Consider the modern children in the book; how do you feel they are affected by the legacy of the war and genocide?

Consider the modern children in the book: the young monks, Lah, and Makara, the young addict-turned-novice. How do you feel they are affected by the legacy of the war and genocide?

I live in MN. I found myself considering what it means to be foreign. How The Cambodian community is unknown to me. We live as neighbors and yet, I do not know them unless I read about them in the pages of a beautiful book. The legacy of this war is diaspora and my contribution is to ignore the beauty and pain in my own backyard. If anything, this book made me want to be a better neighbor and to be part of a larger solution of knowing a community that has lived in MN for decades.

I feel the post war children are going to be like children everywhere. Their parents will tell them of things that happened and the horrors that occurred and the children will hear it but not feel it. I have a hard time understanding all that happened to my brother in Vietnam and feeling as he felt while there and he returned when I was in my twenties. Again it takes a movie or a book to draw the real picture for children and even adults to get the real picture.

I work as a high school special education teacher and some of my students are affected by trauma-not through war or genocide, but through lives infused with poverty, abuse, and tragedy. I feel children in this book and those I teach cannot help but be influenced by tragedy. I also see resilience and determination to not let their lives be defined by what they have experienced. Some of the strongest people I hear about or know have transcended conditions that they have no control over to live with hope.

there is a current exhibit at the New York Historical Society on the Viet Nam War.. I have been to it 4 times. It is very upsetting. I am 72 years old and have many memories of this time. This exhibit highlights the shame, the utter lack of humanity given to the Viet Cong, Cambodians and others. The legacy of this war continues to haunt the United States.

The modern children are still affected by the war. So many families were destroyed and torn apart. This war and genocide was not that long ago. Memories are memories. I can visit my grandparent"s grave. I know when, where and how they died. Many of these children have no idea of when their families died, or even worse, how they died ; they were simply gone, surely they remember searching for any hope of finding a trace.
The country was totally destroyed, the children today are still facing poverty, child labor, lack of education and poor health conditions.

The modern children will always be affected by the legacy of the war and the genocide. It is imperative that they never erase history in an attempt to forget, for choosing ignorance over truth allows history to repeat itself. The goal of any country and its citizens is to remember and to work against anything that would allow past atrocities to retake a stronghold in their country. Countries and peoples must remain diligent.