aBOUT THE BOOK

The Years of Zero - Coming of Age Under the Khmer Rouge is the first book written from a young boy point of view and a native Cambodia who survived his country’s reign of terror and felt compelled to speak of it. The book describes the account of a little boy trying to desperately to make sense of the nightmare exploding around him and he survived all alone as seven years old.

It was April 17, 1975, thenceforth known in Cambodia as the Day of Betrayal—the day the communist insurgents called the Khmer Krohum (known to Westerners as the Khmer Rouge) finally smashed the last lines of defense of the Cambodian government supported by the United States. It wasn’t the Khmer Rouge had succeeded in seizing control of Cambodia. Families like Seng had been living under a shadow of dread.

The book is a survivor’s account of the Cambodian genocide carried out by Pol Pot’s sadistic and terrifying Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s.  It follows the author from the age of seven as he is plucked from his comfortable, middle-class home in a Phnom Penh suburb, marched along a blistering, black strip of highway into the jungle, and thrust headlong into the unspeakable barbarities of an agricultural labor camp.

Seng’s family was killed and tormentors. His mother is worked to death, her last gesture to place her thin, stained blanket over Seng’s bony shoulders.  His siblings succumb to starvation and his oldest brother was brought back from France and tortured in a secret prison of Tuol Sleng.  A mere child, Seng is forced to fend for himself, navigating the brainwashing campaigns and random depravities of the Khmer Rouge, determined to survive so he can bear witness to what happened in the camp.

The Years of Zero guides the reader through the author’s long, desperate darknesses and harrowing dawns, each chapter a painting of cruelty, caprice, and courage.  Even as his countrymen are transformed into a horde of human skeletons, each of them mouthing an obeisance to the revolutionary ideal of Angkar, Seng finds a way to remain whole both in body and in mind.  He rallies past torture, betrayal, disease and despair, refusing at every juncture to surrender to the murderers who have stolen everything he had. 

The Years of Zero follows Seng as he sneaks mice and other living food from the rice paddies where he labors, knowing that the penalty for such defiance is death. It tracks him as he tries to escape into the jungle, only to be dragged back to his camp and beaten half to death. It shows him after the Khmer Rouge have been overthrown, keeping himself alive by virtue of his wits and his instincts in a war-ravaged, post-apocalyptic Phnom Penh.  By the end of the, the reader will have the reader will have lived what Seng lived, risked what he risked and endured what he endured, and finally celebrated with him his unlikeliest of triumphs.