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Review of Haing Ngor, Survival in the Killings Fields (Carroll & Graf, 2003; orig. pub. As A Cambodian Odyssey: Survival in the Killing Fields by Macmillan, 1987) & Chanrithy Him, When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge (W.W. Norton, 2000). This is kinda part two of my previous discussion of Cambodian American memoirs by Loung Ung and Sichan Siv.

Haing Ngor, who won an Oscar for portraying Dith Pran in the 1984 film The Killing Fields (which I actually have not seen yet!), is probably the best-known of the Cambodian American memoirists. The memoir is co-authored by journalist Roger Warner, and the reprint has a very weird Epilogue about Ngor’s murder in 1996, which I’ll return to below.

Survival in the Killing Fields follows the pattern of these memoirs, recounting life in Phnom Penh before the Khmer Rouge; the Khmer Rouge’s victorious entry into the city on April 17, 1975; the forced migrations and prison-work camps; the loss of friends and family members; ubiquitous paranoia, fear, starvation, disease, torture, and death; the bizarre 1984 rhetoric of the Khmer Rouge; the aftermath in refugee camps in Thailand; and the final journey to the U.S. Ngor is part Chinese, but he describes himself as “a typical Cambodian” (76). 

One difference between Ngor and Loung Ung, Chanrithy Him, and novelist Vaddey Ratner is that Ngor was already an adult in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took control. He was a gynecologist with a thriving practice, friends with journalists and intellectuals. Perhaps because the narrator is an adult, this memoir is more violently graphic than some of the others. Ngor’s wife, Huoy, dies horribly in childbirth due to lack of proper medical care, a particular cruelty to Ngor, a gynecologist and obstetrician. Ngor is also tortured numerous times and witnesses atrocities; he warns readers when a particularly brutal episode is about to commence and gives us the option to skip to the end of the chapter.

Another difference is that Ngor provides a more thorough overview of the ongoing political situation. As an adult man, Ngor is involved in discussions as the situation develops, as opposed to the memoirs from childrens’ points of view (particularly the girls). For example, Ngor remembers that in 1974, “If I didn’t worry about the Khmer Rouge, it was because I didn’t believe they could be any worse than the Lon Nol regime….For every story we heard about Khmer Rouge atrocities there were several about the Lon Nol regimes – mostly massacres of ethnic Vietnamese civilians, whom the Lon Nol soldiers seemed to hate every more than they did the ethnic Chinese” (77). While the eruption of violence and deprivation is just as traumatic and shocking for Ngor as it is for Ung and Him, he has more of a sense of what is happening, while the childrens’ psychic universes are more abruptly destroyed.  

The memoir is easy to read because the prose, pacing, and structure are conventional, which may be in part due to journalist Warner’s co-authoring. In this respect, Ngor’s memoir reminds me of The Autobiography of Malcolm X; the life itself is remarkable and the memoir is shaped smoothly, but you cannot help but wonder what has been left out and/or altered (for instance, see Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Viking, 2011). To some extent, it’s always a question when reading creative nonfiction – it’s nonfiction but also creative – but when you have a socially marginal figure (although both Ngor and X were celebrities, representatives of social marginal groups) whose story is being shaped by a “mainstream” (both racially and journalist-literarily), it gets more complicated.

Also, the epilogue, which recounts Ngor’s life after the publication of his memoir and the aftermath of his murder, paints him as mercurial and almost childlike in some ways. He becomes estranged from the niece whom he raised; he gets involved in various shady business deals in Cambodia that fall through. While Ngor does some good work – he advocates for war crimes trials – ultimately Ngor “was like his country: scarred, and incapable of fully healing” (505). Warner’s statement is kind of amazing. While the specifics of both Ngor’s individual situation and the political conditions of post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia (no official reckoning of the Khmer Rouge’s war crimes; former Khmer Rouge remain political leaders) suggest that there were indeed many unhealed traumas, what does it mean to say that someone/-thing is incapable of healing? It puts Warner in the position of paternal judge, which is too often the attitude of Western humanitarian workers towards childlike Third Worlders. Also, despite the epigraph’s statement that Ngor wrote the book “for the world to better understand communism and other regimes in Cambodia,” his memoir also shows how the Cambodian holocaust resulted from the interconnected histories and legacies of imperialism and the Cold War. Until I read Ngor’s memoir, I didn’t really understand that what turned many Cambodian people (particularly rural people) in favor of the Khmer Rouge, initially a minor political faction, was Sihanouk’s alliance with them against the U.S.-backed dictator Lon Nol.

Chanrithy Him’s 2000 memoir, When Broken Glass Floats, reminds me a lot of Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father. Him comes to writing this memoir through working with Cambodian American survivors in Portland, Oregon; interviewing subjects, she realizes that she has to deal with her own suppressed memories. Him is ten in 1975, with five siblings, both parents, and an extended family, who gradually are lost or die over the following four years. Although Him’s family is from Takeo (further south), they have taken refuge in Phnom Penh by the early 1970s. Like Ung, Him is good at sketching out the personalities of her siblings and her parents, and her prose is in present tense and fairly taut. Like Ung and Ngor, Him peppers her writing with Cambodian terms, sometimes footnoted.

One difference, however, is that When Broken Glass Floats depicts less harmony between family members. Fatigued, frustrated, and starving himself, her brother Than yells at their little sister Avy for asking for food (178); the siblings fight about the burial of a sister (239); they panic during a battle and get separated, blaming each other for abandoning them (257). After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, brother-in-law Vantha beats up Than, and when Than chases him with a hatchet, Vantha has Thai soldiers brutally beat the adolescent Than. I think that while Loung Ung’s FTKMF has more urgent narrative forward drive (if that makes sense), WBGF portrays a more complex emotional landscape at any given moment.

Unlike Ngor, the child narrator is mostly unaware of the political and historical background of ongoing events, but the memoir provides some background early on, and many chapters begin with an excerpt from a Western news source (e.g. The New York Times, The Economist). On one hand, these provide broader context; on the other hand, like Ngor’s memoir, the central Cambodian story is framed by Western journalism.

Like Siv and Ung, both Him and Ngor are from upper-middle-class, educated families living in/near Phnom Penh. It would be interesting to hear the narratives of poorer rural people, what the Khmer Rouge called the “Old People” (vs. the urban, educated “New People”). These memoirs (i.e. the ones that I've read) see those country people as "others," in good and bad ways, which immediately makes me curious.

So far, Loung Ung’s books are still my favorite. For more on Cambodian American cultural production, including life writing, see Cathy Schlund-Vials’ forthcoming book, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (U Minnesota P, Sept. 2012).

blackgriot

I have been thinking critically about religious communities. There appears to be a disconnect for me. Even when I find a community such as UU whose values mirror my fundamental beliefs; I do not feel like part of the community. I have been to a couple of UU Churches nearby but have not been consistently. I find more connection online in an environment like this than in a church. Anyway, just curious how others feel....

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

blackgriot

So things seemed to be unjamming after I returned to journaling; coincidence - maybe.

We had been stuck on what to do with the family house, now, our way seems very clear. Anyone looking for a fixer upper in a slowly gentrifying neighborhood?

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.

hansel25

Went to a department meeting and met my colleague for the first time. He exclaimed, "you were at Bali, right? I saw you there."

"huh?"

"you were outside symon's studio, wearing a green tee. I was walking past."

Wtf. He remembers me by looking at me for 3 seconds?! So coincidental, we didn't meet in Singapore but we ran into each other at Bali?! And to think he remembers me?! This is insane. How small is the world. The world is a movie.

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.