Loung Ung (; born 19 November 1970) is a Cambodian American human-rights activist, lecturer and national spokesperson for the Campaign for a Landmine-Free World, between 1997 and 2003. She has served in the same capacity for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which is affiliated with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Ung was the sixth of seven children and the third of four girls to Seng Im Ung and Ay Choung Ung. At the age of 10, she escaped from Cambodia as a survivor of what became known as "the Killing Fields" during the reign of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime. After emigrating to United States and assimilating, she wrote two books which related to her life experiences from 1975 through 2003. Biography Memoirs Ung's first memoir, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, details her experiences in Cambodia from 1975 until 1980: "From 1975 to 1979—through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labour—the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country's population. This is a story of survival: my own and my family's. Though these events constitute my own experience, my story mirrors that of millions of Cambodians. If you had been living in Cambodia during this period, this would be your story too". Published in the United States in 2000 by HarperCollins, it became a national bestseller, and in 2001 it won the award for "Excellence in Adult Non-fiction Literature" from the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association. First They Killed My Father has subsequently been published in twelve countries, in nine languages, and has a film adaptation. Her second memoir, Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind, chronicles her adjustment to life in the U.S. with and without her family, and the experiences of her surviving family members in Cambodia during the ensuing warfare between Vietnamese troops and the Khmer Rouge. It covers the period of 1980 until 2003, and HarperCollins published it in 2005. In both of her memoirs, Ung wrote in the first person and, for the most part, in the present tense, describing the events and circumstances as if they were unfolding before the reader's eyes: "I wanted [the readers] to be there". Early years: 1970–75 Ung's father was born in the small village of Tro Nuon in Kampong Cham province in 1931. Her mother