On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to open a
new and appalling chapter in the story of the twentieth century. On
that day, Pin Yathay was a qualified engineer in the Ministry of
Public Works. Successful and highly educated, he had been critical
of the corrupt Lon Nol regime and hoped that the Khmer Rouge would
be the patriotic saviors of Cambodia.
In Stay Alive, My Son, Pin Yathay provides an unforgettable
testament of the horror that ensued and a gripping account of
personal courage, sacrifice and survival. Documenting the 27 months
from the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh to his escape
into Thailand, Pin Yathay is a powerful and haunting memoir of
Cambodia's killing fields.
With seventeen members of his family, Pin Yathay were evacuated
by the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, taking with them whatever they
might need for the three days before they would be allowed to
return to their home. Instead, they were moved on from camp to
camp, their possessions confiscated or abandoned. As days became
weeks and weeks became months, they became the "New People,"
displaced urban dwellers compelled to live and work as peasants,
their days were filled with forced manual labor and their survival
dependent on ever more meager communal rations. The body count
mounted, first as malnutrition bred rampant disease and then as the
Khmer Rouge singled out the dissidents for sudden death in the
darkness.
Eventually, Pin Yathay's family was reduced to just himself, his
wife, and their one remaining son, Nawath. Wracked with pain and
disease, robbed of all they had owned, living on the very edge of
dying, they faced a future of escalating horror. With Nawath too
ill to travel, Pin Yathay and his wife, Any, had to make the
heart-breaking decision whether to leave him to the care of a
Cambodian hospital in order to make a desperate break for freedom.
"Stay alive, my son," he tells Nawath before embarking on a
nightmarish escape to the Thai border.
First published in 1987, the Cornell edition of Stay Alive, My
Son includes an updated preface and epilogue by Pin Yathay and a
new foreword by David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of
Cambodia, who attests to the continuing value and urgency of Pin
Yathay's message.
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