Stay Alive, My Son by Pin Yathay: book review

Stay Alive, My Son (1987) is an emotional, yet profound, true account of the authors struggle to stay alive during the Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia.

Currently the general elections of July 28, 2013, have re-instated Prime Minister Hun Sen, for another five years, to extend his 28 year term. But before him was a reign of Khmer Rouge terror.

The novel commences in April 1975 with the fall of Phnom Penh, when Khmer Rouge guerrillas moved into Phnom Penh. In three years, more than two million people died and an ancient culture was stripped bare.

The author, Pin Yathay, has a wife and three sons. An engineer with a good education, he was reduced to a labourer in the fields and rice paddies of his district, to join the peasants, the ‘Ancients’. Moving as the Khmer Rouge dictated, he became one of the ‘New People,’ a deported person in the refugee camps of Cambodia—“a lower and despised order … no one complained. We were all paralysed by fear of the Khmer Rouge …” Banished from households was disharmony. Husbands were forbidden to beat wives. Insults were barred. Children were not meant to be scolded. But “tension emerged in other ways” as children were encouraged by the Khmer Rouge to denounce parents whose behaviour fell short of the ideal. “You had to be made of stone, to stay deaf and mute, and blindly obey orders if you wanted to survive.”

“It was not long before the dying started. Even in the first week …” First his youngest son, two years old, dies of fever. A month after the fall of Phnom Penh his oldest son, 9 years old, dies after fainting at work, his leg infected and infested. He plans his escape to Thailand.

Simple in his diction, but powerful in his story-telling, Yathay tells of life, struggle, loss and death, but also of freedom.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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