Lucky Child (42 page)

Dith Pran, ed.
Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999.

Gottesman, Evan.
Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge: Inside the Politics of Nation Building.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

Haing Ngor and Roger Warner.
Survival in the Killing Fields.
New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003.

Kamm, Henry.
Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land.
New York: Arcade Books, 1999.

Kiernan, Ben.
How Pol Pot Came to Power.
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004.

McCurry Steve.
Sanctuary: The Temples of Angkor.
New York: Phaidon Press, 2002.

May, Sharon, and Frank Stewart, eds.
In the Shadow of Angkor: Contemporary Writing from Cambodia.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004.

Shawcross, William.
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia.
New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 2002.

Swain, John.
River of Time.
New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 1999.

Wagner, Carol.
Soul Survivors: Stories of Women and Children in Cambodia.
Berkeley, Calif: Creative Arts Book Company, 2002.

Acknowledgments

To Bobby Muller, my boss, mentor, and friend; Bruce Springsteen’s description of you is right on—you are a “cool rocking daddy!” To my hero, Senator Patrick Leahy, thank you for making this world a better place for all of us. Mark Perry, you are a great teacher. Tim Rieser, you are a true prince. And, Emmylou Harris—who not only sings like an angel but has a heart of one—thank you for all your support with WAF.

To my wonderful agent, Gail Ross, at Gail Ross Literary Agency, my fantastic editor, Gail Winston, at HarperCollins, and the talented Christine Walsh and always cool Katherine Hill, thank you for all your support and encouragement. To the super team of George Greenfield and Beth Quitman at Creativewell, Inc., thank you for helping me to spread the word about the Khmer Rouge. Finally, my deep gratitude to the absolutely fabulous Jenna Free—my reader, teacher, and cheerleader. There would be no
Lucky Child
without you all.

I am also blessed to have so many amazing people in my life both in Cambodia and America, without whom I would not be who I am today. A special thank-you to Lynn and Gordon, for giving life to such wonderful people. My love to all of the Priemers because there is no bad apple in the bunch. To the Costellos, the Lucentis, the Willises, the Aleiskys, the Bunkers, Beverly Knapp, Ellis Severence, and all my friends and teachers
in Vermont—all of you helped to heal the hate and hurt out of this war child. To my friends Nicole Bagley, Wendy Appel, Michael Appel, Roberta Baskin, Joanne Moore, Tom Wright, Ly Carbonneau, Beth Poole, Rachel Snyder, Colleen Lanzaretta, Carol Butler, Erin McClintic, Chivy Sok, Kelly Cullins, John Shore, Noel Salwan, Sam McNulty, Paul Heald, Ken Asin, Mike Thornton, Lynn Smith, Jeannie Boone, Jess and Sheri Kraus, Chet Atkins, Terry and Jo-Harvey Allen, Bob Stiller, Youk Chhang, Heidi Randall, and many others—you all inspire me to be a better person. To Maria and Tori, I love you infinity. And most of all to my husband, Mark—I’m a happier person because you’ve kept me laughing all these years.

To the wonderful communities at Saint Michael’s College and Essex Junction, Vermont—a place where the beauty of the foliage is matched only by the kindness of the people.

Photographic Insert

P.S.

Insights, Interviews & More…

About the author

Meet Loung Ung

About the book

Loung Ung on the Inspiration for
Lucky Child

Read on

“A Birthday Wrapped in Cambodian History”

Food, Good Food! Loung Ung’s Favorite Restaurants

Have You Read? More by Loung Ung

About the Author

Meet Loung Ung

“In 1980 [Loung] and her older brother escaped by boat to Thailand.”

L
OUNG
U
NG
is a survivor of the killing fields of Cambodia—one of the bloodiest episodes of the twentieth century. Some two million Cambodians (out of a population of just seven million) died at the hands of the infamous Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime.

Born in 1970 to a middle-class family in Phnom Penh, Loung was only five years old when her family was forced out of the city in a mass evacuation to the countryside. By 1978 the Khmer Rouge had killed Loung’s parents and two of her siblings and she was forced to train as a child soldier. In 1980 she and her older brother escaped by boat to Thailand, where they spent five months in a refugee camp. They then relocated to Vermont through sponsorship by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Holy Family Church parish in Burlington.

“The first English book I remember loving,” she says, “was
Froggy Went a-Cour tin.
I can still hear the music in my head. I love the humor and silliness of it all.”

Her employment history reaches back to a
local shoe store, where she sold shoes and “developed an intense dislike for smelly feet and socks.” After college, she waited tables for two weeks. (“I was fired when the management team found out I was dyslexic with numbers”)

In 1995 Loung returned to Cambodia for a memorial service for the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide and was shocked and saddened to learn that twenty of her relatives had been killed under the Pol Pot regime. This realization compelled her to devote herself to justice and reconciliation in her homeland. Upon learning about the destruction caused by residual land mines in the Cambodian countryside, Loung also set about publicizing the dangers of these indiscriminate weapons (which number in the millions).

Her memoir
First They Killed My Father: a Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
became a national bestseller and won the 2001 Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association award for “Excellence in Adult Non-fiction Literature.” The book has been published in eleven countries and has been translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, Cambodian, and Japanese (and soon will be published in Greek and Hebrew).

Loung describes her writing process this way: “I handwrite my story in my journal, then flesh it out on the computer.” She relies on an improbable source of inspiration while writing: “Long grain, white rice. Rice is my homing device and my security blanket. When I travel or work on a book I must have at least one bowl of rice every day. Where there is rice, I feel at home.”

“She relies on an improbable source of inspiration while writing: ‘Long grain, white rice.… I must have at least one bowl of rice every day. Where there is rice, I feel at home.’“

A featured speaker on Cambodia, child soldiers, and land mines, Loung also serves
as spokesperson for the Cambodia Fund—a program that supports centers in Cambodia that help disabled war victims and survivors of land mines. She has been the spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine Free World (1997-2003) and the Community Educator for the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project of the Maine Coalition against Domestic Violence.

“‘I have tiny hands and fingers, which allow me to fold little paper cranes and other creatures.’“

Loung has spoken widely to schools, universities, corporations, and symposia in the United States and abroad (including the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and the Child Soldiers Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal).

She was named one of the “100 Global Leaders of Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum.

In her spare time, Loung makes origami earrings for her friends. “I have tiny hands and fingers, which allow me to fold little paper cranes and other creatures,” she says. “When my fingers get tired, I go out and ride my purple Huffy bike around the neighborhood. My bike has a very cool bell that looks like a huge eyeball. I like to ring my bell a lot.”

Lucky Child
is her second book. She is currently working on a historical novel.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

About the Book

Loung Ung on the
Inspiration for
Lucky Child

W
HEN
I
WROTE
First They Killed My Father
in 1999, I was at the beginning stage of my reconnection to my sister, my family, and Cambodia. The political situation in Cambodia was unstable, poverty and disease were widespread, and the scars of war were still very raw due to ongoing battles and the continuing presence of the Khmer Rouge. I was very angry when I wrote
First.
I wanted to purge the war from my body and throw it in the faces of readers, decision makers, and people I thought should have heard my cries. I didn’t want readers to have an easy read because I didn’t have an easy life. In
First
I plunged readers into the depths of man’s inhumanity to man—and left them there.

“In
First They Killed My Father,
I plunged readers into the depths of man’s inhumanity to man—and left them there.”

As a book,
First They Killed My Father
had existed within me long before I knew English. When I finally sat down to write, I knew what I wanted to say. Still, I was ill-prepared for the emotional difficulties of writing, and thought many times that I should give up. What kept me writing during those moments was the realization that I was an activist first and a writer second. The activist in me understood that I did not suffer alone the deaths and murders of my loved ones, but that I shared the pain of families from Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan, and other countries. My activism enabled me to tap into my anger and passion to tell the larger stories of injustice and war when the writer in me was too heartbroken over my personal losses and pain. The act of writing eventually became a
key vehicle for my activism—it enabled me to put a human face on the many innocent civilian casualties of war, to spread the word about the Khmer Rouge genocide and to raise money to help Cambodia. The surprise success of
First They Killed My Father
kept me busy doing just that.