The admirably talented Asrei (aka, Theary SENG) succeeds in combining her young memory with the collective memory of her relatives and others. Her sincerity and intellectual probity add to her credit. This is a story and a history lived by the Khmer people through their blood and flesh and for the first time retold by them, and not just through intellectual analysis or account. How can you understand these Khmer Rouge people, except listening to the Cambodians themselves, who reject their crimes with visceral hatred? The Khmers Rouges are the product of the Cold War, of the class struggle between the westernized and travestied urban population and the authentically original Khmer people of the countryside, who are the exploited of the urban exploiters, being the leaches of the Khmer Society, according to the re-interpretation of the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist doctrine.

If the unprecedented upcoming Khmer Rouge tribunal (distinct from the Nuremberg one) is to make any sense (if only to justify those millions of US dollars spent), one must also try once for all to condemn the aberrations of the French Revolution and the period of the terror conjugated with the Chinese Cultural Revolution that served as model to the Khmer Rouge doctrinaires and leadership, by passing through the Marxist dialectic and the French communist party. But the contradiction resides in the fact that while they rejected the capitalist westernized doctrine, they accepted the westernized Marxist ideology which tried to adapt, as did Mao Tse Dung, in order to create a typically Khmer Communist model. 

Theary has this crossed culture experience that enriched her: quoting St. Augustine, a Christian bishop of Hippone of 396 A.D., to redeem her mother of a Buddhist culture, from the violation of her free-will, is for me sublime, especially in those circumstances of hell living conditions, if not of "force majeure". It sounds like the Jesuit casuistic. 

The untold misery started when the Vietnam war spilled over Cambodia, after the March 18, 1970 coup d'Etat that overthrew the Chief of State, Prince NORODOM Sihanouk. Both South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese soldiers resorted to chicanery to decimate the inhabitants of Svay Kravann in Svay Rieng province, as experienced by members of the author's family. The western reporters focused only on the Vietnamese misery for political, moral and ideological justification, but not on the Khmers who suffered from both North and South Vietnamese soldiers. We have to remember that many of the leftist intellectuals in the West, either journalists or scholars and historians, were supporting the undignified Khmer Rouge heroes, allied of their North Vietnamese counterparts, until 1976, when the book of Father François Ponchaud: "Cambodia: Year Zero", reminiscent title of the French Revolutionary utopian dream, came out and told the truth. Only Jean Lacouture, the French journalist and essayist, with his book "May the Cambodian People Survive" (Lacouture, Jean: Survive le peuple Cambodgien!, Seuil, Paris 1978) tried to beat his "mea culpa", too late to save the old and young victims of the murderous revolution, "killer of its own children". 

The repeated scansion of "Life is but a breath" all along the tale, as Asrei tries to sound like a bard singing the tragedy of the Khmer People, recalled throughout the notion of the Buddhist impermanence, as well as the call for wisdom of the Middle Age Europe, expressed by this Latin sentence: "Memento Mori", "Remember to die". 

Initially, these accounts, including that of Asrei's, were denied by the leftist and communist propagandists as disinformation from the US imperialists and their stooges. All the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge were known, since 1973, when they briefly captured Kampong Cham and rounded up the new people, mistreated and killed them.  However, they were explained away as American propaganda machinery. Journalists and other intellectuals must be accountable for their own naivete and their responsibility of their blind support of the Khmer Rouge, as recounted recently by Français Bizot's "Le Portail" or "The Gate" (La Table Ronde, Paris 2000), concerning the brainwashing that was the fact of that period, in which Jean Lacouture also fell. Malcolm Caldwell finally fell to the deathly trap, when he threatened to denounce the Khmer Rouge for what he knew of the reality in 1978. 

The Khmer Rouge did not only kill, but in their concept of class struggle, they debased the individual human dignity with all kinds of vexation measures. In contrast, the description of her maternal family, during the golden age of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum time of Prince Sihanouk, is a condemnation of the criminal dichotomy of the Free and Communist World, which Cambodia had tried to steer away and finally fell into the trap of it by 1970. It was an era when people can still progress individually and in a family, with mutual assistance. Poor students could get a scholarship to go and study in Paris, as in the case of Hao's younger brother Ân. The story of the economic ascension of this family is also that of the progress of the country, since in 1970, before Cambodia fell into the trap of the Vietnam War; the World Bank annual report had put Cambodia a bit ahead of Thailand. The opportunity for a modest family to go abroad and study is no more of actuality, unless they can have the opportunity to go further in higher education, especially when education was not free as stipulated by the Constitution and became very expensive; then as now, private universities are nearly more numerous than the state-run ones. 

The candid acknowledgement of the shock between the two different cultures by young Theary was also an exercise of purification and exorcism against the complex of inferiority, generally suffered by former colonized citizens vis-à-vis the West, by adjusting the balance to its real value. Like chameleons, we tend to adapt ourselves to our new environment, if not aping everything that is beyond our cultural background. Great lessons to be learnt! For once, please the Great Nations of the West deign to humbly listen to this small voice of the trampled ones. 

Honorable SON Soubert -- Former Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, Member of the Constitutional Council of the Kingdom of Cambodia.