To Destroy You Is No Loss: The Odyssey of a Cambodian Family
By Joan Criddle and Teeda Butt Mam / Narrated by Christina Moore
Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
Brutal, with hit after hit, yet hopeful when all is said and done
It’s hard to review audiobooks like To Destroy You Is No Loss because one can’t really say that one actually likes it: It’s too devastating for you to come out thinking, Golly, what a nifty way to spend time.
Still, it’s very much a worthwhile way to spend your time. It’s enlightening, it’s soul-crushing, it’s also very hopeful because through it all (and there’s A LOT), there’s the love of family, there’s the hope that tomorrow just might be better.
It’s really a biography though the writing in first person makes it seems like an autobiography, and it’s so full of emotion that you really want to applaud Joan Criddle’s efforts.
It starts with a privileged family, forced from the city, instant refugees. It follows that horrific journey, a sojourn littered with fire and the bloating corpses of dead soldiers, and leads them to the village where they are forced to work endlessly, to subsist on starvation rations (If you don’t work, you don’t eat). During that time, they are witness to the removal of individuals, of families, mostly in the summer months before the rice crops are harvested, who simply disappear, only to be heard of as victims of mass slaughter by Pol Pot and his regime. Clothes “donated” to the community are discovered to be the belongings of much-loved, but now disappeared friends.
There is hit after hit, trauma after trauma in this book, but you find yourself plowing through it all because you just have to know what really happened to these people, to all the people of Cambodia.
The worst part, for me at least, comes near the end where, just when you thought it was safe to breathe, you find yourself sucker-punched. It’s a difficult listen, but oh so worth it. If they could live it, you can stand listening to it from this great distance of time and geography.
Christina Moore truly has a sense of language and emotion; her delivery seems so flawless, so knowing, that I never once questioned her pronunciation of such a foreign language with such foreign names (which is why I can’t even begin to spell our heroine’s name. My sincerest apologies to her for that). The only problem comes as a production blip where you can tell from the quality of the audio when each narration session stops and starts; it’s like it’s being recorded in different rooms (and my sister, who has some really, really good headphones, said she heard other sounds, other voices in the background).
Still, a devastatingly good listen, and the family’s eventual journey’s end brings with it such hope for the future, for their future. Even in a different land, they are true to themselves, to each other, to their culture, even while taking every opportunity life has to offer.
Make no mistake, there is plenty of violence in the book, and the section near the end that involves a cliff, is quite graphic and somewhat sickening. But you need to hear this book. While maybe not as harsh as First They Killed My Father, another book on the Cambodian genocide, To Destroy You Is No Loss is hard-hitting and ultimately enlightening. You’ll never look at the blind leading the blind with the same complacence again.
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