3 with cogency and literary flair (thanks to years of practice “telling her story” for the media and family members). As already suggested, each story pivots around a highly personal experience which potentially anchors a larger historical meaning of “The Khmer Rouge.” For Kakrona Khem, this experience is really two experiences in parallel: his rejection of his mother’s offer to send him away to protect him from the war and his later decision to make a run for it on his own terms. For Melanie, the pivotal event is her visit with her parents during a short furlough from her work camp, the last time she saw her mother and father and brothers alive. Though interviewers tended to ask “before and after” kinds of political or military questions, the narrators’ stories cohere around a founding family event which they place at the center of their far‐flung and episodic wartime and refugee experience. The protagonists of these stories are not political, revolutionary, or militants of any sort. They tended to be from respectable families in their villages or children from poorer families who made a special investment in their child’s education. Age cohort and the role of marriage are final striking features. Most of these narrators were mature teens when their stories unfolded in the late 70s, individuals just about to take on their adult roles in their society until interrupted by Pol Pot. Their roles as mates translated into interesting potential as they navigated the regime. Taking a wife, accepting an arranged marriage, or bartering one’s spouse‐like domestic skills allowed each protagonist to generate alliances or emotional and economic resources that could improve their chances of survival or even escape. These were capacities not available to smaller children, to married adult parents, or to elders. Thinking of oneself as a potential wife or husband allowed individuals to hang on to “normal,” to hang on to a future, and sometimes to hang on to a new spouse in order to leverage survival. The cruel underside of this life cycle dynamic is the suffering of SivHeng Ung, who was a new bride with an early pregnancy when the Khmer Rouge took over, a vulnerable status which subjected her to particular cruelties, as her narrative attests. The theme of resistance to the Khmer Rouge regime’s attack on family rings out unmistakably in these narratives. Researchers who listen to entire interviews will notice how the denouement of each ritually restores the moral core of filial piety. Despite hardship, disruption, and loss, the interview experience vindicates family dignity and reaffirms the centrality of intergenerational relations. Each interview ends with participants offering one another verbal tributes of gratitude, love, and respect. By sharing words, tears, and hugs, participants embrace the story and its telling and thereby confirm the enduring power of kinship. Bibliography Etcheson, C. (2005). After the Killing Fields : Lessons from the Cambodian genocide. Westport: Praeger. Jackson, K. (2014). Cambodia, 1975‐1978 Rendezvous with Death. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kiernan, B. (2008). Genocide and resistance in Southeast Asia : Documentation, denial & justice in Cambodia & East Timor. New Brunswick: Transaction. Kiernan, B. (2008). The Pol Pot regime : Race, power, and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975‐79 (3rd ed.). New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press. Schanberg, S. (2010). Beyond the Killing Fields: War Writings. Dulles: Potomac Books. Ung, K. (2009). Golden leaf : A Khmer Rouge genocide survivor. USA: KU Publishing.
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