Loung’s Red Dress Symbol Analysis

Loung’s red dress represents her family and life before the Khmer Rouge. Years before the takeover, Ma made three identical red dresses for Loung, Chou, and Geak to wear during New Year’s celebrations. Loung packs her beloved dress when her family leaves Phnom Penh. Upon their arrival in Ro Leap, Loung looks on in horror as a Khmer Rouge soldier then tosses her dress onto a pile with the other new villagers’ clothes and lights it all on fire. He has not simply destroyed a happy memory, but also Loung’s sense of hope. However irrationally, Loung packed the dress with the dream of one day being able to wear it again—and more broadly, with the dream of being able to return to her life as it was in Phnom Penh. The destruction of the dress, then, signifies the sudden, shocking destruction of a life she knew and loved.

Even so, Loung spends much of the book reminiscing about the dress, which remains an indelible symbol of her family and past. While doing laundry for her foster family in the Vietnamese refugee camp, for example, Loung remembers the joy of twirling around in her dress with her sisters on New Year’s morning, before joining the rest of her family for a delicious feast. She also vows to one day obtain a new red dress—to recreate what was taken from her. Only when she eventually does get a new dress does she realize that certain things—her old life, her family members—are irreplaceable, and that she must accept their loss: “I am sad thinking I have finally replaced the other red dress that the soldier burned,” she thinks. “Staring at the dress I realize it will never be the dress Ma made for me. They are both gone.”

With this acceptance, however, comes the opportunity for Loung to move on. Indeed, the red dress is not only a symbol of dreams destroyed, but of hope reborn. Loung wore the original dress for New Year’s celebrations—a time of fresh starts, and, in Cambodian culture, the time when people become a year older. While the dress Eang makes for Loung can never replace the original made by Ma, it is what she will wear for her journey to America—where she has the chance to finally build a new life.