A Memoir
At 46, Savan sat down to ask his parents the questions he’d spent a lifetime avoiding — not because he didn’t want to know, but because he was afraid of what asking would cost him. Halfway Light traces his family’s survival of the Khmer Rouge genocide, the three-day walk that became a four-year exile, and the silence they carried across an ocean into a two-bedroom apartment in Lynnwood, Washington. It is an attempt, four decades later, to finally name what they never said out loud.
“They didn’t talk about Cambodia because they’d once survived by not talking about Cambodia.”— Halfway Light, Prologue
“We never ate until we were full. We ate to stay upright.”
“To survive, you had to forget who you were. You had to forget that you remembered.”
“We didn’t wait for permission. We just started walking.”— Saroeun, his father