Theary C. Seng’s memoir begins with the Khmer Rouge’s destruction of Cambodia and follows its violence through the intimate scale of one family.

Seng was a child when her father was killed and her mother was imprisoned; the book reconstructs those years through remembered fragments, family history and the testimony of survival. Rather than treating the Killing Fields as a sealed historical atrocity, she shows how political terror continues inside those who escape it—in grief, displacement, damaged memory and the difficult work of rebuilding a life elsewhere.

The second movement of the book follows Seng through refugee camps, migration to the United States and her eventual return to Cambodia as a lawyer and human-rights advocate. This gives the memoir an unusual structure: it is both a child’s account of catastrophe and an adult inquiry into justice, responsibility and the unresolved presence of the perpetrators. Seng writes plainly, sometimes starkly, refusing to make survival into an uplifting moral ornament. A valuable first-person history of Cambodia, exile and the long afterlife of state violence.

Fusion Press, 2005 first edition paperback. Light shelf wear; clean and sound.