Haing ngor a cambodian odyssey tours

It isn’t often that a brutal personal account of mass murder, slavery, torture, and the obliteration of a sovereign nation causes a reader to meditate on the art of acting, but then, Haing Ngor’s was no ordinary life.

An Academy Award winner for his role in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, and a survivor of the Cambodian genocide chronicled in the film, Ngor is depicted on the back cover of his memoir, A Cambodian Odyssey, holding aloft his Oscar, his entire being ablaze with joy.

On the front cover is a picture of Ngor as he must have looked during the depths of his travails just a few years before, seated in torn fatigues, with an expression on his face that defies description – other than to say it is the same as in photographs of Cambodians as they entered Pol Pot’s infamous prison, Tuol Sleng, knowing they were about to be tortured to death.

These two photographs of Ngor are troubling, though in an entirely less consequential sense.

To begin with, their