Book
Stay Alive, My Son
Stay Alive, My Son is Pin Yathay's memoir of life under the Khmer Rouge and his escape to Thailand, first published in 1987.[1][2] It covers the 27 months from the Khmer Rouge's arrival in Phnom Penh to the day he crossed into Thailand.[2]
The story
When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, Pin Yathay was a qualified engineer in Cambodia's Ministry of Public Works. He and seventeen members of his family left the city by car, expecting to return in three days.[3] They never went home. As city people, they were counted among the "New People," moved from camp to camp and forced to work as peasants.[3] They were sent to Pursat, where they lived with forced labor, hunger and disease.[4] The book tells of communal rationing, illness, malnutrition and executions, and of the deaths of members of his family.[1][3]
By 1977 the family was reduced to Yathay, his wife and one surviving son.[3] When the couple set out to escape, they left their son, Nawath, at a hospital.[3][5] His wife disappeared in the jungle during the escape.[4] The title comes from the words Yathay repeated to his six-year-old son before leaving him in the care of another family.[4] Yathay has said that the words were also the ones his late father spoke when Yathay told him he wanted to leave the country.[5] He wrote the book in part to search for Nawath.[6]
The book is dedicated to the memory of Yathay's children, wife, parents and other family members, and to millions of his compatriots. It gives the number of Cambodians who died in those years as about two million.[3]
Publication and editions
Free Press first published the book in New York in 1987. Yathay wrote it with John Man.[1][3] An earlier account by Yathay in French, L'Utopie meurtrière, appeared at the end of 1979.[3]
- Touchstone edition, October 15, 1988: 256 pages, ISBN 9780671663940.[2]
- Cornell University Press paperback, Ithaca and London, 2000: with a new preface and epilogue by Yathay and a new foreword by the historian David Chandler; ISBN 978-0-8014-8699-9.[1][3]
- Khmer-language edition: first available in Cambodia in 2003, and republished in 2006 and 2009.[5]
- Fourth edition: with a new foreword by Yathay about his testimony before the Khmer Rouge Tribunal on February 7, 2013.[5]
The memoir has been translated into twelve languages.[4]
Reception
Khmer Times calls it the first memoir written by a Khmer Rouge survivor and one of the first official testimonies against the regime.[5] David Chandler wrote that it differs from later memoirs because Yathay wrote as an adult professional, able to judge the Khmer Rouge movement critically.[5]
Adaptation
The filmmaker Victoria Bousis found the book in a bookstore near Angkor Wat in 2013. She met Yathay in Paris in 2017 to discuss turning it into a virtual reality work, produced by her company, UME Studios.[4] Its release was planned for the Venice Immersive festival in 2022.[6] As of April 2025, the virtual reality experience had been shown in more than 28 countries and had received the Producers Guild Innovation Award. It was presented at the Bophana Center in Phnom Penh in the program "1975–2025: From Darkness to Light in Cambodia's Story," and was planned as a permanent installation at the resource center of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. A mobile version without a headset, made for rural and underserved communities in Cambodia, was scheduled for global release on April 17, 2025.[4]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Internet Archive
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Simon & Schuster
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 Cornell University Press, 2000 edition, preview
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 Cambodianess, Virtual Reality Brings Pin Yathay's Acclaimed Memoir to Digital Life, April 20, 2025
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Khmer Times, A Memoir to a son
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Khmer Times, This man's search for his child in reality is not a game