that is of great significance: racism. At the
core of the Khmer Institute's objections is their contention that Ms. Ung
hates all Khmer people. That accusation is slanderous, irresponsible and
completely groundless. None of the Khmer Institute's "examples" of this
supposed racism hold up to any scrutiny at all.
The Khmer Institute claims that the book is "presented with light-skinned
victims and their dark-skinned tormentors." But there is absolutely nothing
in the book to support this statement. In fact, the one victim mourned above
all others - Loung Ung's father - is described on page 5 as being
"dark-skinned." The Khmer Institute's claim is completely baseless.
Ung's use of the word "them" is also cited as evidience of her racism: "I
hate them all." But in context it is very clear that Ung is referring to the
Khmer Rouge:
"'He was a Khmer Rouge soldier. He deserved to die. Too bad they are not all
dead,' I say to Pithy. She says nothing. I do not in fact know if the body is
a civilian or a soldier. Thinking of the body as a civilian makes me think of
Pa too much. It is easier to feel no pity for the dead if I think of them all
as Khmer Rouge. I hate them all."
Contrary to the Khmer Institute's claim, the reference is not at all
"ambiguous": Ung explicitly makes a distinction between CIVILIANS and the
Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge are mentioned specifically, and the Khmer as a
race are not mentioned at all. It is plainly and simply obvious that she is
talking about the Khmer Rouge.
One of the ironies of the accusation of racism is that it forces the Khmer
Institute to change ground in the middle of their own analysis. If she were
in fact racist, Ms. Ung would have to draw a distinction between herself as
Chinese and the rest of the people of Cambodia. And yet the FAILURE to make
that distinction drives the earlier criticisms: The Khmer Institute complains
that young Loung's dress wasn't typical of what Khmer children wore to New
Years, or that the gifts of paper money that they received are not common. In
other words, first Ms. Ung is criticized because she DOESN'T differentiate
the herself from the Khmer, and then she is criticized because she supposedly
DOES.
This is not the only point where the Khmer Institute changes its stance. The
KI disputes Ung's descriptions of racism against ethnic Chinese ("If the
Khmer Rouge's policy really was one of 'ethnic cleansing,' Ung's whole family
would have been wiped out at the outset..."). In denying the pogroms against
various ethnic groups in Cambodia, the Khmer Institute notes that "As for the
Chinese in Cambodia however, a United Nation's report released in 1999 notes
no such persecution within the definition of the Genocide Convention." But on
the Khmer Institute's own web site, in the article "The Khmer Rouge and
Justice" The Khmer Institute argues at length that the UN's definition of
genocide is inadequate, calling it "vague and overbroad, arbitrary and
capricious, and statutorily unreasonable both in construction and
application." Why, then, does the Khmer Institute use this "arbitrary and
capricious" definition to claim that the Chinese were not persecuted?
The analysis goes on to claim that Ung's book "implies that Khmers themselves
were not victimized." But it does no such thing: the fact that the Khmer
Rouge committed murder for absurd racist reasons in no way implies that they
didn't also commit murder for absurd ideological reasons. The introduction of
the book notes that "Though these events constitute my experience, mystory
mirrors that of millions of Cambodians. If you had been living in Cambodia
during this period, this would be your story too." Note that she does not say
her experience mirrors that of millions of Chinese. Note that she does not
say "If you had been a Chinese in Cambodia, this would be your story, too."
Moreover, the issue of the treatment of ethnic Chinese in Cambodia provides a
clear example of the manner in which the Khmer Institute ignores accounts
which corroborate Ms. Ung. The footnotes of the analysis contain a quote from
Elizabeth Becker's book "When the War Was Over": "These Chinese were the
people who held the country's peasantry in ransom, who had hoarded rice until
the price shot up to intolerable levels, and who had charged interest rates
that bankrupted families in the city as well as in the countryside." The
quote seems to have been included in the analysis for the purpose of
villifying Cambodia's ethnic Chinese. But the quote - which refers to a
specific group of Chinese within an exclusive enclave of Phnom Penh - is
pulled completely out of context. Moreover, the quote is taken from a section
of the book which DIRECTLY corroborates all of Ung's statements about the
attitudes and policies of the Khmer Rouge toward ethnic Chinese. The Khmer
Institute claims that there was no discrimination against the Chinese, and
disputes Ung's account of children taunting her for her light skin, even
going so far as to claim that "it is difficult even to translate the phrase
'ugly white skin'" into Khmer. But the very section of the book containing
the quote from Becker is titled "'Chalk Face' -- Surviving the Racial
Pogroms." The section begins with an account describing the experiences of a
Chinese merchant during the Khmer Rouge reign. And contrary to the Khmer
Institute's claim that the Khmer language simply has no way to disparage
light-skinnned people, the very next page of Becker's book describes the
jeering epithets in detail: "Tao grew accustomed to the politically
sanctioned racist taunts of the new order. He was called 'chalk face' and
'white-face' and 'Chinese capitalist' but mostly he was called the Khmer
equivalent of 'Chink.'" Becker goes on to note that "Speaking Chinese or
exhibiting Chinese culture in any other fashion was punishable by death in
some areas." [p. 255]
In a broader sense, the Khmer Institute's claims that the Khmer Rouge did not
persecute the Chinese runs counter to all statistical and anecdotal evidence.
As Ben Kiernan has noted, "The Chinese under Pol Pot's regime suffered the
worst disaster ever to befall any ethnic Chinese community in Southeast Asia.
Of the 1975 population of 425,000, only 200,000 survived the next four
years... an estimated 50% of Cambodia's ethnic Chinese perished, a higher
proportion even than the estimated toll among city dwellers in general (about
33%)." ["Cultural Survival Quarterly," Volume 14, Number 3, 1990] Kiernan's
book "The Pol Pot Regime," in a chapter entitled "Ethnic Cleansing," details
at the length the racist policies implemented by the Khmer Rouge.
Similarly, the Khmer Institute's analysis ignores the broader issue of why so
many survivors of the Khmer Rouge have praised the book, including Dith Pran,
Youk Chhang, and Ronnie Yimsut. Some of that praise, in fact, has come from
refugees who were in the same geographic area as Ms. Ung. For example, months
before the publication of the KI analysis, during a newsgroup discussion in
which supporters of the KI position branded Ms. Ung a racist, one of the few
participants who had actually read the book noted that "I do not find her
writing racist at all. As a matter of fact I found out that her & family were
living at the village Roleap (Purstatt province), same as my family during
the Pol Pot era. Most of my family died there : ( Reading her book brought
back all the memories & pain just like many others books I read about The
killing fields during the Pol Pot regime. Loung Ung's story was just almost
like the other 3 million Khmer people who have survived that holocaust
including my sister & me."
(http://groups.google.com/groups?q=roleap&hl=en&safe=off&rnum=3&selm=200010192
11936.07542.00000410%40ng-fm1.aol.com)
The Khmer Institute's criticism of Ms. Ung's book seem misguided on several
fronts, both factual and conceptual. Many of the objections seem to bebased
on attempts to see the book as a broad history of Cambodia, when it was never
intended to be such a thing. It's a memoir: nothing more or less. In the
novel "Memoirs of a Geisha," Arthur Golden writes that "Autobiography...is
like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the
grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field,
on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us -- so long
as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no
position to observe." The authors of the Khmer Institute article note that
"Obviously, this is not a diary that was written at the time of the events"
and yet they evaluate it as though it were. Memoir is about personal
experience: it is not about cross-referenced footnotes and annotated
bibliographies. The difficulty - and pain - of writing a memoir of an
agonizing part of one's life seems to have escaped the authors of the KI
analysis.
In "Memoir Lapse," (Brill's Content, June 2001) Roman Milisic, the son of a
Yugoslav poet killed in shelling in 1991, writes that "To make one's own
parent - particularly if that parent is famous - the hero of one's memoir is
an onerous task. The viewpoint is both wholly personal and hopelessly myopic.
So the final picture may be skewed, but it will be valid... First, and rather
mundanely, I'm afraid that I'll fail. I doubt my strength as a storyteller
and myself as a story. And it's hard for a first-time writer to separate the
two. I put myself on trial every time I sit down at the keyboard... Then I'm
afraid that I'll succeed and thus ultimately lose what I set out to find: my
missing. Write it down and you don't have to remember it, right? Once a real
document for your memory exists, it gradually becomes their sole
repository... My father, the bundle of words, will be available to all. But
how could the real, warm man who used to walk to his kitchen not get lost in
the imperfect house I'd build for him -- trapped in unfamiliar surroundings,
confounded by a misplaced door, a hidden year, an invention of plot? He'll
slip away a second time... That, for me, would mean more suffering. And I'm
not sure I can pay that price again."
The bitter, mocking tone of the Khmer Institute's analysis suggests that they
still do not understand the terrible price that Loung Ung has paid.
Rather than expending such great effort to discredit Ms. Ung's book, wouldn't
it have been more productive to promote something positive? In seekingto
heal the damage done by the Khmer Rouge, there are a thousand constructive
tasks that remain undone. Surely those tasks are more important than a
campaign to discredit one woman's memory of the most painful chapter of her
life.
regards,
Bruce Sharp
http://www.mekong.net/cambodia
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