‘If we don’t write our stories, someone else will’
When Mukoli Editor-in-Chief Uddipana Goswami met Cambodian-American writer and activist Loung Ung at the 2024 Inkubator Conference organized by Literary Cleveland, they instantly connected over their shared experience of living through and writing about conflict and violence. In the conversation that follows, too, they talk about their mutual passion and practice of working toward peace and healing. A lot of the references in this conversation are to First They Killed My Father, a memoir narrated from the point of view of a five-year-old Loung when the Khmer Rouge army stormed into her Cambodian city in 1975 and forced her family to flee their home. Through narrating Loung’s loss of home and members of her family, her life in labor camps and as a child soldier, the book tells the story of an entire nation that survived the horrors of the brutal regime that claimed up to two million lives in four years. Loung was co-screenplay writer of the Netflix film based on the book and directed by Angelina Jolie. We invite you to read more about her inspiring work that centers around storytelling, resilience, and healing here.
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Uddipana Goswami (UG): Hi, Loung, good morning, and thank you for agreeing to speak to Mukoli. As you know Mukoli is our magazine for peace at Kennesaw State University, and it’s housed in our School of Conflict Management, Peace and Development. When I went to that literary event in Cleveland, and I went to your panel, I was deciding between two panels: both dealt with trauma, healing, peace, and writing. And I’m so glad I went to yours because I instantly connected with your work and with your story, and I just knew that I had to bring you to our readers at Mukoli. So, thank you so much for making the time for us today.
Loung Ung (LU): Oh, thank you so much. It was a pleasure, and I’m so glad you came up to me afterward and introduced yourself. I love writers, I love books, and I think in our short conversation, we talked about how story holds the cure. And I really believe that stories have the power to help us find and navigate our way through life, and move forward from the challenges and obstacles that life will often and always throw at you.
UG: Yeah. And the stories that you tell are horrific because violence is horrific. You’ve endured unspeakable violence. I’ve had some experience of it having grown up in a conflict zone and surviving intimate partner violence. So, I understand what it’s like to be in the thick of conflict a little bit, but not as much as you.
And I’m always reminded of this quote by Joan Didion: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” You mention [in your book] some of the stories that became local lore: I remember that one about the palm tree, and how the fruit would taste like the flesh of the people that were dumped under it, and how it was pinkish because of the blood that flowed [through the land]. I was reminded a lot about my own conflict zone. I’m from Northeast India, which is an invisible conflict zone in South Asia, and we’ve had some awful times. And there’s this whole literature around ‘terror lore’ that developed in the conflict context, and people would tell these stories about the conflict years and the experience of conflict. I’m sure you have so many of these stories. I could see some of them in your book about how people cope during conflict and violence, using stories, and how we, as storytellers, use that as a mechanism for ourselves to heal from it. Would you like to tell our readers a little about your own experience with this?
LU: Yeah, sure, before I begin. I also just wanted to share with your readers my feelings about grief and about pain, and about healing. And it is this: grief is grief, pain is pain, healing is very individual and a unique path that many of us are privileged enough to be able to walk on. A lot of people do not have that privilege, cannot begin that journey, and so we try to give them – as writers – compassion and empathy. And that is why we write, and that’s why we work. I view being able to live in America, being healthy, coming here as a child, picking up the language and being able to speak it, all these earned and unearned privileges, as having allowed me to walk the path of healing. And a lot of other people – whether they stayed behind or are here – do not have this privilege and are in pain and grief.
Healing is nonlinear. It’s not rational. There’s no beginning, middle, and end. Triggers don’t tell you when they’re going to trigger you, and you often only discover them after you’ve been triggered, and so, in terms of your pain and your listeners’ pain and your readers’ pain, pain is pain. How I felt the pain of losing my parents, and the violence I went through, maybe, is similar. But maybe it’s not. But pain is pain, and it’s something that we need to really acknowledge in order to move forward.
And for me, the pains of my childhood were also tinged with love and magic and mysteries. That’s why the journey of trying to heal was taking so long because I didn’t come into the world knowing only violence and hurt and hate. I came into the world in 1970 in Cambodia, this tiny little green jewel of place in the earth, populated by seven million people in Southeast Asia. Even when I came into it, it was already in the midst of a civil war. But I came into the world populated by three really fun brothers and three fun, loud sisters and parents who loved me, who showed me and told me stories of monkey kings and mermaid princesses, and the Naga gods, and the Apsara, or the goddesses of clouds and water, who were birthed from the ocean of milk. And so, I came into the world living in a space where pain and beauty coexisted and, therefore, I always was able to find and believe in hope.
Sometimes in the work I do, we see children and people who come into the world knowing only hurt and horror and pain. I ask them: how do you find hope? And how do you believe in love? And so, I see my childhood of love as a privilege, even though when I was five, the Khmer Rouge, the Communist group of soldiers, came into my city and ended my childhood of magic and mysteries, and for the next three years, eight months, and 20 days, this Communist group that took over Cambodia went about trying to create a pure Utopian agrarian society, where power was taken from the elites and the builders, and the writers, and the architects, and the singers, and given to the revolutionaries or people they believed were pure of heart, and anybody and everybody who did not believe in this philosophy was purged and eliminated. That meant soldiers were sent out into this small, beautiful country to gather the doctors, the lawyers, the architects, the singers, and these beautiful leaders and beautiful souls were executed en masse.
And then the soldiers came for my father when I was eight years old. My mother was taken after that, and at the end of their regime, in a span of three years, eight months, and twenty days, an estimated quarter of the population of Cambodia – two million Cambodians – would die from starvation, disease, hard labor, and execution. Among the victims were both my parents, two sisters, and 20 other relatives. So, that was my childhood.
The pain I experienced in those four years had taken me over four decades to [recover from] and to rediscover and reconnect with the magic, with the love, with hope, with our humanity, and that has been my work as an activist, as a writer, as a reader, as a citizen of America and the world, and as a human being.
UG: I would love for you to talk about what you are doing right now to eliminate violence and work towards peace. But before that, I just want to very briefly go back to how you talked about love and hope, and all of that existing in a world that is so traumatic and violent. When I was reading your book, it really struck me how you talked about the beautiful skies, and about the love that you shared with your family. There were these small moments of joy, even when you were running away from the city, or you were in the midst of all these awful things that were happening in your life. And I was thinking about how we talk about peace in the conflict management classroom. Peace is not something that comes after violence or after conflict. It is something that you have to find within the conflict context, or you have to find it in those little moments. Then when you are writing from the perspective of this child, it fills you with rage when you’re seeing these beautiful skies, and you’re cursing the gods for making it so beautiful. But now, as a grown person, who is here so far away, spatially and temporally, from that situation, how do you feel now about those tiny moments of peace, those tiny, small moments of beauty, joy, love? How do you relate to those now? Is it the same? Because I know there was a lot of rage then. Do you still feel rage sometimes?
LU: Oh, I absolutely do. And I think that’s a really wonderful thing for me. When I was going through the war as a child, the moments of joys were something that I fought to hold on to, but they were fading. They were beautiful diamonds that were encrusted in really thick black coal, and as a writer, my job was to tell the stories and break the coal apart in order to show the diamonds clearer because they were there.
But while going through the war I really couldn’t see them. The rage overwhelmed and overtook everything, from my DNA to my heartbeat, to my skin, to my breath… it was what I was taught. I remember one scene when I was eight years old, and the soldiers came, after so many years of coming for other family members, other doctors, they took other dancers, other writers, and one by one they disappeared from my village, and we couldn’t speak and we couldn’t scream, we couldn’t cry, and we couldn’t protest. And then, when they came for my father…I just knew in my child’s heart, I knew, I wouldn’t see him again.
My father was a devout Buddhist and believed in the gods and told me so many stories about the heavens and the gods and the goddesses, and the kicker that night… and even when I think about it I’m getting chills… was that when the soldiers came with their lies and their guns and they took him and escorted him, and I watched, my father walked off into the sunset with the soldiers on either side of him, and their guns hanging over their shoulders, or cradled in their arms… the gods that night had dared to paint the sky this palette of gold and magenta, and shimmering red and purple and pink and orange, and it was so beautiful. Visually, my eyes could see this gorgeous sunset. But emotionally, I felt only hate. I felt hate toward the gods for making the sunset beautiful. I felt hate toward the soldiers for taking my father. I felt rage toward the world for not seeing and understanding and hurting.
And so, all these complicated emotions took root in my heart and stayed, and grew, and dug in deeper—so deep that for decades after that, when I looked at a sunset, I felt hurt, and I felt my stomach knotted, I felt my shoulders tense. I could not enjoy a sunset, a beautiful sunset for years, and some part of me knew why, but I was not strong enough to really dissect it and break the power that the trauma had over me. Until I broke what I saw and what it meant, and then deconstructed the rage and hate in order to put the sunset back together.
And that one instance took me years. Now, every time I see a sunset in my office—I have an office on the 4th floor—and I see so many sunsets, and I am always grateful to enjoy it. Even though there are moments when I still feel the pain of the sunset, I can quickly also just feel it, let it go, and just celebrate the beauty and the magic and the mystery again. But that took years.
So, when we were talking about how stories affect us, and how they rewrite themselves in us, in our psyche, in my community, where we suffer collective traumas, where all the seven million people suffered, all the five million survivors suffered; these are instances where we have to deconstruct our pain and suffering, to rebuild our love and joy. It comes across in sunsets, it also for me, physically, comes across and is retriggered in hunger. Having spent four years of going through starvation, when I’m hungry, I don’t just think I’m hungry; I think I am going to die. When I’m hungry, I hyperventilate. I have a hard time breathing, my heartbeat races, my mind races and travels to a war that is 40 years old.
And when you go to Cambodia, anywhere you go in Cambodia, you talk to people, we, everybody will have a ghost story. A place that is haunted, a place where they hear voices, a place where their dogs are howling at a specific time of night, a place where they see light, and they see bodies and shivers in the breeze of the wind, in the branches of the trees, and it’s a haunted land. It’s a land full of ghost stories. I think it’s because of the traumas we collectively suffered in a land the size of the state of Oklahoma that is littered today with over 20,000 mass graves.
UG: This is fascinating, you know, in a horrific way, and I can totally connect with it, because when you talk about the ghost stories, I remember the ghost stories that are there all over my homeland. It’s wherever you have this kind of human tragedy. I think these stories haunt us right for so long afterwards…
LU: I was wondering if I may ask in your homeland what Eastern or Western faith is predominantly believed in.
UG: It’s a very strange place. It’s a lovely meeting place of South Asian, Southeast Asian, and East Asian influences, because it’s that part of India where India ends, and then it borders China, on the one hand, and then Burma, Bangladesh, Bhutan, on the other. So, it’s a strange mixture of all these different faiths, and none of them are practiced very rigidly.
And then we have all these indigenous communities there which have their own ways of practicing faith and religion. And like I said, I have a friend who studies the terror lore in that region. Like, how is it that just because we are different from the rest of the mainland, from mainland India, that we could be militarized and violated in the way that we have been. And so, I see ghosts. I recognize them when I see them and, you know, I see haunted people.
But what always intrigues me, and I was thinking about that when I was reading your story, and the stories of all the people that populated your pages was, how—yes, emotionally, psychically we heal, there are ways of doing that – but also that the human body, how resilient it is, right? How it heals! It’s starved and it’s beaten, and it’s bruised, and then it can still reproduce, it can still love, have sex, do all those amazing, lovely, beautiful things that it’s meant to be doing—
LU: Well, I really think it’s exactly that. And that’s why I’m hopeful. In Cambodia, we’re 90% Buddhist, and so we believe in reincarnation. And we believe in past lives, and we believe as Theraveda Buddhists, that if the your loved one isn’t given a proper Buddhist burial, their souls are then doomed to wander the earth forever until they’re given that proper burial, and the thing about war and genocide and mass graves is that you are not given proper burial.
I think that accounts for a lot of ghost stories. And when you were talking before about horror lores, terror lores, that’s part of our ghost stories, and how the body reacted in terms of their nightmares and their dreams. A lot of people who were suffering from night terrors and nightmares, and from PTSD, were not able to sleep. There have been studies in Cambodia, and when you dig in a little deeper you find that the people who were haunting them, and the monsters who were chasing after them in their sleep, in their night terrors, in their waking hours, looked and sounded, and did very, very similar things to what the soldiers did upon us and the crimes they committed upon us.
And with that, said, the human heart, is not only the most vital organ in the human body, but it is also one of the strongest muscles, and it just works without us paying attention and thinking about it. And so, for as many times as it breaks and shatters, it has the ability and capability to heal if we give it support and understanding, and acknowledge its pains, and treat it with tender care and I really do think that we are resilient as a human race, and that we are here because we are as resilient. We are here because we are all success stories as a race.
There are always… times when I think, well, if there’s hope, how come there’s so much hurt? But in my Eastern philosophy good and evil exist in the image of the yin and the yang. And so, it’s a circle of black and white, and our work is to try to balance it, both because not none of us are all good, and none of us are all bad, but with education, with mentorship, with leadership, with hope, with centers such as yours, producing great educational programs and teaching people about the humanities, this is how we balance out the good and the bad.
UG: I really appreciate that. And I also want our readers to know a little bit about the work that you do now….
LU: Yes. Well, thank you so much for asking that question again, because I know you’ve asked it before, and because it’s such a pleasure to talk to another writer, to somebody who is interesting, whose story I find interesting. I just want to just ask you questions.
But my work, yes, my degree is in Political Science. I was very idealistic as a young person who wanted to go out and change the world, and I have been able to do a little bit of that in my own way. As an activist, I worked for three years at a domestic violence shelter, helping people leaving their abusive relationships, and then as a community educator at the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project in Maine. My work was to educate doctors and lawyers and leaders and police officers on domestic violence laws, and how to be compliant. That led me into studying a lot about power and how violence is used in wars and in peacetime, in situations with soldiers, and those missing in action, and prisoners of war, and also in situations where it is domestic wars happening in our homes, in our communities, in our relationships, in our schools, in our cities, and how these tools of violence committed on a human being to gain power and controls are not that different.
UG: They are the same.
LU: Yes, that’s been studied by Amnesty International and by many programs all over the world for decades. And that led me to working for 10 years as the spokesperson for the campaign to ban landmines where my job was to interview people as survivors of landmines, survivors of war, and to bring their stories back to raise money and to raise awareness, and then to go back to Cambodia to help people who survived their wars, to have a chance to survive the peace.
And in my work, the chance to survive the peace was as basic as making and supporting centers that produce prosthetic limbs, legs, wheelchairs, orthopedic devices to help people who’ve been made into amputees to walk and work and go to school and support their families. That was very rewarding work, and that led me to writing, because, as you know as a journalist and a writer, nothing is more inspiring than to hear the stories of survival of the people you interview, and to see and to connect to these stories, because they really showed me the value of my own stories: the stories that I kept hidden for many years, the stories of a child survivor.
When I came to the US, living in Vermont, being different, looking different, not speaking in English, and speaking in broken English, I held my story, and carried my story of war like it was a curse. Like it was a curse that made me ‘less than’, or made me broken, made people view me with charity and with pity, and therefore, not allowing me to be the best version of myself. Because pity does not change the world.
Pity only made me believe that you think I am less than and less capable, so I don’t want anybody’s pity. I only want support and allies. If you’re gonna pity me, then you don’t need to be in my space. And it’s because what happened to me: it was not something that was my fault. What happened in the war that I experienced is not the whole of me. It was a circumstance of my life and has not predicted or predetermined my future. There is something that is still left for every single survivor who suffered trauma to write, to rewrite, to reauthor. We have that power. And pity does not help us gain this power. I think it would really take that power away from us.
And so that led me into writing that led me into telling my story. And, specifically, I started writing my story on April 15, 1998, when I woke up to the news that Pol Pot, the Khmer’s leader, had died. In the many interviews he did—one of the interviews I heard replayed on news media on radios—he said, and I’m paraphrasing his words, but that what he did in Cambodia he did for love. And that enraged me. I felt it—I curled into a fetal position on the floor of my office. I was so angry once again, and I was just really wondering: how dare he? How dare he say what he did, he did for love? Because love does not a genocide make. Love does not kill. Love does not torture. Love does not harm. Love does not commit the mass murders of two million people.
And so, on that day I woke up, and I, with my pen, set out to negate this man’s legacy of love with my own story of love. My own story of love between my parents, my mother, my brothers, myself, my country, and my history, my love of music, and my love of green color, that to this day, I’m yet to find the green crayon box of 164 to fill in the scenery, and I set out to tell my story of love, the story of authentic love. Love that seeks to heal and help and not hurt and torture.
And so that, for me, is the journey of my work to create change from activism, to being a listener, and to being a support and an ally in the landmines campaign, to being a writer. And now my husband and I are entrepreneurs, and we make beers! We’re partners of three restaurants, and our restaurant is called Market Garden Brewery, where we make beers, and we host spaces for people to tell their stories and to raise awareness and to connect and to communicate, and also to have good time and drink good beers.
UG: This whole idea of love, and how it is twisted and misused sometimes, that really enrages me, because for me love is kindness, love is beauty, but love is also resistance, right? Love is also a protest, it can be so powerful, it is so powerful, and you’ve used it so beautifully. And that was a thread that I saw running throughout your book. It was love that brought all these stories together. It was this child who was so filled with rage, but then it was love that propelled her to stay true to her story. And I’m so glad that all your life experiences led you to take ownership of the story and to present it the way that you did. It’s so difficult for survivors of these violences to really look back and think about how this narrative of their life is not the only one that defines them. Because I teach these classes on healing through life writing [to help survivors] look forward and own their narrative and say, okay, I have survived this, and I did go through this, but now going forward, this is going to be my narrative, by writing personal essays or memoirs that give them this coherence…
LU: I am so excited to hear that because I’m launching a podcast with another writer friend, and it’ll be about writing and authoring your life. It’s about hidden stories, so I hope you come on to my podcast!
UG: I would love to do that! Yes.
LU: I do believe that our past does not predetermine our future, and if we don’t write our stories, everyone else will. When I first came to the US, I was 10 years old, and I didn’t speak English. People thought I was silent, I didn’t have a voice, and that was partly true. My voice was stunted and silenced from the trauma and not knowing English. It’s hard to have a voice when you don’t know the language. But because my father was a good storyteller, I learned to be observant. I love watching and listening. And as a 10-year-old child, who kept my story silent, I could almost hear the clickety clack of keyboards going off in people’s head as they were typing away their stories of me: “Poor child! How is she going to survive? How is she going to overcome her trauma? How is her heart going to heal? Oh, that poor orphaned refugee, brown, literally poor, lactose intolerant, somewhat dyslexic and small!”
And when I first came here, after four years of not having enough to eat, I was very tiny, and my doctor has to keep an eye on my bone density, because girl children build 80% of their bone density from ages 6-12. From the time I was 5 to 10 years old, I went through starvation, so I am a candidate for brittle bone syndrome. I’m constantly taking calcium pills. But I understood, even as a child at that young age, that if I don’t write my story, everyone I meet will do it—and we women know about this because we hear it from the construction worker, we hear it from all the people we meet when we go into a boardroom or a classroom or a restaurant: other people writing our stories. So, we have to take the reins to author our own life, because that is what we need to anchor ourselves in, and when we can do that, anybody else who writes their story of us will not take our power away because we’re anchoring ourselves in our own stories. So, our podcast is called Living Stories, and how our stories are active and dynamic. They’re happening right now, and they’re not stagnated, not static.
UG: What also struck me [about your story] is you using of the child’s point of view to narrate your story. It gives it that extra authenticity and emotional appeal. But it must have been really difficult for you, going back, re-inhabiting the mind of that child that you were that you had left behind. Did it re-traumatize you?
LU: It most definitely did. And picking that voice and deciding on writing the story from the viewpoint and voice of a 5-year-old child… That was my first book, First They Killed My Father. It is also incidentally, a movie streaming on Netflix. It’s directed by Angelina Jolie from a screenplay that she and I co-wrote and adapted from my book. It’s a beautiful film. I’m so happy, and I’m so proud to be part of a 20,000-people-strong team that came together to make the film, and a majority of them were Cambodian. We shot for four months in Cambodia in 14 different locations.
I wrote the story, First They Killed My Father, originally in three different voices, from three different points of view. As an activist, I wanted to open people’s eyes to the story of Cambodia, and then also as a 30-year-old woman when I wrote the book, I wanted to talk a lot about history and politics, and why people didn’t know, and the war in Vietnam that cross over to Cambodia, and how that war actually was very instrumental in creating and helping the Khmers come to power. So, I wanted to educate, and I wanted in some many to preach in order to make people understand.
But then, there was that little part of me that just wanted to be heard. That child’s voice that said as I was writing, “I don’t really care. I just miss my parents. I just miss the food I miss my sister. I was so invisible I just want to be seen. I was so silent I just wanted to be heard.” And that child would not let me go. That child said to me, “The world can take care of itself. The world can learn more about the history and decide what they want to know more of the Vietnam War, or the Global War, or the Civil War in Cambodia, or the Khmer War. The world can take care of itself. You take care of me. You take care of my heart, you take care of my parents, you just take care of making sure I get to be heard.”
And I had to listen to that child. That child needed to be heard to begin her healing process. And if I was to write in any other voice, that child would have remained silent. So that child was one part of me, my authentic story. Because you go through trauma, it’s almost as if you split and you become multiple selves. And this one self, her growth, her spirituality, her love, almost got stunted. It was another person that grew and left and went to America and went to college. But until the writing reintegrated them both, the healing was not going to be whole. It was going to be truncated and separated.
And so, I wrote that story in her voice. And it was retraumatizing. Part of my wanting to do Living Stories was to also share with people the tools and the practices of what you need to do when you write, and when you are re-traumatized. I went back to Cambodia, it was re-traumatizing to walk on that land. When I wrote about hunger, I starved myself for a weekend. I didn’t eat anything. I drank only tea because I wanted that pain in order to write about it. When I wrote about the deaths, I had pictures of people who died in mass graves and in torture centers plastered all over my walls in my room, because I wanted to be, in some way, back there with them. That was not a smart thing to do. There were so many things that were re-traumatizing and painful, and I’m grateful I have friends.
One of the things I share with people about writing about things that retraumatize or retrigger is that going deep into your story is a journey of deep water diving. And when you go through that journey, you need to make sure there’s a boat on the surface, and in that boat are your allies, your friends, your mentors, your loved ones, your families, a bowl of rice, some good comfy food, some curry—for me, I love curry Cambodian curry, Indian curry, Thai curry, you name it, I eat it—something comfortable. And then that person on that boat is holding on to a lifeline, or a light line, or a love line, or a laugh line that you hold on to as you go toward deep into your journey.
And then, when you go deep into a story, you stop—like many other deep-water divers—you stop at Meter 5. You stop there, you reacclimate, you acclimate, you breathe into your lungs, you look around, you look up, you see if the boat is still there, you can still feel it. You can still see the sun, and if you’re okay, then you go 5 more meters. But if you’re not okay, get the heck back up! Take care of yourself. Pull that tug, have someone else pull you up if you can’t pull yourself up. So, every 5 meters make sure you recalibrate, and then go deeper because we writers sometimes, I think, go deep diving into our stories without taking proper care of ourselves, and that is not helpful to us or our stories, and I am just so grateful that when I didn’t have the tools, I had writer friends who knew of the tools, and they gave me that line.
UG: Yes, this is—I know this is very helpful for our readers, who are also writers, but this is especially helpful for me, because I had this experience very recently, when I was working on my last collection of short stories, and the last story in the book almost never got written because it was too personal, too intimate, too traumatic going back into, you know, like reliving those traumas. And I hear you when you say you need these life lines, love lines, laugh lines to pull you back and save you. It’s these human connections around you, these memories, these childhood memories, and the love all around you that can finally save you.
LU: People can do that. How were you able to pull yourself back up?
UG: I don’t know. I just took like the longest time to write it. I took it really slow, or maybe it just came slow to me because there was a lot of things happening at the same time, and my editor was waiting there with the manuscript. She had all the other stories, and the last one was not getting written, and it’s called ‘Never Got Written’, because the question is, when you’re in a conflict context, when you are surrounded by violence, as a writer you are so much a part of it. You’re within that violence. So, what happens to your art? What happens to your writing? What if these stories that we are supposed to be witnesses to, these stories that we are supposed to document, what if they never got written?
That was the question that was constantly on my mind, and I don’t think I resolved it as well as you did. And I don’t know if I can actually go back and do that again. Which is why I really, really am in awe of your writing, and how you’ve moved through all your stories and brought your split selves together. That, again, is very beautiful for me. As somebody who deals a lot with writing, life writing, and healing through writing, being able to create that coherent narrative by bringing all these split selves together and saying, this is my story, this is how I am going to define my life, and nobody else gets the right to say who I am or to make up stories about me.
LU: When you were writing, did that resonate with you about how we almost become split people and writing is the journey of reintegrating the many selves?
UG: Yes, yes! Because it’s almost like I’m standing apart from my own life, and thinking that that happened to somebody; I don’t know if that was me. And how do I go back there and tell that person that we are the same, or tell myself now that, “It’s okay, you went through that. It’s okay to be who you are now. And it’s okay to move forward, being happy, being joyful, being peaceful. What happened doesn’t define you, that life is not the only life that you had.” Is that what you feel?
LU: Yes, yes, it’s that! It did not define me. I viewed my story as a curse for a long time, and nobody wanted to be with a cursed person. A cursed person was never fun. A cursed person also hid, did not want to be seen, therefore not living life to its full brightness and vibrancy. And so, writing and reintegrating the two selves was a journey of viewing my story, that it’s not a curse, but it’s actually a survival story. A survival story is the oldest story of time, the human story. We are all survival stories. And I think even before love stories, we are first survival stories.
And I am very curious to hear how it was for other people. For me, I did not feel like I could fully begin the healing journey without reintegrating the two selves.
UG: Yeah, through writing. Right?
LU: Through writing. But also, through many kinds of things, maybe through art—painting, or weaving, or dancing, or cooking or singing. But I have a question. When you said the story that was almost never told, but the story was there, and it wanted to be told…
UG: Oh, yes, it was chasing me around, making life miserable for me, surrounding me, and just there in my space all the time, and that’s exactly what this story turned out to be. The story is a character in that story, that comes to me and says, “write me, write me, write me,” and I’m like “I cannot, because I am so deep in my trauma. I’m so caught up in my pain I cannot,” and, so at the end, the story just says, “maybe someday you will heal, and then you’ll write me.” So, I don’t know if that story will ever get written. But this story did get written, the story about the story that almost never got written.
LU: But that story is not forgotten. Someday, maybe, you’ll be there. It’s not forgotten by you, and it’s not forgotten by the story.
UG: And that’s the other thing that I was thinking related to this: the role of memory in our writing and how, as writers, we tell the truth. It might not be facts all the time, like in my fiction. But yours is nonfiction, of course. Did you ever doubt your own memories as you were writing it? Because I know a lot of writers have that self-doubt all the time, like, am I being true to myself? Am I being true to my memories? Am I being true to the story? So, did you ever doubt yourself along the way?
LU: In the beginning, I did. Before I even start writing First They Killed My Father, I made 7 trips to Cambodia. I interviewed my brothers, surviving brothers, my sister, my aunt, my mother’s best friend. I interviewed a lot of people, and I read a lot of books, history books. I watched many, many hours of PBS documentaries on the war in Cambodia, the war in Vietnam… So, I was overfilled with facts, and data, and history, and when I sat down to write the story and landed on, not just the voice of a child, but to write it in the first-person present tense, I had to really deplete my mind of these facts of history. Because the story, the child’s story that wanted to be told, was a story about what it takes to survive a war. What it took her to survive the war.
And it wasn’t history that helped her survive the war. It was taking a step. It was finding food to eat. It was recognizing hunger. It was trying to learn what was a poisonous plant, what wasn’t a poisonous plant. And she really wanted to tell the world, “This is what it takes to survive a war.” Not a war that you read of in the news sections on the back of your papers in a paragraph, but a war that lasted three years, eight months and 20 days, and how you have to survive on a daily basis. And so, that was the story that really wanted to be told.
And you think so much about what the story itself wanted to tell and to share, it became its own character. And when you veer off it, it was there, saying, “No, no, I don’t want you to tell that part. You may tell that part in other stories or in another essay, but this is not my mission, you know, right now.”
So, I actually had so many memories that I had to deplete and extricate from the story. And ultimately, I told the story of her truth, of what was important to her. A lot of the facts and data still found its way through because you have to give the readers context, but for the most part I really stayed true to the child’s character. She told the story in the first-person present tense. And quite amazingly, that taught me to write a lot more about using my senses. The senses of sight and taste and sound, and feel and touch, and the sixth sense, which is your Gaia, your goddess, your intuition, your third eye, whatever it is, that helps you survive. And when I was writing this story, that was her memory.
That’s what was important in her memory. It wasn’t facts and data. It wasn’t the 500,000 bombs dropped in Cambodia. It wasn’t the Khmer Rouge soldiers and what they wore and the guns, and where the guns came from, it was what dead bodies smelled like. And she needed to remember that, I needed to remember that, in order to avoid other dead bodies. She and I needed to know and memorize the road I took, where I found berries to eat, as my sister died from starvation. And I needed visually to remember that. And so, she and I could survive, could eat. And so those were the real memories that I had to really give her credit for.
And I think in the storytelling we do, especially when you’re trying to preach, or when you’re trying to educate, you put so much emphasis on the history that is learned from a Ph.D. professor in a classroom, but for a child, for a person surviving the war, the history that she needed, we needed, to learn was what we can see, what we can feel, what we can eat, what we can hold on to in our hope. And I wanted to give those facts and memories its value, it’s worth, because those are the things—often when you’re in a trauma— that will help you survive: not knowing that it was 500,000 tons of bombs dropped on the country, but that the bombs dropped.
UG: Yes, I totally agree. And these are some decisions that we writers always have to make: are we going to give them information about XYZ, or are we going to make them feel, or show them how it felt. And like you said, is it educational, instructional, or just placing that human story of the little child who felt all of those pains and anger and everything else.
I want to end with talking about another choice that you made, which you talked about at that panel in Cleveland, about choosing to write a vampire/zombie novel next. I’m really intrigued by that, and I want to end on this happy note for readers, and I really want you to talk more about that, and how it’s going so far.
LU: Well, great! Thank you so much. I’ve written three nonfictions. The first, First They Killed My Father, is just about what it takes to survive the war. Then I followed that up with Lucky Child, that follows my life in America and my sister’s life in Cambodia, in alternating chapters to tell our stories of what it took us to survive the peace long after presidents and journalists in the world told us the war was over. It had her in Cambodia and me in America, me as a refugee, and her as an IDP (internally displaced person) surviving in the land where the war happened, and me in a land where the war was existing, still in my head and in fireworks and in my body and in my hunger.
And then I went back, and I wrote a book called Lulu in the Sky, that follows my experience of going back to Cambodia as an activist and also as a daughter, a daughter, in search of my mother, and her story of leaving China to come to America and finding love, and then how that integrated itself into my story of leaving Cambodia to go to America to find love and find activism and to return. I’ve worked on other non-documentaries, nonfiction documentaries, and I love writing, I love words, so this is my first experience of writing fiction. And it started because I love zombie/vampire genres, I read a lot of them, and I have noticed many of those books of zombies and vampires have been told from the viewpoint of Christian mythologies, with priests and power and Western beliefs, and I really wanted to tell a story of a zombie/vampire using Buddhist mythology.
It’s put me on the journey of researching Eastern mythology. Worldwide, we all have similar fears of death and dying, coming back from death and then eating humans. You know, we all have that. But Eastern mythology has a specific little twist that I think caters to our Eastern faith and Southeastern faith in the stories that I’m telling. So, I’m having a really, really, fascinating time.
With that said, you cannot escape yourself. After writing my first draft of zombie/vampire Buddhist mythology, I realized that it is really a book about child soldiers and the war, and the destruction, and the heartbreak. And then I landed back in my original philosophy and belief in doing the work that I do, which is that peace is not a gift.
Peace is not a wish; peace is not automatic. Peace is not something we grant others or ourselves, and it’s not something we ask of others to deliver to us, whether they are teachers, our leaders, our parents. Peace is an action, or rather peace, is many, many actions. And we have to strategize, and we have to work on in whatever capacity, abilities, talents, time. Peace is something that we do on a daily basis in order to create a better world, a safer world for all of us to live in.
UG: And you know the phrase that you used earlier, ‘surviving peace’, that really resonates with me, because, like you said, we work towards it. There are all these different challenges, even in peacetime, and violence is something that’s so intricately a part of our everyday lives. And I was thinking about this when I heard you talk about the zombie novel at Cleveland, and I’m thinking about it now that we cannot really escape this fact of violence that has entered our lives, in each one of our lives. And somehow or another, it finds its way into our life, into our everyday actions, into our writing.
But what matters is how you deal with it, and how you strategize to overcome it and make peace every day. And I really appreciate this last message of yours about working on making peace through all these tiny little things that we do, and the big and small ways that we can strategize and be activists for peace.
Thank you so much, Loung, for making time for us, and I hope we can have you back on Mukoli some other time.
LU: Me, too. And I’m looking forward to having you on my podcast.
UG: I would love that.