Loung Ung was born in 1970 into a middle-class family in Phnom Penh. Five years later, her family was forced out of the city by the Khmer Rouge in the mass evacuation to the countryside. By 1978, the Khmer Rouge had killed Ung's parents and two of her siblings, and she was forced to train as a child soldier. In 1980, she and her older brother escaped by boat to Thailand, where they spent five months in a refugee camp. They then relocated to Vermont. Ung's memoir, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, was published by HarperCollins in 2000, becoming a national bestseller and receiving the 2001 Asian/Pacific American Librarians' Association award for excellence in adult nonfiction. The book has been published in eleven countries and translated into more than a dozen languages, including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and Khmer. Today, Ung is sought after as a speaker on Cambodia, child soldiers, women in wartime, refugee issues, domestic violence, and land mines. From 1997 to 2003, she worked for the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's campaign for a land-mine-free world. Before that, she was a community educator for the Abused Women's Advocacy Project of the Maine Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She continues to serve as a national spokesperson for the campaign to ban land mines. This interview was conducted by telephone in August 2003.