The book is a first-person account, as seen through the eyes of a child, of the rise of the Communist Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s, its enforced mass relocation of the urban population to the countryside to do manual labour (leading to massive levels of fatality), and the regime's eventual collapse.
The blurb for the book reads:
"Until the age of five, Loung Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official. She was a precocious child who loved the open city markets, fried crickets, chicken fights and sassing her parents. While her beautiful mother worried that Loung was a troublemaker, her beloved father knew Loung was a clever girl.
"When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army captured Phnom Penh in April 1975, Ung's family fled their home and moved from village to village to hide their identity, their education, their former life of privilege.
"Eventually, the family dispersed in order to survive, but Ung’s parents were later killed by soldiers. Because Loung was resilient and determined, she walked to a work camp, where she was trained as a child soldier while her other siblings were sent to labor camps.
"As the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia by overthrowing the Khmer Rouge, the surviving siblings were slowly reunited.
"Bolstered by the shocking bravery of one brother, the vision of the others and sustained by her sister's gentle kindness amid brutality, Loung forged herself a new life."[1]
The author later went on to live in the USA, and worked at the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World in Washington, D.C.
Nobody knows exactly—or even roughly—how many people were killed in the Cambodian genocide, whether by direct murders by the regime, or enforced overwork and starvation. For example, UCLA academic Patrick Heuveline wrote in 2015: "The range of estimates of excess deaths under Pol Pot's rule of Cambodia (1975–79) is too wide to be useful: they range from under 1 to over 3 million, with the more plausible estimates still varying from 1 to 2 million."[2] If the estimate of 2 million is roughly correct, that would mean about one quarter of the country's entire population at the time was wiped out.[3]
