Page Count Live: Writing Toward Peace with Loung Ung

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Show Notes

In a special episode recorded before a live audience at the Inkubator writing conference, Laura interviews Loung Ung, whose bestselling memoirs detailing her experiences under the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia have moved readers worldwide. Ung discussed the genesis of her writing life, writing in a child’s voice for an adult audience, writing and publishing in English as a nonnative English speaker, overcoming anxiety about sharing her family’s story, how she met Angelia Jolie and came to co-write the screenplay adaptation of First They Killed My Father, her experiences with the filming process in Cambodia, how others can start on the activist’s path, what it means to write toward peace, and more.  

This conversation was recorded on September 20, 2024 at Cleveland Public Library as part of Literary Cleveland’s free Inkubator writing conference.

Loung Ung is an author, lecturer, and activist who has devoted her life to advancing human rights and equality in Cambodia and around the world. She is the author of the memoir First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (HarperCollins 2000), which tells the story of her survival under the Khmer Rouge regime, as well as Lucky Child and Lulu in the Sky, additional memoirs published by HarperCollins. She is currently working on a novel. In 2013, Ung expanded her activism as a writer for Girl Rising, a documentary film about girls’ education around the world. First They Killed My Father was adapted into a Netflix movie in 2017 by director by Angelina Jolie from a screenplay co-written by Jolie and Ung.

In this episode:

Excerpts

Transcript

Loung Ung (00:00:00):
I view writing as a journey into the deep dark waters. And when you go deep water diving, you go with a lifeline. You've got that lifeline, the rope, or the steel thing that you hold. And at every section, however deep you go, fifty meters, ten meters...you stop and you equalize and you check in with your body. You check in with your mind, you check in with your heart. And then if you okay, you go to the next level. So if you're going to go deep water diving, please take care of yourself. Please make sure you have a lifeline.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:00:38):
Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us today at the 2024 Inkubator Conference. This session will be recorded and will air in the future as an episode of Page Count, which is the podcast presented by the Ohio Center for the Book right here at Cleveland Public Library. So today we have a really special guest that I am so honored to interview, author and activist Loung Ung. Loung thank you for being here. Can we give her a round of applause, please? Thank you.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:01:13):
So Loung. You are the author of three memoirs, all of which surround in various ways your story of surviving genocide in Cambodia in the seventies. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country's population. Among the victims were Loung Ung's parents, two sisters, and many other relatives. And she tells her story in her first memoir, FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER, which was made into a film in 2017. So she has actually suggested that we start by watching the trailer for the film. But before we do, Loung, what would you like to say to introduce your story?

Loung Ung (00:01:54):
Well First of all, thank you so much for, for being here and thank you to you and your group for putting together this fabulous conference. I am originally from Cambodia, then arrived to Vermont and then DC and I've been in Cleveland about 20 years. And I just, every day find more and more things I love about Cleveland. The Metroparks, the Uber driver who was super nice and told me about this new, well this 33-year-old restaurant I haven't been to in Brecksville, called the Creekside, that I can't wait to go. And it was wonderful because I was having a conversation with this white guy, middle aged white guy about menopause. Which like, like I do, this is going to be the next thing I'm going to write about. It's a new experience for me. So it's a new journey. I'm still figuring out the casting characters and the villains <laugh>, you know, who's going to take over my body next and who's going to possess me when I'm hot and who's going to come in and rescue me when I need to be cool.

Loung Ung (00:02:55):
So that is a little bit about me now. Me then in Cambodia, I was born in, in Cambodia, this beautiful jewel of a nation in Southeast Asia in 1970. And back then it was a population of 7 million people. And I came into the world with a wonderful mother who at 5'7'' was considering Amazon in our society and a father who was a entrepreneur business person as well as a military police officer. And so my father was Cambodian, my mother was Chinese. So I grew up in a multicultural household where we ate with forks and spoons and fingers and hands. Where we spoke both languages, Chinese and Cambodian and we visited our family members of all the different cultures. So I loved the internationalism of our stories, of our human stories. And that was what I wanted to write about. The Khmer Rouge, the communist Khmer Rouge took power in my country from April 17th, 1975.

Loung Ung (00:03:57):
And then they were pushed out of power when the Vietnamese troops invaded 1979...January 7th, 1979. So in a span of three years, eight months, and 20 days, an estimated 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians perished from starvation, disease, hard labor, and execution. That is what we read about when we read world news. And if it's written about at all nowadays, it's maybe a paragraph in the tiny little or sentences, a few sentences in the world news sections. But what I wanted to do, the story I wanted to tell was a story of love. And my degree is in Political Science. So I actually did not grow up thinking I was going write, cause English is not my first language. I grew up believing and achieving my dream of becoming a human rights activist and working on campaigns to ban use of child soldiers, to help women who are suffering from abuse and violence,

Loung Ung (00:04:53):
And then as a spokespersons for the campaign to ban landmines, to eradicate landmines from our world. I decided I needed and had to write my story on April 15th, 1998. When I woke up to the news that the Khmer Rouge leader, a man by the war name of Pol Pot. His Cambodian name was Saloth Sâr, but his nom de guerre was Pol Pot. I woke up to the news that he had died. And on that day, many, many of the press around the world replayed his last interview that he gave. And in this interview, I'm paraphrasing his voice because I do not believe in giving him any more words than he already took from us. He basically said what he did in Cambodia, he did for love. And I became so enraged and so angry and so full of hate and hurt that if I could have had the power to hurt this man, I would've.

Loung Ung (00:05:48):
But I didn't. So I knew that I want to negate his legacy of love by telling my own. FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER is a story of love between a mother and a child, fathers and daughters and sons...histories and nations and culture and language and food and dreams and imaginations and Buddhism. And so it was all the stories of love that I could put into a book of a hundred thousand words that still exists, that still was there even in the midst and the darkest of times and war, even when I didn't realize the love was there. Even when I couldn't see the love and didn't believe in love, it was always there. And I sent it out to 25 publishers, received 24 rejections and it came out and it was an international bestseller. So, I'm telling you, if you write about love, people will respond no matter where your love story exists in the world or in the places and spaces, people do respond to love stories. So that is, FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:06:52):
Thank you so much. That was, gosh, I feel like we could just pack it up and go home. That was amazing. But, but thank you. And it's such a powerful story. So if you haven't read the book already, I highly recommend it. But why don't we watch the trailer for the film? It's just a few minutes long. It will take me just a moment to get it set up over there and then we will watch it.

Loung Ung (00:07:11):
It's only two minutes long and I had to learn how to write a screenplay. Writing is such an amazing thing, isn't it? It is such an amazing thing. I just find new things to fall in love with writing everyday and I work hard to learn how to write. But screenplay was a different type of writing.

Loung Ung (00:07:46):
The movie is filmed entirely in Cambodia. We spent four months there. I was there every day, pretty much every day on the sets. And it's also filmed with all Cambodian cast and in the Khmer language. So I worked on the subtitles as well. I had to learn a lot. But part of the story, I think we might get into that, it was, I've written a few books and so, FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER was, tells my story of what it took to survive wars. And that's what I wanted to share with people, that when we talk about surviving any kind of traumas, often we only hear the beginning and then the end. But it's really the journey through the middles that is the most humane and full of humanities that I wanted to tell. So the story it took, the courage, the lies, the strategies, the calculations, the breath work that it takes to survive a war.

Loung Ung (00:08:36):
In LUCKY CHILD, actually I was able to reunite with my sister that I was separated from when I was 10 and she was 12 when we left Cambodia. And I didn't meet her again until she was 27 and I was 25. And so it tells the story of two sisters who experienced what it took to survive the peace long after the war has been over. Long after the journalists, the presidents, the press tell you that your war is over and why is it not over? Whether you are on the ground living still in the country or you've left it and now the war is in the sky, in the low flying planes, in the hums of a mother's songs. Why are you not over it? And so that was my attempt to answer the "why aren't you" question, which drove me nuts. But my story also is that in that war I lost both my parents, two sisters and 20 other relatives. And so I had to walk a long journey to be here and I'm so grateful to be here in this beautiful Cleveland in this room with all of you.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:09:34):
Yes, I read that you said FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER was about surviving the war. And LUCKY CHILD was in a way about surviving peace and coming into your new life, which I think is really beautiful. I have so many questions. You all are lucky that Lit Cleveland will make this end at five because we could be here for three hours, but we won't do that to any of you, especially not you in this warm room. But you know, this is such a powerful story and I think here at the Inkubator, you came to writing and to sharing these stories through your activism. It, it seems you didn't wake up one day and say, I want to become a bestselling memoir writer. Like you were doing this through your activism. But I would love to hear the story of how you came to writing and how you came to write FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER. You came to the U.S. In 1980, you graduated from high school and college and you were working. Can you tell us about your beginnings of writing? What prompted you to start writing your story and in what early forms did that take?

Loung Ung (00:10:33):
You know, I don't know if there was a one specific thing that prompted me to write or told me what it was that I wanted to do. I knew only that I love words. I love books. I love books so much. I love reading books, all types of books. And I love reading articles. I love reading a good story that's well crafted, that's told with passion, that has viewpoint. I love learning and the best way for me to learn of the world, it's through books and words and articles and some people do it through video games or sports, but for me it just, through the written words. Other people kind of measure their lives by specific things that they grew up or learned about. I measure it by the books that made the most impact in my life at a specific point. Starting with, you know, "Frog Went a-Courting", when I first came to America, with the "Twelve Dancing Princesses" and then IVANHOE by Sir Walter Scott and oh, I cannot believe he chose the boring blonde Princess Rowena over the warrior Rebecca.

Loung Ung (00:11:35):
And that taught me a lot about about love and who I was not going to be. I grew up just reading a lot of books and it really wasn't until I became an activist working in Washington DC, working in domestic violence shelter and then even at school, that I started writing stories of women who had gone through the harm and pain in their relationships. My work at the domestic violence shelter was as the community educator. So it was my job in 1993, just a few years out of college, to go out and train police officers, doctors, lawyers, judges about the domestic violence laws and how to be compliance of. And I just never felt that I could tell the women's stories in order to share their experiences, but I needed to. So I learned to really listen. I learned to listen intensely. I learned to really be open and be aware and be conscious. And I think that sort of set the groundwork of what I wanted to do in terms of writing. But still I was writing other people's stories. And it wasn't until that day, April 15th, 1998 when I woke up and I just knew I needed to write my own stories.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:12:51):
I'm also curious about the voice of FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER. In an interview you said, "I tried to channel the physical feelings and emotions of the child who had lost her voice. Become dumb, deaf, mute and blind to survive. It was very empowering to write this book and relive my childhood after having gained the vocabulary to express many of the things that had long been imploding inside me." And I love that quote. And also the book is written in first person present tense, which gives it such an immediacy. Can you tell us about that? About finding the voice of the book?

Loung Ung (00:13:24):
The book is written in the first person present tense from the POV of a child's voice. So a 5-year-old child, which was the age I was when the soldiers stormed into my country. I really had no idea what I was doing. I just, I read so many books that I had an understanding of story and storytelling and a feel for it. I'm still very insecure of myself as a writer, but I'm a really good reader because you, you can learn how to put sentences together but you can only get from reading that sense of pacing and content and musicality and sort the magic of storytelling in words. With that said, I didn't know which voice to write it in, so I actually wrote the story in three different voices, three chapters. Just writing a book proposal took me longer than to write the book itself <laugh>, as you know right, <laugh> it is...Yeah, yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:14:15):
Proposals are tough.

Loung Ung (00:14:16):
Proposals are so tough, and I actually wrote the story from an adult point of view's looking back and then I wrote, you know, with wisdom and what I learned and what I've seen where I've been. And then I wrote it from an activist voice just really screaming out the anger and why didn't you know and why didn't you do anything and how could you not? And this is the politics. And then I wrote it in the child's voice and that just felt the most authentic and it just also was a story that was my experience. And I landed on that because I realized that, you know, even as a human rights activist, we only have so much power in this world. We do not have the power to make anybody change anything, especially their minds and their hearts. But if through our words and their stories we can vibrate their heartstrings enough so that it vibrates to a place where they're reminded of their compassion and their love and their care of the world, maybe we can alter and create goodwill. And what better voice to tell the story in to create and vibrate the heartstrings of humans than it is through the child's voice?

Loung Ung (00:15:28):
An innocent child that I was. So I was very strategic landing on that because one, it was my authentic voice, but two, I was going to make people love...love the world and I know everybody loves kids. Most everybody, especially if they're not crying all the time, you know, if they're five years old, like I was cute enough to know that I could manipulate my fathers with some clever words, but also curious enough about the world that I wanted to know everything. And that's how I landed on that voice.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:16:00):
And we'll talk about the film in a few minutes, but that child's voice, I think the perspective comes through in the film in a beautiful way as well. It's so fascinating to me because in many ways it's a very external story of war, but it's also very internal. And to see how it was translated from your book into a film of going through in the child's perspective, I think was was such an accomplishment. And so I know a lot of nonfiction writers, memoir writers will often write from a child's point of view. And if so, I think you have to read this book if you haven't already because it's a masterclass I think in how to access that in an authentic way.

Loung Ung (00:16:35):
As an activist also in that, for me, seeking to create change and working in the field of warfare and technology and all the various different campaigns, children are often the first victims of any kind of wars and conflicts. Whether it's in our communities, in our cities, at our school, children are often the most vulnerable and they're often the most invisible and are the most voiceless. And so I wanted to give the child that I was that didn't have a voice, her voice back.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:17:06):
Well I'm also curious about writing in a non-native language. So when you started writing FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER. It's not that you were new to English, you had come here and learned in school and went through college and you know, you were out in the world, you knew English for a while, but it wasn't your first language. You have a great quote, "Until I came to America, I thought my language, a mixture of Cambodian, Chinese, and French was special. And whenever I was stuck on a word, all I had to do was reach into my brain and pick out another in a different tongue." Which is so interesting. So already knowing multiple languages and then you learn English and you're writing in not your first language. Can you tell us what that was like? How was your experience of learning English and what was it like to write in this language?

Loung Ung (00:17:49):
English is a very difficult language to learn. Very difficult. I didn't learn it until I was 10. So before the age of 10 didn't speak English at all. And for me, just growing up in Southeast Asian culture, speaking Chinese and Cambodian, my first two languages do not have the same, the same grammar rules. We also don't have past and present. So we don't have past and present tenses and we don't have plurals and articles. And so often when you're trying to make sense of language, you think of it is really being redundant, especially in English. So if an example, if I was to go to a store and I buy three apples, I'm already prefacing it and letting you know I'm going to buy three apples. Why do I need to add in "s". I've already given you a number or multiple or single and, and then if I'm telling you I will go there tomorrow, why couldn't I just say I go tomorrow?

Loung Ung (00:18:44):
Why do I need to say will or went or making all the different tenses? Because that just redundant. So coming from that background, when I wrote, I learned to be very efficient with my words because my brothers and sister who also sister-in-law and a lot of the immigrants that, and refugees that I grew up with, they didn't speak English. And because I was young I picked it up so fast so I had to interpret for them, you know, I had to go to the PTAs with my brother and for my nieces, I had to interpret what the doctor said and what the grocer said. And so I had to learn to be very efficient and concise with my words. And it's actually really lovely. It's amazing. I know I'm talking a lot, but when I write I actually try to say much less.

Loung Ung (00:19:29):
I don't have the same kind of control when I speak, but I love having that control over words. And also just colors and the soul of a language. It's not just what the language means but it's also how it weighs in your ears and how it rolls up your tongue. And when you write characters...when I was writing in Cambodia, when I went back I actually went to Cambodia seven times before I start writing the book. I interviewed my brothers and sisters, my grandmother who was still alive at that time, my mother was best friend. And then I noticed that here we move so fast that our words are clip and shortened similar to the way we move through space. In Asia, you fully land onto your feet and then your healed push you off and then your toes connect on the earth before you kind of fly and then take that next step.

Loung Ung (00:20:26):
And so our words feels a little bit more like it is more connecting to the earth. And we're Theravada Buddhist as well. So our gods and goddesses are based on land and waters. So do you see what writings can do? What words can do? Really it'll take you to all these different spaces and places. I really love being able to interpret and translate. And also you are taking someone else's words from Chinese or Cambodian by taking the spoken words and putting on paper. You're already flattening it. It went from 3D to 2Ds to 1D. And so the work of a writer is to how do we now, I kind of like when I as a kid take the straw and you scrunch it all up and then you put a drop of water in the straw and he pokes it all back out like a worm. That's what we need to do with writing and with our craft and our skills is take the stories that we're going to flatten but to do it in a way where they poof back out and is full and and comes alive.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:21:22):
So writers, make worms. That's what we're here for <laugh>. Well you mentioned grammar and you know the difficulties of learning a different kind of grammar and there is a story you tell I think in LUCKY CHILD about an English teacher giving you an A+++ on one of your essays even though he said the grammar was not correct and that sometimes content he wanted you to know can be more important than grammar. Is there anything else you'd like to share about that? About overcoming maybe concerns about grammar or learning it And kind of that intersection between the content and heart of a story and the technical part of it?

Loung Ung (00:21:58):
For so many refugees and immigrants, when we come to school we learn and try to learn as much as we can, proper grammar rules. But the minute we leave school and we go back home, we had to break it all up again so we can speak to our family members and our community members and loved ones. And for us it's not a broken language, it's not broken English. I know exactly what they meant to say when they say I go tomorrow. And so that's how I hear in that language and that's how I will interpret it. Literal translations for them, it's tough. The U.S. Grammar rule, it's still tough right now and I've done three books and two screenplays and I still don't know if I get it right, which is why editing is great. Writing is rewriting. And Mr. Severance was my high school teacher and I came to the U.S. And for the first few years people didn't know I could speak.

Loung Ung (00:22:54):
And I didn't speak because I couldn't speak. I learned how to read and write within the first year. But conversational English, conversational, anything, whether when you're learning another language takes so much more time. And so I just didn't speak. When I dare to write my story for an English class and was the first time I told my story...Actually I told it to a girl when I was 11 after a holiday break and she asked me what I did and she told me her stories of her grandmother and aunts and uncles and all the gifts she got and she asked me about mine and I said, and I'm here with my brother and my sister-in-law and both my parents were dead. And, and it's still, it's so hard now 40 years later, to see the face of the little girl who looked at me and said, uh huh, I don't believe you.

Loung Ung (00:23:48):
I mean it hurts me to this day because you know, for the little girl that I was. But also that how I questioned how I was viewed. Was I viewed as somebody so broken, was such a misfit that didn't belong to a point where people thought that you would make up a story about your parents being dead. Like who does that? And what do you think of somebody who actually do something like that? So it made me really devalue myself and it started me questioning how people looked at me. And then of course I turned around and started fighting <laugh>. Some girl called me a pain in the neck and wouldn't tell me what that meant. So I grabbed her by the neck and punched her in the neck.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:24:34):
Right, that's in the book: "Is this what a pain in the neck is?"

Loung Ung (00:24:37):
You know, she never called me that again. We do not promote violence. We do not promote violence at all! But I did not under, I did not speak English at the time. So learn your words, people learn your words, use your words.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:24:51):
That was I think in LUCKY CHILD, just hearing the idioms and these expressions that of course you wouldn't know. How would you know? Like thinking it's bucket instead of book it, we have to book it to class and you thought bucket because bucks as animals are very fast. I'm like oh that makes a lot more sense.

Loung Ung (00:25:07):
I still do not know why it's book it. Yeah, well I grew up in Vermont and so I mean we got deer's and bucks and I thought it was always buck it like the the male deer, you know, you buck it everywhere.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:25:21):
So speaking of telling your story and you know as an adult writing this first memoir, a lot of people writing memoir often talk to me about how they feel worried about their family members reading it or how the world will respond to it. And in FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER, you wrote, "In our culture it is enough that the oldest child relates the family story. Children are not asked for opinions, feelings or what they individually endure. For a long time I needed to hold onto the memories because they made me angry. Now however, in closing the memories in my heart and mind is unendurable," which I think is really powerful. But how did you feel about, you know, with your siblings, with your family members in terms of sharing your story with the world? Were you worried about anything or were you just

Loung Ung (00:26:05):
I was that just because we left 8,000 miles in Cambodia behind did not mean that we left our culture. So I was raised by my brother who was 21 and his wife was 22 and I was 10. And having lost both our parents, he was going to be my mom and dad and raised them in a way he thought that was befitting of a respectful traditional culture. And I was the youngest child at that point. So telling my story meant that I was taking that power from him and I was fearful of that, that it was going to be seen as that. And also I was raised in a culture where girls were seldom heard and rarely seen. And the things that we go through were kept silent. We didn't want people to judge us, we didn't want to be seen as broken. We wanted to be seen as strong and American citizen and contributing to our new home and we did not want to be seen as a burden.

Loung Ung (00:27:06):
And I thought my story was going to tell people all those things about me. And I was really concerned what my brothers, I thought they were going to feel that way as well because we were really, we came to the U.S. And we were the model citizens. We worked hard, we got off welfare after two months. And then he worked night jobs graveyard shift and then second shifts and third shifts. And while he was working I was babysitting his two daughters. And so we were really good and, and here I was going to tell our full story. I actually, I asked my brother's permission here in America and he said, okay, I get it. I know what you're trying to do. And then I translated the book into Khmer and I took a copy of it to give it to my brothers and to brothers and sister in Cambodia and gave them full veto power and said even to them that should they not want me to publish it, I would just tear up the contract and not do it.

Loung Ung (00:28:04):
But I had printed the UN Decorations of Human Rights and took that to Cambodia with me. I had learned about genocide and the Holocaust. A little bit of what I could absorb to explain to them that we were not alone. That within the last century over 120, 160 million people have died in some kind of state sponsors wars. Not counting the millions more to people who have been harmed and hurt in domestic wars happening in their homes and in their cities and their schools. That that our story is not alone. That we are 5 or 5 million survivors of the Khmer's genocide. That there were millions of people around the world who have gone through what we'd gone through and that we needed to tell this story to honor that. And before it got to my whole spiel and I got to do any of my whole spiel, my sister looked at it and said, you know, just do it. And she said, we get it. And it dawned on me then that no matter the language or the understanding of international laws or the understanding or knowing of the existence of the genocide laws, that a human knows when a human has been harmed. A person know when their rights have been abused and violated. And they didn't need the UN International Declarations of Human Rights to understand this. And it really reaffirmed me the reasons that I wanted to do this.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:29:35):
That's something I often hear from memoirists as well, that they're so nervous about the family reaction and often like you did if they share their work with their family before publication. Of course I can't speak for all cases, but it does seem people do ultimately seem to understand why it would matter. So can you tell us about that publishing process? You mentioned earlier it went out to 25 publishers was rejected by 24, which is extremely common, and writers that just shows you only need one yes in order to have a huge bestseller. Can you tell us what it was like going through the publishing process and what it felt like to see your book out in the world and what kind of reaction it got? How did you feel about all that?

Loung Ung (00:30:15):
It was really crazy. It was so crazy because until then I've never even published an article. I wrote stories but never really got anything published in any official magazines or newspaper. And so I wrote, spent a year and a half writing my book. I was working as a spokesperson for the campaign for a landmine free world in Washington DC. So I worked during the day, travel a lot for my work. And then over the weekends and evenings and night I wrote my book. And I did research and I travel and I remember after a year and a half I finished it and I came out of my office and I walked by and I saw people sitting at tables drinking wines and beers and having dinners. And it just looked so strange to me. And I realized, wow, this is what evenings looks like. I hadn't seen one in a year and a half and that I thought was a high, like I get my evenings back. And then the publishing process, I was so, so lucky because I was very good at my work and I knew that if my work didn't work out, I was also a pretty good burger flipper at Wendy's.

Loung Ung (00:31:33):
You know, work is great. I loved my work in Maine, I love my work in Washington DC, I was fulfilled there. So I could say that, and I say this to young people all the time, you need to have something else you love so that you could go to a publisher like I did and say you publish it as is or you don't have to. Because I've worked too hard to take back my story, to take back my voice, to heal my heart, to be with reunited with my siblings, for my story to be changed by a group of people or committee members who do not know me. And then it, when it came out, you know, they send you a box of 25 free books when you publish your book. So that was really great and I prayed for 10 people to pick it up and it came out then USA Today put it on the front page and New York Times did a really great review of it...all surprising to me. And then it was number 9 on Amazon. I remember walking in, getting into onto the Metro and watching people on the Metro reading USA Today and there's a picture of my book and yeah, so it was fun. Yeah, that was, that was fun.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:32:41):
I love to hear these kinds of behind the scenes things because I think it is important for writers to know if you go with a big publisher and a lot of writers want to get the big five house, you know, publishing deal, it does in a way your book becomes a product and you're entering into a capitalistic situation where they do want to make money on your book even if it's a very personal story.

Loung Ung (00:33:02):
And also that for me, you have to be so conscious of what you put out, especially when you're putting out your story, your family stories and I, not only for me, not just my family story, but I view it as sort of the stories of many other Cambodians. Not the same, but it's the essence of what happened to us. And so I felt great responsibility of wanting to honor and wanting to protect. For me, again, this is writing toward activism. So I was an activist before I was a writer, so I was very aware of the kind of messages that I wanted to put out as an activist. And it's true, I loved the people I worked with at Harper Collins and still consider many of them friends still keep in touch with them and next year will be the 25th anniversary of FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER. So it's still being taught at different schools and universities and colleges and Harper Collins. So very supportive. So I'm, I'm very, very thankful for that.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:33:56):
Well, let's talk briefly about the film version. Let's take it back to the beginning. So Angelina Jolie directed it and helped produce the movie. How did you first get to know her? How did this relationship start and how did this all get set into motion?

Loung Ung (00:34:11):
Yeah, well FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER came out in 2000 and I believe around 2000, Angelina was in Cambodia filming a movie called Tomb Raiders. And how it was told to me by her, she picked up a copy of the book from a street vendor child. And you know, when you have a book out and especially if you're from another country, your work would just be pirated and it sold everywhere. And they were some of my best salespeople. They also sell my book for very, very, very cheap. So Angie owes me $5 in royalty <laugh>. When she came back to the U.S. after her movie, she called my office up and this is a true story, I was working in DC and she called and it was probably seven or eight o'clock and I don't normally pick up the office line, but I picked it up and there was this voice asking for Loung Ung. And I said, well not sure she's here, but can I ask who's calling <laugh>?

Loung Ung (00:35:07):
And then she said her name and then I remember, because you know I don't play video games, never heard of Tomb Raiders, but I knew of her work and her starting to become a Goodwill Ambassador for refugees. So that's how I knew of her. And then I put her on hold, gave it a good couple seconds, 30 seconds, came back on the phone and said, oh hi, this is Loung <laugh>. Changing my voice. Changing my voice. And we've been friends for 25 years. We have supported each other in our work and we have been there for each other. And I've known all her kids since before they came into the world. And when she...2016, really her son Maddox, who was Cambodian, adopted from Cambodia and I've known him since he was seven months old. And she was the first person he kissed. I was the second person he kissed on the lips. You know, and he just wanted to know more about his country. Ah, as an Auntie. Man that just gives me chills still. But he was a teenager who wanted to know more. And so the three of us got together and just decided we're going to make this movie. Thankfully one of us is Angelina Jolie <laugh>. So who could make it happen and who directed it. But she and I co-wrote the screenplay and...

Laura Maylene Walter (00:36:30):
Yeah, tell us about that. Was this the first script you had worked on? What was it like adapting your book into a screenplay?

Loung Ung (00:36:36):
I did not go to school to learn to write. I just read. I wish I could have gone to school to learn. When Angie said, you know, we should, we should just, we're going to do it. And I said, ahhh. She said, we are going to write the screenplay together. So I went to Robert McKees. Robert McKees is a famous screenplay writer out of Hollywood and he teaches these three day screenwriting intensive seminars in New York City. So I actually signed up and went and took three days worth of learning to write screenplays. It was fabulous. And one of the class we sat and we dissected Casablanca for four hours. It was fascinating, just see it scene by scene, how they write, what the screenwriter was saying, what the directors did. I learned so much. Thankfully I had the word document, this was back even before internet was a thing.

Loung Ung (00:37:28):
And I had the word document on my drive, PC. I put it on a flash drive, sent that to Angelina and then she did the first draft of it because she was going to direct it and I wanted to support her vision of what it was going to be. And we had talked a lot already about how we wanted to tell the story. She loved the book, she loves me, and we love her kids. And so, and we love my family. She's met my family many times and so we all kind of knew that we wanted to follow the story and the child's voice. So she did the first draft and then we went back and forth 8, 10 drafts and I went to her house for three days and we just did line by line. It was quite intensive, but it was really lovely and it was a privilege and I was so fortunate to do this with somebody I care about.

Loung Ung (00:38:16):
Somebody whose track records as a human woman, as a mother, as an activist, as a humanitarian, and just as a fun lovely lady to spend time with. That I get to do it with this person. And somebody who cares so much about the world because again, it was one of those things. I actually, she was not the first person who wanted to option the book. I had other producers when the book came out wanting to option it and I actually said no, unless it was done with the right person, I just didn't need to do it.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:38:44):
Right. The film is beautiful and I can imagine in the wrong hands, just like worrying about the publishers changing your story. You don't want that to happen for the film. Tell us about the filming process. I know it was four months in Cambodia, I think up to 20,000 Cambodians were involved in the process from extras to crew to actors. Were you there for the whole four months? What was filming? Like, what can you tell us about that?

Loung Ung (00:39:06):
I was there for the whole four months and it was amazing because Angelina being Angelina, she had her own compound and all her six kids came. And so I had a place near them so I could be with the family. And then I also had another place near the cast kids and the Cambodian crew so that I could spend half my time there. And then on the weekends we all kind of have pool parties and have fun together. So it was an amazing experience to be there. I've made over 45 trips plus back to Cambodia and continue to this day support the Veterans International group in Cambodia where they manufacture prosthetic arms, and legs, and wheelchairs, and other orthotic devices to support victims, wars and victims of landmines. So I, I have continued to go back, but to be there for four months and to be immersed in my creativities...Because as an activist and as a woman, as a busy person, often when you're trying to be creative you are stealing an hour here, two hours there and it always just doesn't feel enough.

Loung Ung (00:40:15):
So to be there to have that for four months, to be able to speak both languages fluently and also to just be connecting with 20,000 people, we had 20,000 people who worked on the film, 20,000 people we shot in 14 different locations. And to work with a woman who believed in the same things I did, which is we not only had and and had a huge Lego tents, with all the Legos that the kids could play with. We had we also had therapists on set. We also had Buddhist monks on set. We also brought Buddhist monks into every single location to bless the land before we film it. And then we had huge giant arn and piles of incense sticks so that anytime anybody felt like they needs just they need to reconnect and to heal, they could just stop and go and burn incense sticks.

Loung Ung (00:41:14):
And then we went to this different location after we've shot in a location, we make a donation of whatever it is that the community needs. And it, one of the location that we shot, which was near a women's hospital, they needed an ultrasound machine. And so we were able to, well we meaning we had people. I just like listen and tell their stories. She doesn't speak Khmer. So I was the one who was interpreting, I'm like, Angie, we need this. She tells people and somehow one way or another they got an ultrasound machine and installed it in this tiny little village in the middle of nowhere in rural Cambodia countryside. We weren't just making the film, we were really making it well...spiritually, emotionally, historically. And it was such a fully alive experience. And so that when it was painful we were there for each other. It was a way forward.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:42:06):
I love that such care was taken. Because it is a difficult film. I mean, and for the children especially to be acting these things out. It's good to hear, thinking back of my experience of watching the film, to know that offscreen there was a Lego tent makes me happy <laugh>. And also you had a brief cameo at the end, is that right? What was that like?

Loung Ung (00:42:26):
That was fun. That was fun. My surviving siblings all got to be on the film set and you know, hair and makeup and food and they were above the line people for that day and on a film set, they're the below the line people and then they were the above the line. It was really amazing in that our original scene of ending of the film how Angelina and I wrote it was going to be my five surviving siblings...behind us was going be the beautiful Angkor Wat, which is the biggest religious complex in the world in Cambodia and beautiful temples. So the five surviving siblings were going to walk into frame and then our spouses would join us and then all the survivors and our descendants and descendants of my parents would show up and it would be just a hundred of us. And it was so lovely. And then my husband, who's born and raised in from Shaker Heights, in Beachwood who's also 6'2" and white, we did the scene we're like, oh man, <laugh>, oh, so sorry. I'm like, ah man, art life. Oh no. You know? But it was, so we actually had to nix that.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:43:41):
As a tall person, I feel the pain.

Loung Ung (00:43:43):
<Laugh>, you know, just like, and and it's, you know, and it's not like we had any other white people. He was just it, you know. And and also my whole family, we are all 5'0" to 5'3" at our tallest, so we didn't have a tall person so he wasn't just white, but he was a tall white guy. So then we decided to do a praying sessions with just the five siblings. Yeah.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:44:07):
Which is gorgeous. It worked.

Loung Ung (00:44:08):
It was really beautiful. It was so much fun.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:44:11):
In the interest of carrying on with time, because we'll get to audience questions in a few minutes, but I have so many more questions left. But let's see. After the success of FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER, you went on to write two more memoirs. Can you talk about that process? You had already had this success behind you. Did you always plan on writing additional memoirs? What was it like for you from a writing standpoint but also a psychological standpoint of working on new books with the success behind you? Did that help you, did that make it more difficult? Did it not change it at all?

Loung Ung (00:44:41):
It was, I again, after I wrote for FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER, which was very re-traumatizing and re-triggering for me because I am the type of person who didn't know how to take good care of myself, especially when I was young and I wrote it when I was 30. And now that I'm in my, you know, and I'm over fifty, I'm much better. And I say this because I want, when you write, I view writing as a journey into the deep dark waters. And when you go deep water diving, you go with a lifeline, you've got that lifeline, the rope or the steel thing that you hold. And at every section however deep you go, 50 meters, 10 meters, you stop and you equalize and you check in with your body, you check in with your mind, you check in with your heart and then if you okay, you go to the next level.

Loung Ung (00:45:30):
I didn't do that for myself. And so I taped my walls of photos of the genocide and people who were killed. So my, my walls in my room looked like a mass grave and I wanted to be that way. And when I was writing about hunger, I actually starved and I stopped eating for a weekend because I wanted to see how my body react. Some people can do that. But I went through four years of starvation and when I'm hungry, I think I'm dying. When I'm hungry I hyperventilate. And that was a trauma and thank God I have good friends who came in and checked in on me because there were times when I was crawling up in fetal positions. So if you're going to go deep water diving, please take care of yourself, please make sure you have a lifeline, please make sure you have a friend line, a light line, a laugh line of people who will check in on you and who'll give you that helping hand or help you pull that rope back to the surface.

Loung Ung (00:46:30):
I learned that to write my second book and third book. And with that said, I really finished one book and I was like, I was done. I went back to my life. I love my work, I love my work as an activist. And then President George Bush landed his plane on USS Lincoln to speak about the Gulf War being over. And there was a huge sign behind him that said "mission accomplished". Remember mission accomplished. And it was in that moment that I again just knew I had to write a story of what it took to survive the peace. Long after the presidents tell you mission accomplish, if you were a person who went through it, the war still exists and will come back to you every single 4th of July, when the fireworks explode overhead, the war is there with the soldiers. And so LUCKY CHILD was really a story about what it took to survive the peace when the world tells you it is over.

Loung Ung (00:47:33):
After I was done with that book, I was like again done. Ah, this writing thing is hard. My back hurts, my shoulder hurts. Ahh. And then I turned 42 and I woke up one day and I was just crying. I had no idea what the trauma was and where it was coming from. I had no idea. I worked, loved my father, I was a daddy's...papa's girl. And it dawned on me after much therapy and margaritas and happy hour, girlfriends, that I was unconsciously and unbeknownst to me, grieving the deaths of my mother who died when she was 42. You know, in my culture we speak to our ancestors and I was going through this questioning of who do I talk to now? That at this age now she will be forever the younger and I will be forever the older. And I spent my whole life since I was eight when she died, talking to the older, the elder, the wiser.

Loung Ung (00:48:35):
And also how am I going to keep the connection? Will we be able to stay connected? So then I went into this whole spin of trying to write my mother's story and I wrote LULU IN THE SKY and I wrote about my mother and my grandmothers and their experience and just through the whole, the power of women to birth and rebirth. So that was a really joyful, joyful experience. And I also, I want to share this also. We, when we write, especially when you write nonfiction, we not only have to protect ourselves and our families, we have to protect the future generations of their descendants and their loved ones. When I wrote FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER, I wrote the scene in here of how I imagine my parents might have died. What your eyes don't see your mind make up. And we have all as human people who are lived to be this age have gone through pain.

Loung Ung (00:49:27):
And you know what? Your eyes don't see what your head doesn't know, your mind makes up. So my mind has made up many, many scenarios of how my parents might have been killed or torture or massacre. So I wrote the scene that was the most haunted to me down. What I didn't imagine was that this would still exist 25 years later. And their grandchildren. And now it's published in Khmer. I raised money and had it published and translated and donated in Cambodia. My books in 15 different languages. Of the 14 different languages the publisher pay me. In Cambodia. I actually donate the rights of the book to a human rights group because I do not want to own my story in Cambodia. So if you want a copy of the Cambodian book, it's free. And my parents grandkids were reading their last moments of life and it was very painful to them.

Loung Ung (00:50:20):
And I did not realize I was doing them harm because that was all I left them with. So I got to redeem myself and to rewrite their stories in my last book. Where I painted a different scenario where even though I do not know what happened to their bodies, I can imagine that in their last moment of life maybe they were taken out of their body and their minds and spirits were together. And so I connected them together, I seated them next to each other, I put them in their most beautiful clothes, I put my lipstick on my mother's lips and rouge on her cheeks. I connected my father's and mother's hands. I painted a beautiful bonfire in front of them where they sat in their seats. I wrote and showed them how all their descendants and their kids and grandkids were dancing around a bonfire.

Loung Ung (00:51:12):
And we were happy and we were caring for each other and we were plump. And I made them see that. And then I brought in the doves to take them into the heavens. And I did it so well and I did it so vividly that to this day when I think back about their last day of life, the scene that haunted me for decades is no longer the most haunting scene. The other scene has imprinted in my heart and in my mind and it's made a much bigger impression. So now I can just straight away see the joy of what their spirit and where their hearts and mind might have been and why couldn't that be right? And it took me being at this age to believe in the heart and in the spirit of humanity to write that story that's been a gift to their descendants. So stories are not static. Our stories are not static. They change with readers and we have to protect our readers as well.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:52:11):
Yeah, that's such good advice. Because we often don't think about that as writers. We think about the now or I want to get something published now. But when you think about how it will exist years into the future, that's something to think about. It's really important. Well, let's quickly change topics a little bit. We've been talking about nonfiction and writing and activism, but you have been working on fiction lately. I want to hear about that. What can you tell us about what you're working on?

Loung Ung (00:52:36):
It's been almost five years. The pandemic slowed everybody, including myself. I have been working on a zombie vampire Buddhist mythology.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:52:46):
Oh my God. Amazing.

Loung Ung (00:52:47):
It's awesome.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:52:49):
So fun.

Loung Ung (00:52:49):
Oh my. I love zombies and vampires genres and I do not like the Twilight Series. They just, just not my thing. I wanted to write a story where the protagonist is imbued with power and gets to kick ass to rescue and to do all the things I wish I had the power to do when I was growing up. And ultimately it's a book about child soldiers. It's so much fun to do the research. And I have to say, this is the first time that I am having a really good time writing. I wouldn't say the last three books were that much fun.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:53:27):
Right. Understood.

Loung Ung (00:53:28):
Yeah. You know, but it's so much fun. Oh my God...

Loung Ung (00:53:34):
Just get weird with it, I'm assuming.

Loung Ung (00:53:36):
Yes, it's so much fun.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:53:38):
What kind of challenges have you encountered changing to fiction from nonfiction?

Loung Ung (00:53:43):
Well for one, when you're writing nonfiction, you're writing real people. So you, you know your story, you start at point A and you've got to get to point Z. And the path has already been laid before you, you know, or lived before you. So I, I knew the story and it's a matter of whether you choose this path or that path, but whichever path you choose that's already lived. It's already been lived. And with fiction...could live, it could come back to life to zombie vampire mythology. You could decapitate them many times and then they like, you know, get a drop of magical blood and then they come back. So that's really hard. Is justyou got to let some of the characters that you love, I actually, I mean, I wrote a scene where I cried over the death of this one character and then I made my husband cry at it. It was so cool. Not because he's used to crying over my writings, but to actually have him cry over a made up zombie character that doesn't exist. That for me has been hard. Because I, I have to be so much more disciplined. I'm allowing myself to have fun.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:54:47):
I think when writers have fun on the page, it's so clear to the reader and it makes it so enjoyable. And it is the joy of being able to create whatever you want in fiction. But then you have to make those choices, right? Because then it's sort of like everything is open to you.

Loung Ung (00:55:00):
It's like menopause. Eventually it will come to an end. Correct, ladies <laugh>, right? Eventually I will learn what this, you know, hot flash, night flash, all this. But right now I'm just experiencing it and I'm just trying to just enjoy the fact that I'm a woman and that my body's changing. But eventually I'm going to have to give it some discipline. <Laugh>.

Laura Maylene Walter (00:55:22):
Now I'm wishing this whole session was about, you know, connecting, writing to menopause. I'm sure there's many lessons that we could have. Okay, well, so we don't run out time. Let's go to some audience questions. I may repeat your question into my microphone just so we capture it for the podcast in the future. But who would like to ask the first question? Yes. Yes. Excellent question about how to find the courage to get started as an activist. What advice would you have for people?

Loung Ung (00:55:50):
Well, thank you so much for that question. I have never thought about as courage as much as fight. I was just a really angry child. I was a really, when I first came to the U.S. I was just a really angry child. Some people suffered trauma and they curled inward into themselves. I went through trauma and I just wanted to just scream and kick and force people to see because I felt so invisible and powerless. I started in high school joining all the various different school groups and then I went on to college and I started and joined all the various different programs. The student government, the Hunger Program, the Martin Luther King Jr. Society. And because I grew up in Vermont, it was a very, there weren't many other Asians or any other groups of people. And you know, I am so grateful when I was reading in high school about the four Kent students.

Loung Ung (00:56:50):
It gives me chills...about the student activists who stood up when we in Cambodia couldn't. And the students all of the world who stood up, rose up, spoke up when we couldn't. And so all the years, all my anger against the people who I thought didn't do anything, there were people who did something and four young people paid for it with their lives. And so many other people stood up. And it matters. It matters. It may not change this world called Earth, but the life you alter, you may never meet, you may never see, you may not ever exist. But somewhere along the lines, somebody's life will be altered if we choose to do the right thing. And I believe that so, so strongly because if I hadn't been given that helping hand, I wouldn't be here. We came to America because Marty Lucente, our sponsor, who is a parishioner at the Holy Family Church in Essex Junction, Vermont.

Loung Ung (00:57:53):
He's no, he no longer lives in Vermont. So his privacy is protected. Marty was an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War in the seventies. And he had felt bad about the U.S. Involvement in Vietnam. And then he came back home and was living his life, his good life with his wife and his three sons, and saw a news story about the Khmer Rouge defeat on TV and saw the stories of the people who'd been harmed. And then the 2 million people dead and knew he wanted to help. He wanted to help. So Marty went to his pastor and said that he wanted to help. And the pastor said, well, Sunday's coming up. Why don't you stand in front of the parishioners and see if someone else will help you sponsor a family to Vermont. And when he told the to me and this strong man, he was in tears.

Loung Ung (00:58:51):
And he said it was the easiest pitch he ever had to do because more hands went up before he even finished. So we weren't just sponsored by Marty, we were sponsored by the whole parishioner. And this is why I am here where I am today. Other people are sponsored, it's refugees by maybe a family members or a community member or a family. It's not enough. You need a village to raise a village and you need a village to raise a traumatized family and child. And so Marty showed up and brought us over and we all, all the parishioners: Linda and Sheila and Marty and Candy and Jimmy, and they all showed up and we came to the airport and I continued to see them for decades on because they would show up for Thanksgiving, they would show up for Halloween, they would show up on the first day of school, they would show up, you know, to take us to the grocery store. When my brother was trying to walk out without paying for the Burlington Free Press, because it said the Burlington Free Press...they paid for the Burlington Free Press.

Loung Ung (01:00:05):
So I am so grateful to all these people. And you know, activism, that's about it. Peace is not a wish. Peace is not a dream. Peace is not something we expect others to deliver it, whether it's in our heart, in our home, and community. Peace is an action or rather many, many, many, many actions. And so we need to, we need to teach it to our kids. When we tell them be kind we need to be more specific. What actions, the act of being kind means. And in a world where we are telling stories, following the slogans of if it bleeds, it leads, we need to change that narrative. All our stories pretty much told by press. And pretty much all of us follow the slogan of if it bleeds, it leads. We need to change this narrative that we want to create and build peace to, If it's awesome, let it blossom. If it showcase humanity, share it with your friends and family. We need to change the narratives. It does not mean wars do not continue to be fought. It does not mean hearts will stop breaking. It's just mean we can actually work toward peace as well.

Laura Maylene Walter (01:01:18):
I think I saw another hand.

Audience Member (01:01:21):
You talked about working in Washington and I'm guessing writing is your full time career now, but before that I would guess that you had something else as your day job?

Loung Ung (01:01:32):
Oh, right now, yeah, it's not my day job. I was the community educator at a domestic violence shelter for three years. And then I came to Cleveland. I worked at Barnes and Nobles, I worked at bookstores, and I worked at the Ellen Inn Grill. That was my day job for a while, which Beachwood Place.Turns out of the many things that you can do if you're dyslexic. Waiting table is not one of them <laugh>. Because when you are under stress, 42 and 24 looks exactly the same. And so I actually have mild dyslexia, especially when I'm stressed. Right now I write. But my husband and I are partners and co-owners of three restaurants and a micro brewery in Ohio City. If you've been to Market Garden Brewery, that's us. And my husband and I and Sam McNulty's and we started 17 years ago.

Loung Ung (01:02:27):
We start with Bier Market and Bar Cento, which we renovated during the pandemic. It is now called the Brightside. We own Nano Brew and up the street and then Market Garden Brewery Pub, which is right next to the West Side Market and Market Garden Brewery in the parking lot where we make beers, we cake bottles. You can pick our beers up at Heinen's, at Giant Eagle, at all the different restaurants, lots and lots and lots of different restaurants. We employ approximately 150-170 people. So we are paying taxes. So that is really a lot of my day job. Got to be creative, social media.

Laura Maylene Walter (01:03:08):
And I love Market Garden. I always think of that as the literary bar because for years when Brews and Prose, if anyone's been to that reading series, that's where it was held. And that was the best reading series.

Loung Ung (01:03:18):
It is. I really, I want to bring it back. I was trying to talk about, you know, with Dave and because beers and books are just...

Laura Maylene Walter (01:03:24):
They go together. They go together.

Loung Ung (01:03:26):
I have been to so many book readings where it just, this is like, ho hum. You know?

Laura Maylene Walter (01:03:31):
I should have brought a bunch of beer for everyone today. I am sorry. <Laugh> I think we have time for another question. Yes. Yeah. And I'll just quickly repeat that for the podcast. It was a really great question about finding peace within, especially if when you're writing on and immersed in all of these things from the past. What do you do while reliving it to maintain your own peace?

Loung Ung (01:03:53):
That's a really good question. And again, I am so blessed. I'm so blessed. I have a great group of friends who truly care about me as a human being. And they're decent, decent, good people for me. It's when it gets tough. I tell myself this, the heart is not only the most vital organ in the human body, it is also one of the strongest muscle in the human body. And for as many times as it breaks, it has the ability to heal and to grow stronger. If you give it support like anything else, if you are aware of it. So I know things will hurt. I know tears will flow. I think the hardest part growing up of trying to find peace and not finding it was because I was fighting so hard against the fear and the pain. I was so, didn't want to feel it, didn't want to experience it, didn't want to admit to it. And now I just realize it is just a part of all of us. So I learned to stop being afraid of pains and feelings. It is what it is. Sometimes I will cries. Sometimes when I do, snots will come out, sometimes it won't. But I've never been a pretty crier. I have always been <laugh>. My friend is one of the biggest movie star in the world. She's a beautiful crier. When she cries, it's like her eyes sparkles like two diamonds, her face blushes like...

Loung Ung (01:05:25):
Yeah. No <laugh>. No, but, but there are just, you know, there's just some people who are just good criers. And I think I'm a not a pretty crier because I fight crying so hard. Like it just, my whole body tenses up my muscle and my face, my eyes twitch. It just, but I'm not afraid of it. I will be fine. I have what I need and ultimately I don't know what else to do. This is the right thing to do. I'm not doing it because I think it makes me a better person or I think it's going to save anything, but it's the right thing to do it. Sometimes we just got to do what is the right thing to do. There's a book called HELP: THE ORIGINAL HUMAN DILEMMA that I really, really love and whose authors I really do not remember, but he's the pastor from Vermont and the title is called HELP: THE ORIGINAL HUMAN DILEMMA.

Loung Ung (01:06:19):
And the pastor took the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which when you are an activist, you want to learn how other people think. And working in the West, I wanted to learn how other people view, help respond to help and perceive help. You took the Parable, the Good Samaritan, there's a specific person you're trying to help. There's a finite time of what you do. You help the person take them to the end, and then you leave. And then you see the result of your help. When you doing human rights work, it can go on for decades and you may never meet the people you are helping or hoping to assist. And it may go on for decades, even after you are no longer here. So the one thing that you anger yourself through all this is that it is the right thing to do, no matter what else happen is the right thing to do.

Loung Ung (01:07:09):
And then you also, you learn skills. You learn skills. Resilience is not an innate thing. It's a skill we learn and cultivate and build. The way you learn to build your resilience is the same way you learn to build your muscles. It's the same way you learn to be an activist, learn to write grants, learn how to write speeches. You learn how to organize, you learn how hard you have to scream into the microphone, and you learn how to lead as well as how to walk beside somebody who else who's leading. Because it's not about you.

Laura Maylene Walter (01:07:42):
I think that is the perfect note to end on. So everyone, I hope you take what you heard today and go out and work on your writing and your activism and do the right thing. So Loung Ung, thank you so much for being here. Can we give her a round of applause please?

Laura Maylene Walter (01:08:08):
Page Count is presented by the Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review for Page Count, wherever you get your podcast. Learn more online or find a transcript of this episode at ohiocenterforthebook.org. Follow us on Instagram @ohiocenterforthebook or find us on Facebook. If you'd like to get in touch, email, ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org and put 'podcast' in the subject line podcast subject. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back in two weeks for another chapter of Page Count.

Lit Cleveland Volunteer (01:08:41):
When you were kids and you want to stay up later and your parents made you go to bed <laugh>. This is what I feel like now having to bring this section to a close. We would love to stay here for more hours.

Laura Maylene Walter (01:08:50):
I have two more pages of questions...

Lit Cleveland Volunteer (01:08:52):
With or without the beer, with or without the beer... As Laura said, one more time, please for Loung.

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