My Life According to My Destiny (Unabridged‪)‬

My Life According to My Destiny, by Vanny Vorng, a survivor of the Killing Fields, is the story of one man's struggle from his childhood up to the present time. It entails his fight to survive the many brutal events in Cambodia from the Coup d'Etat of 1970, to the fall of the Khmer Republic in 1975, to the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. The Khmer Rouge Communist Party of Cambodia purged the cities and countryside of intellectuals, rival politicians, monks and teachers. The extremeness of this group lead to a country that had no religion, no free market, no schools, no families, and a closed border. Citizens attempted to hide their old lives from ears within the walls while food became dangerously scarce in the so-called Agrarian Utopia. The new party in charge invented ways of making entire families disappear. Mr. Vorng's story describes the events of each conflict as they unfold, where each time he somehow managed to survive the ordeal to tell the story. After the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979, he found a way to provide for his family's needs. Mr. Vorng and his family realized they would be better off leaving the land they called home for so many years. He led his family and friends to the refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines, after which they were transported to America to start a new life.