Loung Ung
FameRank: 4

"Loung Ung" (born 1970) is a Cambodian-born American human-rights activism/activist and lecturer. She is the national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World. Between 1997 and 2003 she served in the same capacity for the "International Campaign to Ban Landmines", which is affiliated with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.

Ung was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the sixth of seven children and the third of four girls, to Seng Im Ung and Ay Choung Ung. Her actual birthdate is unknown; the Khmer Rouge destroyed many of the birth records of the inhabitants of cities in Cambodia. At ten years of age, she escaped from Cambodia as a survivor of what became known as "the Killing Fields" during the reign of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime. After emigrating to the United States and adjusting to her new country, she wrote two books which related her life experiences from 1975 through 2003.

Today, Ung is married and lives with her husband in Shaker Heights, Ohio/Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio.

More Loung Ung on Wikipedia.

Maya put it out there, ... She said 'I am not going to be ashamed of somebody else's act of violence.' The soldiers should be ashamed, not me.

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I have to find food -- either I have to hurt somebody, or I have to steal it from somebody.

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They are having a hard time surviving the peace after they survived the war.

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I thought the world really hated me. I spent four hours a day being taught that people wanted me dead.

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This is what the war has done to me. Now I want to destroy because of it. There is such hate and rage inside of me now. The Angkar (Khmer Rouge government) has taught me to hate so deeply that I know I have the power to destroy and kill.

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I've watched them grow up and study Russian history and American history, ... and they didn't know any Cambodian history. They didn't understand us. They're not going to get the story anywhere else and I just wanted them to know.

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In America there's a saying that children should be seen and not heard, ... In Cambodia, children should not be seen nor heard because you would not survive.

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