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On the Wings of a White Horse: A Cambodian Princess's Story of Surviving the Khmer Rouge Genocide
A moving account of survival in the face of genocide and personal hardships. It is the story of a child hidden in the jungle by her father and who escapes to become a young orphan and refugee on the streets of America.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
193 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 30, 2010
My book is my story of surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, and my subsequent struggle to survive here in America as an orphan immigrant. I was again fighting for my life, but this time as an adult because of financial challenges. I reflected back on my childhood, when I would cry a alone for help and no one would be there for me, to listen. I began to lose faith in myself. I felt people were letting me down and it was very painful. As I did when I was a child, I found myself asking many times to God, why do you punish me again and again?
But now, as an adult, I realize that it has always been up to me to stop being a victim.
My book tells my story as a child surviver of the horrors of war, over thirty years ago. But these same horrors are being perpetuated all over the world, today; in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Uganda, in Darfur, in Gaza, and so on. So it is clear that war and violence continue to be acceptable in the world. Therefore, it isn't enough for me, as a first hand witness of these horrors, to just write a book: I now have to encourage people to read it. To become more aware of how brutal it is, and the ongoing scars it leaves. It is my duty to stop it. So sharing my book is my now challenge as an adult. I realized that the story tell itself.
I am again in a desperate situation just trying to live. As a single mother, I am struggling to find work to help me through school, and to pay my family's bills. I hope you, or someone will see through my eyes, and decide to support my attempt to finish my college education. I have no family. I am raising a daughter on my own, and I need a better education to make more money to empower myself. I can't let myself be held back any longer, while trying to help others. I need a good education, and a good job. I am a full time student at California State University, Dominguez Hill. I am studying Finance and hope to enter Law School in the near future.
My book sends a clear message that we all have a chance to do something really meaningful in life. That we can save lives and can guide our kids, and communities to be pro-active in seeking advancement, and achieving tolerance, hope, empathy, education, and opportunity.
This book is the voice of understanding the obstacles and conflicts that prevent effective communication among different cultures, and it explains what moral weaknesses allowed genocide to occur, how it has been used in various part of the world in attempts to seize control of people who should be free to live the life they desire.
This book is important to all people, as it is a true story of a child's life. It is a powerful story of the human will to persevere against overwhelming odds. The book is educational in many aspects, so the reader is not only drawn into the story, but also learns how the human behavior could turn people to killing other human beings.
As a parents, we never stop worrying, or wanting to help our kids live free from fear, hatred and violence. We bring hope, love and understanding. Sixteen years ago, when my daughter was born. She taught me to love again, when all I wanted to do was hate. She taught me to be brave, and to help others. When I came to this country they offered hope, opportunity and a chance to exercise my rights as a human being. Long Beach has a long tradition of being a place where the immigrant dreams could come true for their family: not just economic dreams, but dreams of education, freedom, justice and equality. I humbly request that your review board read my book.
Use it to educate our city, because all our lives, not just mine, must be cultured to prevent and stop war and genocide. Help me finish my education, and be a successful citizen.
Thank you for your attention and consideration.
Sincerely,
Oni Vitandham
www.onipeace.org
But now, as an adult, I realize that it has always been up to me to stop being a victim.
My book tells my story as a child surviver of the horrors of war, over thirty years ago. But these same horrors are being perpetuated all over the world, today; in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Uganda, in Darfur, in Gaza, and so on. So it is clear that war and violence continue to be acceptable in the world. Therefore, it isn't enough for me, as a first hand witness of these horrors, to just write a book: I now have to encourage people to read it. To become more aware of how brutal it is, and the ongoing scars it leaves. It is my duty to stop it. So sharing my book is my now challenge as an adult. I realized that the story tell itself.
I am again in a desperate situation just trying to live. As a single mother, I am struggling to find work to help me through school, and to pay my family's bills. I hope you, or someone will see through my eyes, and decide to support my attempt to finish my college education. I have no family. I am raising a daughter on my own, and I need a better education to make more money to empower myself. I can't let myself be held back any longer, while trying to help others. I need a good education, and a good job. I am a full time student at California State University, Dominguez Hill. I am studying Finance and hope to enter Law School in the near future.
My book sends a clear message that we all have a chance to do something really meaningful in life. That we can save lives and can guide our kids, and communities to be pro-active in seeking advancement, and achieving tolerance, hope, empathy, education, and opportunity.
This book is the voice of understanding the obstacles and conflicts that prevent effective communication among different cultures, and it explains what moral weaknesses allowed genocide to occur, how it has been used in various part of the world in attempts to seize control of people who should be free to live the life they desire.
This book is important to all people, as it is a true story of a child's life. It is a powerful story of the human will to persevere against overwhelming odds. The book is educational in many aspects, so the reader is not only drawn into the story, but also learns how the human behavior could turn people to killing other human beings.
As a parents, we never stop worrying, or wanting to help our kids live free from fear, hatred and violence. We bring hope, love and understanding. Sixteen years ago, when my daughter was born. She taught me to love again, when all I wanted to do was hate. She taught me to be brave, and to help others. When I came to this country they offered hope, opportunity and a chance to exercise my rights as a human being. Long Beach has a long tradition of being a place where the immigrant dreams could come true for their family: not just economic dreams, but dreams of education, freedom, justice and equality. I humbly request that your review board read my book.
Use it to educate our city, because all our lives, not just mine, must be cultured to prevent and stop war and genocide. Help me finish my education, and be a successful citizen.
Thank you for your attention and consideration.
Sincerely,
Oni Vitandham
www.onipeace.org
October 9, 2009
Oni Vitandham's personal memoir of her survival during the Pol Pot Regime and her adjustment to American life is on the whole an admirable success story. Orphaned early in her childhood, she was adopted no less than six times in the course of seven years, and most of her adopted parents were killed. Oni herself barely escaped death numerous times and through perseverance and pluck she managed by the age of 11 to get to the USA. There her difficulties continued, but at last she established herself and was recognized for her courage and leadership. She eventually founded the Progressive United Action Association, now known as the Foundation for Cambodia. While Oni's story is remarkable, it is often carelessly rendered with little thought as to the reader's reaction.
Like several other Khmer Rouge survivor stories, it begins with the recollections of a small child (she was four years old when the Khmer Rouge took power). Oni mixes the story told from the point of view of a child with information that a child would not have known, such as her father's political and military activities.
Oni survived about a year under the Khmer Rouge before escaping with her foster father to Laos. There she was captured by the Vietnamese and sent to a prison camp in Hanoi, from which she and her foster father escaped with the help of a female guard. Fleeing in a rowboat, they made a perilous journey along the coast until they reached Cambodia, where Oni's foster father died. Eventually Oni made her way to the Thai border and the relative safety of the refugee camps, before being accepted by the US as a refugee.
I found it astonishing that a six-year-old girl could row a boat from northern Vietnam to Cambodia (a journey of over 1,500 miles) by herself (her foster father was dying) during the monsoon season, through seas infested by pirates and Vietnamese patrol boats. Yet Oni says that this superhuman journey took “several weeks” and dispenses with it in two swift pages. She also says that the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia took “several weeks”, when in fact it was only 13 days between the first attack and the day that Vietnamese troops took Phnom Penh.
Oni’s account of her life on the Thai-Cambodian border piles one error on top of another: She says Khao-I-Dang was in Cambodia (it wasn’t) and that Phnom Chat was near Laos (it wasn’t). She describes an attack by Vietnamese troops on the refugee camp of Chumrum Thmey (Oni says she saw the soldiers herself and heard them speaking Vietnamese) when in fact the attack was by Khmer guerrillas under the command of the Khmer warlord Ung Chan Don.
Survivors of war and traumatic events are often vague about dates and places, especially if they were children at the time and are writing their memoirs decades later. However Oni Vitandham should have taken more care with this book. If we dismiss On the Wings of a White Horse as just a badly-remembered tale then it loses much of its force and merit as a survival story. Other authors such as Thida Buth Mam (To Destroy You is no Loss) and Chanrithy Him (When Broken Glass Floats) produced credible and highly readable accounts of their experiences under the Khmer Rouge, taking the trouble to research the historical context of the events they participated in so as to give the reader a better understanding and appreciation of their roles in Cambodian history.
Sadly, Oni Vitandham’s memoir is less focused on describing history as on promoting Oni herself as a survivor and a heroine. Of course, someone who has survived a holocaust should be proud of that achievement, but a memoir that garbles the facts is an unworthy testimony. A woman who rowed 1,500 miles is capable of much more.
Like several other Khmer Rouge survivor stories, it begins with the recollections of a small child (she was four years old when the Khmer Rouge took power). Oni mixes the story told from the point of view of a child with information that a child would not have known, such as her father's political and military activities.
Oni survived about a year under the Khmer Rouge before escaping with her foster father to Laos. There she was captured by the Vietnamese and sent to a prison camp in Hanoi, from which she and her foster father escaped with the help of a female guard. Fleeing in a rowboat, they made a perilous journey along the coast until they reached Cambodia, where Oni's foster father died. Eventually Oni made her way to the Thai border and the relative safety of the refugee camps, before being accepted by the US as a refugee.
I found it astonishing that a six-year-old girl could row a boat from northern Vietnam to Cambodia (a journey of over 1,500 miles) by herself (her foster father was dying) during the monsoon season, through seas infested by pirates and Vietnamese patrol boats. Yet Oni says that this superhuman journey took “several weeks” and dispenses with it in two swift pages. She also says that the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia took “several weeks”, when in fact it was only 13 days between the first attack and the day that Vietnamese troops took Phnom Penh.
Oni’s account of her life on the Thai-Cambodian border piles one error on top of another: She says Khao-I-Dang was in Cambodia (it wasn’t) and that Phnom Chat was near Laos (it wasn’t). She describes an attack by Vietnamese troops on the refugee camp of Chumrum Thmey (Oni says she saw the soldiers herself and heard them speaking Vietnamese) when in fact the attack was by Khmer guerrillas under the command of the Khmer warlord Ung Chan Don.
Survivors of war and traumatic events are often vague about dates and places, especially if they were children at the time and are writing their memoirs decades later. However Oni Vitandham should have taken more care with this book. If we dismiss On the Wings of a White Horse as just a badly-remembered tale then it loses much of its force and merit as a survival story. Other authors such as Thida Buth Mam (To Destroy You is no Loss) and Chanrithy Him (When Broken Glass Floats) produced credible and highly readable accounts of their experiences under the Khmer Rouge, taking the trouble to research the historical context of the events they participated in so as to give the reader a better understanding and appreciation of their roles in Cambodian history.
Sadly, Oni Vitandham’s memoir is less focused on describing history as on promoting Oni herself as a survivor and a heroine. Of course, someone who has survived a holocaust should be proud of that achievement, but a memoir that garbles the facts is an unworthy testimony. A woman who rowed 1,500 miles is capable of much more.
May 14, 2013
This book will touch the humanity in your soul and force it to the deepest depths of despair yet raise it into the sky on the wings of a white horse. It is a story not just of Cambodia or America but is universal to any time or place and a story of rising from the ashes, turning losses into gains and tragedy into triumph. Oni reminds us that that despair does not always end in the land of dreams and teaches us that we must turn hardships around as she found her voice in the face of killing and losing all those close to her by establishing her organization. Her strong character plunges us into the mist of brutal killings and the slowly deteriorating hope inside of her as she endures against all odds death and beating to rise stronger than before, giving a kindling flame of hope for even those who do not experience even half of what Oni goes through in Cambodia and America. I was left in tears and speechless, the same determination to help others like she did even when she suffers so much as well in me as in her. The skill in this book came from the heart and not the pen and translates into other hearts in any language. This is not just Oni's story but the story of all those who silently and innocently suffered so much and still do in Cambodia and the pain of that is on the whole world's shoulders so this book is a story of humanity. The Khmer Rouge took away Oni's innocence, family, childhood, and dreams yet they couldn't take away her hope even when she faced some times when she was ready to commit her soul to the spirit and that is an inspiration to people worldwide. This did justice to all who were killed in the Khmer Rouge and gives a voice to those nameless faces and markers to the anonymous graves left in the sand.
March 7, 2022
I just read a biography of Pol Pot not long ago. Reading about the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge (and others) in that was brutal, but it is so much more brutal to read about it from the perspective of a little kid. The author was the daughter of a Prince of Cambodia, and she was hidden away with some godparents while her father was fighting and her mother had died. Every adult she came into contact with that cared for her wound up dying in terrible ways. She was so brave and so resilient for such a young child. This was a short book, but it was heavy and moving. I would highly suggest reading this book if you are interested in Asian history, genocide, or just war in general. There are some pretty grim accounts of murder in it, so if that is something you can't deal with, steer clear.
July 31, 2017
A heartbreaking, inspirational book about a strong survivor of the atrocities in Cambodia. Not a before bed book, but still an important read. You gain a newfound understanding of Cambodian culture and history through Oni's eyes and, appreciation for life, and desire to make the world a better place.
September 17, 2008
Really great book. The writing put me right there in the thick of things.
March 22, 2010
very interesting story about the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodian history and the struggles of a refugee in America.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews