Speaking Topics:

First They Killed My Father: An Eyewitness Account of the Cambodian Genocide

Lucky Child: From Surviving the Killing Fields To Thriving in America

Loung Ung is an author, lecturer, and activist who has dedicated the last 15 years of her life to promoting equality, human rights, and justice in her native land and worldwide. Some two million Cambodians — out of a population of just seven million — died at the hands of the infamous Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. Of her family of nine, five survived.

Her memoir, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, (Harper Perennial) a national best-seller and winner of the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature (APAAL), details her survival of the killing fields of Cambodia, one of the bloodiest episodes of the twentieth century. First They Killed My Father has been published in 11 countries and has been translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, Cambodian, and Japanese.

Lucky Child, her second book, tells the story of her life in America where she arrived when she was 10 years old and the sister she left behind. Higlighting the harsh realities of chance and circumstance in times of war as well as in times of peace, Lucky Child is ultimately a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and to the salvaging strength of family bonds. It was published in 2005 to critical acclaim. Both works are widely used in high school, college and community reading programs.

Named one of the “100 Global Youth Leaders of Tomorrow” by The World Economic Forum, Ung has been the subject of an hour-long documentary for the German ARTE, Japanese NHK, and U.S. NECN. She has also been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, the London Sunday Times and in Biography. She has made appearances on National Public Radio’s The Diane Rehm Show, Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition, Fresh Air, Nightline, The Today Show, and other news programs on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and C-SPAN.

Ung has shared her messages of civic service, banning landmines, activism, and leadership at numerous symposia in the U.S. and internationally, including: the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), The Million Dollar Round Table Plenary, Linkage Inc, Crowe Chizek and Company LLP, SONY, Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and the Child Soldiers Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal, and many other organizations, schools, and corporate venues.

LOUNG UNG’S STORY

Born in 1970 to a middle-class family in Phnom Penh, Ung was only five years old when her family was forced out of the city in a mass evacuation to the countryside. By 1978, the Khmer Rouge had killed Loung’s parents and two of her siblings. In 1980, she and her older brother escaped by boat to Thailand, where they spent five months in a refugee camp. They then relocated to Vermont through sponsorship by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and Holy Family Church parish in Burlington.

In 1995, Ung returned to Cambodia for a memorial service for the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide. She was shocked and saddened to learn that 20 of her relatives had been killed, and thousands of the survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide were still being maimed, injured, and killed each year by an old threat: antipersonnel land-mines. She decided she needed to act. Ung became the National Spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World (the international version of the Campaign won the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize).

Her second book, Lucky Child was published by HarperCollins in April 2005 to critical acclaim. Both books are widely used in colleges and community reading programs.

Visit:
www.loungung.com

THE RESPONSE:

“Loung Ung is a rare and remarkable speaker. As a survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields, Loung takes her audience into a world of unspeakable suffering, heartbreaking loss, and unimaginable hardship. Yet, it is not these things that remain with you after you have heard her speak. What stays with you is Loung’s voice. A voice of strength, kindness, and most of all, of incandescent hope. A voice that boldly empowers us to put down whatever hardship we might have endured and forge ahead to create the world we all would like to see.”
— Gail Straub, co-founder and Executive Director, The Empowerment Institute

“The ‘All Johnson County Reads the Same Book’ planning committee selected Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father for its community read. It was an outstanding decision… The project culminated in a University of Iowa lecture in which Loung received a standing ovation from an audience of over 500 who were captured by the substance of the subject matter and her passion for social justice.”
— Chivy Sok, Deputy Director, University of Iowa, Center for Human Rights

“Loung Ung gives a face and voice to a topic that could otherwise be almost inaccessible due its great sadness and weight: the topic of war and genocide. Ms. Ung has the compassion and spirit necessary to connect with audiences that might otherwise be overwhelmed by the menace and malice of history. Her story, as tragic as it might be, fills the listener with a sense of hope, direction, and purpose. Whereas her subject matter is as difficult and challenging as it gets, Loung Ung’s presence is a straightforward testimony of human strength and the possibility of good rising from evil.”
— Dan Scheibe, Assistant Head of School, Middlesex School, MA

“It was a pleasure and an honor to host Loung Ung for the 2007 Amnesty International Lecture. Her presentation was truly inspirational, and it is admirable that she was able to reflect on such traumatic experiences in her own past in a way that effectively reached out to others from more safe and comfortable backgrounds. The slightest suggestion of preaching or guilt tripping and the effect would be lost but her able and disarming use of humor took the audience with her, no doubt surprised to find themselves sharing laughter along the way. Loung Ung’s life-affirming energy represents a triumph of the human spirit over adversity.”
— John Watson, Scottish Programme Director, Amnesty International

“Loung Ung is an inspirational speaker and dedicated humanitarian. She empowered the UW Khmer students to learn more about their own histories, culture and to follow their passions to create change for a better tomorrow and future. Loung’s strength and courage inspired them to take leadership positions and find their own opportunities for advocacy in both local and global communities.”
— Linda M. Ando, UW Academic Counselor and KHSA Student Organization Staff Adviser

BLURBS

FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER:
A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers

“Despite the tragedy all around her, this scrappy kid struggles for life and beats the odds. I thought young Ung’s story would make me sad. But this spunky child warrior carried me with her in her courageous quest for life. Reading these pages has strengthened me in my own struggle to disarm the powers of violence in this world.”
— Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, author of Dead Man Walking

“A riveting memoir… an important, moving work that those who have suffered cannot afford to forget and those who have been spared cannot afford to ignore.”
— San Francisco Chronicle

“Ung tells her stories straightforwardly, vividly, and without any strenuous effort to explicate their importance, allowing the stories themselves to create their impact.”
— The New York Times

“There can be absolutely no question about the innate power of Ung’s story, the passion with which she tells it, or its enduring importance.”
— Washington Post Book World

LUCKY CHILD
A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites
with the Sister She Left Behind

“I encourage everyone to read this deeply moving and very important book. Equal to the strength of the book, is the woman who wrote it. She is a voice for her people and they are lucky to have her.”
— Angelina Jolie, UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador

“Ung brings third and first world disparities into discomforting focus and gracefully dramatizes the metaphorical joining together of her haunted past and her current identity as a privileged Cambodian American. When the narrative fuse at the sisters’ long awaited reunion, their clasping of hands throws wide open the floodgates to tamped-down memories — a cathartic release that readers will tearfully, gratefully share.”
— Booklist (starred review)