Book Review: First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung

First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung (Harper Perennial)

In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge attempted to create a completely agrarian society. In order to do so, they evacuated the cities and sent their inhabitants to the countryside to work in labor camps. So began the genocide that killed two million people, targeting the educated people, previous government officials and anyone who questioned their new society.

Loung Ung was a five-year-old girl living happily in Phnom Penh when the mysterious soldiers began the evacuation of her city. All of her family members were educated, upper class citizens, making them prime targets of the Khmer Rouge. Led by wisdom and instinct for survival, her father transformed the family into peasants who worked in labor communes. Despite farming for fourteen hours a day, they were denied the crops they grew, and slowly starved. Loung was fortunate enough to scrape by until 1979 when the Vietnamese helped overthrow Pol Pot’s regime, but many of her family members were not so lucky. The book illustrates a powerful and inspirational story of survival and raises questions about contemporary genocide through the events of the not so distant past.

Liz Kuenstner & Zach Toedtman
TBB Students 2008-2009
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