Lesson Thirteen: Documenting Life Under the Khmer Rouge

As we mentioned in the introduction to Chapter Six in the textbook, historians speak of two different types of main sources of information on which they base the histories that they write: primary and secondary. Secondary sources are what you get when you go to do historical research in a library; when you use the writings of other historians on which to base your writing about history. For primary sources, you need to go "into the field": interview people about their personal experiences, visit an archives, look at photos, sound recordings, film, video or other artifacts that come from a specific historical period. What you'll see in this video is something truly rare in the study of the history of the Khmer Rouge era: a myriad of primary sources collected by a woman who lived through it all.

The woman interviewed in this video, Om Sophany, is a novelist and songwriter. During her experiences under the Khmer Rouge, she kept a diary every single day for some three years. Also, after returning to Phnom Penh in 1980 she went back and revisited the villages she had lived in under the Khmer Rouge, sketching and photographing them and doing drawings of the housing she had lived in. She has become justly famous (somewhat) for this careful documentation of her experiences, and she's been interviewed by Japanese journalists, among others.

You shouldn't have much trouble with the language spoken on this video, so there's no transcript. However, her discussion of her experiences and presentation of her documents is divided into sections on this page, which will open in a separate window.

Using the video, the list of sections just mentioned, as well as the excerpt from her novel in your textbook (page 286), prepare answers to the following questions, which we'll discuss in class:

  • How was she able to get away with keeping a journal while living under the Khmer Rouge?
  • What's the significance of the photo she shows at the end of section one of the interview?
  • In section two, when she shows the photo of a place she stopped at while being evacuated from Phnom Penh, what's interesting about her comment about people she met there?
  • What does she say about the construction of the house (represented in her drawings) she lived in under the Khmer Rouge? What does she say prompted her to make the drawings?
  • In section three, listen to the woman read the final entry in her journal, the entry that eventually became the novel excerpt which appears in your textbook on page 286. Read the excerpt, and write down at least three differences between the two versions.
  • What's the significance of the dress the woman shows and discusses in section four?
  • Be prepared also to discuss Om Sophany's experiences under the Khmer Rouge in light of what Michael Vickery calls the "Standard Total View" of the Khmer Rouge (see page 271 in your textbook).

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