Beautiful Hero: How We Survived the Khmer Rouge (2016) is the memoir of a
young girl Geng (Jennifer) in Cambodia from 1975 to 1981.
It is the time of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 when Geng’s family is forced from
their home in Sadao, where her father was a photographer and her mother was a
hairdresser, to forced labour in Phnum Sress. She is five years old, and her
brothers and sisters range from 6 months to 13 years. However, the memoir
focuses on her mother, Meiyeng (which means ‘beautiful hero’), and her
relentless struggle to keep the family alive.
It is interesting to note what, at short notice, they take with them and
what they leave behind. For example, her nine-year-old brother ‘carried nothing
but his cherished slingshot and clay balls’ and her father bundled up his
cameras. Little did they know that it would be a ‘death march’ and that they
would never return home.
Not only did the family endure the brutality of the Khmer Rouge soldiers,
but also malaria, diptheria, lice, leeches, worms, snakes, malnutrition and
tuberculosis.
When the Khmer Rouge regime ended in 1979 due to Vietnam’s victory Geng’s
family had no home to return to. Of her extended family of 45 people, 15 died,
but there were more deaths in the years afterwards as they fled to Thailand.
The writing and style is clumsy and irritating – such as ‘After we
transferred the sandals from Papa’s baskets to our feet, he …’ However, it is
the truth of her family’s and her country’s ordeal that kept me reading. The
chapters are logically sequenced and clearly dated, so the events are easy to
follow.
I was rewarded at the end as the chapters became more impactful and riveting.
This was particulary evident in Chapter 30, Out of the Frying Pan and into the
Fire (April 1979), about Uncle Rain, Big Daughter aged 13, and Sida aged 7, and their attempt to reach Thailand
through the border jungle full of mines, trip wires, and concealed pits. Months
later Geng’s family attempted the same journey. Chapter 32, Dangrek Mountains
(June 1979), is harrowing, and Chapter 33, Down the Mountains from Whence we
Came (June 1979), is equally heart-wrenching.
Lau adds family photographs and maps of the region. Overally it is a book
well worth reading as a personal account 40 years after the horrific events in
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international
aid and development consultant, and the author of:- 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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