Book
When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge
When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge is Chanrithy Him's memoir of her childhood in Cambodia, first published in 2000.[1] The title refers to a Cambodian proverb in which broken glass that floats stands for evil winning over good.[2]
About the book
The memoir is told from a child's point of view. War entered Him's life in 1969, when she was four years old.[1][3] The first chapter, "A Heavenly Comet Foreshadows War," recalls a comet she saw in 1968, at three, whose tail her mother linked to a folk belief about war. In 1969 the family hid in a bunker by a pond during gunfire and artillery fire.[4] Amid the upheaval of the Vietnam War, the family moved to Phnom Penh.[2]
After the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, the family was forced from its home.[2] The memoir recounts forced displacement, labor, starvation, illness and executions through the years of the civil war and the Khmer Rouge regime. Adults and children were separated into labor camps, where there were no longer cars or electricity, and death and illness were constant.[1][2] The family stayed loyal to one another, though the Khmer Rouge demanded loyalty only to itself.[2] Of the twelve members of the Him family, five survived.[1] When the Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, the "broken glass" at last sank.[2]
In 1981, Him and her surviving siblings escaped Cambodia, sponsored by an uncle in Oregon, and set out to rebuild their lives in the United States.[1] The book's themes are trauma, family loyalty, survival, resilience and hope.[1] It includes photographs.[1]
Since 1989, Him has worked as a researcher on the Khmer Adolescent Project, a federally funded study of post-traumatic stress disorder among young Cambodian refugees. The stories of those refugees, together with her own, led her to write the memoir.[1] Him has said she wanted to tell her story in a way worthy of the suffering she endured as a child.[3]
Publication and editions
- First edition: W. W. Norton, New York, April 17, 2000; 330 pages with six pages of plates; ISBN 0-393-04863-2.[1][5]
- Paperback: W. W. Norton, April 17, 2001; 336 pages; ISBN 9780393322101.[3][2]
Reception
The memoir received the Oregon Book Award and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the PEN USA West Literary Award.[1][3] Kirkus Reviews called it simply told and inspirational.[1] Ha Jin, the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting, called it "a gut-wrenching story told with honesty, restraint, and dignity."[3]