Uong Lung

Loung Ung is a survivor of the killing fields of Cambodia, one of the bloodiest episodes of the twentieth century. 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.

Loung was born in 1970 to a middle-class family in Phnom Penh. Five years later, 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 and she was forced to train as a child soldier. 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.

Loung returned to Cambodia fifteen years after her escape for a memorial service for the victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide and was shocked and saddened to learn that twenty of her relatives had been killed. This realization compelled her to devote herself to justice and reconciliation in her homeland. Learning about the continuing destruction being caused by the millions of landmines that still litter the countryside in Cambodia led Loung to work to spread the word about the dangers of these indiscriminate weapons.

Her memoir, First They Killed My Father: a Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, published by HarperCollins in 2000 is a national bestseller and recipient of the 2001 Asian/Pacific American Librarians’ Association award for "Excellence in Adult Non-fiction Literature" (APALA). The book has been published in eleven countries and has been translated into German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, Cambodian, and Japanese. Loung has been the subject of numerous television programs, including documentary film broadcasts on NHK Television in Japan and by WDR in Germany.

Loung is a featured speaker on Cambodia, child soldiers, women and war, domestic violence, and landmines. She worked for the Vietnam Veterans’ of America Foundation's (VVAF) Campaign for a Landmine-Free World from 1997-2003, prior to which she was Community Educator for the Abused Women's Advocacy Project of the Maine Coalition Against Domestic Violence. Ms. Ung continues to serve as National Spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World.

Loung has spoken widely to schools, universities, corporations, Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), The Million Dollar Round Table Plenary, and other symposia in the US and abroad, including the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, the UN Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, and the Child Soldiers Conference in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Loung sits on the Advisory Board for Hewlett-Packard’s World E-Inclusion Initiative and The Cambodian Association of Chicago, Illinois. The World Economic Forum selected her as one of the "100 Global Youth Leaders of Tomorrow." She has been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe, and the London Sunday Times and in Biography, Glamour, Jane, Ms., and People magazines. Loung has been featured on National Public Radio’s The Diane Rehm Show, Talk of the Nation, Weekend Edition, and Fresh Air with Terry Gross, The Today Show with Matt Lauer and Katie Couric, and has appeared on ABC NEWS Nightline, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and C-SPAN. She has recently been spotted on stage with such notable personalities as Paul McCartney and Sheryl Crow.