LoungUng

=**Loung Ung**= == 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.

For more information, please contact George Greenfield at CreativeWell Lecture, Inc at 1-800-743-9182 or via the email at George@creativewell.com. = = © [|Loung Ung], 2004. All Rights Reserved. http://www.loungung.com/loung_ung_bio.php = = = = =**First they killed my father**= =**The Age August 25, 2003**= =**A childhood lost to the killing fields**=

Before she was nine, the Khmer Rouge wrecked Loung Ung's life. Loung Ung's disturbing and illuminating autobiography, First They Killed My Father, like her survival instinct and sense of self-preservation, is nourished by the memory of her father. Loung's memories of his supportive presence sustain her through the horrendous ordeals of displacement, forced labour, inhuman conditions, starvation and the elimination of loved family members.

The Khmer Rouge revolutionary army, under the leadership of the notorious Pol Pot, was driven by the anti-modern, anti-Western ideal of a restructured ``classless agrarian society''. But in the process of enforcing this ``ideal'' with pragmatism and extreme violence, the regime had a genocidal impact on the Cambodian people between 1975 and 1979.

Loung's personal story contributes an intimate face to the generalised, systematic horror of the Cambodian ``killing fields''. It may be compared with Primo Levi's experience of the Holocaust in If This is a Man and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's writing about the Russian Gulag in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Each of these books raises explicit issues about the nature of systematic, ideologically driven political violence and its costs, especially at the level of human suffering.

First They Killed My Father brings into stark focus the physical and emotional realities of such suffering, and gives rise to crucial questions about political ideas divorced from their actual human context, and especially about pragmatism - about ``the ends justifying the means'' - forever a troubling proposition.

Loung refers to her father's career as a police commissioner and his time in the Lon Nol government, which overthrew Prince Sihanouk and instigated Cambodian democracy. But gradually it came to be regarded as corrupt and too closely identified with the West, feeding the resistance of the revolutionary, indigenous Khmer movement.

The story does not dwell on political details; instead it is the practical impact and reality of family dislocation and suffering that underpins the writer's purpose. However, it is the family's ``sheltered middle-class life in the face of the classless revolutionary ``ideal and her father's former work that made him a marked man after the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Phen in April 1975.

One of the most shocking aspects of the family story is that Loung's experience takes place between the ages of five and nine, and bears no connection to what most readers would consider a normal childhood. She suffers a total loss of the innocence generally associated with childhood.

A vivid picture of a middle-class life in Phnom Penh is presented in the early stages of the book, a life that was not enjoyed by large numbers of poorer people and peasants living on and beyond the fringes of the city. Throughout the recounting of her dreadful ordeals and with hindsight and a tone of gentle awareness, Loung regularly refers to the conditions she once took for granted. The contrast between the happy, secure, comfortable life in the city and the trials across the four years of constant movement, hard labour and the quest to find enough food to survive provides a clear refe