Language Barriers

In high school Phavantha Mao never thought about applying to a four-year university. Back then, his mentality was typical of Cambodian American students: “Good schools are for the rich, for kids of another race.”

As he says those words today, however, Mao speaks with a sense of irony: Not only is he a fourth-year engineering student at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), but he is also president of the Cambodian Student Society. Still, Mao says he wouldn’t be content with just a secure future and material goods.

“When I take a step back, I see a lot of my peers struggling,” he says. “Some already have families. Some have been working at McDonald’s for three or four years.”

Mao says on campus, he and his friends often discuss the sense of responsibility they feel being the first-generation of Cambodian Americans to get a college education. And like many of them, Mao volunteers in the community and hopes to continue after he graduates. But, in order to increase his influence with older Cambodian Americans and with newer immigrants, he says he will need to improve his Khmer (the Cambodian language). Currently, he speaks at a 1st grade level.

The struggle of the Cambodian community in Long Beach to maintain the Khmer language is an American story. As the generations progress, the homeland that parents and grandparents so often speak of seems more and more distant. In addition, the lack of a common language widens the gap between the generations. Those who are non-English speaking and first generation are often at odds with the younger generation, many of whom speak only English. Meanwhile, the so-called 1.5 generation grapples with their identity, trying to find their place somewhere in between the old country and the new one.

Mao’s acquisition of English and, consequently, his loss of Khmer follows a typical pattern. After escaping Cambodia, Mao spent seven years in a Thai refugee camp, where schools lacked resources and trained staff. When he arrived in the United States, learning English became the priority. And in college, he’s been too busy to take Khmer classes. “Most of us are going high-tech,” he says. “Khmer isn’t seen as essential. It’s just something nice to know.”

But now that school’s winding down—he’s set to graduate next year—Mao has reassessed the importance of learning Khmer. This summer he hopes to study the language, perhaps at a temple or at a local non-profit organization.

What makes Mao’s story unfortunate is that until last semester he would have been able to take Khmer at CSULB, a campus situated in the center of the largest Cambodian American community in the United States. But just this past spring, the university eliminated its Khmer literacy courses. In the past two years, partly because of the passage of Proposition 227—a California ballot initiative that sought to ban bilingual education programs in public schools—Khmer classes have been empty. The lack of students prompted the university to reduce Khmer classes to conversational-level courses rather than a full-literacy curriculum.

A Program To Develop Bilingual Education Teachers

In 1990, Long Beach’s Cambodian American population was estimated at a mere 18,000, according to census statistics. Since then, however, the community has increased substantially, as families have expanded and sponsorship has allowed more Cambodians to immigrate to the United States.

Non-profit organizations that work within the community estimate that today there are some 50,000 to 55,000 Cambodian Americans in Long Beach—the largest population outside of Cambodia.

It was fitting, therefore, that CSULB was one of only three U.S. universities to offer a Khmer language program. Established in 1995 by a consortium of faculty and staff from the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Education, CSULB’s Khmer coursework was initiated to prepare teachers to pass California’s Khmer/English bilingual certification examination.

City and school officials hoped that the university program would encourage a greater number of fluent Khmer-speakers to become bilingual teachers in the Long Beach Unified School District. In 1997-98, some 9,500 limited English proficient Khmer speakers were enrolled in the district, far more than in any other district in California or the United States.

But when Proposition 227 took effect in November of 1998, the district virtually eliminated its Khmer/English bilingual language classes, and thus the need for bilingual teachers.

To many advocates in the community, that change has hurt Cambodian American students, their families and the entire community.

Mao, who arrived in the United States at age 12, says that when he was in junior high school, he was placed in an English as a Second Language (ESL) class, but the teacher spoke Spanish. Not surprisingly, Mao says he was lost during those years. He would speak Khmer to Latino students and would wonder why they couldn’t understand him. When summer came, he didn’t even know there was vacation, so for two weeks he would take the bus to school, wondering where all the students and teachers were. He ended up playing basketball from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.

“Those years hurt me. It was terrible not knowing what was going on.”

Mao was able to pick up more English in high school, where other Cambodian American and Latino students more fluent in English helped him with the language.

Mao says if he had Khmer/English bilingual classes, “it would have helped tremendously to have someone able to understand [you], to see through you and understand your history and why you are here. That would have quadrupled my learning process.”

Students like Mao had little support from home, since few of their parents had any English proficiency. Indeed, according to 1990 census statistics, 95 percent of Cambodians spoke Khmer at home, and 73.2 percent did not speak English well.

Sameoun Sim, a sophomore at CSULB, says that many people in his parent’s generation have not found it easy to approach the school system or the city government to demand bilingual teachers. “Since they don’t speak English, they don’t have a voice,” says Sim.

The Language Barrier

Although the younger generation, primarily those under 18 who arrived in the United States as small children or who were born in the United States, have English fluency, the older population of Cambodian Americans largely remains in poverty because they lack English proficiency.

Meanwhile, many of those who arrived in this country as older children or teenagers—the so-called 1.5 generation—lack language skills in both Khmer and English. In 1990, only 46.2 percent of Cambodian American males and 28.6 percent of females completed high school, compared to an average of 78 percent for all Asian Americans. Only about 28 percent of Cambodian males and 3 percent of females attended college, compared to an average of 38 percent for all Asian Americans.

Mao’s experience is typical of those who are in their 20s and 30s. After escaping from the war in their homeland, many Cambodians were interned in Thai refugee camps. Housed with their families in impoverished conditions, children and teenagers received inadequate education for years. Because of an almost complete lack of financial resources, young people attended single-room schools with students from all grade levels in one classroom; good teachers were as rare as school supplies were scarce.

Mao arrived at a Thai refugee camp when he was five years old. A year later, his family moved to Kaoidang, a camp where students were taught in Khmer. The school was a bamboo hut and the teachers were older Cambodian refugees. “Just having a place to sit was a luxury,” says Mao. “Students had just one pencil to use for the whole year. There might have been some paper, but you couldn’t just pick up a stack.”

Mao was there for about five years before he moved to another camp. Though the schooling was not great, he says, it “motivated [us] to study.”

Numerous Cambodian Americans of this age group have suffered because of this break in their schooling. Mao says that many Cambodian American students understand when other people speak English or Khmer, but have difficulty forming sentences in either language.

“I would say that we linger between Cambodian and English,” he says.

Generation Gap

Wayne Wright, a Khmer/English bilingual teacher at Lincoln Elementary School in Long Beach, believes that if more students had Khmer competency, there would be fewer communication problems between younger students and their parents.

“There’s a huge generation gap, and the language problems only make it worse,” said Wright. “I’ve had to translate between parents and children when issues come up.”

Thira Srey, an administrator at the Long Beach-based nonprofit Cambodian Association of America, says the 1.5 and second generations are becoming increasingly Americanized. But as they have assimilated, the gap between them and the first generation has increased. “The space between the generations is very great. Grandparents don’t understand their grandchildren,” he says.

That gap exists not only because of language barriers but because of cultural barriers as well, says Srey. Parents are used to raising their children by authoritarian rule. Cambodian American children who are not given room to develop more freely often rebel and turn to friends for support and guidance.

“In America, young people must be aggressive to survive,” he says. “In Cambodia, you don’t have to be aggressive. You can stay with your family, but here after 18 it’s not so easy to stay with your parents. Young people must learn to be aggressive and independent. If they assimilate into a good environment that is good and they will have a good future.”

But there is also evidence that more of the 1.5 and second generations are interested in reconnecting with their roots. After years of trying to master English, Srey estimates that about 10 percent of the young people are studying the language of their parents and grandparents. At Srey’s Cambodian Association of American, where Khmer language classes are held, 70 students are now enrolled, compared to 50 in 1997 and just 18 students 10 years ago. More young people, after earning a college degree, are interested in learning Khmer, says Srey.

“Young people realize that if they want to get a job, the most important thing is that they are fluent in English,” he explains. “So first they learn English and some go on to college and get their diploma. After that some have returned to the Khmer language and culture.”

Helping the Community With Language

When CSULB started its Khmer language program, the university and social service agencies felt that the presence of such a program would help train students for community service. Khmer speakers are needed to assist older generation and recent immigrants, who are non-English speaking and remain in dire need of outreach. In 1990, the Cambodian American per capita income was just $5,120 compared to national per capita income of $14,143. And in 1989 poverty rates stood at 42.6 percent.

Terry Yamada, a professor of Asian and Asian American Studies says, “a lot of potential was wasted when the Cambodian refugees arrived. It’s when people first came here that they needed to be fitted into English language programs; taught how to drive a car, and given government services.”

Instead, she says, thousands of them were turned away because of a lack of help on city, state, and federal levels.

“The Cambodian community is being ignored on multiple levels,” says Yamada. “There is an inability to be effective and intervene, in cases where people need access to welfare, medical, and social services.”

Program Goals Shift

The university administration still feels that there is a future in teaching Khmer. John Attinasi, director of Bilingual Education at the College of Education at CSULB, hopes that the now-conversational Khmer language program will offer more people the opportunity to work with the Cambodian community.

“Our goal is to give people a greater fluency in the Khmer language so that they can engage in assisting the Cambodian community of Long Beach with many types of social services,” says Attinasi.

Furthermore, Attinasi says the elimination of the full-literacy Khmer curriculum at CSULB is not necessarily permanent, but was a short-term decision based on low enrollment. “If we renew the demand for the Khmer literacy classes, they can be offered again,” he says, adding however, that to do that would require efforts by the public schools and community to lower the dropout rate and increase college enrollment.

Sim and Mao say that if Khmer could be used to fulfill the general education language requirement, more students would enroll. Moreover, if more students learned the language they could teach English to others in the community.

However, even Sim adds that if the social conditions of the community don’t improve, few students are likely to value the Khmer language. “If we got another chance to take Khmer without changing anything, we probably won’t take advantage of studying the language. People might still think it is a waste of time,” he says.

Mao, on the other hand, is more optimistic. With the war, people lost hope—and their sense of pride in the Khmer culture diminished. But as the political situation and economy there improves, and as Cambodian Americans move up the social ladder in the United States, he predicts there will be renewed interest in Khmer. He already feels that change. “Five years ago, most people were just glad to be here,” he says. “But now when I walk down the streets of Long Beach, businesses are thriving. There is a sense of community. Many hope to travel back to their homeland. And young people are trying to reconnect with their parents.”

Adds Mao: “Language is the best way to do that.”