Keeping the Memory Alive

Refugee Account of the Khmer Rouge Experience Accessible as Memoir

by Ethan Plaut

The Cambodia Daily, December 17-18, 2005

     In a few decades, those who are old enough to remember the catastrophes wrought by the Khmer Rouge will begin dying off, as the survivors to the European holocaust of the second world war are now doing, taking their stories with them.

     Millions of Cambodians each have a personal story compelling enough to carry off a memoir without elaborate prose or embellishment to ornament the bare truth of the radical communist experiment and genocide.  Every family that suffered at the hands of the regime should be as lucky as Seng Theary's to have someone recording interviews and stitching the patchwork of relatives' memoirs together for posterity.

     And for the foreigners who couldn't point to the country on a map and get lost in the harder histories of ideology, geopolitics and numbers as incomprehensible as 1.7 million, a personal memoir - like her recently released "Daughter of the Killing Fields" - is a good way to get engaged. o get engaged.

     Seng Theary was born in 1971 to a Chinese-Cambodian mother and schoolteacher father. She suffered the loss of both parents and her childhood innocence before she reached the US as a refugee at the age of nine. But that is the very issue that many readers will have with this book - as with some other recent Khmer Rouge memoirs - that the bulk of it happens while the author is too young to remember much. She offers a disclaimer early, between her acknowledgements and the prologue, admitting that her childhood memory is flashes of images mixed with accounts she head from family over the years and read in Western publications. She also wrote that a lot of what she collected from recording interviews with family members told with emphasis on message and disregard for factual detail.

     Seng Theary said in a recent interview that her training as a lawyer left her at a bit of a loss as to how to get not just the story, but also the facts from her family without turning adversarial, but she found a way to piece the story together.

"I'm not David Chandler writing a history book," she said, adding that the memoir genre fills a gap between fiction and nonfiction, truths elaborated with emotion and what she called "metaphysical knowledge".

     One poignant example comes from a passage she read at a party for the book's Cambodia release on December 11. At a Khmer Rouge group wedding, Seng Theary's mother began sobbing, which was recounted to the author by an uncle who saw it. In the book, Seng Theary gives her mother a sort of internal dialogue about why she wept, listing thoughts that bubbled to the surface at the event, such as the memory of her own wedding and long-lost husband.

     "I put myself in her place, knowing what I know of her," Seng Theary said. "It's me putting myself in my mom's shoes."

     Embellishments aside, the book is a competent account of a Khmer Rouge survivors' family story. The protagonists are sympathetic victims, the drama and imagery are gut-wrenching and the survival at the end is cathartic. It winds around the chronology, beginning on Khieu Samphan's doorstep in 2001 before moving on to the deaths of the author's parents under the Khmer Rouge and then sliding back further into the 1960s for their wedding. From that point the book mostly moves forward, ending up back in Khieu Samphan's home in the closing chapter.

     To Seng Theary's credit, she tempers her preconceptions of him as a madman and killer with the reality she found: an elusive Khmer Rouge apologist who denies culpability but is "charming, gracious and grandfatherly."  Seng Theary's forgiveness, and much of her adult personality, comes from a Western - and more specifically Christian - perspective. She decided to write the book, she says, in great part at the urging of her American friends. She also said the primary intended audience is foreign, though she is hoping to publish a Khmer language translation in the future.  "A Cambodian looks [at my book] and says 'What's new? I know this story," she said.

      But the story is still new to many foreigners, contrary to the view from Phnom Penh, and Seng Theary's more Western personality, where it peeks out around the edges of the story, adds an unusual voice.

     Theary Seng's brother, sitting in front of a television 25 years later, tells her how a solder raped their mother at gunpoint. But only in the footnote below does the reader discover the reaction of her incensed aunt that to publish such a thing would be disrespectful.

     Much of the book's humor is similarly buried. One anecdotal footnote apologizes to the people in the movie theatre where Theary Seng's family went to watch the film "The Killing Fields" and whiled away the time laughing and gossiping about the actors they knew.

Watching themselves on television the night after they arrived in the US as refugees, the family laughed at themselves. But in parentheses, Seng Theary adds that years later they would look back and laugh again with a more "developed" sense of humor at themselves as backward refugees wearing big awkward winter jackets, carrying plastic bags loudly emblazoned with UNHCR and other acronyms.

     There are near-universals in Khmer Rouge survivor's stories: displacement, loss, hunger and death, just to begin. That provides the framework for powerful memoirs.

     But it is the little details, both during the regime and years later as people come to terms with their experiences and move on, that can distinguish one memoir from the next and give readers the truly human stories that come from inhumane times.