Lucky Child

lucky child

a daughter of cambodia reunites
with the sister she left behind

LOUNG UNG

Dedication

To the Khmer people—for theirs are not only the voices of war, but
testimonies of love, family, beauty, humor, strength, and courage.

To Ma and Pa, you are my angels. To my sisters Keav and Geak, I will forever remember you. To my brothers Meng, Khouy, Kim, and sister Chou, thank you for inspiring me to live my life with dignity and grace. My deep gratitude to my sister-in-law Eang Tan, who nurtured and raised me, and to Huy-Eng, Morm, and Pheng; thank you for a lovely and amazing new generation of Ungs.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

The Ung Family Tree

part one
WORLDS APART

1 Welcome to America
June 10, 1980

2 Chou
June 1980

3 Minnie Mouse and Gunfire
July 1980

4 War in Peace
August 1980

5 “Hungry, Hungry Hippos”
September 1980

6 Amah’s Reunion
September 1980

7 Square Vanilla Journal
September 1980

8 Restless Spirit
October 1980

9 Ghosts in Costume and Snow
October 1980

10 A Child Is Lost
November 1980

11 The First American Ung
December 1980

part two
DIVIDED WE STAND

12 Totally Awesome U.S.A.
March 1983

13 A Box from America
August 1983

14
The Killing Fields
in My Living Room
June 1984

15 Living Their Last Wind
April 1985

16 Sex Ed
September 1985

Photographic Insert

17 Betrothed
October 1985

18 Sweet Sixteen
April 1986

19 A Peasant Princess
July 1986

20 Write What You Know
November 1986

part three
RECONNECTING IN CAMBODIA

21 Flying Solo
June 1989

22 A Motherless Mother
December 1990

23 No Suzy Wong
January 1991

24 Eldest Brother Returns
June 1991

25 Seeing Monkey
May 1992

26 Khouy’s Town
1993

27 Ma’s Daughters
May 1995

Epilogue: Lucky Child Returns
December 2003

Resources and Suggested Reading

Acknowledgments

Photographic Insert

   
About the Author

   
About the Book

   
Read On

Praise for Lucky Child

Books by Loung Ung

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

From 1975 to 1979—through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labor—the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country’s population. Among the victims were my parents, two sisters, and many other relatives.
First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
(HarperCollins Publishers, 2000) tells the story of survival, my own and my family’s.
First was
born out of my need to tell the world about the Cambodian genocide.

As a child I did not know about the Khmer Rouge, nor did I care anything about them. I was born in 1970 to an upper-middle-class Chinese-Cambodian family in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Until the age of five, my life revolved around my six siblings, school, fried crickets, chicken fights, and talking back to my parents. When Pol Pot’s communist Khmer Rouge stormed into the city on April 17, 1975, my charmed life came to an end. On that day, Cambodia became a prison and all its citizens prisoners.

Along with millions of other Cambodians, my family was forced to evacuate the city, leaving behind our home and all our belongings. For three years, eight months, and twenty-one days, we were made to live in villages more akin to labor camps, where every day was a Monday and every Monday was a workday, no matter if you were six or sixty. Inside our prison, our former life—religion, school, music, clocks, radio, movies, and TV—was banned. Rules and laws were enacted to control our travels,
friendships, and relationships, familial or otherwise. The Khmer Rouge dictated how we could dress, speak, live, work, sleep, and eat.

From dawn until dusk, we dug trenches, built dams, and grew crops. As our stomachs ballooned from hunger, the Khmer Rouge soldiers with their guns guarded the fields to prevent us from stealing. No matter how hard we worked, we were never rationed enough food to eat. We were always hungry and on the verge of starvation. To survive we ate anything that was edible, and many things that should never have been eaten. We ate rotten leaves, and fruits fallen on the ground to the roots we dug up. Rats, turtles, and snakes caught in our traps were not wasted as we ate their brains, tails, hides, and blood. If we had free time, we spent it roaming the fields hunting for grasshoppers, beetles, and crickets.

The Khmer Rouge government, or Angkar, sought to create a pure utopian agrarian society and to achieve this they believed they had to eliminate threats and traitors, real, perceived, or imagined. So the Angkar sent their soldiers out to hunt down former teachers, doctors, lawyers, architects, civil servants, politicians, police officers, singers, actors, and other leaders and had them executed en masse. Then they sent more soldiers out, and this time they gathered the wives and children of these traitors. With my father being a former high-ranking military officer, we knew we were not going to remain safe for long.

When the soldiers came for my father, I had already lost my fourteen-year-old sister, Keav, to food poisoning. As my father walked into the sunset with the soldiers, I did not pray for the gods to spare his life, to help him escape, or even to return him to me. I prayed only that his death be quick and painless. I was seven years old. Knowing that we were in danger, my mother sent us away to live in a children’s work camp. By the time the soldiers came for her and my four-year-old sister, Geak, I was done with praying and plunged deep into my rage and hate.

At the age of eight, I was an orphan so lost, hurt, and full of rage that I was pulled out of the children’s work camp and placed in a child-soldier’s training camp. While children in other parts of the world went to school to learn and make friends, I was taught to hate and hurt. While others played hide-and-seek with their friends, I was counting under my breath—waiting for the bombs to hit our shelter. The shrapnel from one bomb pierced my girlfriend Pithy’s head. I had to brush bits of her brains off my
sleeve and shut down my emotions to survive. Even when the bombs were quiet, there were still dangers lurking in the fields, trees, and bushes. I was lucky to escape them all—from poisonous snakes, diseases, land mines, bullets, to an attempted rape by a Vietnamese soldier. As I struggled to survive on my own, I asked the gods why no one cared.

In
First They Killed My Father,
my war story ended in 1979 with the Vietnamese penetrating Cambodia and defeating the Khmer Rouge army. Slowly afterward, my four surviving siblings and I were reunited, and shortly after that we made our ways back to the village where our family and relatives still lived. Then in 1980, in search of a better future for our family, my brother Meng and his wife, Eang, decided to make the dangerous journey out of Cambodia to Thailand. Sadly, Meng could borrow enough gold to take only one of his siblings with him—and he chose me because I was the youngest.

When it was time to leave, my extended family stood in the middle of our red dusty village to say their good-byes. My sister Chou and I held hands in silence. I was ten and she was twelve. Though we were still children, our war-torn hearts were grown and bonded over the deaths of our parents and our sisters. Kindred spirits, we were each other’s best friend, protector, and provider.

As Meng pedaled me away on his bicycle, breaking Chou’s hold of my hand, I turned my back to her. I knew she would not leave until we were out of her sight. My last image of Bat Deng was of Chou, her lips quivering and her face crumpled as tears streamed down her cheeks. Her face stayed with me all through the trip to my new world. I swore I would return in five years to see her.

Meng, my sister-in-law Eang, and I left behind Chou and my brothers Kim and Khouy for Vietnam where we joined the thousands of other boat people being smuggled into Thailand. After six months in a refugee camp, we were eventually resettled in Vermont through the sponsorship of the Holy Family Church in Essex Junction.

It would be fifteen years before I would be reunited with my sister again in 1995. Fifteen years of her living in a squalid village with no electricity or running water. Fifteen years of me in the United States living the American dream. It is my obsession with these fifteen years that has taken me back to Cambodia over twenty times.

In the years since our first reunion, Chou and I have spent many hours talking and sharing our lives with each other. As we continued to share our joys and sorrows, we decided to write our stories so that future generations of Ungs will know of our love and bonds. As the author, I have had to translate Chou’s Khmer and Chinese words to tell her story in English. Admittedly, this involved interpreting not just her words, but often their meanings as well. As I was not there to witness Chou’s life, this book is my best attempt to piece together her story from our numerous conversations, interviews with family members and neighbors, and our many literal and emotional walks down the memory lanes of our childhoods. The challenges of writing our separate lives into book form were made even more difficult because our memories of events and time wax and wane with each passing moon. In America, I was helped by the many date books, journals, diaries, homework assignments, clocks, calendars, and the sources that I kept to mark the passages of my life. In the village, Chou did not possess such items. Instead, time for her flows from one day to another, from one harvest season to the next, distinguished only by the rising sun, fallen stars, and the birth of a new generation of Ungs. And thus I was left with having to give the best “guesstimate” to the time and events that marked her life. Though inaccuracies in dates and time may exist in this book, the events that touched our lives and people who have healed our hearts are true. Here are our stories: mine as I remember it and Chou’s as she told it to me.