Ngor Haing - Survival in the killing fields

Haing Ngor, a young doctor in his native Cambodia, saw his life transformed when the Khmer Rouge communists, led by the notorious Pol Pot, took over his country in 1975. He and his family, along with entire populations of cities and towns, were forced into the countryside to become war slaves in a vast gulag policed by brutal enforcers and spies. After suffering nearly unbelievable hardships, Ngor finally escaped Cambodia in 1979, resettling in the US, where he helped fellow refugees. His prospects improved when director Roland Joffe cast him as the real-life character Cambodian translator Dith Pran in the film The Killing Fields (1984). His performance earned him an Academy Award. Ngors subsequent film work included parts in Oliver Stones Heaven and Earth and various movies and TV shows, but acting was secondary to his main concerns of aiding Cambodians and bringing his Khmer Rouge persecutors to justice. In 1988, he wrote his autobiography, A Cambodian Odyssey (Surviving the Killing Fields). Ngor died in 1996, while attempting to prevent a drug-dealing Los Angeles street gang from stealing a locket which contained a photo of his wife. This is his true story of finding love and fighting for survival.

Roger Warner is a journalist, historian and author of several books on Southeast Asia. His Shooting at the Moon: The Story of Americas Clandestine War in Laos won an overseas Press Club award for the best book on foreign affairs. He first met Haing Ngor when Dr Ngor was a refugee fresh from the traumas of the Khmer Rouge, in a camp along the Thai border, long before Haing Ngor starred in the film The Killing Fields.

Praise for the first edition (A Cambodian Odyssey):

Gripping... Invaluable... A landmark book... This is the most revealing book about the nature of evil I have ever read. But it is also a drama with heroes and heroines and comedy and laughter... Ngor starred in the best film on Cambodia that has ever been produced. And now he has written the best book on Cambodia that has ever been published.

T.D. Allman, Chicago Tribune

Profound, personal, and proud... a story so essential to our understanding that it deserves to be considered as one of the more important autobiographies of our time.

Los Angeles Times

A beautiful, frightening, gentle, terrifying tale... The brilliant testimony of a courageous man... There might be moments when you read Haing Ngors [book] and weep, but I promise you they will be tears of enlightenment.

Chicago Sun-Times

A potent tribute to the human spirit... With sure and simple prose, Ngor sweeps the reader inexorably into a maelstrom not easily forgotten. Nor should it be; this important document, which traces the suffering of a nation within the torment of one life, deserves remembrance.

Kirkus Reviews

A terrible and thrilling story.

Publishers Weekly

Anyone who wants to understand what Khmer Rouge rule did to the Cambodian people must read Haing Ngors A Cambodian Odyssey. I venture to say that if you do, it will be among the handful of books you will recall for the rest of your life.

Congressman Stephen Solarz

It is hard to imagine a more remarkable story. It is a record and an indictment that will last for generations to come.

Pittsburgh Press

An emotional personal journey... harrowing... uncommonly candid... compelling because it reminds us anew of mans capacity for cruelty and self-delusion. It also reminds us of the surpassing strength of the human spirit. Most important, it implores the civilized world to remember the millions of innocent men, women and children who lie beneath killing fields and to condemn those responsible for these brutal murders.

New York Daily News

A personal testament of courage... Ngors observations of war, the horror of captivity, and the wholesale desecration of Buddhist culture and religion make for sheer narrative power; but the books real impact has to do with the triumph of human spirit.

Christian Science Monitor

A major book... You walk away from this autobiography with more enrichment and understanding than any movie could provide.

Chicago Sun-Times

A searing eyewitness account of cultural genocide and personal triumph.

Booklist

Stunning, triumphant... illuminating. Ngor not only describes the events of his own life but also delivers an insightful analysis of the events that transformed his native land from an island of peace in war-torn Southeast Asia, to a nation at war with itself. His account bears witness for himself and the hundreds of thousands of other Cambodians who lost loved ones among the millions put to death under the Pol Pot regime.

Buffalo News

COPYRIGHT

Published by Robinson

First published in 1987 as A Cambodian Odyssey in the US by Macmillan Publishing Company

ISBN: 978-1-47210-388-8

Copyright 1987 by Sandwell Investment Ltd., and Roger Warner

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Robinson
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk

[I want to dedicate this book to the memories of my father, Ngor Kea, of my mother, Lim Ngor, of my wife, Chang Huoy (Chang My Huoy), who have died in the most miserable, uncivilized, and inhuman ways under the Khmer communist regime. I have written this book for the world to better understand communism and other regimes in Cambodia.]

I have been many things in life: A trader walking barefoot on paths through the jungles. A medical doctor, driving to his clinic in a shiny Mercedes. In the past few years, to the surprise of many people, and above all myself, I have been a Hollywood actor. But nothing has shaped my life as much as surviving the Pol Pot regime. I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. Thats who I am.

Between the years of 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge communists exchanged our traditional Cambodian way of life for a vast, brutal experiment in communism. Toward the end of those years I was living in the northwestern part of Cambodia in a tiny agricultural village. By then, the luxuries of life before the revolution were a half-forgotten dream. I went barefoot. My clothes were rags and my ribs were showing from hunger. To keep the Khmer Rouge soldiers from killing me, I had to pretend I was not a doctor. They had already killed most of my family. And my case was typical. By destroying our culture and by enslaving us, the Khmer Rouge changed millions of happy, normal human beings into something more like animals. They turned people like me into cunning, wild thieves.

I began stealing on a small scale. Slipping out of my hut after dark, blending into the shadows, pausing to look and listen for soldiers, hearing only the crickets and frogs in their loud nighttime chorus, I crept into the village garden. Reaching into the rows of ripening corn, pulling the husks carefully back, I twisted the corncobs from their stalks, pulled them out, and smoothed the empty husks to their original shape around the hollow space inside. In the daytime, to a casual observer, the corn would appear to be untouched.