Inaccuracy and Testimonial Literature: The Case of Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

In his 2001 review essay of three survivor accounts of the Cambodian genocide (1975-79),¹ Sody Lay criticizes Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (2000) for historical and cultural inaccuracies, calling Ung’s testimonial text “a sensationalization and over-dramatization of the Killing Fields experience” (“Cambodian” 173). Lay not only accuses Ung of consciously manipulating her story for “the sake of making a buck,” but he also questions her status as a Cambodian: “Given Ung’s lack of memory and her apparent disdain for everything Khmer, it is not only ironic but misrepresentative for her book to be subtitled ‘a daughter of Cambodia remembers’” (181).

The Khmer Institute Web site, which Lay co-founded and for which he serves as Executive Director, has published scathing reviews of Ung’s book with similar accusations regarding historical inaccuracies and cultural inauthenticity.² One group of reviewers examines a section in First They Killed My Father in which the Ung family takes a trip in the early 1970s to Angkor Wat, pointing out that such a trip was impossible because the area was a battle zone at that time. The reviewers then note that Ung miscalculates Cambodia’s Angkorian period (from approximately the ninth to the fifteenth centuries) when she wrote that “Angkor Wat was built by powerful Khmer kings as monuments of self-glorification in the ninth century and completed three hundred years later” (Ung 67), reducing this seven-hundred-year period to half of its length.³ The reviewers conclude: “A true ‘daughter of Cambodia’ would not be so careless as to provide such blatantly incorrect information about these [Angkor Wat] temples, as they are an integral part of Khmer heritage and pride” (Hor, Lay, and Quinn).

However, such harsh criticism does not take into account the impact on survivors such as Ung of losing family members, being separated from their homeland, and struggling with a new language and culture in an attempt to build a new home thousands of miles away from Cambodia, in a place with unfamiliar customs and rituals.⁴ Furthermore, not every Cambodian American has had identical experiences. In attempting to make sense of this controversy, we must explore how to take Lay’s charges into account while still valuing Ung’s memoir.⁵

This essay begins with a discussion of the Lay-Ung controversy in the context of the Cambodian diasporic community, paying close attention to the politics of representation and our need for multiple and diverse representations. Teri Shaffer Yamada’s work on Cambodian American autobiography informs the discussion of Ung’s First They Killed My Father within the context of testimonial literature, as I examine the difficulty that Ung, as a survivor, had in balancing her psychological need for healing with the political duty to speak on behalf of the Cambodian people. Ung’s need to work through the traumas originating in the Cambodian genocide, what I call her emotional truth, often overshadows her responsibility to represent accurately what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime, that is, factual truth. Historical inaccuracies in Ung’s text result from her filtering facts through emotion and trauma; they serve as markers of the psychological effects on survivors of the Khmer Rouge terrorism. In other words, despite its failure to provide historical facts, Ung’s text succeeds in bearing witness to the destruction by the Khmer Rouge, a destruction that impedes the survivor’s ability to create the kind of narrative that can be used as straightforward evidence against the Khmer Rouge and as a pedagogical resource for the younger generation.

This failure also teaches us something important about trauma-inflected testimonial texts such as First They Killed My Father. In spite of its historical inaccuracies, Ung’s text is emotionally and experientially truthful to its author. Its emotional truth, although fraught with inaccuracies, should be respected because it is a legitimate part of the story of the Cambodian genocide. This is not to say, of course, that all survivor memoirs are tainted with...