When My Father Was In Cambodia (Imaginative Essay)

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Imaginative diary entries There is a 12 km walk between the killing fields and Tuol Sleng S21 torture high school. Just a few miles outside the capital city is Choeung Ek, one of the largest killing fields. This mass grave contains over 10,000 bodies of prisoners who were brutally integrated and tortured before being murdered. Most of the victims did not die from gunshots. Instead, the regime short on weapons, bludgeoned them to death with machetes, pickaxes, bamboo sticks and other weapons. My father grew up in a farming neighbourhood around the area of Phnom Penh in Cambodia, in the early 60’s. When ever I asks about how life was he says “It was fine”, but even I know that it wasn’t. He has scars up his arms and on his back when I ask him where they came from he says “I was in the army, those things used to happen”, but I know that he wasn’t in the army. When I ask my mother where he got them from she says that he had them before she met him and never asked. I then ask her if he was in Cambodia in the 1970’s she says “nah, he got out before then”. Being told all this I still know that there was a significant amount of lying, and not much truth. Knowing this I began to research what life was like in Cambodia in the 1970’s and saw what an atrocious time it was. There were so many people that got killed during this time and I was thankful that my father got out before all that, or did he? If he didn’t get out how did he survive? Was this the reason why he doesn’t like to talk about his childhood? This suspicion got the better of me and I started to investigate his history, without him knowing. As I had begun my enquiry I knew that he would have kept something from that time of his life, so I started to rummage though his things in the study. I looked through his documents in his desk but I found nothing relating to his youth. Looking around the house for

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