Stay Alive, My Son

by Pin Yathay, David P. Chandler (Foreword), John Man (Contributor)

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh to open a new and appalling chapter in the story of the twentieth century. On that day, Pin Yathay was a qualified engineer in the Ministry of Public Works. Successful and highly educated, he had been critical of the corrupt Lon Nol regime and hoped that the Khmer Rouge would be the patriotic saviors of Cambodia. In Stay Alive, My Son , Pin Yathay provides an unforgettable testament of the horror that ensued and a gripping account of personal courage, sacrifice and survival. Documenting the 27 months from the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh to his escape into Thailand, Pin Yathay's story is a powerful and haunting memoir of Cambodia's killing fields. With seventeen members of his family, Pin Yathay were evacuated by the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, taking with them whatever they might need for the three days before they would be allowed to return to their home. Instead, they were moved on from camp to camp, their possessions confiscated or abandoned. As days became weeks and weeks became months, they became the "New People," displaced urban dwellers compelled to live and work as peasants, their days were filled with forced manual labor and their survival dependent on ever more meager communal rations. The body count mounted, first as malnutrition bred rampant disease and then as the Khmer Rouge singled out the dissidents for sudden death in the darkness. Eventually, Pin Yathay's family was reduced to just himself, his wife, and their one remaining son, Nawath. Wracked with pain and disease, robbed of all they had owned, living on the very edge of dying, they faced a future of escalating horror. With Nawath too ill to travel, Pin Yathay and his wife, Any, had to make the heart-breaking decision whether to leave him to the care of a Cambodian hospital in order to make a desperate break for freedom. "Stay alive, my son," he tells Nawath before embarking on a nightmarish escape to the Thai border. First published in 1987, the Cornell edition of Stay Alive, My Son includes an updated preface and epilogue by Pin Yathay and a new foreword by David Chandler, a world-renowned historian of Cambodia, who attests to the continuing value and urgency of Pin Yathay's message.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Memoir, Asia, Biography, War, Biography Memoir

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Yathay Pin was born in Oudong, a village about 25 miles north of Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Yathay’s father, Chhor, was a small trader, and his family, though not impoverished, was poor.

Yathay was the eldest of five children. His father had high expectations of him: Knowing that Yathay was an excellent student, Chhor sent him to a good high school in Phnom Penh. Yathay received a government scholarship after completing high school, and he went to Canada to further his studies. In 1965, Yathay graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in Montreal with a diploma in civil engineering. He went back to Cambodia and joined the Ministry of Public Works. He married his first wife soon after, and they had one son. His first wife and second baby died in childbirth in 1969. Afterward, Yathay married his wife’s sister, Any, and they had two sons. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge overthrew the Lon Nol government in Phnom Penh and began a regime of terror. The communist Khmer Rouge persecuted educated professionals and intellectuals and accused them of being bourgeois capitalists. Yathay and his family, consisting of eight members, were sent to work as unpaid agricultural workers in the countryside. By 1977, most of his family members had perished from malnutrition, overwork, or sickness. Yathay, who had managed to disguise his educated background for a few years, was finally betrayed by an acquaintance. Fearing execution, he made a run for freedom by walking over the mountains that separated Cambodia from Thailand. Yathay safely reached Thailand two months later; he had, however, lost his wife in a forest fire. From his Cambodian past, Yathay has one surviving son whom he fears is already dead. Yathay now works as a project engineer in the French Development Agency in Paris. He has also remarried and now has three sons.

Reviews

[Doreen Petersen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a moving book!!! The horrors the author endured are too numerable to mention. This is definitely a must read!!!

[Khushi · Rating 5 out of 5]

my heart aches, please do yourself a favour and read accounts like these

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an incredible book, i took so much away from it. A narrative that read like an adventure film, a heartbreaking true account of the plight of the people of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, an insight into how quickly what you have can be lost, how quickly a politically vulnerable country can be taken over by so little ammunition and so much stealth and obfuscation.
What surprised me was how currency was de-valued within three days of the people being driven from their homes, and how survival depended on family and guile.It is ironic that the author lost all of his family when the important message of the book is that family is all that counts.
Anybody who believes that extreme communism ever works in practice might like to read this book, and contemplate the importance they place on their freedom and their individuality.

[Alesa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pin Yathay was a government engineer when Pol Pot's regime took over Cambodia. He describes being marched with all the other residents of Phnom Penh, the capital city, to the fields to labor. This is his true story, told with simplicity and a sort of beauty. I bought this book in Cambodia, and it helped explain what we saw during visits to The Killing Fields and S-21, the Khmer Rouge's torture center. Although it's educational, it also just leaves you numb inside, wondering about our species, and we can be so horribly cruel to one another. If you want to learn about Cambodia's history, this is a great book.

[Tom Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this is a similar story to all the accounts of Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, I thought it was well written and even exciting.

It helped tell the history of Cambodia through the eyes of people that lived through it and I won't soon forget this one.

[Audrey L · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a hard to find book. My mom borrowed it from a woman who bought it on her trip to Cambodia. This is one of the best books I've read from an adults point of view what happened during the takeover of Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge (the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the totalitarian ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot)

The Khmer Rouge subjected Cambodia to a radical social reform process that was aimed at creating a purely agrarian-based Communist society. The city-dwellers (New People) were deported to the countryside, where they were combined with the local population (Ancients) and subjected to forced labor. About 1.5 million Cambodians are estimated to have died in waves of murder, torture, and starvation, aimed particularly at the educated and intellectual elite.

The Khmer Rouge wanted to eliminate anyone suspected of "involvement in free-market activities". Suspected capitalists encompassed professionals and almost everyone with an education, many urban dwellers, and people with connections to foreign governments.

The Khmer Rouge believed parents were tainted with capitalism. Consequently, children were separated from parents and brainwashed to socialism as well as taught torture methods with animals. Children were a "dictatorial instrument of the party" and were given leadership in torture and executions.

One of their mottoes, in reference to the New People, was: "To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss.

The worst part of this story is that so many people didn't believe this could happen to them. They were clueless that the communist party they were embracing would turn out to be their killers. All they wanted was to be taken care of, not realizing that giving up their personal freedom and responsibility would turn into tragedy.

[Saxon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best Khmer Rouge memoir I've read so far. Unlike the child narrators in "First They Killed My Father" and "When Broken Glass Floats," both of which were still quite good, the narrator in this book is a married man with kids. As a result, you get a much more nuanced account of what happened, along with the added weight of his being responsible for children. When I finished reading it, I felt like I did when I got through "Alive" by Piers Paul Read. Absolutely harrowing.

[Seylene sl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book in 2012, and I left my hard copy in Tokyo somewhere along the street as a gift to stranger..

The horror from the regime was inhuman and the worst nightmare..

[Ben Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible story of one family's survival during the Khmer Rouge. Thay must work toward the survival of his extended family in the harsh conditions of relocation including famine, illness and death. Gripping details of what it took for him to survive, and the family he lost along the way. Would you be willing to do anything to survive?

[Steve Castley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book. Difficult to read but harder to put down. Pin Yathay is an amazing writer and has crafted a very difficult and emotional memoir. Genocide in Cambodia is not an easy topic and for it to be told by the sole survivor of his family is an incredible accomplishment. Sadly similar books will soon be coming out of Burma / Myanmar.

[Chase Healey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was the beginning of my love for memoirs. I was forced to read this book for an English class and soon found myself sobbing in bed late at night after finishing it. Truly heartbreaking and a sad look into one of the worlds great massacres.

[Reet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roundup of people from Phnom Penh was universal. Evacuating from the city with his family, the author looked around him at the crowds:
2000, Paperback, Cornell University Press
P.23-4:
"No one, it seemed, had escaped the roundup. One young man was carrying his sick father on his back. Women carried babies on their hips, the lame limped on crutches. Twice I saw patients in wheeled hospital beds being pushed along by relatives. Some people had small bundles of food or clothing, some carried a chicken or a duck slung over their shoulders, some had nothing but the clothes they wore. One little boy of seven or eight was wandering through the crowd, crying pathetically for his mother, staring up at every adult, hoping to see someone he recognized."

You could lose your belongings at any time from the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge. The author had an expensive watch that he had kept hidden during their enforced exodus. His wife urged him to trade it for something useful, noting truthfully that it could be taken away from him at any time. He traded it to a fisherman for two of his fishing nets.
P.52-3:
"When, back in the pagoda, I mentioned this to my father, he told me something else that gave me pause. In the boat, going up river, an old man had made some critical remark about the Angkar. When being reprimanded, he was searched. The Khmer Rouge discovered that he was carrying dollars, pocket after pocket of them, perhaps 10,000 dollars altogether.
The young Khmer Rouge soldier had brandished the wad of notes and yelled at the old man, 'you're keeping imperialist money!'
Then, with a determined lunge, he had thrown the wad of dollars into the river. Stupefied, the passengers looked at each other. Why not keep the dollars? The young man could easily have confiscated them. Apparently, he had no idea of the meaning of foreign currency and how the Khmer Rouge could benefit from it.
How many Khmer Rouge officers across the country, I wondered, were currently repeating this ignorant and self-destructive gesture of empty defiance? Were all the Khmer Rouge simply arbitrary in their behavior, with each man interpreting orders in his own way?"

The author had worked in a government department. He ran across a friend he had worked with, who in turn introduced him to an official of the Khmer Rouge. Little by little, the author approached this official, to try to find answers to the question of why was Phnom Penh evacuated? (R3sist0rs, take note:)
P.66-7:
"...'we know that it is dangerous to leave the cities intact, inhabited. They are the centres of opposition, and contain little groups. In a city, it is difficult to track down the seeds of counter-revolution. If we do not change City life, an enemy organization can be established and conspire against us. It is truly impossible to control a city. We evacuated the city to destroy any resistance, to destroy the cradles of reactionary and mercantile capitalism. To expel the city people meant eliminating the germs of anti-Khmer Rouge resistance'.... "

Moved from one place to another, Thay's family ends up in an area that the regime named veal vong. It was in a forest, and the New People, as the city people were called, were to clear the area to make a camp. If you look up Veal Vong on Google maps, you'll see that it is a totally developed City now, where once there was just forest.
P.83:
"... For several weeks after our arrival, thousands and thousands more, All City people in their tattered City clothes, all as distressed as we had been, filed past our huts, plunging deeper into the forest, to make new Fields as we were doing. We watched them in silence, as we had been watched on our arrival. Always the same poignancy, the same drawn and mortified faces, the same tears, the same little dramas as friends and families met and parted, never to see each other again. So many people, so many wracked bodies, so many unsmiling faces. I began to wonder if we were part of some gigantic extermination program, for the decrease in rations and the increase in forced labor could only lead to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths. If this was purification, it was purification by the survival of the fittest."

The Khmer Rouge found many ways to get what they wanted for themselves, while starving the refugees.
P.87-9:
"As conditions worsened -- the rice ration after several weeks was dropped to one can for six people each day -- a New economic system, barter, insured survival of a sort.
It appeared that three or four miles away, there were villages occupied by Ancients [the name for villagers], as well as many other camps established by newcomers like us. We had frequent contact with both Ancients and New People, for New People, supervised by Ancients, were often sent into the forest to cut bamboo. Columns of people would stream past our hut in the morning carrying cooking pots, with small bags of food at their waists, returning in the evening laden with bamboo. Often, a casual greeting would lead on to conversation, and thus contacts and friendships developed. The Ancients received rather more rice than we did, and in addition were allowed to grow their own food. And we, the city people, had possessions -- mainly clothes, but also jewellery, watches, the occasional radio -- that were of interest to the peasants, who were willing to exchange their rice for our goods. Regular contacts with passers-by ensured that everyone knew the relative values of their goods.
Strangely, it became clear that the Khmer Rouge were also feeding rice into this black market system, and profiting from it to acquire goods for themselves and their families. Where did all this rice come from?
Eventually, the explanation got around. The amount of rice to be distributed was calculated on the basis of the census carried out on our arrival. But the only people who knew the actual number of survivors were the Khmer Rouge themselves. They simply never reported many of the dead. Rice for those who had died kept on arriving. Thus, the worse we were treated, the more deaths there were, and the more rice the Khmer Rouge had for themselves."

Many family members of the author died from starvation. The baby of the family died, and when the older boy, from the author's first marriage, was sent out to work in a distant camp, news came back to them one day that he had died as well. Now the only child left in the family was sick, and Thay anguished over what to do to try to keep his family intact. He and his wife Any, left their boy in the hospital.
When people went to the hospital, it was because they were too sick to work. But because there was no medicine and no healthcare workers, they went there to die. He made plans to escape with his wife, and made the overwhelming decision to leave their son in the hospital there. They knew that he would die but they felt they had no choice.
They decided to try to make their way through the Cardamom mountains to the West, towards the border of Thailand. But it was dangerous terrain, Especially for people who had been starved for over a year. During their trip through the forest in the mountains, he lost his wife Any.
P.196-7:
"Night began to fall. We decided to sleep right there, regaining strength for the climb down the next day. It was a good campsite -- a grassy plateau, backed by trees, with a large Boulder that offered protection. We began to prepare our meagre dinner in the glow of the setting sun. I lit a small fire with some twigs and dry wood, near the boulder, leaving Eng [the only remaining member of the group that had left the camp together] to take care of the cooking. There was little danger -- the smoke disappeared into the tall trees above us. Any and I prepared our beds.
Even as we worked, a stiff wind sprang up, scattering a few Sparks from the fire. I told eng to be careful, to cover it with damp leaves so that the villagers didn't notice any sudden blaze. After eng had finished cooking, she broke the fire apart with a branch and we gulped down our rice soup.
We were about to lay down, when I suddenly saw flames licking at the dry grass around the fire."
They had to run for their lives, unable to beat out the fire. When they had gone a small distance, Thay's wife realized she had left their cooking pot behind. She ran back. Thay and Eng stayed there waiting for her to come back. But she never showed up, so Thay turned back in the direction she had gone. He got lost. Moreover, when he finally gave up looking for his wife, he couldn't find Eng. Now he was on his own.

I don't really believe in karma, and I know that a starving refugee had to eat food where he found it. But when Thay found a mountain tortoise, and turned it upside down to cook it in its own shell, I found that very cruel. He didn't say whether he smashed its head first, to keep it from feeling the agony of burning to death. Thay gets his fill, and stuffs leftover meat in his pockets.
P.202-3:
"The next day I left at dawn, intending to stop at noon in order not to lose my sense of direction. But the smell of the grilled meat so whetted my appetite that I stopped early, near a stream to refresh myself and to eat a little. I stretched out beside the stream, took my bag from my shoulder and pulled out a piece of tortoise to chew. After a brief rest, I drank some water and continued on my way.
All at once I felt better than usual. I seemed to be walking faster. I was surprised, and pleased that I was moving on towards Thailand so quickly. I had covered several hundred yards at this brisk Pace when I had a strange feeling, a sort of inexplicable uneasiness. The Ease with which I was walking was not normal. I thought for a few moments the tortoise meat must have given me exceptional strength. I climbed quite a steep slope, at a good pace, without even panting.
Then came a sudden appalled realization: I had left my bag beside the stream. I was not in the habit of taking it off for a short rest, and simply hadn't thought of it.
Well, it wasn't a catastrophe. I turned back to retrieve it. The stream was only about 300 yards away. I retraced my steps.
At least, I thought I did. I thought I recognized the way. I even found a stream and walked along it. But it was the wrong stream. I couldn't find the place where I had stopped. At countless turns, at countless large trees, and endless little ups and downs, I thought I knew where I was. Time and again, my intuition proved itself wrong. It seemed nightmarish, incredible, that I was incapable of retracing a path of 300 yards. But after 3 hours, I had to admit the bag was lost.
With it, I had lost my rice, my spare clothing, my can, and the bag itself which was useful as a pillow. Now I was stripped of almost everything."

Thay almost dies, and gets captured, before he reaches the border of thailand. But he does make it. His story is important, because he recounted the treatment under the Khmer Rouge to the world.
In his country, a renegade government sought to complete genocide against its own people. But they rushed it, so that in just over a year at least 1/3 of the population of Cambodia died of starvation and sickness.
Our own 3lite are doing this to us, but at a very slow pace. It began with The loss of our j0bs, making it so that we must fight each 0ther for sh1tty j0bs and thus, l0wer w4ges, and the crappy w4ges we receive allow us only to buy the che4p3st, most unhealthy f00d, was planned, turning us into f4t, s1ck people, who will need much he41thc4re that we cannot aff0rd, thus t4king all our m0n3y on the way to our d34ths.
So we have a constitution. So this is the way they do it, p4ced out over 80 to 100 years. So that the 3l1te can keep all the m0ney, all the r3s0urces that are left, for themselves.

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

How quickly can your normal life turn into terror, loss…hell?
One of the toughest books I’ve ever read.
A testimony of the worse humanity can become.
Don’t miss this book.

[Bill V · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the flow of the narrative can be choppy and clumsy at times, I did enjoy the book. Towards the end, it did seem a bit fantastic as to the manner the author ultimately escaped the Khmer Rouge. I did learn a few things about Cambodia during this time. While I've known for years that the Khmer Rouge depopulated the urban centers, I didn't know rural populations ended up moving into the cities. The book didn't provide any details to this claim.
While I also always heard and read that anywhere from 1.5 to 2 million people died, apparently it was the urban people (new people) who mostly died. It seems rural communities (ancients) stayed quite stable. The book highlights yet another failed Communist state.

[Mona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wishing I'd read this book before a four-day whirlwind stop in Cambodia. We have no idea of the horrors that happened to innocents during the time of the Khmer Rouge and the "killing fields". Little by little the author lost every family member and all he owned. By luck and ingenuity he managed to escape the horrors which will fill his heart, mind and soul for the rest of his days. When does the world learn? This is happening again now in another part of the world and we know it, yet can't stop it.

[Paul Vermeher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This might be a controversial comment, but I think Pin Yathay ate his wife.

Pin Yathay gives a very detailed account of his esacpe from the Kmher Rouge. The only part of the escape that is recollected in less than a paragraph is the death of his wife.

Cannibalism had been frequently reported, and the man was surely starving. Cannot blame him though for wanting to admit to that. Just my theory, of course.

[Karen San Diego · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it in Filipino, translated by Ruth Elynia S. Mabanglo. The descriptions were very graphic and real. I am very sorry for having no knowledge of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia much because of Sihanouk's involvement with the Vietnam war, until now. What happened was very horrible and I grieve for his family. This is very well-written and emotionally charged. Recommended for those looking for historical non-fiction wartime stories.

[Elliot Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gave me a great insight into life during the Democratic Kampuchea period (Khmer Rouge). A harrowing true story of suffering and barbarity within a sphere controlled by those devoid of human emotion. It has tinctures of humanity from those who helped or assisted the author to escape. It's well worth a read and can provide additional information for those curious about life during the Khmer Rouge's sanguine control of Cambodia.

[Anu · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting reading this book immediately after 'First They Killed My Father'. Both stories are about the Cambodian holocaust (1975 - 1979), but one is from the perspective of a five year old child, and the other of an adult who is a husband and father of three. Both had the same goal: to survive. But their approaches were so drastically different.

[Will Peart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harrowing and revealing account of living through the Khymer Rouge era in Cambodia. The book is essential reading for people spending time in Cambodia wanting to fill the gaps of historical overviews and broad statistics with a human story representative of the suffering and horrors at the hand of Pol Pot and his 'Democratic Kampuchea'.

[Jo Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

devastating and heart breaking to read but highly recommended. Purchased a dog eared copy whilst backpacking in South East Asia in 2008. The remnants of devastation still evident in this lovely country.

[Gayle Winchester · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book broke my heart to read but it is such an insight into the life of the Cambodian people in the pol pot years you cannot ignore what they went through and still to this day the scars remain as the book explains

[Benjamin Rerden · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really clear analysis of the Cambodian civil war and the social and economic impacts it created. Told through the crushing story of a father's journey to survive a war that killed up to two thirds of the population.

[Chiro Pipashito T H · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible story of survival and such a first-hand testimony of a brutal regime. The author lost all of his family members but survived to tell the story. And the survival was not easy. This story makes all our own grievances seem so small.

[Alyssa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I randomly picked this up at a used bookstore and couldn't put it down the minute I started reading. It is so beautifully but painfully written. This is also the first book I have read in years and will always be remembered.

[Konitha · Rating 5 out of 5]

the writing style is awesome, it's really easy to follow, it make me feel emotional .
Since I'm a Cambodian same as the author pin yathay ,this book means even more to me. I might not be there ,but that pain somehow stick with me. I'm glad I read this through.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shattering story of one families suffering in the Cambodian atrocities. It should win the booker prize

[B Deg · Rating 5 out of 5]

i'd like to give it more than 5 stars. Amazing story!!

[Ines · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartbreaking narration of the brutality of fanatic totalitarism... I couldn't stop reading it...

[JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

On m'a dit un jour que la vie était comme ce pote trash qu'on a presque tous : à chaque fois qu'on imagine qu'il ne peut pas faire pire, il nous surprend en remettant une couche. J'ai déjà lu plusieurs livres sur l'auto génocide khmer. C'est un déchirement à chaque fois. La question qui me hantera toute ma vie, je pense est de savoir comment un homme peut faire ce qui est décrit dans ce livre à un semblable...?

Pin Yathay porte un regard lucide sur des événements terribles. Je reste absolument sans voix face au récit de la mort de sa famille. Étrangement - est-ce une pudeur de la part de l'auteur ou une différence culturelle - et malgré l'horreur traversée, le récit des morts de sa famille m'a souvent laissé une sensation étrange de vide. On n'a pas accès à la puissance de ses émotions et cela est très déstabilisant pour le lecteur, au point parfois de devenir désagréable. J'ai claqué mes propres émotions sur sa douleur, et j'ai souffert avec lui, protégé par le confort de ma propre vie.

Merci à Pin Yathay pour ce récit. Je suis absolument effondré qu'il n'ait à ce jour pas retrouvé Nawath...