[The following is an excerpt from Loung Ung’s amazing memoir about her experiences as a young girl who survived the Khmer Rouge atrocities in Cambodia during the late 70s. Here, the family is still in Phnom Penh not long before the Khmer Rouge take the city.]
Later that evening, out on the balcony, I asked Pa about the bombs dropping in the countryside. He told me that Cambodia is fighting a civil war, and that most Cambodians do not live in cities buyt in rural villages, farming their small plot of land. And bombs are metal balls dropped from airplanes. When they explode, the bombs make craters in the earth the size of small ponds. The bombs kill farming families, destroy their land, and drive them out of their homes. Now homeless and hungry, these people come to the city seeking shelter and help. Finding neither, they are angry and take it out on all officers in the government. His words made myt head spin and my heart beat rapidly.
”Why are they dropping the bombs?” I asked him.
”Cambodia is fighting a war that I do not understand and that is enough of your questions,” he said and became quiet.
Source:
Ung, Loung. “The Ung Family, April 1975.” First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. Harper Perennial, 2017. 11. Print.
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