First They Killed My Father By Loung Ung

Dead bodies everywhere you turn. The smell of gunpowder, filth, and death choke your lungs. You wonder everyday whether it will be your last. All your body feels is pain; all your heart feels is emptiness. One might think this is how life was for Jews during the Jewish Holocaust. In reality, this is how life was for many Cambodians during the reign of Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979. This event, known to many as the Cambodian genocide, left a profound mark on the world around us.

     By losing this father figure she was left to fend for herself and was virtually helpless.

April 17th, 1975; the day that Loung Ung’s life changed forever. The Khmer Rouge marched through the city of Phnom Penh, ordering the evacuation of all those they believed to be “corrupted”. Loung and her family fled when she was only five years old, and thus their new life of terror, starvation, and hard labor began. It would have been easy for her to give in to the fear and despair, yet even as a young girl she showed great resilience. While planting rice in the fields of a child labor camp, Loung feels leeches crawling between her toes.

Here we are revealed more about human nature. Just like any society that instills fear into its followers or citizens that is exactly what the father does with his family. The father is the figure of power of this family and instead of leading with love and kindness he demonstrates his power through fear and dominance. We are able to see that the family in itself is a whole and loves each other, yet there is this rift between each family member that is threatening to tear it apart. For example, when Yunior gets in trouble with his father and his brother is around instead of standing with Yunior and speaking up Rafa backs away and avoids any confrontation with their father in order to avoid his wrath. This makes Yunior look down on his brother in a sense that Rafa doesn’t have his back at times when he needs him most, so he truly can’t trust him (Shreve & Nguyen, 2006). This is just the small part of the family for there are even parts of the whole family that act in a similar fashion.

Between the years of 1975 and 1979, an estimated 1.5 to 3 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian genocide. First They Killed My Father is the story from the perspective of a five year old girl, Loung Ung, and how her life was changed by the Khmer Rouge. Her and her family were forced out of their home, and into labor camps where they were to work for food in order to survive. They relied on each other, and pushed through the Hell that they were unfortunately placed into. In the memoir, First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung, the author demonstrates how the Khmer Rouge use the techniques of confiscation, dress regulations, and food rations in order to remain in control of the citizens.

Childhood wartime experiences have an impact on Ung’s life. Loung Ung is a Cambodian-born American human-rights activist and lecturer. She wrote a memoir called “First They Killed My Father” and talks about the war in Cambodia and experiences. As a result of the war in Cambodia, Ung’s childhood was impacted because she experienced no freedom of religion, a lack of privacy and a lack of individuality .

Loung Ung 's First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers follows her struggles as a child during the Angkar rule. Children in Cambodia directly suffered from trauma, which obviously dismisses the myth that children experience less pain than adults. The importance of Ung 's book is the emotional impact she has on the reader because she gives a voice to the victims and to the dead. As Americans, this topic, the Cambodian genocide does not get taught commonly in education. It shows the trauma that the citizens went through and how it affected the country.

Unwinding is not mandatory but an option. An option that parents can take and never return from. As soon as the order gets signed , the teenager is sent to a harvest camp where he/she is unwound. Parents must feel some type of pain. Maternal love is strong, especially since that person was once a part of them. Although children are the worst behaved their parents still love them deep inside.Regret of the parent could end with depression and guilt. One character in the book that was full of regret was the Admiral. An urban legend about a so called “Humphrey Dunfee” is first mentioned in Chapter 7. The legend says that humphrey dunfee’s parents regret unwinding their son, so they try to put him back together again. This legend was actually

In another story by McLeod called “The Boat” the death of the father liberates his spirit and frees his son from obligated responsibility. When the father dies his own spirit is freed from his nagging wife, she always nagged on him because “… he was a failure as a husband and father who retained none of his own.”(p. ) His wife was controlling and he was burdened by her; dying in a sense liberated him. The father’s dying also freed the son from obligated responsibility. The son felt he had to stay because he loved his father very much and he thought it was “…very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather then selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations.” (p. ) After the father’s death the son was free to return to his own life and follow his own dreams.

Eric Tang’s Unsettled is an ethnographic account of Cambodian refugees in the Bronx, New York that evokes a nuanced understanding of the refugee experience. Unlike many other ethnographies, Tang’s work centers around one individual named Ra Pronh, a fifty year old woman who survived the Cambodian genocide and has lived as a refugee for most of her life. The bulk of his work draws upon two main sources: Tang’s notes that are gathered from his work as a community organizer in refugee neighborhoods and his interviews with Ra Pronh over a three year time period. Throughout his interviews with Ra, Tang often encountered a language barrier with her. There were times where Ra’s children would translate her words from Khmer to English for Tang to

In this book readers see the way the the Cambodian genocide has tormented the lives of many soldiers and prisoners that had to follow the orders that they were given. The book explains that Arn had seen a toddler sneak out at night and go to the pile of dead bodies and he was eating the dead bodies so that he could survive. This little boy had to do this to survive, but in a few days he would be killed for sleeping in and he became one of the dead bodies in the pile for being lazy. If the readers look at the other side, some people didn’t have a choice. Once Arn becomes a soldier and has to become fearless like the guards at his camp. Later the readers find that when he moves to America that he cannot get used to our way of life and he keeps thinking about the people that he had killed and the lives that he had effected. The barbaric and traumatizing experience Arn went through changed him into an enforcer of the new regime, the same kind he used to hate.

Through life, we often lose someone we loved and cared deeply for and supported us through life. This is demonstrated by the loss of a loved one when Esther's father died when she was nine. "My German speaking father, dead since I was nine came from some

In 1975, The Khmer Rouge became the ruling political party of Cambodia after overthrowing the Lon Nol government. Following their leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge imposed an extreme form of social engineering on Cambodian society. They wanted to form an anti-modern, anti-Western ideal of a restructured “classless agrarian society'', a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects. The Khmer Rouge revolutionary army enforced this mostly with extreme violence. The book “First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers”, written by Luong Ung, is the author’s story of growing up during this time period. She was five years old when the Khmer Rouge came

The loss of an adult child is devastating just as is the death of a younger child. However, there are differences as to how both the parents react to such losses. In this case the paper focuses on loss of an adult child and how the parent copes with the situation. The paper will give insight on the situation that precedes the demise of the child such as trajectory of illnesses which is more recent. A review on how the parents deal with the loss after it occurs will be discussed as well as the various issues the parent faces. The impact on the parent after the child’s loss is also featured. There will be a summary of the findings then finally a section that will give the implications of the research and its importance to the field of psychology and an improvement in human beings

In the source titled “Longitudinal influence of paternal distress on children’s representations of fathers, family cohesion, and family conflict” written by Yeon Soo Yoo, it describes the impact of father and child relationships and father’s distress, which greatly affects the child. It clearly states that children that have “distressed fathers” will develop “negative representations of their fathers…” (Yoo). Also, if the father was hostile to the child, the child will be emotionally impacted negatively. These children will have “lower levels of positive fathering and family harmony than children of less distressed fathers” (Yoo). This relates to the poem “forgiving my father” because clearly her father was troubled and this affected the narrator greatly. The speaker accuses her father of stealing money from the mother by saying “but today is payday, payday old man; my mother’s hand opens in her early grave... there is no more time for you. never be enough daddy daddy old lecher old liar” (lines 5-10). This can lead to the inference that he did not work for himself and he just selfishly used the mother. He did not contribute anything to her because according to the daughter she says, “you gave her all you had which was nothing” (14-15). This can be interpreted with the idea that he did not contribute giving his money from his work because most likely he did not even have a job and was just using his wife’s money to live. Or, it can be interpreted that he did not give her any love or any support. He was “a needy” (13) father, therefore expecting everything from his family but not giving anything in return. Her “distressed” (Yoo) father has inhibited her ability to