Beyond the Killing Fields · Default Product

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In 1975, after five years of devastation and upheaval caused by civil war, the Cambodian people welcomed the victorious communist Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot. Once in power, the new regime tightly closed Cambodia to the outside world. Four years later, when the Vietnamese communists invaded Cambodia and defeated the Khmer Rouge, the world learned that during their control the Khmer Rouge had turned the country into "killing fields," in one of the most horrifying instances of genocide in history. Of an estimated population of 7 million people, about 1.5 million had been killed or had died of starvation, torture, or sickness. After the Vietnamese takeover, thousands of survivors of the Khmer Rouge, fearful of continuing war and a new communist regime, fled their homeland. Approximately 150,000 of them settled in the United States. This book documents the Cambodian refugee experience through nine powerful first-person narratives of men, women, and children who survived the holocaust and began new lives in America. The narrators come from varied socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds and include a former Buddhist monk, an unskilled factory worker, and a farm boy, all of whom are ethnic Ca

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