IN THE SHADOW OF THE KHMER ROUGE

A compelling memoir written by a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. 

Forty-five years have passed since the end of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia in 1979. Angkar, the hidden, menacing face of the revolutionary leadership, is gone, yet the misery, death, and destruction they wrought in the name of revolution cannot be forgotten. In In the Shadow of the Khmer Rouge, a voice is given to these memories by a child survivor of the catastrophe that engulfed Cambodia in the 1970’s. 

Muy Lang's memoir begins by recalling her gentle childhood with her Sino-Cambodian family in Phnom Penh. With the fall of the city to the Khmer Rouge and its brutal emptying, the country descended into a utopian hell in which drastic economic ideas were enforced with deadly fervor. Muy Lang was only nine years old when she and her family were marched at gunpoint out of Phnom Penh in 1975. Within three years, she was completely alone; tragically, the seven other members of her family were all killed.

Muy Lang survived nearly four years of starvation, sickness, brutality, and threatened death in the Cambodian countryside. She ultimately escaped to Thailand with the first group of refugees to navigate a treacherous descent from the border through the landmine-infested Dângrêk Mountains. In the Shadow of the Khmer Rouge pays tribute to Muy Lang’s family and to other war victims who shared their stories with her. It offers future generations a personal reflection on themes such as displacement, loss of cultural identity, hope, and resilience in the face of unimaginable circumstances, and is an unflinching account of Cambodia's darkest years.

Lim Muy Lang survived the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia as a child. She arrived in Australia in 1980 as an orphaned refugee and has lived there since.

David Chandler is an American historian and academic.