Customer Reviews

Golden Bones: An Extraordinary Journey from Hell in Cambodia to a New Life in America

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I must congratulate the author for creating such a powerful story that will inspire us all for generations to come. It takes an incredible amount of courage to relive those moments in order to tell of them. On behalf of all of us who are fortunate to be able to read of his journey, we thank him for his soulful outpouring and for sharing a piece of history that we might otherwise never have known about.

From cultural highlights about Cambodia (arranged marriages, faith, and even pet bears), to the carnage of the Khmer Rouge, to public speaking tips (Z180 delivery), to even getting ripped off in NYC, Sichan has created a memorable book that reminds us that the key to overcoming anything life throws at us is to keep that optimistic spirit alive, and to treat others around you with endless kindness and respect.

Golden Bones reads like fiction, until you realize it is a true story. It is history, international politics, intrigue, the White House, United Nations and a love story all rolled into one. I started it on a Friday evening and could not put it down until I finished it on Sunday. What a most fascinating and moving story. The courage and leadership showed by Sichan Siv at such a young age was remarkable, and should be an inspiration to everyone. Fleeing hell and thirteen years later becoming a Presidential aide sounds more like a novel than reality.

In addition, I enjoyed learning more about the history and culture of Cambodia.

While reading Golden Bones, I was often in tears, and frequently, crying. Ambassador Siv's escape during the 1975-1976 period occurred when I was working in the White House. I saw how difficult his life was, and thought how soft it was for me at that same time. I can't even imagine what it was like to learn that your family had been brutally murdered. The description of his mother and family was wonderful and heart warming. His escape from the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields was remarkable and riveting.

Sichan Siv's return to Cambodia in 1992 representing the President of the United States must have been one of the most enjoyable and emotional moments of his life. Also, what a thrill to have the Dalai Lama ask for your autograph?

After going through hell, Ambassador Siv had so many good things happen to him upon arriving in the United States, but, obviously, meeting Martha Lee Pattillo, his future wife, had to be at the top of the list. His description of their courtship and relationship has the making of a movie, a true love story.

One of my regular tennis partners while in the White House was George H. W. Bush, before he became "41," so I also share Sichan Siv's great admiration for him. (Bush, Sr. was our liaison to China and then Director of the C.I.A. in those days).

I learned a great deal from Golden Bones, including courage, motivation and leadership, not to mention ABC, (American By Choice), and overall, one must work hard to achieve their objectives. Also, I'll always remember, "No matter what happens, never give up."

Golden Bones is an inspiring and uplifting story for people of all ages and walks of life.

John G. Carlson

Golden Bones is one of the most amazing, inspiring stories that I have ever come across. It is really at least two inspirational stories. The first is Sichan Siv's tale of survival during the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia--a reign that killed over a fifth of Siv's countrymen and almost his entire family. His dramatic, against-all-odds escape from Cambodia by bicycling across the entire country, somehow escaping detection and outwitting the Khmer Rouge, is an epic in and of itself. The second story--how Siv rose from a penniless refugee in the U.S. to a high-ranking White House official and later a U.S. Ambassador--is an incredible tale in its own right. His rise from working as a New York cab driver plying the streets outside the U.N. to a high-ranking Ambassador representing the U.S. inside the U.N. is one of those "only in America" stories that should make us all proud. The book keeps you on the edge of your seat as it navigates through all of the dramatic twists and turns of Sichan Siv's remarkable life. This book is required reading!

Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge under the authoritarian regime of Pol Pot, attempted a form of social engineering unprecedented in history. Pol Pot, a relatively obscure peasant who had unsuccessfully pursued engineering in Paris, tried to re-engineer Cambodian society on Maoist principles by eradicating the past.

He ordered the mass relocation of the population of entire cities, including the capital, Phnom Penh; destroyed social unity by conscripting workers into labor gangs; abolished currency and all forms of money; and even declared that Time, as it existed, would be stopped and resume at "Year Zero," the first year of his regime. Self-sufficiency was rewarded, and non- productive people imprisoned or executed. Education and culture were swept away, and those who were educated or skilled, especially in foreign cultures, were eliminated. It was as if Orwell's "Animal Farm" had taken over Joseph Conrad's Congo in "Heart of Darkness," all against a backdrop of Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now."

Statistics are difficult to come by because many records were destroyed, but the best estimate is that between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians were tortured, worked, or starved to death in Pol Pot's reign of terror. As a factor of the population (about 8 million), that makes "The Killing Fields" one of the deadliest episodes of genocide in modern history. Human bones and piles of skulls littered the landscape and are still being unearthed thirty years later.
Hundreds, mostly children, are killed or maimed by land mines years after the war.
Responsibility for these atrocities has been delayed by the passage of time and by the death of many of the key players, including Pol Pot, ("Brother Number One") who died in 1998. Ieng Sary, or "Brother Number Three," faces crimes against humanity charges in an International Court. So far, there have been no convictions or legal consequences to the individuals involved. I've probably taken up too much time and space retelling the story, but as far as I'm concerned it can't be told often enough. The news media, in my judgment, didn't adequately cover the atrocities in Cambodia, just as they missed the enormity of the genocide in Rwanda.
The newly-created Cambodia was a dangerous place for anyone with an education, cultural awareness, and social status.... Like Sichan Siv. Fluent in French and English, trained in diplomacy, and employed by an international relief agency ("Care") he was a prime target for arrest.
His autobiography, "Golden Bones: An Extraordinary Journey from Hell in Cambodia to a New Life in America"... is a triumph of the human spirit.
He details in vivid but unsensational style his hastily-arranged departure from Phnom Penh a few steps ahead of the Khmer Rouge. (He had missed the last US Airlift of Cambodian employees by minutes.... Just as Vietnamese who assisted the United States in Saigon were stranded when Saigon fell. As he worked his way toward Thailand as a rice grower, truck driver and crane operator in Teak forests ,Sichan endured the relentless march of the Khmer Rouge. "Less than one year after the victorious Khmer Rouge had come swaggring into Phnomh Penh, the countrywide lay in ruins. The mass extermination of nearly 2 million Cambodians was well underway...With a population of only 8 million, this country had been flung into one of the twentieth century's grimmest nightmares."
Sichan finally did make his way to Thailand where he spent several months in a refugee camp. His eventual evacuation to the United States, a chance meeting that led to a job with the Bush White House, and appointment as US Ambassador to the United Nations rounds out this inspired, astonishing story. Sichan owes his survival to his faith in the Buddhist principles he learned from his mother.

Hierachy, opression, and requisite conformity characterize the typical Cambodian experience. Yet even within this framework, individuals emerge - "ascendant personalities" - who are able to survive the harshest of deprivations, tortures, and self-betrayal. Furthermore, they not only survive but emerge self-aware, entrepreneurial and full of hope. These ascendant personalities constitute more than an isolate phenomenon, more than a breakthrough of purely individual triumph. They also represent the potential of Cambodians to develop, use, and evolve an inner strength despite a culture that has yet to truly value the qualities that keep these ascendant personalities alive and thriving - qualities such as autonomy, introspection, independent thinking, creative imagination, and entreprenurialism. And beyond the Cambodian application alone, their ability to survive and thrive illustrates the human capacity to use adversity to enhance one's capabilities, evolve one's vision, and transform a baseline warrior tradition into the same creative force repsonsible for Angkor Wat and other treasures of Cambodian's Golden Age.

One of the factors responsible for ascendant personalities is their belief that they are special; that they have been infused with a super god-force that protects them and enables them to fulfill the mission that they feel chosen for, usually a mission to their family and country. In the case of Mr. Siv it was his mother's advice to "never give up hope" and others attributing his great "luck" and success in life to having "Golden Bones". This conviction of specialness gives them a "trauma immunity" similar to the immunity of terminally ill patients who baffle their doctors by going into remission despite negative offs and grim prognoses. This was the greatest gift Mr. Siv's mother gave him that enabled him to continue on despite all odds and it is thus no surprise that Mr. Siv dedicated his book to his mother. . By studying the survival characteristics of such people, not only can we be inspired, but we can learn how to locate, even emulate those characteristics within ourselves. Ascendant personalities within the framework of a conforming, oppressive, hierarchical culture........like the one Mr. Siv escaped from......teach us about the surprising reaches of human potential, as well as the potential of a reconstructed-from within Cambodia.

For some, physical survival was sometimes the luck of the draw or a matter of timing. Survival of the psyche was not simply a matter of luck or good fortune, however. To move away from imminent death of the spirit to embrace the possibilities of ascendancy was a journey to be traveled on what Cambodian wisdom calls "the curved path". To surmount life's most difficult challenges a Cambodian proverb advises, "Do not abandon the curved path; don't travel on the straight path." The curved path is not laid out like a roadmap, however, with specific markers and directions which a person could follow. It is a path which demands instead that the traveler summon his creativity and life force to confront the barriers which characterize the life conditions, to bend according to the circumstances. Those survivors who have not succumbed to the darkness of their despair demonstrate to the fullest the qualities needed.

It is a spirit I see often. I see it in the 17 year old waitress in Phnom Penh who speaks four languages fluently and will soon be departing to study university in Japan. I see it in a student who graduated from Phnom Penh university in 1999 and now has a PHD and teaches at an American University. I see it often in Cambodia. I see it in Dr. Sophal Ear who fled with his widowed mother and four siblings, earned three masters degrees, a doctorate and speaks four or five languages.

It is the strength og the inner will, the innermost essence of self, which distinguishes ascendant personalities. A strong will is not simply an accident of nature, however, but usually has been refined throughout the life experience and strengthened in much the same way that muscles of the body become stronger with exercise. As both a conscious exercise or more unconscious reaction, ascendant personalities engage in a consistent effort to build the strength of will to survive. They carry out the simple tasks of life with energy, precision, persistence, and concentration, competing almost with themselves to perfect the task until it becomes a habit.

In contrast to the body of thought which suggests that traumatic experiences must always be indelibly etched on the human soul in a way which leaves scars for life, ascendant personalities provide ample evidence that there is the equal potential for using the experience to reflect on their life in a more positive way.

This is a remarkable book by a remarkable guy. From the compelling story of his childhood in Cambodia (in which I as a reader virtually shared with him), to his horiffic experiences under the Khmer Rouge, which involved not only the loss of so many in his family, but the years of uncertainty surrounding that loss, I alternated between tears of sorrow and tears of joy. I could not put this book down. I literally felt physically relieved when I read of his resettlement in Connecticut, which he described in almost biblical terms, as he wrote about his discoveries in America. And the tenderness in which he speaks of his courtship and marriage to Martha as well as his rise into the halls of power in this country, remind the reader that this can only be a true American story - you just could not make it up. I recommend this book to all young American teenagers in every school, who can truly learn what it is like to BECOME an American.

In his autobiography, Golden Bones, Sichan Siv relates a remarkable life story, detailing not only his near-death experiences as a slave laborer and escape from Cambodia in 1978, but his assimilation into American life as well as his tremendous successes as a civil servant. The book opens with a concise but informative account of Siv's homeland, Cambodia, from ancient history through to the time of his childhood in the 1950s. It then documents, in often harrowing detail, the dissolution of Cambodia into civil war in 1975. Siv's previously comfortable middle-class life becomes a nightmare. Considered a member of the educated intelligentsia, he is forced to flee on a brutal cross-country journey to Thailand to escape death at the hands of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. Near death with disease, malnutrition and exhaustion, Siv does indeed gain refuge over the border. After several months in a Thai refugee camp, he is sponsored in America by a Connecticut couple who becomes his honorary family. Tortured with worry over the fate of his family members, Siv nevertheless immediately starts to seek employment in his new country. He goes on to hold a variety of very different jobs, from Friendly's supervisor to NYC cab driver. He receives a Masters of International Affairs from Columbia University and ends up a US ambassador to the UN as well as a key player in the first Bush administration. Whether trekking through the Cambodian jungle starving and terrified or undergoing the trials of adaptation into a new society, his mother's message resonates within him: "Don't give up hope!" Siv's story is hugely inspiring and demonstrative of how many immigrants must overcome a past of terrible adversity in order to build new lives in the U.S.

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This book was recommended since I am traveling to Cambodia in June. What an amazing book! I found it so interesting, educational, inspiring and so amazing that Sichan Siv not only survived, but thrived and went on to inspire so many and accomplish such great things in his new life in the United States. I can only imagine the horror he witnessed under the Khemer Rouge regime and not knowing what his family was being subjected to during the time he was held captive. It is a testament to his mother that he had the peace, strength and wisdom to outsmart his enemies and work his way up through his entire life. I am grateful to Siv for telling his story and helping me to understand the history of Cambodia, before I travel there. I would love to someday meet Sichan Siv.

This book seemed a little bit slow at the beginning but as soon as Sichuan Siv started his escape from Cambodia, I was hooked for the rest of the book. It is so amazing that he survived the escape. It may sound odd but I think I learned some survival tips from him.
I really love the fact that what principally keep him going was remembering that his mother told him always to have hope. Without hope, he could never make it through all the physical obstacles or worse yet the many encounters with the Khmer Rouge. I knew about them before from a book that I read some time ago, 'The Killing Fields'. This book is more a tale of survival and why you need to survive instead of relating what the Khmer Rouge did. He also made me appreciate Khmer folktales, poetry and gave some information on Khmer cooking. I thought that it symbolic that everyone in Cambodia always wore black clothes and the way he knew he had finally made it to Thailand was wearing colorful clothes clothes.
I don't it is giving away the book too much to state this observation. When I first started reading this book, I noticed that Sichan Siv was an extremely resourceful person. I started a list of the occupations that he had as the book went along, it was an amazing number of different kinds of work. I would have never applied for a job that I knew I didn't have the background for or at least know what the job title was but he did! I will let you compile your own list, you will be amazed.
I recommend this for everyone interested in the history of holocausts, Cambodian history and survivor stories.