Local woman's book recounts her family's ordeal in Pol Pot's Cambodia

Yorktown resident Sovannara Ky Glass has written "The Sieve of Angkar" about her life in Cambodia. (Jennifer Williams, Daily Press / August 4, 2011)

August 4, 2011
By Jennifer L. Williams
Newport News (Newport News, Virginia)
jwilliams@dailypress.com | 247-4644

YORK —— A local survivor of the murderous Pol Pot regime in 1970s Cambodia has made her family's story available to everybody.

Sovannara Ky Glass self-published "The Sieve of Angkar" in December and the book is available on amazon.com.

The brutality of the Khmer Rouge started in 1975 when Communist dictator Pol Pot decided to drive citizens into the countryside and remake Cambodia into a self-sufficient farming society. It's estimated that around 2 million people died during the starvation and murder that followed.

Sovannara, who is called "Ra," started recounting her story to her husband, Carl Glass, in 2007. The Yorktown couple is easing into retirement, and Ra, 52, said it was important for her to finally record her story.

"I thought about it the minute I came to the states, but it was so difficult for me to get it down," Ra said. "It was like reliving the nightmare all over again."

She has had difficulty revisiting those awful years since arriving in the United States in 1980. But despite stopping and starting on the book because of sadness and depression caused by recounting her story, she said she and her husband were finally able to finish it.

Carl's brother, Howard Glass, did the final polishing and editing.

Ra lost both parents and seven siblings as well as extended family members, during four years of slave labor for the Khmer Rouge. She and her two sisters survived.

After the Communists were driven from power in 1979, Ra reached a Thailand refugee camp. She was sponsored by a local relative and church to come to Newport News in 1980, and graduated from Denbigh High School in 1983 at age 23. After taking classes at Christopher Newport University for a couple of years, she opened restaurants in the area.

Ra was 15 in April, 1975, when the Ky family was driven from its home in the Cambodian capital city of Phnom Penh. She picks up the story there, and recounts the vivid details of how quickly and dramatically her life changed.

The fast-moving story recounts how one family was displaced and affected by the much larger political events of the country.

Ra's voice takes the reader into the daily life of those forced to work at cultivating rice fields, felling trees and moving dirt while subsisting on a diet of next to nothing.

Executions and deaths became grim reality.

The emotions and depth of despair experienced by a teenage girl put in a situation of trying to survive are deftly conveyed.

""I think it's a story that needs to be told," Ra said. "It's important to honor my family, and the millions of other people who didn't make it. I know God saved me for a reason, and he wanted me to spread the word.

"I just feel honored to be the person representing those people who couldn't speak for themselves."

Want to read it?

"The Sieve of Angkar" by Yorktown resident Sovannara Ky Glass is available from amazon.com.