ABSTRACT
Focusing on First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, Cambodian-born American human rights activist Loung Ung’s testimonial narrative of her childhood experience of the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, this chapter explores the dual – both private and public – life-writing impetus spurring first and “one-and-a-half” generation Cambodian American autobiographical works, from victimhood to survival and from silence to testimony. By probing the cathartic, (co-)transformative potential of Ung’s self writing and by shedding light on its complex historical and cultural implications for the (trans)national Cambodian (American) self, this chapter will examine the therapeutic, evidentiary, and commemorative functions of Ung’s autobiographical narrative and of Cambodian American testimonies of the Cambodian genocide.
