Loung Ung

Ung's father was born in the small village of Tro Nuon in Kampong Cham province in 1931.

Her mother was from Chaozhou, China and moved with her family to Cambodia when she was little.

The two married against her family's wishes, and eventually came to live with their children in a third-floor apartment in the center of the bustling capital city of Phnom Penh.

Due to his record of service in the previous government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Ung's father was conscripted into the government of Lon Nol and became a high-ranking military police officer.

Ung's mother supported her family as a housekeeper.

The family was relatively average and owned two cars and a truck, and lived in a house with running water, a flushable toilet, and an iron bathtub.

They had telephones, as well as the daily services of a maid, and often enjoyed films at the nearby theater and swimming in the pool at a local club.

Loung Ung (អ៊ឹង លួង; born 19 November 1970) is a Cambodian-American human-rights activist, lecturer and national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World from 1997 to 2003.

She has served in the same capacity for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which is affiliated with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.

Born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Ung was the sixth of seven children and the third of four girls to Seng Im Ung and Ay Choung Ung.

At the age of 10, she escaped from Cambodia as a survivor of what became known as "the Killing Fields" during the reign of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime.

After emigrating to United States and assimilating, she wrote two books which related to her life experiences from 1975 through 2003.

Ung's first memoir, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, details her experiences in Cambodia from 1975 until 1980: "From 1975 to 1979—through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labour—the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country's population. This is a story of survival: my own and my family's. Though these events constitute my own experience, my story mirrors that of millions of Cambodians. If you had been living in Cambodia during this period, this would be your story too".

By her own account, Loung lived a happy and carefree life in a close-knit loving family, until April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge gained control of Cambodia and evacuated Phnom Penh.

Loung was playing near her home when trucks filled with Khmer Rouge troops rolled into her neighbourhood.

The population of Phnom Penh, estimated at nearly two million people, was forced to evacuate.

The Ungs abruptly left their home with what few belongings they could stow in their truck.

When the truck ran out of fuel, they gathered the bare essentials that they could carry and began what became a seven-day trek toward Bat Deng in a throng of evacuees, harried by the bullhorns of the soldiers.

Along the way they stopped at night to sleep in the fields and to search for food.

Seng Im Ung, posing as the father of a peasant family, was fortunate to get by a military checkpoint in Kom Baul without being detained; many evacuees who were perceived to be a threat to the new government, because of their previous education or political position, were summarily executed there.

On the seventh day, as the Ungs neared Bat Deng, Loung's uncle found them and arranged to bring them by wagon to his village of Krang Truop.

Ung and her family stayed only a few months in Krang Truop because Loung's father was afraid that newly arrived evacuees from Phnom Penh would reveal his identity.

He made arrangements for the family to be transported to Battambang, the village of Loung's grandmother, but his plan was thwarted by the Khmer Rouge soldiers.

Instead, the Ung family was taken, along with about 300 other evacuees, to the village of Anglungthmor, where they stayed for five months.

During that time, more than half of the new arrivals at Anglungthmor died of starvation, food poisoning, or disease.

Malnourishment was severe.

Again fearing that discovery of his ties to the Lon Nol government was imminent, Loung's father pleaded to have his family relocated.

The Khmer Rouge ordered them taken to Ro Leap, where about sixty other families arrived on the same day.

Ro Leap was Ung's home for the next eighteen months.

Cut off from all outside communication and constantly in fear of soldiers who patrolled the village, the Ungs were forced by the Khmer Rouge to work long hours with very little food.

Near-starvation and physical exhaustion became a way of life.

A few months after their arrival, Loung's oldest brothers, eighteen-year-old Meng and sixteen-year-old Khouy, and her oldest sister, fourteen-year-old Keav, were sent away to work in different camps.

Six months later, in August 1976, Keav died of food poisoning at the teenagers’ work camp at Kong Cha Lat. In December, two soldiers came to the Ungs' hut and demanded the help of Loung's father to free a stuck wagon; he was never seen or heard from again.

Loung and her brother, eleven-year-old Kim, and her two sisters, nine-year-old Chou and four-year-old Geak, remained in Ro Leap with their mother until May 1977.

During this time, they avoided starvation with the help of Meng and Khouy, who brought them what little food they could get from their work camp, and Kim, who risked his life late at night by stealing corn from the crops guarded by the soldiers.

It covers the period of 1980 until 2003, and HarperCollins published it in 2005.

In both of her memoirs, Ung wrote in the first person and, for the most part, in the present tense, describing the events and circumstances as if they were unfolding before the reader's eyes: "I wanted [the readers] to be there".

Published in the United States in 2000 by HarperCollins, it became a national bestseller, and in 2001 it won the award for "Excellence in Adult Non-fiction Literature" from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association.

First They Killed My Father has subsequently been published in twelve countries, in nine languages, and has a film adaptation.

Her second memoir, Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind, chronicles her adjustment to life in the U.S. with and without her family, and the experiences of her surviving family members in Cambodia during the ensuing warfare between Vietnamese troops and the Khmer Rouge.