Cambodia

Stay Alive, My Son

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to open a new and appalling chapter in the story of the twentieth century. On that day, Pin Yathay was a qualified engineer in the Ministry of Public Works. Successful and highly educated, he had been critical of the corrupt Lon Nol regime and hoped that the Khmer Rouge would be the patriotic saviors of Cambodia.In Stay Alive, My Son, Pin Yathay provides an unforgettable testament of the horror that ensued and a gripping account of personal courage, sacrifice and survival.

Documenting the 27 months from the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh to his escape into Thailand, Pin Yathay is a powerful and haunting memoir of Cambodia's killing fields. With 17 members of his family, Pin Yathay was evacuated by the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, his family taking with them whatever they might need for the three days before they would be allowed to return to their home. Instead, they were moved on from camp to camp, their possessions confiscated or abandoned. As days became weeks and weeks became months, they became the “New People,” displaced urban dwellers compelled to live and work as peasants, their days were filled with forced manual labor and their survival dependent on ever more meager communal rations. The body count mounted, first as malnutrition bred rampant disease and then as the Khmer Rouge singled out the dissidents for sudden death in the darkness.

Eventually, Pin Yathay's family was reduced from 17 to just himself, his wife, and their one remaining son, Nawath. Wracked with pain and disease, robbed of all they had owned, living on the very edge of dying, they faced a future of escalating horror. With Nawath too ill to travel, Pin Yathay and his wife, Any, had to make the heart-breaking decision whether to leave him to the care of a Cambodian hospital in order to make a desperate break for freedom. “Stay alive, my son,” he tells Nawath before embarking on a nightmarish escape to the Thai border.

“During the Kampuchean revolutionary madness... all the urban population was driven out to work in the country, creating new peasant communities which operated on strict, dogmatic Maoist lines.... Pin Yathay's story is told with no attempt at self-aggrandizement.... For he has to live with the shame of having deserted his own child in order to facilitate his escape, of losing his wife in the jungle through ineptitude: it is a revelation of prehistoric strength within the human conscience which is far beyond our imaginings.” —Times Literary Supplement

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Survival in the Killing Fields

Note: If this book is chosen as a club read, it will be read over 2 months since it is a longer book.

“Nothing has shaped my life as much as surviving the Pol Pot regime. I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That’s who I am,” says Haing Ngor. And in his memoir, Survival in the Killing Fields, he tells the gripping and frequently terrifying story of his term in the hell created by the communist Khmer Rouge. Like Dith Pran, the Cambodian doctor and interpreter whom Ngor played in an Oscar-winning performance in The Killing Fields, Ngor lived through the atrocities that the 1984 film portrayed. Like Pran, too, Ngor was a doctor by profession, and he experienced firsthand his country’s wretched descent, under the Khmer Rouge, into senseless brutality, slavery, squalor, starvation, and disease —all of which are recounted in sometimes unimaginable horror in Ngor’s poignant memoir. Since the original publication of this searing personal chronicle, Haing Ngor’s life has ended with his murder, which has never been satisfactorily solved. In an epilogue written especially for this new edition, Ngor’s coauthor, Roger Warner, offers a glimpse into this complex, enigmatic man’s last years—years that he lived “like his country: scarred, and incapable of fully healing.”

The best book on Cambodia that has ever been published.

“For his role in the film The Killing Fields, Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor with no acting experience, won an Oscar. In playing the part, he drew on his own tormented life as a war slave during the Cambodian civil war. His book is a very demanding read, but it is of such high merit and rare importance that it deserves a place in every collection. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

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