The Story Behind the Memoir

There is a part of my story that is difficult to explain quickly, but it is important to understand.

My mother was a survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Her parents and family were slaughtered. She became the sole survivor of her family, carrying a grief that no child should ever have to carry. Her family came from a militant background, and her life was marked by loss, survival, and the kind of pain that does not simply disappear because someone makes it to another country.

My father’s story was different, but just as haunting.

He was part of the Khmer Rouge. He was raised as a child inside a world of violence, torture, and killing. He was shaped as a child soldier, trained in an environment where cruelty was normal and survival was tied to violence. For much of my life, I did not fully know or understand this part of his identity. That truth did not become clear to us until 2009.

So when I say I was born in America but raised by the Khmer Rouge, I am not speaking in a symbolic way only.

I was raised inside a home where both sides of that history lived.

My mother carried the pain of surviving the regime. My father carried the violence of being formed by it. And as their child, I lived in the middle of those two realities before I had the language to understand either one.

That is why this memoir is not only about inherited trauma. It is also about lived trauma.

I inherited the aftermath of genocide, but I also survived what that aftermath became inside my home. I survived the fear, the confusion, the violence, and the silence. I survived loving my mother, who had lost everything, while also trying to understand the pain she carried. I survived living under my father’s violence before I even knew the full truth of what had shaped him.

For years, I thought my story had to be smaller because theirs was so devastating.

But I have learned that pain does not have to compete.

My mother’s survival matters.

My father’s history matters.

And what happened to me as their child matters too.

This is the tension my memoir holds. It is the story of a daughter born after genocide, but still raised inside its consequences. It is the story of what happens when history does not stay in the past, when war comes home through the bodies, behaviors, fears, and wounds of the people who survived it or were shaped by it.

I am telling this story carefully because it is sacred and painful. I am not writing to flatten my parents into one thing. My mother was not only her grief. My father was not only his violence. But I also cannot tell the truth about my healing without telling the truth about the home I survived.

This is why my voice matters.

Because I am not only the daughter of survivors.

I am also a survivor.