[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.]
The population in the village is growing smaller by the day. Many people have died, mostly from starvation, some from eating poisonous food, others killed by soldiers. Our family is slowly starving to death and yet, each day, the government reduces our food ration. Hunger, always there is hunger. We have eaten everything that is edible, from rotten leaves on the ground to the roots we dig up. Rats, turtles, and snakes caught in our traps are not wasted as we cook and eat their brains, tails, hides, and blood. When no animals are caught, we roam the fields for grasshoppers, beetles, and crickets.
In Phnom Penh, I would have thrown up if someone told me I would have to eat those things. Now, when the only alternative is to starve, I fight others for a dead animal lying in the road. Surviving for another day has become the most important thing to me. About the only thing I have not eaten is human flesh. I have heard many stories about other villages where people have eaten human flesh. There was a story about a woman in a village nearby who turned to cannibalism. They say she was a good woman, not the monster the soldiers portray her to be. She was so hungry that when her husband died from eating poisonous food, she ate his flesh and fed it to her children. She did not know that the poison in his body would kill her and her children as well.
A man in our village came upon a stray dog in the road one day. The poor dog did not have much meat on it, but the man killed and ate it anyway. The next day, the soldiers arrived at the man’s door. He cried and begged for mercy, but they did not pay any attention to him. He raised his arms as a shield, but they did not protect him from the blows of the soldiers’ fists and rifle stocks. He was never seen again after the soldiers took him away. His crime was that he did not share the dog meat with the community.
I feel sorry for this man’s fate, for I would have done the very same thing to my dog. In Phnom Penh, our family had a friendly little puppy with a wet nose. It was a tiny thing with shaggy long hair that dragged on the ground. The dog loved to hide underneath big piles of clothes on our oriental rugs. Our housekeeper was quite fat and did not know that the dog liked to hide. It was a terrible sight when she stepped on and killed the dog. Pa threw the body away before any of us girls saw it. It shames me now to know that I would eat it if it were alive today.
Source:
Ung, Loung. “New Year’s, April 1976.” First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. Harper Perennial, 2017. 81-2. Print.
Further Reading:
Of all the horrendous stories you've shared. Nothing else comes close to the tales of what this poor girl has witnessed.