On a September afternoon in 1995 just outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Loung Ung listened during a memorial service as a monk read off the names of 30 of her relatives killed during Pol Pot’s 1975-1979 reign of terror, when 2 million Cambodians died. Included on the list were her parents and two sisters.
Ung had immigrated to the U.S. in 1980, when she was 10, and had not kept close contact with her family. At the memorial service arranged by her brother, Ung, 28, was back in Cambodia for the first time and was surprised so many of her relatives had been killed.
“It was really hard when the names were read,” Ung said, “and I realized then that I could escape back to America, but my sister and brothers had no escape. They’d been there every day, and I felt like I’d left not just the country, but them. . . . I spent my childhood wanting to be someone else.”
Of her four siblings still alive, only her eldest brother, Meng Ung, had escaped with her. The plan had been for Meng to earn enough money in America to send for the other three, Ung said, but after five years the money still wasn’t there and the three in Cambodia had begun to rebuild their lives.
“I left them,” Ung said, “I left them all. I didn’t write. I didn’t contact them. I didn’t know my sister had five children or that one of my brother’s kids had died. There was tremendous guilt in all that, and shame and sadness. I knew I wanted to find my way back.”
Ung, who had been working in Maine with battered women since graduating from college in 1992, decided during the memorial service to dedicate her life to Cambodian causes.
“I worked a job that was safe and nice and helpful,” she said, “but it was helpful to a different group of people.”
Eighteen months after the memorial service, Ung found a way to link her future with her past. She accepted an offer from Bobby Muller, president and founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, to be spokeswoman for Muller’s international campaign against land mines.
Cambodia has 10 million anti-personnel mines still in the ground, Ung said, and children born long after the horrors of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge feel the ravages of war two decades later when they lose lives and limbs to this indiscriminate weapon.
“In a sense, Cambodia had to wait for people like me to grow up. The (Khmer Rouge) almost eliminated the upper echelon of society — the writers, the artists, the politicians, the monks, the leaders — so after the war 65 percent of the population were women and children. How do you rebuild a country when your leaders are eliminated? I feel I have a certain obligation to do something about it.”
She gives a lecture called “Wars End, Land Mines Don’t” to high school and college students in an attempt to raise awareness about land mines.
“I used to fantasize about saving people, about sacrificing myself for people,” she said, sitting at her desk next to a poster of a prosthetic arm holding daisies. “Now, if something needs to be done for Cambodia, I’ll do it. My whole life is just about being redeemed.”
Ung described a childhood of incredible hardship and trauma. When Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia in 1975, Ung was 5, the second youngest of seven children. Her father, who had been a government official in previous regimes, went into hiding for two years, moving the family from village to village, taking false names and pretending to be a farmer. The children, who were fluent in Khmer, French and Mandarin, were forbidden to show their education for fear of execution.
“At 5 or 6 years old, I knew I could not speak out about who we were,” Ung said. “We were never to talk about each other.”
Ung said two Khmer Rouge soldiers came to her family’s home in 1977 under the guise of needing her father’s help to move a plow. No one saw him again. For Ung, the memories of that night come back in ragged shreds.
“For years I could never enjoy a sunset,” she said. “Every time I’d see one, I’d get very depressed and I never understood it until I realized that when my father was taken away, there had been this glorious sunset.”
After that, Ung’s mother split up the family to protect her children. The Khmer Rouge “killed whole families to eliminate the threat of revolutions and revenge,” Ung said. “So to survive, she sent all of us kids in different directions.”
Ung said her mother pointed each of the children in a different direction, gave them fictitious names and told them to walk until they encountered a stranger and then claim to be an orphan. Because this was the height of the war, Ung said, there were orphanage camps everywhere and shehad to walk only a few hours before happening upon one. She was 8 years old at the time.
Ung said she didn’t understand that her mother had done this to save her children’s lives. Ung was angry; she thought her mother weak.
“I didn’t want to go. The Khmer Rouge had been teaching us all this propaganda about women being dispensable and to kill them was no loss. Every time I thought of her, I was really angry.”
As an adult, however, she has come to see her mother as a woman of incredible courage and strength to have let her children go to save them.
A few months after Ung was sent away, she awoke one morning and knew her mother and 5-year-old sister had been killed. “I had a really bad sinking feeling, and I just knew they were dead.” Her fears were confirmed, she said, when she sneaked out of her camp and returned to her mother’s village. Though she cannot remember how she was able to leave and return from her camp, she does remember learning of the executions from neighbors.
Ung still doesn’t know how her parents and sister were killed and while it sometimes haunts her, she said, “I don’t want to know my father was tortured. Some say he probably went through a confession center. At that time people were killed with a hammer to the head because ammunition was too expensive. It’s enough to know (they) died. What you don’t hear, your mind makes up.”
Ung said her anger at her mother may have kept her alive at the orphanage labor camp. The Khmer Rouge troops saw her fighting spirit and trained her as a soldier. She learned to use knives, machetes and AK-47s. She learned to kick and punch. She learned how to handle herself in battle.
The reward for obedience, for fighting, for loyalty to the Khmer Rouge, was food.
“I was trained that if someone came to you, you got them first. If you were a boy, you got more food,” Ung said, “and if you were a boy who fought well, you got lots of food. They were Pavlovian conditions — everything was rewarded with food. It wasn’t power or privilege you wanted, it was just food.”
In her camp, Ung said, the children were awakened at dawn to work. The older ones labored in rice paddies and the younger ones, like Ung, carried bags of rice back and forth between fields for adults to plant. The children worked 10- and 12-hour days, she said, the adults, 16 or 17 hours.
“Your body adapts,” Ung said. “You’re exhausted, you’re tired, you’re hungry. People used to ask me how I could go on, but there’s really no choice. I didn’t have any power. There was nothing else I could do but go on.”
Ung said she watched her older sister starve, and she saw her own body — swollen stomach and bony limbs — slowly deteriorate from malnutrition.
“Whether or not you were going to die wasn’t so much on your mind,” she said. “Whether or not you should feel sad when other people died wasn’t on your mind. Well, someone else is dead, you thought, but I’m still hungry. That’s the constant on your mind and in your body.”
Every day Ung saw people die from hunger, execution, exhaustion. Ung described the first time she saw a man taken into a field and shot to death.
“Back then I was not as desensitized to death as I was later on. You stand there, and you gasp a little and say, `Wow, this guy’s dead. They shot him.’ “
Later, Ung said, she thought nothing of fetching river water and having to dislodge corpses that had gotten stuck in the reeds. Or walking around bodies deteriorating in the hot sun.
“Youre completely desensitized to it,” she said. “It’s an everyday event, like drinking water.”
In 1979, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, sending Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge fleeing into the countryside. Ung went to a refugee camp outside of Phnom Penh where she managed to find her surviving siblings.
Six months later, Ung and her brother, Meng Ung, who was 22, fled the country. He had kept jewelry from their mother during Pol Pot’s reign, which he offered to a fisherman in exchange for passage from Cambodia. Ung recalled that there was only enough money for two, so they decided Meng, who was the oldest and could work, should go and bring Ung, who was the youngest at 10 and could get an education in America. The two buried themselves under dead fish and escaped first to Vietnam, then to Thailand, where they spent six months in a refugee camp before being sponsored by a church in Maine.
By sharing her experiences, through public speaking and a book she’s writing, Ung hopes things like the Cambodian genocide and the use of anti-personnel mines will be horrific chapters in history, rather than present-day fears.
“Responsibility has a lot to do with how much you know about what’s going on,” she said. “When the war in Cambodia happened, (no one) knew. So how can I expect students to take responsibility and take action against land mines when they don’t know about them? It’s not just a job, it’s a mission for me. It’s very idealistic, I know. But in a small way, I think I get to change the world.”
