Week 9_Rosanna Oung_ASA 150E

Cathy Schlund-Vial’s War, Genocide, and Justice recalls the historical era of the Killing Fields and the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge was a group seeking to eradicate any Western influence by any means to restore Cambodia back to its pre revolutionary society. The group implemented extreme measures to prohibit religion, outlawed education, forbid private property, and forcibly relocated Cambodian residents into labor camps (Schlund-Vial 2). With all this trauma that Cambodians endured, it is no surprise that many of them experienced Cambodian Syndrome.

Cambodian Syndrome consists of “political and selective processes of remembering the genocidal past” but this strategic remembering is an issue, because it reflects fragments of memory and provides an incomplete framework for understanding the Khmer genocide (Schlund-Vial 13). Within this transnational context, artists in U.S. have connected this era with forms of art, literature, cinema, and performance as “alternative sites for justice, healing, and reclamation” (Schlund-Vials 17). For example, Loung Ung’s book First They Killed My Father recently became a film adaptation in 2017. As a daughter of a Cambodian genocide survivor, it was powerful and shocking to watch a movie adaption that displays scenes of horrific events and actions that took place. Watching this film provided a better context and displayed obscured perspectives of how traumatizing and disheartening it was for Khmer victims to endure this brutality. It also explains why it’s so painful for my parents to speak about their past, because they had to suffer an era of genocide, in which many individuals can not truly understand the pain and hardships they faced. Therefore, it’s important to educate community members about the atrocities and wickedness that occurred in 1975 to prevent history from repeating itself and to fully empathize with Khmer genocide victims.




Source for image: https://audiobookstore.com/audiobooks/first-they-killed-my-father-1.aspx
Citations: Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work. 2012. Introduction: Battling the “Cambodian Syndrome”