I was born an ethnic Chinese Cambodian minority and have lived my life as a minority ever since.  People tend to judge others by the colour of their skin and their social status.  Others judge people by the level of their education and family background.  There was a large number of ethnic Chinese.

Khmer in this story refers to the Cambodian language and the aboriginal Cambodians.  I use Khmer to differentiate the people of Cambodia from the ethnic minority groups such as Vietnamese, Chams, Chinese, and Cambodian-Born Chinese like myself.

I also use capital letters to denote some of the new languages that the Khmer Rouge cadres often used or emphasised during the regime.  Other authors has used the word evacuees to describe the residents who were forced out of Phnom Penh after April 17, 1975, but I prefer to the words Residents of Phnom Penh or Residents because that is how I remember.

There are no dates and years to record to the actual events had happened because I did not have access to any time or calendar from April 1975 to October 1980.  The story is based on my memory and I have tried the best I could to place the events in a chronological order using the wet and dry Monsoon seasons of Cambodian each year as guidance for my readers.

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