Archive - March 1, 2013

Bending with the Wind: Memoir of a Cambodian Couple’s Escape to America by Bounchoeurn Sao and Diyana D. Sao (as told to Karline F. Bird (Thailand 1968-70) McFarland & Company, Inc. $35.00 210 pages 2012 Reviewed by Collin Tong (Thailand 1968-69) With the fall of Phnom Penh on April 20, 1975 and the ascendancy of the Khmer Rouge came the closing of Cambodia’s border and a cataclysmic reorganization of Cambodian society. As documented in previous histories and first-person accounts, the Cambodian nightmare led to the wave of terror marked by torture and the extermination of intelligentsia. More than two million people, a quarter of the population, perished in the Killing Fields. In 1970, the United States and South Vietnamese forces invaded eastern Cambodia, driving the North Vietnamese army further west. A young Cambodian double agent working for American and Cambodian Special Forces, Bounchoeurn Sao, was stationed near the Cambodian and Lao border. . . .