First They Killed My Father: Chapter 19 Summary & Analysis

Six months pass. Rumors of Youn invasions spread, and Loung spends hours learning to fight in combat. Met Bong stuffs clothes with leaves and straw to act as Youn dummies, then lines the children up in front of them. On Met Bong’s cue, Loung charges at her dummy, stabbing it and screaming, “Die! Die!” The next morning she feels agony, panic, and rage coursing through her body so strongly that they “manifest into physical pains.”

Loung feels an overwhelming urge to see Ma, and sneaks away from the camp. She rushes back to Ro Leap, feeling as though Ma and Geak are calling out to her. Pa once told Loung she had extrasensory perception, which she now fears is true. When she reaches the Ro Leap she finds Ma and Geak’s things still in their hut, but the two of them gone. A young woman is there instead, who tells Loung that soldiers took Ma and Geak away the day before. Loung knows what this means. She cannot believe Ma fought so hard for three years only to die now, and that Geak never “got anything good out of life.” She again thinks of stealing rice from the container, “out of their mouths.”

Loung pictures how they could have died: First they are marched away by Khmer soldiers through muddy fields, along with everyone else deemed traitors to the Angkar. Ma thinks of Pa and wonders if he, too, was this afraid. The soldiers make everyone kneel and Ma pulls Geak toward her, praying and thinking of Pa rather than begging for her life, which she knows is useless. Seconds pass and a solder tears Geak away from Ma. They scream for each other, but soldiers kill all the adults. Geak runs to Ma’s dead body, crying as she cannot understand what has happened, before the soldiers kill her too.

Loung walks back to the camp, so overwhelmed with grief that she has no memory of how she spends the next three days. She is angrier than ever before and charges at her Youn dummy in training, pretending it is Pol Pot and reflecting that she no longer has to “pretend to be an orphan.”