When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge
SynopsisPlot
Chanrithy Him gives us a child's-eye view of a Cambodia where rudimentary labor camps for both adults and children are the norm and modern technology no longer exists. Death becomes a companion in the camps, along with illness. Yet through the terror, the members of Chanrithy's family remain loyal to one another, and she and her siblings who survive will find redeemed lives in America.
Story
About this book
The title draws from a Cambodian proverb: when broken glass floats, evil has overtaken good. Chanrithy Him's memoir opens in 1969, when the expanding war in Vietnam destabilized Cambodia and her family moved to Phnom Penh. Six years later the Khmer Rouge seized power and forced the family from their home again. Cars, electricity, and other parts of modern life disappeared.
Him narrates as the child she was, describing rudimentary labor camps where adults and children alike worked, and where illness and death were constant presences. She was a young girl through most of these years. The regime demanded that loyalty belong to itself alone, yet her account traces how the members of her family kept faith with one another under extreme pressure.
In 1979 Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia and drove the Khmer Rouge from power. Of a family of twelve, five of the Him children survived. An uncle living in Oregon sponsored Chanrithy and her siblings, and at sixteen she began a new life in the United States. The memoir spans roughly a decade, moving from a city childhood to the camps and then to resettlement abroad.
