Prologue: The Road Back Home

Discovering the Cambodian genocide, and life in general, through my parents’ eyes

Trying to figure out how I’ve come to being has always interested me. Not the whole ‘birds and bees’ talk — which I gratefully heard from the elementary school nurse in a formal, academic setting and not from my parents — but about the factors and circumstances which shaped my parents and, therefore, me.

You see, my parents came to the United States in 1979 to escape the Khmer Rouge, whose Cambodian genocide sought to eliminate all forms of education, arts, and government in order to return to an idyllic agrarian past. A ‘Year Zero.’

My parents, being educated and bespectacled, were the antithesis of this ideal.

They were relocated to forced labor camps and stripped of family, stripped of food, stripped of humanity. They lost loved ones, lost their home, nearly lost their lives. What happened to them there has undoubtedly shaped who they are and, implicitly, who I am.

It is not my intent to retell the history of the Cambodian genocide for all Cambodians. It is my intent to tell the story of the Cambodian genocide through the lens of my parents.

Post Script

I realize that conveying these stories will inevitably leave something lost in translation. I won’t understand exactly what my parents are trying to say, or I will say something that is completely contrary to what another Cambodian experienced. Such is the way with storytelling, memory, and experiences. And such is the difficulty in trying to capture the suffering of a whole group of people by recounting the stories of only a few.

But my parents have shaped me and so it’s important I hear their stories. Maybe one day I’ll be lucky enough to hear others’ stories but for now I’ll be happy with hearing my parents’.