Stay Alive, My Son

"There are numerous memoirs written by Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, but I recommend this one in particular because it is written by someone who was older than most – for example, Loung Ung, Theary Seng – when the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh. The author was an engineer at the time and he was married and had two young children. Three generations of his family tried to leave Phnom Penh – he was the only one who survived. Yathay describes the confusion of that period. Cambodians had experienced a civil war, American bombing, the corrupt Lon Nol regime and so, to some extent, the takeover was quite welcome. At first many people, including the educated middle class, thought the Khmer Rouge would be better, and thought that at least the war was over. How could things get worse? But of course it did. Yathay describes how things became worse on a personal level – how he watched his children starve to death, how society was turned on its head and how everything that was sacred turned to ash. Yathay made it out of Cambodia as a walking skeleton by crossing the border to Thviailand. The title, Stay Alive, My Son, refers to his own father telling him to hang on, and how those words helped him to survive. Part of the book deals with the author’s guilt of not having recognised what was going on earlier – his father had tried to warn him, but he hadn’t listened. Such memoirs are far from cheerful and it’s certainly not the West’s finest hour in terms of foreign policy, but it is testament to the resilience of these Southeast Asian nations that it is now possible to travel happily around them when 30 years ago it was a horrendous situation. Of course, the legacy remains – Laos still has the most unexploded ordinances in the world and many children and farmers both in Laos and Cambodia are maimed horrifically every year. As a traveller, it will certainly make your trip more interesting if you understand the background to the West’s involvement in this region."