About the book

Seng Ty’s The Years of Zero is a survivor’s account of the Cambodian genocide carried out by Pol Pot’s sadistic and terrifying Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s. It follows the author from the age of seven as he is plucked from his comfortable, middle-class home in a Phnom Penh suburb, marched along a blistering, black strip of highway into the jungle, and thrust headlong into the unspeakable barbarities of an agricultural labor camp.

At first, Seng and his family are led to believe that they will be returned to their home. By degrees, however, it becomes clear to them that the Khmer Rouge have no intention of letting them go back to the city. Rather, the tyrants are bent on reducing Cambodia to a primitive, agrarian society, one in which there is no place for the educated, the cosmopolitan, or the capitalistic. The goal of the Khmer Rouge is to cut out such “impurities” by murdering those who embrace them.  

And murder they do. Seng’s father is killed with a length of bamboo, which his tormentors use to break his neck. His mother is worked to death, her last gesture to place her thin, stained blanket over Seng’s bony shoulders. His brother Da succumbs to starvation. A mere child, Seng is forced to fend for himself, navigating the brainwashing campaigns and random depravities of the Khmer Rouge, determined to survive so he can bear witness to what happened in the camp.

The Years of Zero guides the reader through the author’s long, desperate darknesses and harrowing dawns, each chapter a painting of cruelty, caprice, and courage. Even as his countrymen are transformed into a horde of human skeletons, each of them mouthing an obeisance to the revolutionary ideal of Angkar, Seng finds a way to remain whole both in body and in mind. He rallies past torture, betrayal, disease and despair, refusing at every juncture to surrender to the murderers who have stolen everything he had.

The Years of Zero follows Seng as he sneaks mice and other living food from the rice paddies where he labors, knowing that the penalty for such defiance is death. It tracks him as he tries to escape into the jungle, only to be dragged back to his camp and beaten half to death. It shows him after the Khmer Rouge have been overthrown, keeping himself alive by virtue of his wits and his instincts in a war-ravaged, post-apocalyptic Phnom Penh.