Preface: I want to clarify that this is a largely fictional story based on some true events. It is an extension story of the mysterious barang in First They Killed My Father, whose true story remains unknown. The dates of the story are in part correct (Khmer Rouge invasion on April 16th, 1975), but it was not until 4 years later in January 1979 that the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge (this did happen) just following the Vietnam-American (Vietnam) War. Moreover, Tuol Sleng was an old high school that was made to be a detention and torture center for the Khmer Rouge. Thousands of people (mainly foreigners and wealthy individuals) were wrongfully accused and slaughtered in prison utilizing electric chairs and other horrifying devices. April …show more content…
The sun begins to peek above the Horizon, it’s starting to get hot out; which is my queue to head into the air-conditioned family club. I am fortunate enough to have Som as a friend. I observe masses of children and adults enfolding themselves in vibrant tarps that shield them from the killing machine we call the Sun. Each day over 20 people die from heat stroke, if not for some, I might be one of them. To further alleviate myself from the scorching heat, I headed over to the club pool. I change into the extra swimming trunks Som has provided me, grab a towel, and head for the deep end. As the fluid laps around the pool, a five-person family enters the facility. They look like an average bunch for Phnom Penh. The two parents and the eldest sister (from what I can assume) part ways with the two younger girls and take a seat behind the glass window looking out from the lobby. The girls waddle towards the shallow part of the pool, but before the two plunge into the clear blue water, they look over at me and stare. “What are they doing?” I think to myself. I can make them whisper to each other; they look frightened. I reflect on the dark times in …show more content…
“Go, leave, get away from here!” He yells. The “Why” of the “Why”? !” I exclaim, but it is too late. Som is apprehended by the man, and I shall never see him again. A million thoughts swarm my brain; “Why should I run? Where can I run? What was that unusual parade I saw earlier?” All of my questions would soon be answered. The stocky man pointed at me and in an instant two smaller, dirty, and frugally dressed men came leaping towards me from a neighboring tent. They grabbed me like rabid animals and threw me to the ground. All went dark in the night. Bright white lights are the first thing I see when I wake up. “Is this Heaven?” I ask louder than I mean to; “no, this is Tuol Sleng” a foreign voice responds. I jolt up and gain back my awareness. “Your friend Sam has told me all about you. You will stay with us for a while,” the voice continues. The “Where am I? Where is Soma based? Who are you?” I ask in a flurry of panic. “You are going to live here in Tuol Sleng with other foreigners. Som is dead. I am your doctor until you are alive enough to confess to your crimes and suffer for them, which is now.” Terror circulated through my veins, but before I could react, I was hoisted out of my
Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot-the leader of the Khmer Rouge followed Maoist communism, which they thought they could create an agrarian utopia. Agrarian means that the society was based on agriculture. They wanted all members of society to be rural agricultural workers and killed intellectuals, who had been depraved by western capitalist ideas. A utopia means a perfect society. This idea went to extremes when The Khmer Rouge resumed that only pure people were qualified to build the revolution. They killed Cambodians without reasons by uncivilized actions such as: cutting heads, burying alive… There were about 1.7 million people killed by the Khmer Rouge.
“The bones cannot find peace until the truth they hold in themselves has been revealed” This quote, said by Deputy Military Police Chief Nhim Seila, means that the deceased persecutors of the Cambodian Genocide cannot rest well until the reason for their actions has been told to the public. On April 17, 1975, soldiers of a communist group known as the Khmer Rogue, stormed into the capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, and attacked the city, forcing all the citizens into the countryside to work vigorously for the Khmer Rouge. The stories of Samnang Shawn Vann and Sisowath Doung Chanto paint a picture of what it was like to live under this cruel group.
“The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s Regime”. Mtholyoke.edu. 11 May 2005. Web. 7 May 2014.
Daniel Goldhagen (2009) states that in less than four years, Cambodia’s political leaders induced their followers to turn Cambodia’s backwards and regressing society into a massive concentration camp in which they steadily killed victims. Furthermore, a deeper understanding of the Cambodian genocide is provided within Luong Ung’s personal narrative, “First They Killed My Father” (2000). Ung’s memoir is a riveting account of the Cambodian genocide, which provides readers with a personalized account of her family’s experience during the genocide. She informs readers of the causes of the Cambodian genocide and she specifies the various eliminationist techniques used to produce the ideological Khmer vision. Nonetheless, she falls short because
In 1975, The Khmer Rouge became the ruling political party of Cambodia after overthrowing the Lon Nol government. Following their leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge imposed an extreme form of social engineering on Cambodian society. They wanted to form an anti-modern, anti-Western ideal of a restructured “classless agrarian society'', a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects. The Khmer Rouge revolutionary army enforced this mostly with extreme violence. The book “First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers”, written by Luong Ung, is the author’s story of growing up during this time period. She was five years old when the Khmer Rouge came into power. As stated in the author’s note, “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.”
Most people in the world have not heard of the genocide going on in Laos today. Most people have not taken notice, read about it or bother to spend more than thirty seconds of their lives learning about it. The world has managed to almost entirely ignore the genocide of the Hmong people in Laos for over 30 years and still allows this crime against humanity to continue. Since the 1970s, the ethnic Hmong people in the Southeast Asian country of Laos have been persecuted by the Laotian government (Malakunas, 2000). This harassment is a direct result of the Hmong’s link to the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States in what has become to be known as the Secret War (Malakunas, 2000). The Laotian government officials directing this massacre have not been detained due to lack of evidence (Sommer P.4).
The Khmer Rouge years was a period of time that devastated all of the small country Cambodia, a story that was so well told by Loung Ung about the Pol Pot regime. The Khmer Rouge years was from 1975 to 1979 (http://www.cambodiatribunal.org). The Khmer Rouge, otherwise known as Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), conquered Cambodia for four years. The Khmer Rouge forced people to work in the fields including children. To make matters worse, the people that were forced to work were also malnourished and were living in grim conditions (http://www.wcl.american.edu).
Marks, Stephen P. "Elusive Justice For The Victims Of The Khmer Rouge." Journal Of International Affairs 52.2 (1999): 691. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 19 Dec. 2011. .
“Wake up, wake up, son. We must leave now.” He opened his eyes and looked outside; it was still very dark and rainy. “Where are we going, Mom?” he asked while crawling out of bed sleepily. When they left the house for the train station, it was only four o’ clock in the morning, and the boy thought that his family was going to visit their grandparents whom he had not seen for ten years. The next morning, they arrived in Nha Trang, a coastal city in Central Vietnam, where his father told him that they would stay for a while before going to the next destination. They went to live in the house of an acquaintance near the fish market. Every day they would stay inside the house and would go out only when it was absolutely necessary, especially the kids who now had to learn how to be quiet. They learned how to walk tip-toe and to talk by finger pointing; few sounds were made. Every sound was kept to the minimum so the neighbors and the secret police would not be aware that there were new people in town.
As I stroll into the old, musty building in the small, hospitable city of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, the pungent stench of sweat and day long suffocated feet smothers me. The cracks in the pale yellow walls of the hallway cause chippings of paint to gather on the cold, tile floors. Daddy long legs creep along every crack and crevice in sight, and cobwebs occupy the corners of the walls. I toss my bag into the vivid, Hulk colored bathroom, then sign my name in the rusty, tattered binder. Walking down the stairs covered in a thin woolen cloth, my mind erases the negative thoughts present in my brain throughout the day as I enter the dojang. The American Flag and the Korean Flag are fastened on the wall in the front of the room above the mirrors.
How can someone live with themselves after doing such a thing? I guess nobody really can, because some of the members of the Khmer Rouge were diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after the years of execution. Unfortunately, there is no treatment for this disorder. Thirty years after the violence ended, a tribunal was set up to investigate those responsible for the mass killings of the Khmer Rouge. The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia was formed in 2003, and they were empowered to prosecute leaders of the Khmer Rouge who committed the mass crimes.
Cambodia would become a battle ground for American troops fighting in Vietnam for four years; the war would kill up to 750,000 Cambodians through U.S. efforts to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines. This devastation would take its toll on the Cambodian peoples’ morale and would later help to contribute to the conflicts that caused the Cambodian genocide. In the 1970’s the Khmer Rouge guerrilla movement would form. The leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, was educated in France and believed in Maoist Communism. These communist ideas would become important foundations for the ideas of the genocide, and which groups would be persecuted.
“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” (Ung 5). This is a quote from Ung, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide and the author of the book First They Killed My Father. In this quote, Ung talks about four horrific years of her life living under the reign of the Khmer Rouge. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge, millions of innocent lives and those who survived, such as Ung, were left traumatized. Just like Ung, in the book The Gangster We Were All Looking For, the protagonist, a young Vietnamese girl is also left traumatized due to the wake of war in Vietnam.
History is a huge part of mankind’s existence as it reminds them what they have accomplished and tells stories to their little ones about the things humans have created in their short lives. Moreover, history is key to civilization here on earth but sometimes humans have a bad habit of only writing about their victories and forgetting to mention their failures. No matter what the case, mankind knows that there are always two sides to every story because they know they are far from perfect. However, it is the handful of individuals that come along once in a life time that reminds every one of their flaws and immoral ways and opens human’s eyes and changes their ways. In 1757, on the 28th of November in Soho London, a man by the name of William
I let out a withered sigh, which caused me to choke in the middle of yet another sob. I had had enough. I weakly pulled myself out of the pool and walked to my towel. I grabbed the huge, orange and white stripped thing and wrapped it around my shivering body, hoping to find some warmth and comfort; but even my monstrous beach towel could not cut the chill I felt inside. I started to walk to the changing room past the hundred faces I knew nothing of, but by now were familiar. I had searched each face a hundred times hoping to see someone I knew. Finally, I realized that I knew none of them, and the person I was looking for just wasn't coming.