Dear Mr. Sharp,
We appreciate the time you spent in reading our analysis and writing your comments. I'm sorry to say, however, that I find your tone in responding to us as venomous and mocking as you claim ours is toward Ung, not to mention condescending. You begin by quoting Dr. Feynman and attempting to give us a lesson on objectivity:
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...
The tone of the analysis is anything but objective. Much of its rhetoric
is 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.
First, perhaps it is much easier to be "objective" when your family and lives have not be destroyed by the KR, only to have someone profit off sensationalizing their deaths years later. We admittedly write from a biased vantage point -that of victims of the KR. Your quote of Dr. Feynman is a nice one, but unlike science, in history there is no true "objectivity" because ones viewpoint almost inevitably colors the interpretation of history. That of course does not mean there is no truth. For example, that the KR killed more than just Cambodians of Chinese descent is a truth. Secondly, we would not and do not claim that Ung's father was a murderer, but merely assert that individuals in his line of employment (government secret police) tended to be very brutal men who did in fact murder many people. The uncle of one of the analysis authors was a well-known Cambodian journalist in the 1960s who barely managed to evade several assassination attempts by such men, and was eventually forced to flee to Laos in fear of his life. His crime: speaking out against government corruption. To become a member of the Cambodian secret police meant that you had to be ready and willing to commit some very nefarious acts, including murder; same as if you joined the Gestapo or Pinochet's secret police or any other such instrument of oppression.
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
We sympathize with her pain for the loss of her father. Members of the KI have experienced this loss due to the war and the KR as well. But as victims of the destruction of our country, we are equally offended by the fact that the author, not a five-year-old girl but as a grown woman, tries to rewrite history in a manner which tries to cover up how corruption led to the destruction of our country. Many people were killed because of the KR and because of the corruption and injustice that helped give rise to the KR. It may be irrelevant to you that Ung's father may have contributed to the destruction of Cambodia, but not us. Such people practically handed our country over to the KR through their brutality and corruption.
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"
It is not meant to be an insult, but to show that the author is willing to even manipulate the title of her book for purposes of sensationalism. She herself in her book flatly states that "the Khmer Rouge" (not disease) killed/murdered her sister. When we say that the KR killed 1.7 million Cambodians, we are not saying they physically shot every one of them, but that through their policies they are responsible for their deaths.
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.
(1) If the trip had taken place earlier, then Ung would be "remembering" a trip she took when she was 2 years old or younger. (2) She is not even present in the photo at issue, which shows her older sister as an infant. She could not have been on that trip unless she also claims to possess pre-natal memory, which she may as well do given all the other extraordinary powers she attributes to herself (strength to fire an AK-47 and overpower a Viet soldier as a malnurished 7-8 year old, extrasensory perception, remarkable power of self-healing after she gashes her foot on a shard of glass lying on the ground which serendipitously stops her assault on the Viet soldier, etc.).
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?
It is difficult to believe because it would have been so completely obvious that they were not at that point in time -when they still had much of their possessions, such as urban clothing, with them and they had not worked a single day in the field. Just looking at their skin, mannerism or language, someone would be able to gauge whether or not they are peasants. Ung herself discusses how different they appear when they arrive at the village later in her book. Yes, many people had to lie about their past in order to survive the KR period, but during the evacuation of Phnom Penh, when they were still wearing their city clothes and carrying luggage full of the same?
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)
We would under no circumstances claim that rape did not occur! Rape undoubtedly occurred during the KR period and under Vietnamese occupation and in the refugee camps. It did occur and is one of the great evils of war and instability. What we dismiss is: (1) the notion that at 6-7 Ung was so cognizant of what rape was, and (2) that it was a systematic policy by the KR. To say that it was not a systematic policy of the KR is entirely different from dismissing that rape occurred. Even in the anecdotes you give, we can see that it was not policy, but rather a result of "drunk" "animals" getting away with giving in to their base instincts - somewhat different from the systematic rape that took place, e.g., in Kosovo. No less evil, but different in motivation. I also assume that the women narrating these passages were older than 6-7 when these atrocities took place, at an age when they would be fully aware of what might happen to them, unlike Ung.
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.
Of course we cannot "prove" that this did not happen, but we do give reasons in the analysis for why we say that the scene is "implausible" (beyond the fact that it is simply "a remarkable coincidence"): "Considering all the members of her family were separated at the time, it seems overly coincidental that they would all have been granted leave to go to the infirmary at exactly the same time. The Khmer Rouge did not casually permit those under their supervision to go anywhere. And Ung herself states that often times the infirmary was just a place where people went to die. Instead of being extremely ill, however, everyone in her family seem to have been in fine health: "After much discussion, we conclude that we are not so much sick as weak from starvation" (155). If this were the case, then the entire population of Cambodian at that time would have been in the infirmary. Also, Ung describes her and her family as being given at the infirmary an "amount of food comparable to what I was given while I worked" (155). The Khmer Rouge did not waste such food on people in the infirmary - their motto, after all, was "To destroy you is no loss, to keep you is no gain." Instead of describing the infirmary as the death trap that infirmaries were, Ung describes how amongst all the suffering she basks in her family's happiness because they are all together. While effective as a literary device to make the story more interesting and to give the reader a reprieve from all the hatred and misery, the event is so implausible as to make it out of place even if the book was publicized as fiction."
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.
Although three of us co-authored the analysis, we sent it to numerous other victims of the KR to critique before publication. Some of those individuals and one of the authors were themselves orphaned by the KR; some others are social workers who work with KR trauma victims. We do not propose to tell Ung how she should feel, but find her getting "chills down her spine" from being given simple household chores another incident of the over dramatization found throughout her book -such as her firing of an AK-47 as a malnourished 7 year old, her physical overpowering of a Vietnamese combat soldier and claim that she actually attempted to attack him when she sees him later, her description of feeling regret that her sister who died would never feel the warm embrace of a lover (what does a six-year-old know of a lover's warm embrace -esp. in 1970s Cambodia?).
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.
We have welcomed and invited a public debate with Ung on her book. It is she who shies away from any kind of public discussion, instead choosing to slander those of us who have taken offense to her book through the media. She claimed in the Boston Globe's article "Revisiting a painful chapter in Cambodia" (4/1/01), that individuals who disagree with her account "continue to deny the genocide's existence" or condemn her "for being half-Chinese while writing on behalf of Cambodians." Apparently she feels the need to compound the lies in her book with more lies to the media. I do not know of one single Cambodian who denies the genocide took place. The KI neither denies that the tragedy happened nor take offense to Ung because she is part Chinese. One of the authors of the analysis as well as several of those who reviewed it before publication are of Chinese-Cambodian descent. All have lost family members to the KR.
Unlike Ung, we have nothing to gain from speaking out. In fact, we knew that we would be attacked by those such as yourself for doing so, but felt our message important enough to go forward with publication. And as one of the authors of the analysis, I will not only accept but welcome Ung to sue me in an American court of law for defamation as I am fully prepared to defend my statements that she has misrepresented Cambodian culture and history. I am confident the accusations DO have merit and WILL hold up under scrutiny in a fair proceeding.
Finally, at a speaking engagement at CSULB in Fall of 2000, Ung was confronted with the question of her racism. She attempted to explain it by stating that it was due to her father's family disowning him for marrying her Chinese mother. This is a very odd answer considering her father was supposedly Chinese-Cambodian himself. So which of his parents disowned him for marrying a Chinese person? The Chinese parent or the parent who married a Chinese? Oh what a tangled web she weaves... This seems like merely another misguided attempt by Ung to depict Khmers as racist. In truth, intermarriage between Khmers and Chinese are quite common; and as we cited in the analysis, William Willmott who wrote two books on the Chinese in Cambodia observed: "Although the Chinese form a distinct ethnic group in Cambodia, relations between Chinese and Khmer are relatively cordial. ... Intermarriage has been both the result and a further cause of this cordiality" (1970:8).
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.
The KI was not "forced" to "change ground." We made two entirely different arguments: one is cultural misrepresentation, the other is racism. They are not inconsistent. Re. cultural misrepresentation: Cambodians neither give each other little red envelopes for New Years nor are red, chiffon dresses traditional New Years attire for Cambodian women. Perhaps the word choice in our analysis is unclear, but we do not argue that these things are not common - we argue it is misrepresentative for her to claim or allude that they are part of Khmer culture when they are not. Yet she only attributes other things, such as heirarchical kinship terms, to her Chinese culture, when in fact it is a vital part of Khmer culture as well. Ung is "Cambodian" when it suits her need, such in the subtitle of her book for publicity purposes, and Chinese when it does not. Furthermore, despite all your assertions and proclamations that she is not racist, I would think that Khmers themselves could best judge whether or not they have been offended by her book. That some Cambodians have supported her does not negate the fact that many others felt their ethnic background and culture slighted. Why is it that this book caused such a stir among Cambodians, whereas Chanrithy Him's book or Dr. Haing Ngor's performance in the Killing Fields did not (both of whom are also Chinese-Cambodian)? It is because Cambodians were uniquely offended by the misrepresentations and racism in Ung's book, not her particular ethnic background.
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?
First, the articles published in the KI's website are not necessarily endorsed by nor reflective of the KI's point-of-view. Nevertheless, we do agree that the definition of genocide is inadequate because it does not permit prosecution of KR leaders for the millions of ethnic Khmers who were killed by the KR's policies. The definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention only applies when one group of individuals are persecuted by another group of individuals of a different ethnic, religious, national or racial background. Khmer killing Khmers, therefore, is not within the parameters of the Genocide Convention. The point I believe that Mr. Touch is making about the Genocide Convention being "inadequate," however, does in fact coincide with our argument: that is, the prosecution of the KR leadership under the Genocide Convention for persecution of non-Khmer ethnic groups risk being unsuccessful because many non-Khmer ethnic groups were actually represented within the KR's leadership - e.g., Sino-Khmer, Chams, Khmer Loeu. Therefore, they could not be argued to have committed "genocide" within the definitions of the Convention because it would not be considered against "another or different" ethnic, religious, national or racial group of people. This flaw in the Convention I believe arose because the drafters did not take into account the possibility of "auto-genocide," as occurred in Cambodia.
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.
Again, we do not deny the existence of racism in Cambodian society, but we do not believe KR atrocities were motivated by it. For one, some of the top KR leaders were themselves of Chinese descent. Additionally, it is extremely doubtful that racism motivated the slaughter of the educated class or Khmer Republic soldiers and their families or Buddhist monks and other religious leaders. Racism did not motivate the KR to create the agrarian collectives that starved so many people. All these atrocities were motivated by communist fanaticism, insecurity, paranoia and hatred of the urban corrupt (not all urban dwellers were corrupt, but obviously the KR failed to make this distinction and didn't care - just as Ung does not care to make the distinction between Khmer Rouge and Khmer victim). In this respect, the KI disagrees with Kiernan, whom you cite, and others who wish to assert the Killing Fields was motivated by racism. Such individuals strain to blame the KR's brutality on something other than ideological fanatacism because of their own history of advocating for the KR. It is therefore difficult for them to attack the KR purely on ideological grounds. Racism is a convenient alternative, but inappropriate explanation for their brutality. In any event, Ung herself states at the end of her book that several hundred Ungs still live in their home province in Cambodia. How could so many Ungs still be alive if the KR were committing "ethnic cleansing" as she claims? If the KR were good at anything, it was killing people. If the KR were somehow out to get ethnic Chinese, how did Ung herself survive the KR period given her constant refrain about her light skin? Thankfully they were not engaged in ethnic cleansing, which is how so many of our friends and family who are of Chinese descent managed to survive. If the Killing Fields were really about racism and ethnic cleansing, we would have no reason for denying it, esp. considering some of us are Chinese-Cambodian ourselves.
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.
Again, one of the primary authors of the article and several of those who reviewed the analysis before publication are Cambodians of Chinese descent. We have no desire to vilify the Chinese, but neither will we permit a person of Chinese descent to vilify and openly display such contempt for Khmers. The quote is included to support the statement that "Khmers have always both admired and resented the Chinese for their industriousness and financial success." The argument we were making was that although the Chinese may have been hated by some, they would not have been called "lazy white people" and Ung's usage of this phrase was pure pandering to a American, predominantly white, audience. Also, as we pointed out in the analysis, how do you explain the praise Ung noted her ethnic Chinese uncles received from the KR?
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.
Actually, in the chapter of the book to which you refer, even Kiernan is forced to admit: "In general, though, the tragedy of Cambodia's Chinese was not that they were singled out for special persecution by an anti-Chinese regime, but rather that a pro-Chinese regime subjected them to the same brutal treatment as the rest of the country's population" (295) - supporting our view and the UN Experts' findings that "Cambodians of Chinese descent were discriminated against, if at all, by virtue of their association with the urban capitalist economy of the old regime" (which also helps explain the statistics you cite since ethnic Chinese represented a disproportionately higher percentage of the urban capitalists whom the KR, as communists, sought to eliminate).
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,
As stated in our mission statement, we acknowledge that Khmers would not necessarily speak with one voice on any issue. We have received both criticism and praise for our efforts to seek the truth. Most of the praise has been by Cambodians, most of the criticism by non-Cambodians. To you, the three individuals you mention may represent authoritative figures because they are in the media. But to us, these are simply three members of the Cambodian community just as the authors of the analysis are three members of the Cambodian community. The fact that they receive more publicity does not necessarily give them more credibility. Thus, citing them in support of your position adds nothing to your argument.
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 be
based 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."
"Memoirs of a Geisha" has been discredited as being inaccurate sensationalism and many members of the Japanese community were outraged by its distortions. A very appropriate reference in this instance.
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 seeking
to 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.
The "bitter" tone, if there is one, is a result of the terrible mockery Ung has made of the experiences and death of our loved ones. We do know how Ung feels because our own families have perished under the KR. That does not mean we should condone her opportunism and lack of scruples. Obviously, you do not understand how we feel about a person profiting from distorting and sensationalizing the experience of the Cambodian people. One of the reasons that people want a KR trial is for closure and so that "the truth" may come to light. We have "wasted" time on this issue because we believe to get to the truth, the lies must be dispelled (especially when those lies can be construed as racist). The position we have taken has not been an easy one given Ung's successful manipulation of the media and the fact that a lot of money is at stake for herself, her publicist, and her publisher. It would have been much easier for us to sit back and do/say nothing; but we were compelled by our conscience to put forth the analysis, just as you have been compelled by your conscience to spend so much of your time responding to it.
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