Profile of Chanrithy Him, Author of When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge

The U.S.-Indochina Educational Foundation (USIEF) is pleased and honored to host a series of web pages devoted to Chanrithy Him and her award-winning memoir. Here are two articles (MSWord format) that Ms. Him wrote: Starring Perfect Subjects is about a documentary produced by the Danish filmmaker, Anne-Gyrithe Bonne, entitled The Will to Live. The other article, Love Heals All, is about the Chanrithy Him Scholarship that USIEF recently created in her honor.

Ms. Him was nine-years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power. According to her publisher, W.W. Norton, she felt compelled to tell of surviving life under the Khmer Rouge in a way "worthy of the suffering which I endured as a child."

In the Cambodian proverb, "when broken glass floats" is the time when evil triumphs over good. That time began in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia and the Him family began their trek through the hell of the "killing fields." In a mesmerizing story, Him vividly recounts a Cambodia where rudimentary labor camps are the norm and technology, such as cars and electricity, no longer exists. Death becomes a companion at the camps, along with illness. Yet through the terror, Chanrithy's family remains loyal to one another despite the Khmer Rouge's demand of loyalty only to itself. Moments of inexpressible sacrifice and love lead them to bring what little food they have to the others, even at the risk of their own lives. In 1979, "broken glass" finally sinks. From a family of twelve, only five of the Him children survive. Sponsored by an uncle in Oregon, they begin their new lives in a land that promises welcome to those starved for freedom. She now lives in Eugene, OR.

Chanrithy Him received a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Oregon and is now a Medical Interpreter (on call) for Oregon Health Sciences University and elsewhere in America. She was a research associate at the Oregon Health Sciences University School of Medicine, working on a long-term study on post-traumatic stress disorder among Cambodian refugees in the U.S. Chanrithy is working on Unbroken Spirit, the sequel to her first book, and frequently performs Cambodian classical dance.  When Broken
Glass Floats has been translated into Dutch, Estonian, and Swedish.        Chanrithy Him at Nardin Academy,
                                                                             Buffalo, NY, October 2000

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2003 U.S.-Indochina Educational Foundation, Inc.