FTKMF: Post 3. B.

Dear Loung Ung,
I am very much enjoying your novel, First They Killed My Father. As I am reading your book, I get a sense of unimaginable cruelty and desperation. In this last section that I just read, You have been leaving at various work camps, suffering the constant decreasing food rations, and have started to increasingly fear the safety of your family from your wealthy past. As you describe the impoverished communities, the selfish new government, and the horrifyingly disease prone persons, I have begun to truly feel the pain all of captive Cambodians most have felt. “Many of the villagers are getting sicker and sicker from the disease and starvation. They lie in their huts, whole families together, unable to move. Concave faces have the appearance of what they will look like once the flesh rots way.”(84) As you described the diminishing health status of the villagers around you, I thought that your next quote was very interesting. “They lie there, as if no longer of this world, so weak they cannot swat away the flies sitting on their faces. Occasionally, parts of their body convulse involuntarily and you know they are alive. However, there is nothing we can do but let them lie there until they die… My family does not look very different from them.”(84) This quote shows how hopeless, you felt or doomed and depressed your environment was. At the end of the section I just read you dropped the bomb that your sister had just died in a teenage work camp after being separated from your family. Considering that you could not cry or show emotion, or else you would be killer, I thought that most have been very hard for you. I wonder what will happen, as more and more father are being murdered around your village.
Sincerely,
Caitie