The events of The Clay Marble are anchored in a national tragedy almost without precedent in the modern age: the Cambodian Civil War and the rise of the Khmer Rouge, a brutal communist regime that presided over the deaths of over 20% of the country’s population through starvation, forced labor, and murder. Minfong Ho’s novel begins in 1980, after the Khmer Rouge has been forced into exile, but the nation’s suffering is still far from over. Vietnamese forces occupy the country, and various Cambodian factions (royalist, anti-communist, and communist, including the resurgent Khmer Rouge) continue to fight the Vietnamese and each other. As always in civil war, the civilian population is caught in the crossfire.

Early in The Clay Marble, Dara, the novel’s narrator, recalls a time of peace and happiness 10 years before, when “the smiling round-faced Prince Sihanouk ruled Cambodia” (5). This period of relative tranquility came to an end in 1970, when Sihanouk was forced out of power by members of his own government. The main cause for this was the civil war in neighboring Vietnam, which regularly spilled over the border: Communist guerrillas in that war often took refuge in the jungles of eastern Cambodia, even using Cambodian ports to resupply their forces in South Vietnam.