Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey

Foreword

ix FOREWORD Ronnie Yimsut’s absorbing and passionate memoir deals with his life before, during, and after the Khmer Rouge era (1975–1979). It fits neatly into a genre of survivor narratives that have emerged from Cambodian authors since the 1970s, but it surpasses many of them in terms of its breadth of focus, its depth of feeling, and the clarity of its prose. Like many narratives in the genre, Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey has an almost mythic three-part structure that might be labeled Idyll, Horror, and Recovery. Yimsut tells the story of a large, relatively prosperous, and happy Cambodian family that suffered horrendous losses under the Khmer Rouge. Several of them, including Yimsut’s mother, were brutally put to death before Yimsut fled the scene, found refuge in the United States, and eventually had the time and encouragement to write this book. Ronnie Yimsut was born in 1961 into Cambodia’s small, predominantly urban middle class. His father was a provincial official and part-time schoolteacher in the town of Siem Reap. Because people in the middle class were the major beneficiaries of prerevolutionary Khmer society, they were singled out for harsh treatment by the (recovering bourgeois) leaders of the Khmer Rouge. Most other writers of Cambodian survival narratives were also members of the middle class. Almost all of them hailed from Phnom Penh. They were thrown off balance in April 1975 by their exile to rural areas, where they were spurned by local people and proved largely inept at agricultural tasks. Yimsut, on the other hand, was raised in Siem Reap, which in the 1960s was still a smallish town. His semirural boyhood gave him skills (such as fishing and plant recognition ) that made it slightly easier for him to cope with life under the Khmer Rouge than it was for urban refugees. Where his narrative differs from many others and what makes it in more compelling, I believe, is that by waiting until 2011 to publish it, Yimsut has been able to place the trauma of his Khmer Rouge experiences into the larger pattern of his life and also alongside patterns in Cambodian history before and since. The chapters that deal with his family’s ordeal are the most vivid, wrenching , and passionate in the book, but they are its centerpiece rather than its raison d’être. The book you’re about to read, in other words, is as much about Yimsut’s own resilience, his keen observational skills, and his personal “journey into light” as it is about his sufferings and those of his family under the Khmer Rouge. I found the chapters about his breathtaking escape to Thailand in 1978, his months on the Thai-Cambodian border, and his rewarding absorption into life in the United States as perceptive and readable as any others in the book. The closing pages recount his frequent returns to Cambodia since 1992 and the work he continues to do to help his fellow Khmer. The trajectory of the book, like Yimsut’s life so far, feeds into a familiar, partly misleading narrative of Cambodian history since the 1960s. This narrative reflects the way in which many middle-class Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge era have constructed their country’s history to coincide and harmonize with their personal experiences, often conceived in the triadic pattern (idyll, horror, recovery) that I mentioned above. This pleasing, exculpatory construction begs a range of questions. Beneficiaries of the Khmer Rouge period, for one thing, including Cambodia’s premier, Hun Sen, and the former Khmer Rouge leaders now on trial in Phnom Penh, don’t see the 1960s as idyllic or the Khmer Rouge period as impenetrably dark. What’s more, for many survivors in Cambodia and overseas, wherever they stood, politically, in the 1970s, the “recovery” (aside from the welcome end of fighting in the late 1990s) has been uneven or nonexistent. Aside from Khieu Samphan, the former Khmer Rouge chief of state, now facing trial in Phnom Penh, no beneficiaries of the Khmer Rouge period have published memoirs of their lives. Were they to do so, the three-part pattern of their books might fall into sections labeled Injustice, Empowerment, and What Came Later. The readership for such books would probably be minimal, but if we are to get a balanced and accurate view of recent Cambodian history, we have to remember that it has many voices, including those of people who have chosen, perhaps prudently, to remain...