[Review of] Usha Welaratna. Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America

Although approximately 150,000 Cambodians now reside in the United States, very little information has been published on this group. When available at all, descriptive and statistical data about Cambodians is generally lumped together with that of Laotians and Vietnamese in the category “Southeast Asian Refugees.” This is a grave shortcoming: first, because the Cambodians’ culture is quite different from that of other Southeast Asians -- making aggregate accounts of their experience inaccurate; and second, and perhaps even more important, is the fact that the Cambodian people have experienced one of the most horrible holocausts in modern history, making their ordeal one which should be well-documented such that humanity might prevent its repetition. However, with the publication of Beyond the Killing Fields, a valuable new source of information about Cambodians in the United States has become available