Annotation
By: Janese Nolan
Ung, Loung. First They Killed My Father: a Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. Print.
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung begins in Cambodia circa 1975. Recounted by the author, Loung, this life story begins with her upper middle-class childhood, happy and carefree as any childhood could be. However, as the new Communist regime in Cambodia rises and the Khmer Rouge movement sweeps the nation, Loung's happy family finds themselves in need to flee for their lives. Because of her father's affiliation with the government, her mother's Chinese ancestry, and her level of education, their family is a prime target for genocide. These reasons, and more, drive Pol Pot, the communist leader of the Khmer Rouge movement, to wipe out almost an entire generation of Cambodians. He wanted to turn the country into a completely classless agrarian society, but instead he caused the many deaths of innocent people. Ethnic “cleansing” and the “cleansing” of Western influences drove millions of people to flee their homes, work in reeducation camps and labor camps, be drafted as child soldiers, be separated from their families, live in refugee camps, and suffer from starvation and abuse. Loung experienced all of these things along with her family, some of which did not survive the five-year ordeal. After her sponsorship to America with her eldest brother, she grew up in American society with the same resilience and strength she demonstrated during her early years in life and now advocates on behalf of her homeland.
(Annotation Courtesy of Melorie Mascupan)
Summary
By: Janese Nolan
First They Killed My Father is a compelling story about one family’s life and death under the control of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Set in the 1970’s we are introduced to the Ung family. At the onset of the novel they are living in Phom Peng Cambodia and enjoying everything that upper middle class society had to offer. They had nice clothes, fancy jewelry, and a car. They never seemed to be ungrateful for what they had and truly valued family.
All of this was taken away from them when their village was invaded by the Khmer. The Ung family is marched out of the city into the mountains and told that they would be allowed to go home in three days. After three days pass and they are not allowed to go home, it finally sinks in that their lives are about to change in ways that none of them could ever imagine.
Over the course of the next 4 years we are told about the trials and tribulations of this fmailyy through the eyes of the second youngest child Loung who is 5 years old when the invasion starts. She suffers from sickness and famine while living in camps, loses many loved ones, experiences death and pain at every turn, but looks for hope and holds onto family despite the difficulty presented by the government.
Loung is a survivor and this novel is a story of survival. The story of Loung survival against all odds and obstacles.
Biography of Loung Ung
By: Adam Blazek
Loung Ung is a survivor of the killing fields of Cambodia, one of the bloodiest episodes of the twentieth century. Some two million Cambodians—out of a population of just seven million—died at the hands of the infamous Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime.
Loung was born in 1970 to a middle-class family in Phnom Penh. Five years later, her family was forced out of the city in a mass evacuation to the countryside. By 1978, the Khmer Rouge had killed Loung’s parents and two of her siblings and she was forced to train as a child soldier. In 1980, she and her older brother escaped by boat to Thailand, where they spent five months in a refugee camp. They then relocated to Vermont through sponsorship by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Holy Family Church parish in Burlington.
Loung returned to Cambodia fifteen years after her escape for a memorial service for the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide and was shocked and saddened to learn that twenty of her relatives had been killed. This realization compelled her to devote herself to justice and reconciliation in her homeland. Learning about the continuing destruction being caused by the millions of landmines that still litter the countryside in Cambodia led Loung to work to spread the word about the dangers of these indiscriminate weapons.
Her memoir, First They Killed My Father: a Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, published by HarperCollins in 2000 is a national bestseller and recipient of the 2001 Asian/Pacific American Librarians’ Association award for “Excellence in Adult Non-fiction Literature” (APALA). The book has been published in eleven countries and has been translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, Cambodian, and Japanese. Loung has been the subject of numerous television programs, including documentary film broadcasts on NHK Television in Japan and by WDR in Germany. Her second book, Lucky Child will be published by HarperCollins in April 2005.
Loung is a featured speaker on Cambodia, child soldiers, women and war, domestic violence, and landmines. She worked for the Vietnam Veterans’ of America Foundation’s (VVAF) Campaign for a Landmine-Free World from 1997-2003, prior to which she was Community Educator for the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project of the Maine Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Ms. Ung continues to serve as National Spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World.
Loung has spoken widely to schools, universities, corporations, Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), The Million Dollar Round Table Plenary, and other symposia in the US and abroad, including the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and the Child Soldiers Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Loung sits on the Advisory Board for Hewlett-Packard’s World E-Inclusion Initiative and The Cambodian Association of Chicago, Illinois. The World Economic Forum selected her as one of the “100 Global Leaders of Tomorrow.” She has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, and the London Sunday Times and in Biography, Glamour, Jane, Ms., and People magazines. Loung has been featured on National Public Radio’s The Diane Rehm Show, Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition, and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, The Today Show with Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, and has appeared on ABC NEWS Nightline, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and C-SPAN. She has recently been spotted on stage with such notable personalities as Paul McCartney and Sheryl Crow.
Source: http://www.loungung.com/loung_ung_bio.php
Book Review
By: Adam Blazek
During the three years that the Khmer Rouge tried to create an agrarian utopia in Cambodia, two million people are believed to have died from execution, starvation and disease. Two million -- a horrifying number, but so large as to seem almost an abstraction, like the distance to the nearest star. The number gains far greater psychological force with [this] new memoirs, whose author, a young girl in the Cambodia of the time, describes the terror and losses she suffered during the Khmer Rouge revolution in wrenchingly particular terms... [Ung] tells her stories straightforwardly, vividly, and without any strenuous effort to explicate their importance, allowing the stories themselves to create their own impact.
-Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
Source: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/First-They-Killed-My-Father/Loung-Ung/e/9780060931384#TABS
Written in the present tense, First They Killed My Father will put you right in the midst of the action--action you'll wish had never happened. It's a tough read, but definitely a worthwhile one, and the author's personality and strength shine through on every page. Covering the years from 1975 to 1979, the story moves from the deaths of multiple family members to the forced separation of the survivors, leading ultimately to the reuniting of much of the family, followed by marriages and immigrations. The brutality seems unending--beatings, starvation, attempted rape, mental cruelty--and yet the narrator (a young girl) never stops fighting for escape and survival. Sad and courageous, her life and the lives of her young siblings provide quite a powerful example of how war can so deeply affect children--especially a war in which they are trained to be an integral part of the armed forces. For anyone interested in Cambodia's recent history, this book shares a valuable personal view of events.
-Jill Lightner, Amazon.com
Source: http://www.amazon.com/First-They-Killed-Father-Remembers/dp/0060931388
Historical Links
By: Janese Nolan
http://worldwithoutgenocide.org/past-genocides/cambodian-genocide
This link is to a website sponsored by the William Mitchell College of Law and it breaks down the cause of the Cambodia genocide in a way that would be very accessible to high school students. The article gives it information by answering who, what, when, where, why and explaining the events after the genocide ended. This link would provide great contextualization for not only the students, but the instructor as well.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/08/16/cambodia.khmer.rouge.verdict/index.html?iref=allsearch
CNN did a story in August of 2010 that featured photos and stories about the people that were affected by the Cambodian genocide. One of the men that had been convicted of war crimes due to his involvement in the mass killings of Cambodian citizens in the 1970’s, was only given a 35-year sentence for his involvement. That sentence was commuted to 19 years to accommodate the 11 years he had already served awaiting trial. This article takes an event that happened before many students were born, and makes it more current and real in its influence.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/07/26/cambodia.genocide.khmer.rouge.explainer/index.html?iref=allsearch
This link is to an article, also by CNN and gives additional information about the Khmer Rouge and the individuals who are currently in the process of being charged with war crimes for their involvement in the Genocide.
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Pe-Pu/Pol-Pot.html
This is a biography of Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge. Not much is known about him in the novel however this information would assist students in putting a face and identity with the name of one of the “leaders” of the Khmer Rouge. This information also provides a springboard for analyzing his motives and methodology behind his leadership style.
By: Janese Nolan
Ung, Loung. First They Killed My Father: a Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. Print.
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by Loung Ung begins in Cambodia circa 1975. Recounted by the author, Loung, this life story begins with her upper middle-class childhood, happy and carefree as any childhood could be. However, as the new Communist regime in Cambodia rises and the Khmer Rouge movement sweeps the nation, Loung's happy family finds themselves in need to flee for their lives. Because of her father's affiliation with the government, her mother's Chinese ancestry, and her level of education, their family is a prime target for genocide. These reasons, and more, drive Pol Pot, the communist leader of the Khmer Rouge movement, to wipe out almost an entire generation of Cambodians. He wanted to turn the country into a completely classless agrarian society, but instead he caused the many deaths of innocent people. Ethnic “cleansing” and the “cleansing” of Western influences drove millions of people to flee their homes, work in reeducation camps and labor camps, be drafted as child soldiers, be separated from their families, live in refugee camps, and suffer from starvation and abuse. Loung experienced all of these things along with her family, some of which did not survive the five-year ordeal. After her sponsorship to America with her eldest brother, she grew up in American society with the same resilience and strength she demonstrated during her early years in life and now advocates on behalf of her homeland.
(Annotation Courtesy of Melorie Mascupan)
Summary
By: Janese Nolan
First They Killed My Father is a compelling story about one family’s life and death under the control of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Set in the 1970’s we are introduced to the Ung family. At the onset of the novel they are living in Phom Peng Cambodia and enjoying everything that upper middle class society had to offer. They had nice clothes, fancy jewelry, and a car. They never seemed to be ungrateful for what they had and truly valued family.
All of this was taken away from them when their village was invaded by the Khmer. The Ung family is marched out of the city into the mountains and told that they would be allowed to go home in three days. After three days pass and they are not allowed to go home, it finally sinks in that their lives are about to change in ways that none of them could ever imagine.
Over the course of the next 4 years we are told about the trials and tribulations of this fmailyy through the eyes of the second youngest child Loung who is 5 years old when the invasion starts. She suffers from sickness and famine while living in camps, loses many loved ones, experiences death and pain at every turn, but looks for hope and holds onto family despite the difficulty presented by the government.
Loung is a survivor and this novel is a story of survival. The story of Loung survival against all odds and obstacles.
Biography of Loung Ung
By: Adam Blazek
Loung Ung is a survivor of the killing fields of Cambodia, one of the bloodiest episodes of the twentieth century. Some two million Cambodians—out of a population of just seven million—died at the hands of the infamous Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime.
Loung was born in 1970 to a middle-class family in Phnom Penh. Five years later, her family was forced out of the city in a mass evacuation to the countryside. By 1978, the Khmer Rouge had killed Loung’s parents and two of her siblings and she was forced to train as a child soldier. In 1980, she and her older brother escaped by boat to Thailand, where they spent five months in a refugee camp. They then relocated to Vermont through sponsorship by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Holy Family Church parish in Burlington.
Loung returned to Cambodia fifteen years after her escape for a memorial service for the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide and was shocked and saddened to learn that twenty of her relatives had been killed. This realization compelled her to devote herself to justice and reconciliation in her homeland. Learning about the continuing destruction being caused by the millions of landmines that still litter the countryside in Cambodia led Loung to work to spread the word about the dangers of these indiscriminate weapons.
Her memoir, First They Killed My Father: a Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, published by HarperCollins in 2000 is a national bestseller and recipient of the 2001 Asian/Pacific American Librarians’ Association award for “Excellence in Adult Non-fiction Literature” (APALA). The book has been published in eleven countries and has been translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, Cambodian, and Japanese. Loung has been the subject of numerous television programs, including documentary film broadcasts on NHK Television in Japan and by WDR in Germany. Her second book, Lucky Child will be published by HarperCollins in April 2005.
Loung is a featured speaker on Cambodia, child soldiers, women and war, domestic violence, and landmines. She worked for the Vietnam Veterans’ of America Foundation’s (VVAF) Campaign for a Landmine-Free World from 1997-2003, prior to which she was Community Educator for the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project of the Maine Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Ms. Ung continues to serve as National Spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World.
Loung has spoken widely to schools, universities, corporations, Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), The Million Dollar Round Table Plenary, and other symposia in the US and abroad, including the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and the Child Soldiers Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal.
Loung sits on the Advisory Board for Hewlett-Packard’s World E-Inclusion Initiative and The Cambodian Association of Chicago, Illinois. The World Economic Forum selected her as one of the “100 Global Leaders of Tomorrow.” She has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, and the London Sunday Times and in Biography, Glamour, Jane, Ms., and People magazines. Loung has been featured on National Public Radio’s The Diane Rehm Show, Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition, and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, The Today Show with Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, and has appeared on ABC NEWS Nightline, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and C-SPAN. She has recently been spotted on stage with such notable personalities as Paul McCartney and Sheryl Crow.
Source: http://www.loungung.com/loung_ung_bio.php
Book Review
By: Adam Blazek
During the three years that the Khmer Rouge tried to create an agrarian utopia in Cambodia, two million people are believed to have died from execution, starvation and disease. Two million -- a horrifying number, but so large as to seem almost an abstraction, like the distance to the nearest star. The number gains far greater psychological force with [this] new memoirs, whose author, a young girl in the Cambodia of the time, describes the terror and losses she suffered during the Khmer Rouge revolution in wrenchingly particular terms... [Ung] tells her stories straightforwardly, vividly, and without any strenuous effort to explicate their importance, allowing the stories themselves to create their own impact.
-Richard Bernstein, The New York Times
Source: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/First-They-Killed-My-Father/Loung-Ung/e/9780060931384#TABS
Written in the present tense, First They Killed My Father will put you right in the midst of the action--action you'll wish had never happened. It's a tough read, but definitely a worthwhile one, and the author's personality and strength shine through on every page. Covering the years from 1975 to 1979, the story moves from the deaths of multiple family members to the forced separation of the survivors, leading ultimately to the reuniting of much of the family, followed by marriages and immigrations. The brutality seems unending--beatings, starvation, attempted rape, mental cruelty--and yet the narrator (a young girl) never stops fighting for escape and survival. Sad and courageous, her life and the lives of her young siblings provide quite a powerful example of how war can so deeply affect children--especially a war in which they are trained to be an integral part of the armed forces. For anyone interested in Cambodia's recent history, this book shares a valuable personal view of events.
-Jill Lightner, Amazon.com
Source: http://www.amazon.com/First-They-Killed-Father-Remembers/dp/0060931388
Historical Links
By: Janese Nolan
http://worldwithoutgenocide.org/past-genocides/cambodian-genocide
This link is to a website sponsored by the William Mitchell College of Law and it breaks down the cause of the Cambodia genocide in a way that would be very accessible to high school students. The article gives it information by answering who, what, when, where, why and explaining the events after the genocide ended. This link would provide great contextualization for not only the students, but the instructor as well.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/08/16/cambodia.khmer.rouge.verdict/index.html?iref=allsearch
CNN did a story in August of 2010 that featured photos and stories about the people that were affected by the Cambodian genocide. One of the men that had been convicted of war crimes due to his involvement in the mass killings of Cambodian citizens in the 1970’s, was only given a 35-year sentence for his involvement. That sentence was commuted to 19 years to accommodate the 11 years he had already served awaiting trial. This article takes an event that happened before many students were born, and makes it more current and real in its influence.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/07/26/cambodia.genocide.khmer.rouge.explainer/index.html?iref=allsearch
This link is to an article, also by CNN and gives additional information about the Khmer Rouge and the individuals who are currently in the process of being charged with war crimes for their involvement in the Genocide.
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Pe-Pu/Pol-Pot.html
This is a biography of Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge. Not much is known about him in the novel however this information would assist students in putting a face and identity with the name of one of the “leaders” of the Khmer Rouge. This information also provides a springboard for analyzing his motives and methodology behind his leadership style.
