Creator
Chanrithy Him
Cambodian American memoirist and speaker who survived the Khmer Rouge period as a child.
Chanrithy Him is a Cambodian American writer and speaker who wrote When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge (2000).[1][2] A child survivor of the Cambodian genocide, she uses storytelling and dance to share her experience and Cambodian culture.[3]
Life
Him was born in Takeo Province. From 1969 she was displaced around Cambodia by war, and she was a child when the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975.[4][3] She was forced to work in labor camps, where she lived with starvation, hard farm labor, punishment and no medical care.[3] After Vietnamese forces drove out the Khmer Rouge in 1979, she fled Cambodia and passed through several refugee camps. She came to the United States in 1981.[5][2]
The move was hard because of the language and the new culture, but she went to summer school and became one of the top 25 students in her school.[3] She studied at Brigham Young University in Hawaii, where she suffered severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and then moved to the University of Oregon. There she studied pre-med and earned a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry.[3][4] She found her way to storytelling and public speaking while in college, and she had come to Cambodian classical dance in high school.[4]
Khmer Adolescent Project
Dr. William H. Sack recruited Him to the Khmer Adolescent Project at Oregon Health Sciences University, a federally funded study of post-traumatic stress disorder among young Cambodian refugees who survived the Khmer Rouge years.[4][2] She worked on it as a research associate from 1989. Her own understanding of what participants had lived through, culturally and in trauma, helped draw more Cambodians into the project.[2][3] The work meant interviewing survivors of the genocide.[6]
Writing
Him spent four years writing When Broken Glass Floats, drawing on her own experience and the stories of other Cambodian refugees.[1][2] Norton published it in 2000. It tells the Khmer Rouge years from a child's point of view and carries the story on to resettlement in America.[2][7] The book also records acts of kindness by some people tied to the Khmer Rouge.[6] She has said she wrote it to testify for the millions who lived and died under the Khmer Rouge.[8] Dith Pran praised it as an effort to educate the world.[1]
The memoir has been translated into Swedish, Khmer, Estonian, Dutch, Indonesian and Vietnamese, and it is used in book clubs and school curricula in several countries.[1] Tantor Audio released an audiobook in February 2023, read by the actress Kalean Ung.[1] The book was adapted as the one-act play Four Children, which ran from October 7 to 24, 2021, at City Stage in Kansas City's Union Station, alongside the traveling exhibition Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away.[1] Kathleen Warfel played Him in the Kansas City cast.[9]
Her screenplay of When Broken Glass Floats was endorsed by producer Karen Baldwin on July 19, 2021.[1] It was a semifinalist in the 2021 American Zoetrope Screenplay Competition, judged by Francis Ford Coppola, placing in the top 1 percent of nearly 2,000 entries.[1] In 2003 she was working on Unbroken Spirit, a sequel to the memoir.[8] Her young adult novel Rise of the Golden Aura was released on January 7, 2017.[3] It follows JD Bophatip, an adopted Cambodian girl in America who enters the Queen of Rosaria competition, and mixes Cambodian lore with vampires, mysticism and romance.[1] She has also written Chanlina: The Golden Warrior Queen of Angkor, a 116-page feature screenplay drawn from Cambodian mythology, with a novel version in progress.[1] Her writing appears in the anthology Voices of Protest: Documents of Courage and Dissent, alongside documents by figures including Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.[10]
Speaking
Since 2000 Him has spoken about the Cambodian genocide at schools and conferences in the United States and abroad, including Cambodia, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Japan, France, Vietnam and England.[3][1] Her talks may include the Cambodian classical Blessing Dance, which she uses to teach audiences about Cambodian culture.[5] In 2007 she spoke at Portland State University during Genocide Awareness Week, marking 32 years since the Khmer Rouge takeover.[11] She has said that telling her story gives her a sense of personal justice, and also that she plans to stop retelling it because reliving the genocide is hard.[3]
Him was one of the subjects of Anne-Gyrithe Bonne's documentary The Will to Live: A Notebook on Love, Hate and Reconciliation, which also features Archbishop Desmond Tutu.[8][1] Her story has been broadcast by the BBC, Al Jazeera, Voice of America and Cambodian National TV.[12] It is part of an audio box at the Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, with the stories of genocide survivors from Rwanda, Armenia and Bosnia, and it was featured in the United Kingdom's Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony in 2017.[9]
Recognition
In 2004 Madeleine K. Albright wrote to thank her for giving voice to people who have none.[1] In 2003 the U.S.-Indochina Educational Foundation created a scholarship in her name for a woman from Cambodia, Laos or Vietnam committed to social and economic justice.[8]
Works
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 Chanrithy Him, official website
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 Kirkus Reviews, When Broken Glass Floats
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, Chanrithy Him (August 20, 2018)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Chanrithy Him, Biography
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, Chanrithy Him life story (PDF)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Mekong.Net, When Broken Glass Floats
- ↑ Goodreads, When Broken Glass Floats
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 University at Buffalo, Transcendent courage and endurance are subjects of The Will to Live (October 30, 2003)
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Chanrithy Him, The Will to Live and press page
- ↑ Goodreads, When Broken Glass Floats (anthology note)
- ↑ Oregon Peace Institute, Past OPI work (2007)
- ↑ Goodreads, When Broken Glass Floats (author note)