3 Growing Up under the Khmer Rouge: Cambodian American Life Writing

The Angkar is the mother and father of all young children, as well as adolescent boys and girls.

—Khmer Rouge slogan, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar

As a survivor, I want to be worthy of the suffering that I endured as a child. I don’t want to let that pain count for nothing, nor do I want others to endure it.

—Chanrithy Him, When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up under the Khmer Rouge

In June 2000, a quarter century after the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh, the New York Times published a review of two Cambodian American memoirs: Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers and Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up under the Khmer Rouge. Titled “Memories of Genocide,” Joshua Wolf Shenk’s literary appraisal opens with an allusion to the Khmer Rouge–driven forced evacuation of Cambodia’s cities. As the writer turned critic surmises,

Most left on foot and, after walking for days in the scorching heat, received another order from soldiers: to write their “biographies.” It was a simple ruse to ferret out intellectuals to be executed. But it also hinted at a crucial theme of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal regime: an obsession with the control of stories…. Now the stories are being told by survivors…. Cambodia does not yet have its Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel, two storytellers who bore so hard into the particulars of their experience that they could speak for anonymous millions. Perhaps Ung and Him had these models in mind, as both chose to narrate their stories in present tense, from their point of view as children.¹Close

Alluding to state-authorized “biographies” and cognizant of the totalitarian regime’s “obsession with the control of stories,” Shenk gestures toward a central mode in contemporary Cambodian American writing: Killing Fields–era memoirs. Situated within a catastrophic milieu of war, genocide, and familial loss, First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats are topically linked, comprised of childhood memories emblematic of growing up under the Khmer Rouge.

Correspondingly, First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats begin with a pre–Khmer Rouge setting, replete with idyllic scenes of city and family life. Each narrative then shifts to the large-scale evacuation of Phnom Penh (or other major Cambodian metropoles) and en masse relocation of its denizens to agricultural labor camps. Camp life—and the traumatic details of such an existence—occupies the bulk of both autobiographies. Concomitantly, the camp space, typified by a Khmer Rouge authoritarianism personified by countless cadres who constantly surveil and punish, is the principal panoptic setting for child protagonists who bear firsthand witness to execution, starvation, overwork, disease, and torture. In each memoir’s concluding chapters, the 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia foregrounds an out-of-country migration to Thai refugee camps. These noncitizenship sites become a final narrative resting place for protagonists who await refugee sponsorships to the United States.

As Shenk suggests, such memory-oriented returns assume revisionist registers when placed adjacent to Democratic Kampuchean directives to forget the past, forgo familial relationships (as the opening Khmer Rouge saying makes clear), and exist in a tabula rasa revolutionary present. In tactical Janus-faced fashion, by recollecting a pre- and postrevolutionary Cambodia, Ung and Him produce an identifiable cold war cartography (inclusive of U.S. bombings of the Cambodian countryside) and reconstruct a Democratic Kampuchean imaginary. Further, like other Cambodian American cultural producers, both authors highlight a postgenocide subjectivity (wherein Cambodian refugees are transformed into Cambodian Americans) and, most significantly, agitate for juridical action (in the absence of domestic trial or international tribunal). Chronologically ordered, First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats formalistically echo other Cambodian American memoirs that, as Teri Shaffer Yamada notes, employ a distinct “autobiographical chronotype” composed of three time periods: before April 1975 (prerevolutionary Cambodia), 1975–79 (Democratic Kampuchea), and after 1979 (wherein protagonists flee the Vietnamese-occupied People’s Republic of Kampuchea for Thai refugee camps).²Close From Dith Pran’s edited anthology Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields (1999) to Daughter of the Killing Fields (2005) by Theary C. Seng, from On the Wings of a White Horse: A Cambodian Princess’s Story of Surviving the Khmer Rouge Genocide (2006) by Oni Vitandham to Martha Kendall and Nawuth Keat’s Alive in the Killing Fields: Surviving the Khmer Rouge Genocide (2009), Cambodian American life writing time and again accesses this before, during, and after Khmer Rouge continuum.

Notwithstanding structures unique to Cambodian American life writing, Shenk’s second assertion—which maintains that “Cambodia does not yet have its Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel, two storytellers who bore so hard into the particulars of their experience that they could speak for anonymous millions”—troublingly eschews the tenets of a distinct life-writing genre in favor of a now-familiar Holocaust referent. Shenk evaluates the efficacy of childhood remembrances of genocide by way of canonical narratives like Anne Frank’s eponymous diary and Elie Wiesel’s Night trilogy, accentuating the dominant role such productions play in the mass reception of non-Holocaust texts. This reception accretes more significance within a contemporary literary marketplace increasingly flooded by what Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith characterize as stories of “traumatic remembering,” part and parcel of a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century “memoir boom.” As Schaffer and Smith contend,

Exemplary of the literature of traumatic remembering in the West have been Holocaust stories and all that has come to signify “the Holocaust” as the emblematic limit case of human rights abuse in the twentieth century. So important and influential have Holocaust stories become, and so ingrained in Western audiences invoking a pattern of response, that this signal event has become the template for all forms of traumatic telling, response, and responsibility within the contemporary field of human rights.³Close

If the Holocaust is the “signal event” that has “become the template for all forms of traumatic telling, response, and responsibility,” then memoirs about the Shoah—as Shenk’s valuation makes clear—become totalizing prototypes upon which stories of genocide and state-sanctioned violence are measured. Such autobiographical indices obscure very real differences between Jewish productions and Cambodian American life writing with regard to history, politics, and state-sanctioned justice. Most obvious, the disjuncture between hindsight prosecution (the trials at Nuremburg) and still-to-be-served justice (the ongoing U.N./Cambodian War Crimes Tribunal) weakens Shenk’s original comparative claim because two different agendas are at play. For those who recall the Holocaust, at stake is a “never again” modality facilitated through a juridically acknowledged remembrance (e.g., Yad Vashem); for Cambodian American writers who recollect the Killing Fields era, the issue is an instantiating “remember again” impulse intended to catalyze unrealized juridical processes.

Less apparent is the extent to which Shenk’s critical appraisal ignores the specific traumatic contours of Cambodian American life writing. Shenk’s childhood comparison fails to account for asymmetrical juridical histories; it is likewise undermined by a misreading of narrative rupture, thematic purpose, and extenuating sociopolitical contexts. For example, Shenk insists that each memoir lacks a coherent (or authentic) narrative voice. In particular, Shenk criticizes First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats on the flat assumption that each author carelessly uses incongruous adult reasoning. Accordingly, Chanrithy Him’s memoir is extravagantly “tinged with melodrama” and the author “seems to strain to relate the immediacy of a time so long ago.” Shenk moreover asserts that Him “tries to impose an adult’s logic and values on a world that, to a child, must have seemed impossible,” which he later argues lessens the narrative impact of her autobiography.⁴Close Similarly, Shenk alleges that Ung’s “child narrator sometimes seems like a puppet whose strings are held by the adult author,” a reading ostensibly substantiated by the author’s use of political terms like “cadre” and “coup,” indicative of grown-up characterizations. In turn, such insights supposedly make her memoir “disingenuous.”⁵Close

From the beginning, this less-than-generous reading of First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats is suggested in the review’s title. In stressing “memories” and not “memoirs” of genocide, Shenk stimulates an incomplete and fragmented reading of each text. Nevertheless, it is precisely such interrupted childhood memories of genocide, influenced by war, shaped by authoritarianism, and marked by unimaginable suffering, that demand a reading of Cambodian American literature through alternative frames. As Ung and Him attempt to make sense of national rupture, forced familial separations, parental executions, and lost childhoods in First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats, respectively, the inclusion of adult commentary brings to light an undeniably politicized context forged in the interstices of conflicted Cambodian nationhood, replete with foreign-born realpolitik and comprised of unthinkable violence. Simultaneously, the tactical use of a child perspective—which calls forth legible frames of innocence—inadvertently destabilizes allegations of U.S. innocence via midcentury campaigns in Southeast Asia.

For these reasons, the desire to combat such historical amnesias in the face of genocide is of paramount significance in Cambodian American Killing Fields narratives. In his introduction to Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, survivor Dith Pran provocatively argues:

It is important for me that a new generation of Cambodians and Cambodian Americans become active and tell the world what happened to them and their families under the Khmer Rouge. I want them never to forget the faces of their relatives and friends who were killed during that time. The dead are crying out for justice. Their voices must be heard. It is the responsibility of survivors to speak out for those who are unable to speak, in order that genocide and holocaust will never happen again in this world.⁶Close

Pran’s declaration to “never to forget the faces of their relatives and friends” directly challenges individual and communal impulses to disremember (deliberately and unintentionally) the tragic realities of the Khmer Rouge era. Equally important, Pran’s desire that “a new generation of Cambodians and Cambodian Americans become active” by “tell[ing] the world what happened” underscores a testimonial manifesto linked to intergenerational juridical protest. This collective impulse—to represent the Cambodian experience between 1975 and 1979 (the period of Democratic Kampuchea)—eschews a strict reading of autobiography as an individual life story and instead situates Cambodian American memoir within the rubric of collective (and collected) articulation.⁷Close

Indeed, First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats highlight that memoir—a genre that potentially enables survivors and their children to “speak out for those who are unable to speak”—proves an apt literary vehicle for such “cries for justice.” However, as a closer analysis of both memoirs makes clear, this juridical agenda—grounded in an evidentiary narrative of Khmer Rouge abuses and crimes—instantiates particular limitations at the level of subjectivity and articulation. Expressly, if First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats detail Khmer Rouge crimes, each autobiography is (as subsequent critiques over authenticity and authorship underscore) subject to practices of judicial cross-examination. These cross-examinations are apparent in the contested reception of each work, which include allegations over fabricated narratives and claims of uncertain authorship. Even so, the critiques levied in each work (e.g., against U.S. foreign policy and Democratic Kampuchean authoritarianism), coupled with the compulsion to remember the Killing Fields, function as multivalent diagnoses of the failure of American exceptionalism and Khmer Rouge collectivization.

These debates, diagnoses, and criticisms bring to light the main charge before Cambodian American life writing, which is rooted in a specific responsibility: the verbalization of justice through individual account and collective remembrance. Remembering a Cambodia that, after 1975, ceases to exist as a “once-gentle land”(drawing on Chanrithy Him’s country-of-origin characterization) attaches to each production the additional task of making visible a certain absented presence. Suggestive of an event that has occurred but remains unacknowledged, the absented presence of the Killing Fields era resembles what Avery Gordon argues is integral to haunting and other “ghostly matters.” As Gordon explains:

If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life…. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.⁸Close

Correspondingly, it is the ghost of the Killing Fields—an absented presence or social figure that draws into dramatic focus violent histories, large-scale memorialization, and refugee citizenship—that, regardless of geographic distance and temporal gap, continually haunts Cambodian American writers who autobiographically attempt to structure feelings via an unreconciled genocidal past.

Likewise invested in a transformative recognition evident in the eventual vocalization of alternative juridical sites, Chanrithy Him and Loung Ung inevitably begin their respective memoirs with individual haunting experiences fixed to this seething past. For instance, stating that “in 1990 Cambodia still remains home to political unrest. Pockets of the Khmer Rouge still fight,” Him admits, “The Khmer Rouge are a continent away, and yet they are not. Psychologically, they are parasites, like tapeworms that slumber within you, living passively until something stirs them to life.”⁹Close Similarly, in First They Killed My Father’s epilogue, Ung confesses, “In my new country, I immersed myself in American culture during the day, but at night the war haunted me with nightmares.”¹⁰Close Taken together, at stake in When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father are interrelated ghostly matters, traumatic impulses inclusive of commemoration (for those lost) and reconciliation (for those living). At the same time, Him and Ung reconstruct and reimagine—through family frames—the socially destructive dimensions of Khmer Rouge policy, which separated parents from children through relocation, reeducation, and execution. These family frames and childhood remembrances reproduce the Killing Fields era as a cast of social figures: unseen U.S. military personnel, ubiquitous Khmer Rouge cadres, and disappeared family members.

Returning to Joshua Wolf Shenk’s critique, these social figures are imagined and reproduced within the interstices of childhood remembrance and adult reflection. Consequently, the ghost of the Cambodian genocide is visible in after-the-fact interpretation, past/present commemoration, and concomitant juridical interpolation. This ghostly reading engenders an analysis of both memoirs through trauma narrative, embodied frame, and triage practice. If, as Cathy Caruth reminds, the “originary meaning of trauma itself (in both English and German), the Greek trauma, or ‘wound,’ originally refer[red] to an injury inflicted on a body,” the notion nevertheless is most legible via affective rubrics that make plain profound emotional injury.¹¹Close Analogously, fundamental to the psychoanalytic definition of trauma is the extent to which it is comprehended, or embodied, and whether it can (or cannot) be narrativized. As Caruth argues, trauma is

much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked to only what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language.¹²Close

Reminiscent of Dith Pran’s above-mentioned call to action, it is the “story of a wound that cries out” that typifies First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats, two trauma narratives focused on “a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.” Set against a backdrop of juridical nonreconciliation, Ung’s and Him’s interrupted childhood remembrances are undeniably rooted in the “delayed appearance” of justice and “belated address” of Khmer Rouge crimes of genocide.

Within this traumatic milieu, crucial to Cambodian American cultural production then is an ongoing evaluation of state-inflicted injury and mass-scale loss. As Cambodian survivor Pin Yathay, author of one of the first accounts of the Killing Fields, solemnly outlined, “the tragedy of Cambodia has not yet run its course nor will it for generations. … Millions have died … [a] culture has almost vanished, a social system disintegrated.”¹³Close

Mindful of multigenerational impacts, Cambodian American childhood narratives about the Democratic Kampuchean era undertake a mode of memory work ultimately mediated through transnational triage. Drawing on James Kyung-Jin Lee’s exploration of triage vis-à-vis governmentality and biopolitics, Cambodian American authors (who necessarily articulate ruination by way of individual trauma and familial loss) retroactively render a contrapuntal “diagnosis infused with power” and a “decision made with authority” independent of state-sanctioned reconciliation efforts. Indeed, as Lee suggests, triage “is not healing, but is a way to healing … [it is] a tool for making order out of chaos, and most important, for assigning value to that order.”¹⁴Close Cambodian American writers Loung Ung and Chanrithy Him reproduce a distinct sense of agency through the strategic and tactical reorganization (or triaging) of political, social, and familial chaos.

Expressly, the destabilization of U.S. exceptionalism, the revelation of large-scale indifference, and the lack of access to state-authorized justice delineate the primary parameters of postgenocide, postmigration Cambodian American selfhood. Such a restructuring restages criminality, reassesses causality, and recalibrates culpability. In the process, Cambodian American autobiography militates against multisited erasures and constitutes an otherwise space (à la Gordon’s haunting discourse) for memory, reparation, and justice. Situated against and adjacent to these politicized contexts, Cambodian American literary production is invested in an antiforgetting project that transnationally spans the United States and Cambodia. Put otherwise, Cambodian American writers—in their respective literary recollections of the past—repeatedly use the literary labor of memory (i.e., memoir) to expose catastrophic U.S. policy, lay bare international indifference, and underscore contemporary juridical inaction.

Alluding to “anonymous millions,” Joshua Wolf Shenk reveals the extent to which genocides are at once measured through quantitative frames. Nonetheless, it is the multifaceted qualification of genocide via politicized, affective remembrance that brings to light a narrative tension between singular recollection and collective memorialization in Cambodian American life writing. As an April 2000 New York Times synopsis of Cambodian American life writing by Richard Bernstein evokes, the almost two million who perished in Cambodia’s Killing Fields represent “a horrifying number, but so large as to seem almost like an abstraction, like the distance to the nearest star.”¹⁵Close Bernstein’s remark about “abstraction” and “distance” emphasizes certain geographic realities and multidecade time passages. After all, the nearly 8,600 miles that separate Cambodia (as traumatic epicenter) from the United States (as principal reception site), coupled with the twenty-year divide between the 1979 dissolution of Democratic Kampuchea and the millennial publication of Ung’s and Him’s memoirs, potentially makes less urgent a reading of the Killing Fields as a relevant and remembered genocide event.

Notwithstanding geography and history, Ung and Him are chiefly concerned with a qualitative retelling of Cambodia’s genocide through contrapuntal childhood moments. Indeed, as Loung Ung recalls in a 2005 New York Times op-ed titled, “A Birthday Wrapped in Cambodian History,”

While children elsewhere in the world watched TV, I watched public executions. While they played hide-and-seek with their friends, I hid in bomb shelters with mine; when a bomb hit and killed my friend Pithy, I brushed her brains off my sleeve. I will never forget the day they [the Khmer Rouge] came for my father. They said they needed him to help pull an oxcart out of mud. As he walked off with the soldiers, I did not pray for the gods to spare his life. I prayed only that his death be quick and painless. I was 7 years old.¹⁶Close

Whereas childhood is sentimentally conceived as a time free from worry, strife, and violence, Him’s desire to “be worthy of the suffering … [she] endured as a child” and Ung’s fatal game of “hide-and-seek” (which ends in her friend Pithy’s death) uncannily makes clear the degree to which innocence gives way to trauma. Indeed, both Him and Ung lose their childhoods and are forced to grow up under the Khmer Rouge. Hence, such childhood memoirs give way to a decidedly traumatic bildungsroman chiefly comprised of personal losses (the deaths of family members) and sociopolitical costs (the removal of state-authorized citizenship).

This particular utilization of the bildungsroman is problematically fixed to what Joseph Slaughter notes is a long-standing connection between the form and human rights, which—“since the Atlantic movement for the abolition of the slave trade”—has been “one of the primary carriers of human rights culture” that has “travel[ed] with missionaries, merchants, militaries, colonial administrators, and technical advisors.”¹⁷Close Correspondingly, yet also to different degrees, both authors privilege a decidedly iconoclastic childhood narrative about the Democratic Kampuchean era. The individualization of communal trauma is made more immediate and pressing amid amnesiac frames wherein U.S. bombings are strategically forgotten, the genocide is discounted (as an “autogenocide”), and international justice is—as the ongoing machinations over the contemporary UN/Cambodian War Crimes Tribunal illustrate—for the most part absent.

Nevertheless, Ung and Him initially recall the genocide in quantitative fashion, which on one level confirms the status of each memoir as evidentiary text. Explicitly dedicated to the 1.7 million Cambodians who died under the Khmer Rouge, Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats and Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father establish from the beginning the human cost of Democratic Kampuchean policies, making possible a reading of both memoirs as legible literary memorials. If a memorial is both commemorative and contemplative, then Ung’s and Him’s autobiographies publicly acknowledge and reevaluate national, familial, and individual loss. In the process, these Cambodian American cultural productions attest to what Martha Minow observes is the affective potential of literary memory work: to “name those who were killed … depict those who resisted … and those rescued … accord honor and confer heroic status … [and] express shame, remorse, warning, shock.”¹⁸Close Be that as it may, though Him and Ung access past childhood memories, their political projects are simultaneously predicated on a still-elusive present-day prosecution of surviving ex–Khmer Rouge leaders and cadres.

Within this justice-to-be-served milieu, a linear (or chronological) narrative corresponds to the judicial agenda at work in each text, which joins the significant challenge to remember the past to contemporary struggles for justice. Given that only one Khmer Rouge official has successfully been charged, tried, and convicted in the current UN/Cambodian War Crimes Tribunal (Kaing Guek Eav, aka Comrade Duch, the head warden of the notorious S-21 detention center), each memoir (published seven years before the official start of the tribunal) establishes an alternate route to justice forged not in courts of law but staged in literary, more fluid courts of public opinion. In an alternate but linked vein, the construction of Cambodian American memoir via the instability of place is epitomized by the seemingly unending movement of protagonists from city to country, from labor camp to refugee camp, from Southeast Asia to North America. This movement in and out of country cements each memoir’s transnational dimensions, wherein Ung and Him articulate the transformation of Cambodian protagonists into diasporic refugee subjects. Returning to memorial frames, such work on one level operates—in the glaring light of nonjuridical action—as a placeholder for (or marker of) loss that has yet to be negotiated by way of state-authorized processes.

On another level, these movements expand the purview of U.S. autobiography beyond a literary mapping of the self to encompass a transnational cartography of culpability and equally complex political subjectivity. Equally important, such productions reveal a mode of retroactive nationbuilding that foregrounds a specific, pre- and postgenocide Cambodian citizenship claim. Accordingly, Him opens When Broken Glass Floats with the following poetic enunciation:

When broken glass floats, a nation drowns,

Descending to the abyss.

From mass graves in the once-gentle land,

Their blood seeps into mother earth.

Their suffering voice resounds in the spirit world,

Shouts through the soul of survivors,

Determined to connect to the world:

Please remember us.

Please speak for us.

Please bring us justice.¹⁹Close

Him’s use of collective pronouns—for example, “their” to refer to victims whose “blood seeps into mother earth” and whose “suffering voice resounds”—immediately establishes the relationship between the living and the dead, the traumatized survivor and the deceased victim. Despite death, those who perished under the Khmer Rouge regime are all the same “determined to connect to the world” through “survivors” entrusted with the enormous task—or, to draw briefly from Pran’s directive, responsibility—of genocidal remembrance.

The repetition of “please” and the use of italics in the concluding lines of the above poem foreground an intended relationship between writer and audience. Beseeched by those lost to “remember,” “speak,” and “bring us justice,” Him positions herself as a witness (through memory and speaking) and a prosecutor (an embodied vehicle for justice). Concurrently, these calls to action are extended to the reader, who analogously functions as juridical spectator and—given the subsequent testimony that composes most of the narrative—a de facto jury member. To a different but still connected degree, Ung’s opening claim in First They Killed My Father that “if you had been living in Cambodia during this period, this would be your story too” confirms her membership to an ostensibly universal Cambodian genocidal narrative.²⁰Close Likewise, the second-person use of “you” and inclusive “too” gestures to a soon-to-be concretized juridical relationship between author and reader.

Cambodian American cultural production is further guided by refugee subjectivities born out of Khmer Rouge totalitarianism and cold war foreign policy, which in turn undercut sentimental notions of Democratic Kampuchean nationhood and idealized U.S. exceptionalism.²¹Close The issue of justice at the forefront of Cambodian American cultural production marries U.S. civil liberties (inclusive of free speech claims and due process subjectivity) to universal human rights. This reading of Cambodian American memoir connects to what Schaffer and Smith argue is a context of an “evolving culture of rights.” Drawing on the testimonial registers of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the two cultural critics rightly assert that “personal witnessing plays a central role in the formulation of new rights protections, as people come forward to tell their stories in the contexts of tribunals and national inquiries.”²²Close Marked by “personal witnessing,” First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats operate in slightly different frames, in a still-to-be realized tribunal imaginary.

Alternatively, the hybridity of Cambodian American identity—born out of Cambodian and U.S. subjectivity—presages and echoes in some way the fused nature of the UN/Cambodian War Crimes Tribunal, which similarly attaches international human rights to domestic Cambodian law. Thus, the very locus of Cambodian American selfhood presciently addresses the formation of contemporary trial formation in the country of origin. Even more relevant, the tactical use of American autobiography as self-making narrative is transformed into a story of self-destruction via U.S. bombings of the Cambodian countryside and subsequent U.S. support for the Khmer Rouge. Consequently, Him and Ung unintentionally draw upon a particular politics of resistance and critique embedded in American autobiography. Drawing on a previously mentioned example, if Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1846) revised—via autobiographical slave story—sentimental citizenship-building tropes to levy a potent critique against romantic democratic virtue, then Ung’s and Him’s memoirs analogously call attention to the catastrophic failure of cold war policies in Southeast Asia. Implicitly, the lack of U.S. involvement between 1975 and 1979 is apparent in each memoir’s omission of any mention of the United States after the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh in 1975. Following the fall of the Democratic Kampuchean regime, the United States reemerges as an asylum site only in the concluding moments of When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father.

Countering cold war claims of U.S. superiority and moral responsibility on the world stage, Him and Ung draw limited but nonetheless concentrated attention to U.S. military policy in Cambodia. Explicitly, these critiques are manifest through maps of and direct mentions of U.S. bombings in the region. Illustratively, a map of Southeast Asia (which includes Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand) appears in the front matter of When Broken Glass Floats. Indicative of an expansive U.S. foreign policy during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the map’s coordinates gesture toward Laotian dirty wars waged from Thai air force bases, epicenter military campaigns in North and South Vietnam, and—most important—illegal bombings of the Cambodian countryside along the alleged Ho Chi Minh Trail. Comingled with well-known Cambodian cities (e.g., Phnom Penh, Takeo, and Battambang) are B-52 target sites, which are identified by way of a map key in the lower left-hand corner (“B-52 ‘Menu Targets,’ 1969–1970”). Labeled “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Dinner,” “Supper,” “Snack,” and “Dessert,” these locations bear the euphemistic mark of a larger U.S. campaign titled Operation Menu.²³Close A dotted line extends from Takeo (Him’s home city) to Khao-I-Dang (a post–Khmer Rouge refugee camp in Thailand) and intersects at distinct points in Phnom Penh and Cambodia’s Northwest Province.

Taken together, the map demarcates three key spatial/temporal sites in Him’s memoir: the B-52 bombings and the subsequent Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh; the time of the Killing Fields (in Northwest Province labor camps); and the post–Democratic Kampuchean migration (to Thailand). The narrative use of such site-oriented and historical referents are buttressed by the inclusion of newspaper articles from the New York Times and the Economist, which directly attest to the political situation in Cambodia before, during, and after the Killing Fields era by way of contemporaneous reportage. For example, the fourth chapter of Him’s memoir commences with a May 6, 1975 New York Times headline, “Victors Emptying Cambodia Cities, U.S. Now Believes.” The caption is followed by an excerpt that reads: “Washington, May 5—State Department officials said today they believed the Cambodian Communists had forcibly evacuated virtually the entire population of Phnom Penh soon after they took power in the capital early last month.”²⁴Close These alternative modes of documentation strengthen a sustained engagement with U.S. foreign policy and international nonresponses to an impending humanitarian crisis. Subversively, such reportage militates against amnesiac readings of the period that insist that no international action was taken out of a profound ignorance of Khmer Rouge totalitarian policies and practices.

At the same time, When Broken Glass Floats outlines a specific coalition of nation-states connected to Cambodia’s destabilization during the latter part of the 1960s and the mid-1970s. This geography—composed of multiple countries—illustrates the complicated political terrain that will, as subsequent chapters in the autobiography reveal, lead to the disastrous formation and implementation of Democratic Kampuchea. The metaphoric articulation of this geography initially occurs through the aptly spectral image of a comet. Him narrates, “When the tail of the comet pointed to a particular place, Cambodia would be drawn into war with that country.”²⁵Close She then interrupts the memoir’s temporality with a present-day assertion that

I look back now as a survivor educated in America. I’ve sought out answers to questions I raised as a little girl. Trying to make sense of what happened. Trying to understand the players in the Vietnam conflict and those who took advantage of the situation, pulling Cambodia—the pawn, they called it—into the whirlpool of destruction.²⁶Close

Him’s inclusion of the Vietnam Conflict reiterates the narrative dimensions of the above-mentioned map and combats a particular amnesia within the United States about the Cambodian genocide. This memory work is reinforced by Him’s observation that the comet “had more than one tail”—one that pointed to Vietnam and “one … invisibly pointed to the United States.”²⁷Close The use of “invisibly” in relation to the United States complicates a simplistic reading of the genocide in terms of isolationist or domestically contained dynamics. Embodied cartographically and expressed literarily, the connection between U.S. foreign policy, the Vietnam War, and the political destabilization of Cambodia is reconfirmed and expanded through the narrative inclusion of U.S. bombings, which are linked to the subsequent rise of the Khmer Rouge.²⁸Close

Divergently, the map of Cambodia that appears in Ung’s First They Killed My Father is temporally and geographically fused to the Khmer Rouge era, a reading substantiated by its delineation of Democratic Kampuchean zones (by way of directional coordinates such as “NW,” “W,” “SW,” and “E”). Cambodia occupies a central position in the map, which—as in the case of When Broken Glass Floats—also includes Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. Notwithstanding these other nation-state representations, the question of responsibility is primarily attributed to the Khmer Rouge regime that has geopolitically segmented Cambodia. However, Ung does address—albeit briefly—the role of U.S. foreign policy in the making of the Khmer Rouge. As she critically notes:

The war in Vietnam spread to Cambodia when the United States bombed Cambodia’s borders to try to destroy the North Vietnamese bases. The bombings destroyed many villages and killed many people allowing the Khmer Rouge to gain support from the peasants and farmers. In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was overthrown by his top general, Lon Nol. The United States–backed Lon Nol government was corrupt and weak and was easily defeated by the Khmer Rouge.²⁹Close

Tellingly, this admission of U.S. culpability occurs after the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh. Though seemingly incidental, the evaluation of U.S. foreign policy embedded in Ung’s recollection renders explicit a critique of cold war politics. On another level, Ung—unlike Him—includes dates as subtitles to chapter headings. For example, chapter 1 is titled “Phnom Penh, April 1975” and concerns a pre–Khmer Rouge Cambodia; chapter 3 (“Takeover, April 17, 1975”) encompasses the Khmer Rouge evacuation of Phnom Penh; and subsequent chapters incorporate this pattern. The inclusion of dates attaches a historicity to Ung’s personal narrative, further substantiating its function as evidentiary text.

All in all, in both When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father, the issue of international responsibility with regard to Cambodia’s genocide foregrounds the argumentative potential of memory work, which recalls—in complex fashion—a historical narrative that necessitates reconsideration and reevaluation. Indeed, such revised narratives of nation-state culpability directly dispute President Richard M. Nixon’s April 30, 1970 pronouncement that U.S. bombings were conducted not “for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia but for the purpose of the war in Vietnam.”³⁰Close Through their explicit engagement with U.S. foreign policy, Him and Ung produce an oppositional reading of U.S.– Cambodia relations prior to the start of the Khmer Rouge regime. This reading reimagines and reinscribes the centrality of U.S. foreign policy in the making of the Khmer Rouge. Consequently, Him and Ung (to varying degrees) counter discourses of U.S. exceptionalism as expressed through idealized cold war frames of democratic virtue, nonintrusive containment, and purportedly benign warfare.

Comprised of state-authorized histories of violence, Cambodian American memoir largely reimagines agency through a postgenocide citizenship and engagement with juridical activism. Central to the articulation of citizenship is the use of daughterly frames, which make visible a postgenocide communal membership (in Cambodia and within the Cambodian diaspora). Key to this citizenship formation is familial affiliation, which functions as an index of personal and national loss during the Khmer Rouge regime. The engagement with family frames is immediately apparent in Him’s and Ung’s memoirs.

For instance, When Broken Glass Floats opens with the following: “In dedication to Pa and Mak, I honor you. Chea, my idol who enriched my life. Tha, Avy, Vin, and Bosaba, who will live forever in my memory, I love and miss you dearly. For Cheng, who helped me escape the death camp.”³¹Close This dedication is preceded by an “author’s note,” which confirms the familial scope of Him’s narrative project in its emphasis on collaborative telling:

Although I have photographic memories of what happened in my childhood as early as when I was three, some of the events in this book were recounted to me as I grew up and filled in by my relatives. To protect some people, I have changed their names in this book.³²Close

Him’s confession that her autobiography is shaped by familial stories signals a return to memory as a collective narrative process made more difficult by deterritorialized refugee subjectivities. Such remembrance correspondingly militates against a practice of disremembering, which—as previously discussed—takes the form of survivor silence and the absence of justice on the world stage.

Echoing a similarly collaborative trajectory, First They Killed My Father commences with a familial dedication:

In memory of the two million people who perished under the Khmer Rouge regime. This book is dedicated to my father, Ung; Seng Im, who always believed in me; my mother, Ung; Ay Choung, who always loved me…. To my sisters Keav, Chou, and Geak because sisters are forever; my brother Kim, who taught me about courage; my brother Khouy, for contributing more than one hundred pages of our family history and details of our lives under the Khmer Rouge, many of which I incorporated into this book; to my brother Meng and sister-in-law Eang Muy Tan, who raised me (quite well) in America.³³Close

In When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father, family members epitomize and personify large-scale loss. Each dedication assumes an elegiac register, manifest in the listing of names, relations, and community members. Such familial pronouncements cohere with the inclusion of family trees in each memoir’s front matter. Set amid a Cambodian/Democratic Kampuchean backdrop, these family trees—which bring together genealogy and geography—afford the reader the morbid task of mapping those who died and those who survived the regime. Indeed, elegiac frames confirm the multifaceted memorialization efforts constitutive of First They Killed My Father and When Broken Glass Floats. Correspondingly, such literary memorials necessarily connect the loss of family members to the dissolution of prerevolutionary life. Therefore, central to each dedication is the articulation of large-scale loss, the negotiation of dislocation, and the exploration of mass state-authorized violence through, by, and within familial frames.

Simultaneously, as 1.5-generation Cambodian American authors, Him and Ung deconstruct and revise traditional notions of a bildungsroman—a coming-of-age narrative focused on moral, psychological, and intellectual development—through stories of growing up under the Khmer Rouge that encompass memories of moral decay, trauma, and confusion. Drawing on the cultural capital that thematically accompanies the bildungsroman, Chanrithy Him and Loung Ung further legitimize their position as daughters of Cambodia to speak for the nation and about the genocide. Without mothers and fathers, a fact confirmed in both visual and verbal imaginaries, Him and Ung speak to the national trauma of Cambodia via their respective roles as daughters, subverting normative modes of narrative transmission from parent to child. Additionally, their status as de facto Khmer Rouge orphans coincides with their nonstate status as contemporary refugees. Taken together, through the deployment of familial frames, wherein citizenship location is related to mother, father, brother, and sister—and within the space of familial disruption—each author rescripts and reincorporates personal, familial, and national memories of the Killing Fields era.

Initially, daughterliness seems incidental, a superficial category that describes Ung’s and Him’s identities within the family unit. However, the characterization of the family as political unit sets in motion a reading of the daughter as enfranchised subject. Alternatively, the filial self-characterization of daughter becomes more politically significant when juxtaposed with contemporaneous Khmer Rouge policies. This chapter’s opening epigraph, which unequivocally positions Angka in a parental role, illustrates the desire of the nation-state to destabilize and destroy affective modes of belonging in service of total Democratic Kampuchean allegiance. As Ben Kiernan forcefully reminds, the Khmer Rouge “mounted history’s fiercest ever attack on family life … children were no longer affiliated with their parents, but to Angka, the Khmer Rouge’s ruling organization.”³⁴Close The revised function of the nation-state as parent is evident in Him’s recollection that

Family ties were suddenly a thing of suspicion. Control was everything. Social ties, even casual conversations, were a threat. Angka, the organization, suddenly became your mother, your father, your God…. To question anything—whom you could greet, whom you could marry, what words you could use to address relatives, what work you did—meant that you were an enemy to your new parent.³⁵Close

Sucheng Chan advances the focus on the Khmer Rouge’s assault against the family unit in her assertion that previous words for “mother” and “father” were replaced with the more communist-centered “comrade.”³⁶Close

Equally, Loung Ung confirms this observation in First They Killed My Father, recalling that, during the Khmer Rouge regime,

children will change what they call their parents. Father is now “Poh,” and not Daddy, Pa, or any other term. Mother is “Meh.” I hold on to Pa’s finger even tighter as the chief rants off other new words. The new Khmer have better words for eating, sleeping, working, stranger; all designed to make us equal.³⁷Close

All the same, Ung resists—in her retelling—the Khmer Rouge directive in her continued use of intimate family addresses. Similarly, Him writes,

Every day the Khmer Rouge set new rules. Now they want to control the words out of our mouths. We have to use the rural terms of address, calling our mothers Mae, and our fathers Pok. Our other option is to call our parents “comrade,” a strange, detached word that, by the sound of it, makes me laugh. How absurd! In our culture, we have four or five words to describe the act of eating, to designate an older person, a monk, or a king.³⁸Close

The lexical shift, coupled with policies that physically separated children from their parents, brings to light the extent to which Democratic Kampuchean citizenship was coded through the denial of familial affiliation at and beyond the level of address. Since the model citizen under the Khmer Rouge was defined through disremembering (of previous regimes, social structures, and classed identities), children, who temporally carried the fewest memories, were configured as idealized revolutionary subjects.

Therefore, the characterization of daughters as witnesses to atrocity, genocide, and national ruination resists the Khmer Rouge by way of memoir and memory work. The traditional script of idealized Cambodian womanhood—wherein daughters take on established female roles within and outside the home—is recuperated to challenge Khmer Rouge familial ideology. Him and Ung include episodes involving caring for children, providing food for the family, and, most significant, maintaining familial connections through remembrance. Addressing specific forms of this “memory resistance,” Chanrithy Him writes,

Though the Khmer Rouge can control every other aspect of our lives, they cannot scrub out our minds, polish away our intellect like an empty brass pot. In the midst of the daily fear of Khmer Rouge village life, it is a delicious secret. And I’m proud to witness it.³⁹Close

As family members die through execution and from disease, each author constructs literary memorials that speak to the intimacy of family dynamics. As brothers, sisters, and mothers are separated from one another, Him and Ung reflect on the passage of time and the totalitarianism of the Khmer Rouge regime. Following the assumed execution of her father, Him writes,

Now time becomes hard to measure. We mark its passage in terms of who has died and who is still alive. Time is distilled and recalled by death. Before Vin died … After Pa was executed…. This is how we talk. Before Yiey Srem’s death, I’m able to walk and see her briefly. Such visits are rare, even though our extended family members live close to each other. We have to weigh our desire for such contact against the risk of being punished for exhibiting “family intimacy”—a connection the Khmer Rouge frowns upon.⁴⁰Close

As the above passage epitomizes, it is through the loss of family members, which reinscribes parent–daughter, brother–sister modalities through a survivor/nonsurvivor binary, that Him and Ung recount the passage of time. As suggested by Ung’s title, the temporal frame that encompasses the genocide begins with her father’s death, even though it is Ung’s sister Keav who is the first to die under the Khmer Rouge regime. However, the inclusion of father and the quick connection to a daughter of Cambodia—who, most importantly, remembers—reinforces readings of daughterliness and family frames. Notwithstanding the absence of a familial connection in Him’s title, the constant reference to family members and family trauma reinforces her similar position as a daughter of Cambodia.⁴¹Close

For this reason, the maintenance of familial codes and the insistence by each author that she is a daughter of Cambodia and not a daughter of Democratic Kampuchea cultivate alternative national narratives that challenge Khmer Rouge directives to disremember.⁴²Close Covertly, the assumption of traditional gendered roles—exemplified in dutiful daughters—simultaneously speaks to dominant characterizations within the United States about the role of family in the task of nation-building. The prominence of not only mother and father as signifiers of Cambodia but husband and wife as identifiable pre–Democratic Kampuchean categories indirectly caters to cold war characterizations of the communist—and by extension, communism—as antifamily. The middle-class subject position embodied by both Him and Ung contributes to this relatively conservative reading. Indeed, both authors recount images of home wherein mothers prepare traditional meals in comfortable domestic spaces.

Analogously, these domestic spaces are characterized through identifiable class signifiers. Ung, describing her home prior to the Khmer Rouge takeover of Phnom Penh, clearly announces her class position early in the memoir, stating:

Inside our apartment, Kim, Chou, Geak, and Ma sit watching television in the living room while Khouy and Keav do their homework. Being a middle-class family means that we have a lot more money and possessions than many others do. When my friends come over to play, they all like our cuckoo clock. And while many people on our street do not have a telephone, and though I am not allowed to use one, we have two.⁴³Close

The mention of a television, cuckoo clock, and telephones establishes the Ungs as a middle-class family, a point corroborated by the author’s own socioeconomic admission. The acquisition of wealth—underscored by what Ung notes is “a lot more money and possessions”—engenders a vision of pre–Khmer Rouge Phnom Penh as a space of capitalist enterprise and success. Him echoes Ung’s nostalgic capitalist characterization of prerevolutionary Cambodia in her observation that

Pa was a good husband and father. At twenty-five, he was successfully supporting a growing family. In truth, my father and mother surprise not only his parents but also Mak’s. A home was a status symbol, a measure of making it. Even their parents wondered, “Where did they get the money to build a house this big?”⁴⁴Close

As Him claims, the home emerges as a potent “status symbol, a measure of making it.” The articulation of “making it”—reminiscent of the American dream—is couched according to a capitalistic understanding of success, which is further confirmed by the size of the house.

If, as Rachel C. Lee notes, the “the American national narrative of ‘home’ encourages home ownership as a part of capitalist production,” then Him’s and Ung’s home visions are legible to a U.S. readership and therefore suggest an intended audience.⁴⁵Close Such home visions set up a contrasting characterization of life after the Khmer Rouge, wherein individuals are forced to eschew capitalist production in favor of extreme collectivization.⁴⁶Close The strategic inclusion of middle-class modalities highlights a potential danger embedded in the nationally inflected milieu of testimonial cultural production. As Jenny Edkins reminds, “the potential of testimony to resist is not often realized in contemporary practices. Survivor testimony is appropriated and co-opted in projects of state-building or money-making.”⁴⁷Close Nonetheless, essential to When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father is the corresponding role of the genocide in the configuration of familial memory and the creation of communal memory work. Such memory work is two-sided in its resistance to Khmer Rouge directives to forget and amnesiac U.S. politics that potentially lead to further erasure. As children who grew up under the Khmer Rouge, Him and Ung rely on the immediate family frame to relay, comprehend, and triage trauma and loss. At the same time, Him and Ung’s strategic use of conservative home notions engenders—albeit problematically—a wider U.S. readership not cognizant of Cambodian history and cultural practices but familiar with heteronormative middle-class values.

The intergenerational aspects embedded in such practices of commemoration are to varying degrees suggestive of Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory,” which “characterizes the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation, [and] shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.”⁴⁸Close Applied to analyses of second-generation children of Holocaust survivors, Hirsch’s work on intergenerational trauma is instructive, prompting a productive rethinking of genocidal memory beyond the first-generation level of witness. As Hirsch remarks, family photographs are emblematic sites for such intergenerational memory, for they “contain, perhaps more obviously than the names and narrative fragments handed down … the work of postmemory.”⁴⁹Close Recognizing the centrality of the familiar in such photographs, Hirsch highlights the potential of transmitting genocidal remembrance at the level of both the intergenerational and the intracommunal. Fixed to what Roland Barthes maintains is the didactic relationship between image as artifact and victim as photographic subject, Hirsch‘s postmemory schema depends on the family as recognizable referents in personal albums.⁵⁰Close The human value of family photos dramatically shifts within a genocidal context.

Accessing Robert G. Lee’s argument that the family is “the primary metaphor of the nation” (a notion substantiated by the abundance of kinship terms that linguistically determine citizenship and allegiance), the family frames embedded in genocidal narratives thus have the capacity to make visible national annihilation.⁵¹Close The photographic images and genealogical referents contained in When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father bring to light a specific body-count reading that tragically involves family members lost and victimized during the Khmer Rouge period. Such images include vacation photographs, group portraits, individual portraits, and more formal images taken at refugee camps. The written story that precedes the visual narrative—replete with accounts of the execution of fathers, the death of family members, starvation, disease, and forced labor—collapses the political and politicized spaces between family and nation. Mindful of such collapses, these family photographs carry multiple meanings: they signify idealized notions of belonging, are the pictorial embodiment of citizenship, and operate as memorials to the prerevolutionary Cambodian nation-state. The photographic albums included in When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father also motion toward the aftermath of the genocide in depictions of each author and surviving family members in refugee camps. The absence of images taken during the era of Democratic Kampuchea underscores the recollective burden assumed by the written word.⁵²Close

Notwithstanding the value of Hirsch’s concept of postmemory in evaluating—through cultural production—intergenerational familial trauma, at stake for Chanrithy Him and Loung Ung is not so much the issue of traumatic transmission between generations. Instead, the traumatic memory is transnational, not intergenerational, in scope. Supplanting the primacy of the previous generation in second-generation traumatic narratives in favor of an analysis of the previous nation, 1.5-generation Cambodian American genocidal narratives address the unique position of artists who were child witnesses to state-authorized mass violence. Likewise compelling, each writer’s specific political location as a refugee forces an analysis of postnational rubrics that influence mixed feelings around return and reconciliation.

These postnational dynamics are reflected in the concluding moments of both When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father. In her memoir’s closing passage, Him writes,

In my duffel bag, there are other pictures, tattered photographs I managed to keep safe during the Khmer Rouge time, moving them from the roof of one hut to the next. They travel with me to America, along with the indelible memories of Cambodia’s tragic years; of Pa and Mak; of Chea, Avy, and Vin; of twenty-eight members of my extended family and countless others who have perished…. We are like the dust of history being blown away…. We are leaving behind Cambodia, ground under the wheel of the Khmer Rouge, and flying to America. There, we will face other challenges, other risks, in a new place in which we have to redefine ourselves, a kind of reincarnation for us all.⁵³Close

The “pictures, tattered photographs” are attached to acts of resistance during Pol Pot time, substantiating their value as artifacts of memory and reminders of pre–Democratic Kampuchean selfhood. What is more, Him’s declaration that she will travel to America with “indelible memories of Cambodia’s tragic years” promulgates a reading of postnational loss. Articulating such loss through the metaphoric “dust of history,” Him reconfirms for the reader that the Cambodia of her youth is now an absented presence that persists only in nostalgic, imagined memories. Even with the seemingly hopeful observation of “reincarnation,” Him’s relocation to America carries “other risks” and requires postgenocidal redefinition. To be sure, Him’s conclusion offers no true sense of reconciliation, a troubling open-endedness made clear in the memoir’s preface, wherein the author, situated in an American present, is haunted by memories of the Khmer Rouge. Nor do the final moments of the memoir establish a physical means for return. After all, Cambodia has, according to Him, been “ground under the wheel of the Khmer Rouge.”

For Loung Ung, the physical ability to return is explored in First They Killed My Father’s epilogue. All the same, Ung—like Him—must contend with the legacy of the Khmer Rouge on contemporary notions of selfhood and affective belonging. Admitting that while in the United States she fantasized about “how it would feel to return to where [she] belonged,” Ung acknowledges that she dreams of “a place where everyone speaks my language, looks like me, and shares the same history.”⁵⁴Close However, Ung cannot completely “return home” because of her postnational subject position, which marks her not as a Cambodian but as a Cambodian American. Correspondingly, her return to Cambodia is marked by misstep and estrangement. For example, upon her return, Ung wears “loose-fitting black pants, brown T-shirt, and black Teva sandals,” prompting her brother Khouy and sister Chou, along with her uncles and aunts, to frown at her appearance. Immediately realizing she “looked like a Khmer Rouge,” Ung confesses, “All my fantasies of instant connection were crushed. My family and I reacted awkwardly to each other and they kept their many warm arms at their sides.”⁵⁵Close Despite the declaration that she is a daughter of Cambodia at the beginning of her memoir, Ung assumes an alienated prodigal role in its concluding moments. Though the scene ends with a seemingly individual act of reconciliation—wherein Chou takes Ung’s hand and leads her to the car—a reading of affective alienation persists in the author’s initial admission that “instant connection” is impossible.

The lack of closure that marks the author’s return is reinforced by Ung’s observation that “our fingers clasped around each other naturally as if the chain was never broken.”⁵⁶Close The inclusion of “as if,” suggestive of interpretation formed through imagination, relies on the condition that the “chain” (or connection) between the two sisters has in fact been broken. In so doing, Ung makes visible a post–Democratic Kampuchean rupture that persists in the face of amnesiac policy, time passages, and geopolitical distance. All things considered, these ruptured narratives—embedded in both Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats and Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father—foreground an uprootedness that shapes the turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Cambodian American experience. Forcibly relocated in and out of country, Him and Ung are two daughters of Cambodia who, deprived of parents by the Khmer Rouge, dispossessed in their country of origin, and haunted by a genocide past in their assumed country of asylum, remain transnational orphans.

Armed with juridical agendas, Cambodian American life writing directly engages the public sphere. Accordingly, Cambodian American memoir is subject to public expectations that reinforce the extent to which (in a more universal vein) all autobiographies are politically constructed, deliberately ordered, and strategically manipulated. Notwithstanding the particular juridical activism at work in each memoir, controversies involving When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father foment a less celebratory reading of each text. In When Broken Glass Floats, at stake was a question of whether Him’s work was single-authored or collaborative. In the case of First They Killed My Father, accusations of racism and hyperbolic accounts marred the reception of Ung’s text among Cambodian American readers. As each controversy suggests, the responsibility of representing genocide and mass-scale trauma unquestionably intersects with a public sphere shaped by expectations of sole authorship, corroborated authenticity, and ostensibly rigid factuality.

Soon after the publication of When Broken Glass Floats, a debate over authorship erupted. The case principally involved Eugene, Oregon, reporter Kimber Williams, who claimed she had closely collaborated with Chanrithy Him in the production of her memoir. Not named as a contributor nor identified in the acknowledgments, Williams contended that she coauthored the text. Ironically, given the book’s juridical registers, the reporter threatened legal action. This issue over authorship was the focus of a November 1994 article in the Willamette Week (a Portland, Oregon, paper). Titled “Broken Promises,” journalist Debra Gwartney’s article juxtaposed an excerpt from the Eugene Register Guard (written by Williams) with a passage from When Broken Glass Floats. What follows is an excerpt from Williams’s article and Him’s memoir, respectively:

Chanrithy Him loved to watch her father work the magic. It happened when the tight fingers of asthma would grip her lungs. Despite her frantic gasps, the air was stuck. Quickly, her father would open his drawer of medicine, grab a vial, a syringe. The magic worked. She could breathe again. Nothing was more amazing to her—one minute taking her last breath, the next minute running to play.⁵⁷Close (Williams)

My father knew magic. I felt him work his magic when the heavy fingers of asthma clutched my lungs. I would sit up and gasp for air, but everything was stuck. Quickly, my father would open his drawer of French medicine, grab a vial and a syringe. Then the magic worked, it always did. It was amazing to me. One minute I was taking my last breath, the next minute I was running off to play.⁵⁸Close (Him)

The title of Gwartney’s piece—“Broken Promises”—at once establishes in legal fashion an assumed contract (or promise) between reporter Williams and subject turned author Him. Previously discussed former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning series, “The Life and Death of Dith Pran,” was the narrative basis for the 1984 Killing Fields film, figured keenly in the controversy. Schanberg had—prior to such allegations—written a publicity blurb for Him’s memoir. Amid a heated back-and-forth between Him and Williams, Schanberg rescinded his earlier praise and eventually sided with the Eugene, Oregon, reporter.

Stating that he had “substantial proof that Williams collaborated with Him,” Schanberg declared, “Nobody can take that story away from her … I don’t think she realizes that…. There’s no shame in calling upon others to help you. The only embarrassment is to not acknowledge it when people help you.”⁵⁹Close In the face of undeniable consistencies between Williams’s article and Him’s memoir, what emerges from Schanberg’s comments is a more compelling contemplation of ownership vis-à-vis genocide narrative. Him declined to speak publicly about the controversy, but her lawyer, Michael Ratoza, contended that Williams had never “written a book in her life but would like to, so she’s riding on Chanrithy Him’s coattails.” Ratoza further argued, “Williams never lived in Southeast Asia; she never experienced the tragedies my client experienced.”⁶⁰Close Insisting that Him’s subject position as a Cambodian American refugee afforded her exclusive ownership, Ratoza’s reliance on experience as a defense coheres with Sydney Schanberg’s conciliatory acknowledgment that Him’s story “could not be taken from her.”⁶¹Close

Accordingly, at issue for Ratoza and Schanberg (notwithstanding different agendas) was not the prima facie veracity of Him’s story but rather its legitimacy as a written narrative. For Schanberg, the question over authorship involved production but not content; for Ratoza, Him’s position as writer was inextricably fixed to her identity as a Cambodian American. Schanberg and Ratoza’s divergent readings of content and production—which converge at the point of identity politics and personal history—highlight a rupture between internally guided remembrance and the external values of a U.S. marketplace, or public sphere. Expanded beyond law and justice, this particular conflict over authorship makes visible the transnational dimensions of Cambodian American life writing focused on Cambodia and produced in the United States. Even with allegations of plagiarism, Him’s story remains valuable with regard to genocide remembrance. After all, U.S. bombings did occur; the Khmer Rouge did exist; the genocide did happen.

Nevertheless, in terms of its reception, When Broken Glass Floats as autobiographical (not ethnographic) product is by and large destabilized. What is more, Him’s text—or rather, the controversy over it—brings to the fore a complementary consideration of how Cambodian American genocide narratives are authenticated. Sydney Schanberg’s role in the controversy—as an authority on Cambodian genocide narratives—confirms his prominent position as a foundational figure and de facto Cambodian American cultural broker. In other words, if Schanberg is founding father (by way of his first accounts of the genocide) and ultimate expert (due to his New York Times connection to the Killing Fields era), he is also charged with a problematic taste-making directive wherein memoirs about the Khmer Rouge are deemed worthy, appropriate, or potentially legitimate.⁶²Close Schanberg’s critical position with regard to Cambodian American memory work assumes—on an extreme level—a mode of gatekeeping, whereby such narratives are monolithically vetted and validated.

This concomitant issue of potentially essentialized narratives and authenticity foregrounds the controversy that faced Loung Ung following the publication of her memoir. Sino-Cambodian American Ung’s self-articulated position as one whose story “mirrors that of millions of Cambodians” is in part undermined by her repeated declaration that she is a member of an ethnic Cambodian minority group. Indeed, as the narrative progresses, this self-characterization takes on an increasingly racialized dimension. Reiterating that her mother is Chinese and her father is Chinese Cambodian, Ung repeatedly ascribes “light” and “dark” characteristics as significant markers of difference. For example, Ung describes her mother as having “Chinese” features—“perfectly arched eyebrows, almond-shaped eyes; tall straight Western nose; and oval face”—and juxtaposes these features with her father, who has “black curly hair, a wide nose, full lips, and a round face.”⁶³Close Reliant on a distinct binary (between light and dark), Ung’s narrative perhaps inadvertently adheres to dominant U.S. ethnoracial logic that directly and indirectly privileges whiteness over blackness. The employment of racialized constructs is one reason why the now-defunct Khmer Institute, a nonprofit organization committed to promoting the study of Cambodian American knowledge production and Khmer-related issues, questioned Ung’s authorial authenticity and demanded that the writer respond to allegations of racism.⁶⁴Close The status of Cambodian as other is correspondingly articulated throughout First They Killed My Father, and Ung goes so far to attribute the treatment of her family to a Khmer Rouge sense that they are “racially corrupt,” even though leaders of the regime (such as Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, and Ieng Thirith) were likewise Chinese-Khmer.⁶⁵Close

Alongside Ung’s ethnoracial claims, those critical of First They Killed My Father attack her class background and politics. Expressly, she by and large celebrates (and then commemorates) her former middle-class status with little attention to those from poorer backgrounds.⁶⁶Close To be sure, largely absent in First They Killed My Father are the countless Cambodians who inhabited a lower socioeconomic position than that of her family. When such figures appear in the memoir, Ung repeatedly dismisses them as simply (and problematically) “ignorant.” As Ung alleges, the peasant population was more apt to commit crimes against her family because, in the words of her father, the villagers wish to “make us the first scapegoats for their problems.”⁶⁷Close The enumeration of the treatment of her family, which involves several episodes of abuse and comments about her “foreignness,” buttresses claims of scapegoating within the text.⁶⁸Close As the Khmer Institute vehemently criticized,

Although Ung’s book is sub-entitled “A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers,” it is apparent that she neither truly considers herself “a daughter of Cambodia” (except for the purpose of publicity) nor does she with any kind of accuracy “remembers.” Unlike the acclaim and support given to the movie “The Killing Fields,” many survivors of the Democratic Kampuchea regime find this book inaccurate, distasteful, and insulting. We believe in this case that misinformation is more dangerous than no information. It is sad that a person would distort and sensationalize such a tragic experience for personal gain. It dishonors the memory of the 1.7 million people who died and the legitimate stories of countless others who have and still suffer because of the Khmer Rouge.⁶⁹Close

Taking to task Ung’s daughterly characterization by way of race, ethnicity, and class, the Khmer Institute complicates the representational politics at work in First They Killed My Father, which were chiefly absent in mainstream appraisals of the memoir in the likes of Publishers Weekly, which assert its value according to representative experience.⁷⁰Close The veracity of Ung’s narrative was further undermined by the details included in it. From unfeasible accounts of child soldiering (wherein a seven-year-old Ung is able to hold an AK-47) to a prerevolutionary trip to Angkor Wat (which the Khmer Institute deemed impossible because of civil war checkpoints and blockades), Cambodian American critics maintained that Ung’s memoir was exaggerated, hyperbolic, and troublingly fabricated.

In contesting the veracity of the text as accurate memoir, the Khmer Institute ultimately called into question Ung’s daughterly assertion that she was a true citizen of Cambodia.⁷¹Close Illustratively, the debate over literary authenticity foregrounds a more politicized discussion of Cambodian American citizenship, genocide remembrance, and belonging. Indeed, the Khmer Institute’s critique utilizes a language of political citizenship and affective belonging to rhetorically deconstruct Ung’s transnationally constructed claim of Cambodian nationality. In doing so, the institute replicates—to a different, indigenous degree—a verification mode analogous to Sydney Schanberg’s response to Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats. Even so, this verification potential represents one reading of the Ung/Khmer Institute debate. On another level, these contestations illuminate unreconciled racial rubrics (which maintain the primacy of whiteness), nonreconciled juridical frames (an identifiable tribunal), and the politics of representing mass-scale loss.

Central to criticisms about First They Killed My Father was its legitimacy vis-à-vis the Cambodian genocide, which was marred by alleged racial bias and misrepresentations of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge past. Within a delicate juridical space, such biases and misrepresentations carry the political potential to undermine declarations of victimhood and impede (by way of truth telling) juridical activism. The critique of Ung’s reliance on black/white modalities and her privileging of middle-class subjectivities also make visible the class and racial inequalities in the United States in that they also underscore the prevalence of such inequities among an American readership that willingly consumes such productions. At the same time, the actuality of the Cambodian genocide is, in light of the memoir’s best-selling status, effective among an outsider readership drawn to First They Killed My Father’s melodramatic narration and ethnoracial legibility. The debates that followed the publications of Him’s and Ung’s memoirs highlight the stakes of Cambodian American life writing, wherein telling becomes a necessarily politicized act. Although Ung and Him break potent silences with regard to the Khmer Rouge era, they do so in a polarizing and largely unreconciled milieu comprised of competing national agendas (in the United States and Cambodia) and inclusive of survivors, victims, and perpetrators.

To be sure, scandals involving autobiographical veracity—and the connected politics of traumatic representation—are not limited to Cambodian American literary production. In fact, two years prior to the publication of When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father, a well-publicized authenticity case hit the front page of the New York Times. The subject of this autobiographical exposé was Guatemalan indigenous rights activist and 1992 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Rigoberta Menchú, whose self-titled autobiography (I, Rigoberta Menchú) was under attack. Assembled from early 1980s interviews conducted by Venezuelan sociologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, I, Rigoberta Menchú detailed the eponymous subject’s harrowing experiences growing up during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96).⁷²Close More than a decade after its 1983 publication, the memoir’s veracity was the focus of David Stoll’s 1998 tell-all, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. An American anthropologist, David Stoll spent a decade fact-checking the memoir’s claims and interviewed those who personally knew the Menchú family and who were from the subject’s home village. Notwithstanding Menchú’s assertion that hers was the “story of all poor Guatemalans,” Stoll stridently maintained that Menchú’s story was in part an egregious fabrication.

Taking to task Menchú’s self-ascribed uneducated status, undermining the politicized dimensions of her family’s land struggles, and disputing the details of her brother’s death, Stoll ultimately concluded, “By presenting herself as an everywoman, she has tried to be all things to all people in a way no individual can be…. [Readers must be able] to distinguish between what can be corroborated and what cannot, what is probable and what is highly improbable.”⁷³Close Among Stoll’s larger contentions was that the memoir was propagandistic; the anthropologist vociferously alleged that I, Rigoberta Menchú served—in its celebration of leftist political consciousness—a problematic Guatemalan guerrilla agenda. Soon after the publication of Stoll’s exposé, Menchú was repeatedly asked to answer to Stoll’s allegations. Acknowledging she had omitted particular details, Menchú revealed that she had “mixed her own experiences with those of others to draw attention to Guatemala’s violence.”⁷⁴Close

The mixture of Menchú’s “own experiences with those of others to draw attention to Guatemala’s violence” corresponds to similar articulations in When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father. What is more, these narrative mixtures—which attempt to raise awareness to facilitate social change—make visible the extent to which intimate remembrances of representational suffering are received within a more expansive public sphere, or jurisdiction. Indeed, Leigh Gilmore’s notion of jurisdiction, which reimagines the public sphere via the “mechanisms of judgment that pervade it,” productively traces how such “oppositional texts” represent “extrajudicial ‘trials’” by way of “ethics, truth telling, and scandal.”⁷⁵Close

Apropos the autobiographical intentions that undergird Menchú, Him, and Ung’s respective works, central to the reception of I, Rigoberta Menchú, When Broken Glass Floats, and First They Killed My Father is to varying degrees the extent to which trauma (inclusive of self, family, and nation) is reproduced and received. As Gilmore explains,

jurisidictional conflicts over how to represent trauma and gender, and who may do so and with what limits, may occur whenever personal accounts are introduced into the public sphere, but particularly when those accounts concern the relation between personal injury and collective politics and make a claim for the representativeness of one’s experience of, or perspective on, violence. Insofar as an individual who speaks of injury emerges as the subject of an autobiographical practice, and insofar as that subject makes a claim on public attention through the dissemination of that practice, a juridical project is immediately enjoined.⁷⁶Close

Focused on the gendered autobiographical relationship between the personal, the collective, and the representative, Gilmore’s engagement with “jurisdictional conflicts” and “juridical projects” underscores the difficulty facing authors invested in nonreconciled political movements. Within a milieu marked not by state-authorized justice but state-sanctioned silence, to represent trauma as a means to a juridical end is evaluated (or judged) according to dominant claims of authenticity and, as the I, Rigoberta Menchú critique brings to light, a troubling universal standard for human rights narratives. Such authentically driven judgments privilege absoluteness with regard to clearly delineated authorship, precise remembrance, and uncomplicated subjectivity.

Concomitantly, as the Menchú, Him, and Ung controversies nonetheless underscore, the inherent danger of such debates is that macrolevel histories of violence are eschewed in favor of microdegree debunking. In other words, though elements of Menchú’s account may have been manipulated, what nevertheless remains is a nonreconciled, nonreparationed story of violence born out of racialized colonization and racist colonialism. Likewise, although Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats and Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father are less stable authentic narratives, they nonetheless bring to light the forgotten disastrous impact of U.S. foreign policy, the calamitous legacy of the Khmer Rouge, and the unresolved history of the Killing Fields era in the juridical arena. In so doing, When Broken Glass Floats and First They Killed My Father still succeed—in spite of such controversies—as qualified literary memorials to the Cambodian genocide and as conflicted monuments to a still-forming Cambodian American selfhood.