Finding refuge in her writing

When Loung Ung started school in Vermont at age 10, she was not only two years older than the other children in the class, she had also survived three years of terror in Cambodia under the genocidal Khmer Rouge, who killed an estimated 1.7 million people, including Ung’s parents and two of her siblings.

In 1979, her elder brother was able to borrow enough gold to hire a smuggler to take him and two family members to a refugee camp in Thailand, where they could apply for resettlement in America.

The brother took his wife and Loung because she was younger than her sister, Chou, and might be able to better adapt in a strange land. Ung vowed to her sister that she would return for her in five years. It took 15 years before they were reunited.

Ung spent her first summer in America studying English and looking forward to the start of school. As soon as the teacher called her name, she shot her arm into the air and proudly said, “Here.” Then the teacher asked the class to write about their summer. She had not yet learned to write in English, so Ung wrote the strange characters by copying the paper of the child next to her.

Twenty years later, Ung found that she couldn’t stop writing -- but this time it was her own remarkable story that poured out. She wrote out of rage about a happy girlhood in Phnom Penh that ended in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took over the country and marched city dwellers into the countryside where they were forced to labor like slaves. She wrote of death and near starvation and being trained as a soldier -- all before she turned 10.

“There are therapists for everything, but there really was no therapist specializing in war trauma, at least in Vermont,” she says. “Writing was a way to exorcise the Khmer Rouge from my soul.”

Ung, who lives in Cleveland, was in Los Angeles recently promoting her second memoir, “Lucky Child.”

She told the story of her family’s ordeal in Pol Pot’s Cambodia in her previous book, “First They Killed My Father,” which, despite being rejected by almost two dozen publishers, became a bestseller when it was printed in 2000. The new book picks up the story from Ung’s arrival as a refugee in Vermont.

“I like this writing thing,” she says. “First it was therapy, then it was activism. It’s hard and difficult and heartbreaking, but it’s a thrill, a high, to describe something exactly the way you want to.”

In person, Ung is unfailingly pleasant and upbeat, but her books recount a continual struggle with inner fury. In America, every time she hears someone comment that it was lucky that she was so young during the Khmer Rouge’s brutal regime she seethes inside.

“They are wrong,” she writes. “I do remember. I just don’t have the words to tell them about it. And although most of the time I’m silent about the war, it’s never silent to me. It’s always with me, in the buzz of a low-flying plane, the boom of fireworks, the cry of a child, the hums of a mother, the hands of a father and the rumbles in my stomach. And I’m sick of it all. I’m tired of waiting for the pain to heal. I want it cut out of my body.”

The book was published this spring to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge taking over Cambodia on April 17, 1975 -- a date that Ung uses as her birth date because she doesn’t know the month and day of her birth. In Cambodia, where the biggest tourist draws are the glorious ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat and a pile of human skulls uncovered at the killing fields near Phnom Penh, the anniversary is a national day of mourning.

“Written with an engaging vigor and directness,” Merle Rubin wrote in a review for The Times, “ ‘Lucky Child’ is an unforgettable portrait of resilience and largeness of spirit.”

The Khmer Rouge misrule ended in 1979 when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and set up its own puppet government -- but the U.S. refused to recognize the new government and continued to deal with the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, who waged a guerrilla war for years.

For Ung’s family in America that meant that to mail a letter to Cambodia they had to travel to Canada. No diplomatic relations, no mail.

Ung finally returned to Cambodia in 1995 -- the first of more than 25 trips home.

“I had put all thoughts of seeing Chou out of my mind,” she writes. “And through the years, as I became busy with school and life, I left Chou farther and farther behind until, in my mind, the oceans and 12,000 miles between us seemed impossible to cross.”

Ung showed up at the airport in Cambodia wearing loose black pants, a brown T-shirt and Tevas. “You look like a Khmer Rouge,” a cousin said.

After 15 years of speaking mostly English, Ung found that her brother had to translate her rusty Khmer for her relatives.

“It wasn’t hard reconnecting with Cambodia,” she says. “Cambodia was so beautiful. I expected the poor people. I didn’t expect the survivors with no arms and legs trying to survive the peace. It was tough to realize that years after the war, the land mines were taking life and limb. My sister’s life was at risk just trying to farm or walk. You have to stay on this path. You can’t chase butterflies.”

On her visits, Ung and her sister spent hours becoming reacquainted -- a process that led eventually to the memoir, which alternates chapters describing Ung’s upbringing in Vermont and her sister’s parallel existence in a Cambodian village.

“We were obsessively curious about each other,” Ung says. “My life would have been hers if she came to America and her life would have been mine. It was hard to write from her point of view. It was two lives and cultures that were very different. In Cambodia things move slowly. I had to indicate the rhythm of life. I wasn’t there for her. Time flowed without things to mark the passage.”

In Vermont, Ung was embarrassed when she had to buy groceries with food stamps. In Cambodia, her sister had to tiptoe around land mines to forage for rice.

The American schoolgirl had nightmares. Her sister had to live with Khmer Rouge raids on her village and the specter of the group returning to power. The younger girl won a scholarship to study international politics in graduate school at Columbia University but turned it down to become a spokeswoman for an anti-land mine campaign. She stayed single until 32. The older sister entered into an arranged marriage at 18 and before long had five children.

A published book, she says, was not her motivation for recording the family’s history. “I was thinking of keeping the story for just the family,” Ung says. “The Khmer Rouge destroyed everything. We have nothing. The next generation will never meet the last generation except in words.”

And though Ung can now visit her family as often as she likes, there’s still a sense of dislocation for her in either country.

“I’m a little envious of my sister,” Ung says. “I would like to know how it feels to know your place in the world and in the community. In Cambodia, I’m accepted but I stick out. In America, I’m a bit of a party pooper because I’m always talking about war and peace.”

As the national spokeswoman for the Campaign for a Landmine Free World, a program of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, Ung often visits Cambodia with donors and dignitaries. Afterward, she always visits her sister’s village.

“I still cry when I do presentations,” she says. “Your shoulders get knotted, and your stomach goes queasy. You get mean. I use my rage to help me work. Rage and hatred are useless unless you can focus them on something.”

Now she’s focusing on writing a novel about three women surviving Cambodia’s turbulent history.

“My family thinks I’m absolutely crazy,” she says. “All these years I worried about my sister, she was worried about me. I work all the time. I don’t cook. I didn’t get married until 32. They actually think I’m crazy. I watch her walk. Each step is really connected to the ground. I kind of bounce. That’s just my way of life. I’m very fortunate.”