A Stick of Good Fortune: How I escaped from the Pol Pot Genocide and My Ten-Year Journey to Freedom

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Andreus Usha

Sieu Sean Do was born into a loving family in Cambodia. His childhood was violently shattered when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975. That sentence contains a world of loss inside it, and A Stick of Good Fortune spends its pages making sure you feel exactly how much was lost, and exactly what it took to survive it.

This is the second volume of Do's memoir, picking up where A Cloak of Good Fortune left off, and it covers the years 1975 to 1985 with the precision and emotional honesty of someone who has carried these memories for fifty years without letting them harden into abstraction. Millions were driven from their homes, separated from loved ones, and forced into a brutal world of starvation, hard labor, and terror. Under a regime determined to erase identity, family, memory, and hope, he endured repeated brushes with death in a landscape where survival itself seemed impossible.

What makes this memoir remarkable beyond its historical testimony is the spiritual thread running through it. A prognostication from a humble fortune stick, rooted in Cambodian spiritual tradition, became a recurring symbol of faith and an unseen force that appeared to shield him through unimaginable danger. That detail is not decorative. It is the key to understanding how a person maintains hope when every rational reason for hope has been systematically destroyed. Do holds onto that thread, and the book asks you to understand why a thread was enough.

Due to his fluency and aptitude for languages across seven tongues, the American Refugee Committee trained him as a camp physician's assistant. He also supported the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders as a volunteer serving thousands of refugees in crisis. That transformation from victim to healer, from the person being served to the person doing the serving, is the moral spine of the entire story.

Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, described the first memoir as a powerful and moving account that testifies to the unforgettable courage and resourcefulness of human beings confronting terror. A Stick of Good Fortune extends and deepens that testimony.

For anyone who believes that individual lives carry the full weight of history inside them, this book is an essential and deeply moving witness to exactly that.

About the Author

Sieu Sean Do

During Sieu Sean Do’s idyllic early years, he was immersed in the ancient rural Cambodian traditions practiced in the Kampong Speu province. His family then moved to Phnom Penh, where he adapted to the bustling city life of the capital until he was twelve. But that is when the Khmer Rouge seized control of the country to begin their awful reign of terror. City dwellers spared execution, including his family, were forced to relocate to the countryside and subjected to violence, brutality, and starvation.

After surviving a year in a labor camp in the Cambodian jungle, Sieu Sean and his family escaped and fled across the border into Vietnam. After six years, however, he realized that Vietnam offered refuge but no future. Cambodian refugees in camps in Thailand received resettlement offers to Europe, the US, or the British Commonwealth. So once again he risked his life and traveled back across northwestern Cambodia to a refugee camp on the Cambodia-Thai border.

Due to his fluency and aptitude for languages—Khmer, Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Chew chow, French, and English—the American Refugee Committee trained him as a camp physician’s assistant. He also supported the International Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders as a volunteer serving thousands of refugees in crisis.

A Cloak of Good Fortune, Sieu Sean Do’s first book, covers the portion of his life that concludes with his arrival in the Thai refugee camp. He is now working on a second book, focused on his life in the camp, which will document the little-known, life-and-death secrets that affected the desperate refugees he encountered there. These refugees struggled to adapt while enduring crowded confinement in a foreign land as they recuperated from trauma before figuring out their next moves toward freedom.