The Gate (2000) is the memoir of Francois Bizot, the only Western prisoner of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge to survive. The memoir is set in Cambodia from 1971 to 1979, and again briefly in 1989. Frenchman Francois Bizot was in Cambodia from 1965 as a research scholar at the Angkor Conservation Office 13 kilometres from Siem Reap. Speaking fluent Khmer, he lived and worked at the well-known Angkor Wat site with his wife and daughter. In Siem Reap from June 1970, largely unknown to the international community, the Khmer Rouge had surrounded Siem Reap as they were ‘discreetly growing more powerful.’ This was before the Khmer Rouge, under their leader Pol Pot, entered Phnom Penh and imposed its brutal regime from 1975 to 1979. In October 1971, when his daughter was three years old, Bizot was working in Oudong 30 kilometres north of the capital Phnom Penh when he was taken prisoner with his two work colleagues, Lay and Son. He was accused of being a spy for the ‘American Impe