Khmer Rap (Feature)
	New York Tabloid Slams API Letter-Writer (in National News) Top Dog Guaranteed Top Education (in Bay Area News) Get Ready for Cyberwars (in Business) Click. Click. (in A&E) The Flame and the Street Name (in Opinion)

By Janet Ng

A group of Cambodian American women cluster around a table in the center of the room, conversing in animated, yet hushed tones. Their children dash around, some playing with a rubber ball, others scurrying in and out of the door.

Though carefully applied makeup brightens their faces, many wear worn and set expressions. Three times a week, they meet at the Neighborhood Learning Center (NLC) in East Oakland to attend computer, parenting and ESL classes.

Several streets over, the Asian Community Mental Health Services, which runs NLC, is bustling with activity. Suon In, a family counselor, speaks quietly with his clients. This is where people go when they need help — either to talk about their memories of Cambodia, or find assistance for family members.

In one case, a woman hears voices from the walls. She hasn’t taken a shower for months because if she does, the voices threaten to drown her. Several weeks ago, they commanded her to light the stove. Her husband came home to find her sitting in the room with the stove on the entire day. Alarmed, he brought her to the community center where she was diagnosed with major depression and referred to a psychiatrist.

There are thousands of Khmer Rouge survivors who, everyday in the United States, relive the terror they endured in Cambodia. These survivors of one of the worst holocausts in history rarely speak about their experiences, however. Insead, many sit silently in their homes, reluctant to emerge because their minds are riveted on the horrors they witnessed in their homeland.

Sauyuth Tep helps a student navigate the Internet at NLC. Photo by Janet Ng

They suffer from similar symptoms. Some are afraid of noises they hear outside, others are convinced they are being watched. They have nearly identical nightmares of people trying to kill them. They wake up sweating, clutching their hearts.

It has been about 20 years since the United States admitted refugees from Cambodia yet, compared to other groups escaping war-torn countries, Cambodian Americans have been less successful at rebuilding their lives in the United States, points out Sereivuth Prak, deputy director at United Cambodian Community, Inc., in Long Beach, Calif.

“They’ve seen a lot of suffering. They’ve seen starvation, oppression, and family members killed. The majority just isolate themselves.”

The Mahantdorai: Cambodian Holocaust

Mass graves of people murdered during Pol Pot’s regime, are uncovered. Photo courtesy of www.dithpran.org

Her heart pumping with panic, Theanvy Kuoch ran through dense brush in Cambodia, clutching her six-year-old son. It was “year zero” under the Khmer Rouge and Kuoch escaped from a labor camp. The stench of dead bodies enveloped her, yet she kept moving, hoping she wouldn’t step on any of the land mines — some say one left for each person in Cambodia — littered throughout the forest. After 10 days, Kuoch finally reached her hometown. Her sister was one of few family members still alive.

“There was no food and I was so sick,” she recalls.

Kuoch decided to leave her son with her sister and tried to find help in a refugee camp in Thailand. Once she made it to the camp, though, she was too ill to go back. Malaria kept her in bed while her body swelled and all 10 toenails sloughed off.

“I lost everybody,” Kuoch says, her voice strained. “I only had my son, but I was separated from him.” The Khmer Rouge murdered 19 members of her family. Kuoch, who now resides in Connecticut, barely speaks of the horrors she has witnessed in Cambodia, but they remain fixed in her memory.

The Khmer Rouge arrive in Phnom Penh. Photo courtesy of cybercambodia.com

The Khmer Rouge, “Red Cambodians,” wiped out almost a quarter of the population in Cambodia. Also known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea and the Party of Democratic Kampuchea, the Mao-inspired group rose to power in 1975 after winning a civil war against General Lon Nol, who was backed by the United States.

Prior to 1975, King Norodom Sihanouk had tried to keep Cambodia neutral during conflicts in Laos and Vietnam. The United States believed that the North Vietnamese had stationed communist bases in Cambodia and wanted to stop them from using the country as a supply route. In 1969, then-President Richard Nixon approved bombing raids along the Cambodia-Vietnam border, killing approximately 600,000 people, according to figures from Khmer Health Advocates (KHA), a West Hartford, Conn.-based advocacy organization. Areas with large civilian populations were also often bombed.

In 1970, General Lon Nol overthrew King Sihanouk, but civil war raged between General Lon Nol’s government and the Khmer Rouge. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge won and instituted its plan to create a utopian, agrarian society, bringing Cambodia to “year zero.”

Banking, finance and currency were abolished, all religions were outlawed, and traditional systems of social structure were destroyed. In a working paper by KHA titled, “Dying in Silence,” Kuoch reports that doctors and intellectuals were the first targets of the Khmer Rouge. She also describes cases in which the Khmer Rouge conducted medical experiments on the elderly and those dying in hospitals.

Pol Pot, originally named Saloth Sar, was the Khmer Rouge leader. He attempted to create a purely classless society by evacuating urban areas such as Phnom Penh and Battambang City. According to KHA, over 3 million people were force-marched out of cities and sent to concentration camps to be “re-educated.” During its reign from 1975 to 1978, the Khmer Rouge terrorized the Cambodian people.

“If you mentioned anything about the past, even if you just said, ‘I remember we used to eat this and this,’ [they] would come and kill you,” Kuoch explains. She says that people became scared to even talk to each other because the Khmer Rouge would send soldiers to spy on them.

“Trust no longer existed,” she says.

Khmer Rouge soldiers herded people into labor camps in the countryside, where if the soldiers didn’t kill or torture them, disease and starvation would leave them barely alive. KHA reports that survivors were traumatized by sensory experiences such as hearing people, oftentimes family members, beaten to death, seeing bloody clothing, and smelling dead bodies. Children were also punished or killed if they expressed emotion.

Says Kuoch: “It just broke their hearts.”

Killing fields remain as testimonies to the unimaginable cruelties of the Khmer Rouge. KHA states that investigators mapped graves in seven of Cambodia’s 22 provinces using satellites. They found approximately 10,000 to 20,000 pits, each holding an average of 100 to 250 people, while the largest might contain several thousand victims. The Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University reports that at least 20 percent of the population — or 1.7 million — died during the Pol Pot regime.

Skirmishes along the border with Vietnam finally provoked the Vietnamese government to invade Cambodia in 1979. Death did not end there, however. Cambodians flooded refugee camps in Thailand. The Thai military guarding the camps could be just as cruel as the Khmer Rouge; survivors recount stories of soldiers rounding up survivors and pushing them off cliffs.

Though Pol Pot retired in 1985, the Khmer Rouge continued to wage a guerrilla war in western Cambodia until it collapsed from internal conflict. Pol Pot died in 1998, but the effects of his regime still haunt Cambodians today.

The Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) in Washington, D.C., reports that some 510,000 Cambodians fled to Thailand, and approximately 100,000, to Vietnam. In the early 1980s, from camps in Vietnam supported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Cambodian refugees entered Australia, France, Canada, the United States and other countries.

A Hushed Community

As Kuoch recovered inside the camp in Thailand, she learned English from Catholic missionaries. In 1981, she immigrated to the United States, but her heart was still in Cambodia

“I couldn’t get my son back. I felt so lonely. I didn’t think I would stay alive,” she says.

A nurse convinced her to see a psychiatrist and she slowly worked her way out of depression. “If there [had not] been so many kind people, I wouldn’t be here today,” she says.

After 11 years of separation, she returned to Cambodia and was reunited with her son. Kuoch, a former teacher in Cambodia, is now a family therapist at KHA in the United States.

“I’m a really lucky person,” she says.

But other Cambodians are not as fortunate as Kuoch. Many still can’t sleep at night, and if they do, it is a slumber full of nightmares. Even the ring of a telephone sends some elders into a frightened trance. To them, the Khmer Rouge can still wipe out entire families without reason.

Based on the 1990 census, 43 percent of Cambodian Americans are living at or below the Federal Poverty limit. KHA estimates that at least 25,000 are disabled. According to 1999 data developed by SEARAC, there are approximately 176,000 Cambodians in the United States, with the majority concentrated in Long Beach, Calif. and Lowell, Mass.

Mental health workers surmise about 90 percent of the Cambodian American community suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression.

“When Cambodian refugees first come here, they concentrate on language skills and getting a job,” says In of Asian Community Mental Health Services.

After several years, however, they become overwhelmed by the pressures of adjusting to a new country and the memory of the trauma they experienced, he explains.

Adds Kuoch: “They think all their pain will be cured in the United States. They try to block their memory, try to continue their life, but can’t. Mentally and physically — you can’t separate it.”

Three or four years after resettling in the United States, problems begin to arise for Cambodian American families. Many refuse to leave their homes. The language barrier isn’t the only problem. Like most Asian cultures, Cambodian customs prevent people from speaking of personal difficulties outside of immediate family circles. More often than not, they keep their pain to themselves.

“They don’t come forward, so we don’t know about them,” says Rena Bo, a mental health worker at United Cambodian Community (UCC).

Community centers such as KHA and UCC, therefore, try to reach the community with home visits.

“Even if they don’t come to the center, we still go and talk to them,” Kuoch says. “They’re quiet, but they have so much pain.”

In addition to the stigma of mental disorders, the difficulty of treating Cambodian Americans is compounded by the effectiveness of the Khmer Rouge campaign. The Khmer Rouge created a community afraid to speak, unable to forget one of the regime’s most powerful slogans: “Only you and the silence will survive.”

Psychological trauma has aggravated family problems and physical health. According to 1990 census data, in California, Cambodian Americans have the second highest rate of stroke in the United States. Hepatitis B and diabetes are also major health concerns for the community, as are alcohol and drug abuse.

Furthermore, the 1996 Welfare Reform law has made it more difficult for Cambodian Americans to receive help. Refugees who have been in the United States for five years or more can no longer hold refugee status and cease receiving benefits.

“With the kind of problems [Cambodians] have, there is no way they could work,” Bo says.

Cambodians remain a population that lacks political clout because they are seldom heard by the government, Kuoch adds.

According to Kuoch, the Khmer Rouge drilled into Cambodians’ minds that “to keep you is no gain, to lose you is no loss.” They were not allowed to talk or remember the past. Their distrust of the government leaves them wanting nothing to do with politics.

“Their problems overwhelm them,” she says. “They feel they have no value, they don’t want to live; they want to give up. They’ve suffered from brainwashing: If you talk, you die.

“If [Cambodians] don’t like something about the government, they don’t protest. [The government] always tells [us]: ‘The population is too small. It doesn’t matter.’ It’s as if the population doesn’t exist.”

Theanvy Kuoch, once a prisoner in a Khmer Rouge concentration camp, founded Khmer Health Advocates with three nurses.

At the Neighborhood Learning Center, bright-eyed children gather around their mothers when it is time for art class. They stand attentively one minute, then hop around excitedly the next. With a stern word though, they quiet down.

The rift between children and their parents widens as the children grow older, sometimes more so, in immigrant families. Most Cambodian Americans who resettled are widows. Their children were either very young when they arrived in the United States, or they were born here. They quickly learned English and adapted more easily than their parents, who must rely on them to navigate the new country.

Yet, the children also suffer.

“[The United States] never created a place for [the refugees]. They never received holistic service. They never received psychological treatment. Now we’re seeing the degenerate effects of that in juvenile crime and gangs,” Porthira Chhim, a project manager at SEARAC, says.

Some who work in the Cambodian community call it secondary PTSD. Kuoch explains that even though parents never speak of what happened in Cambodia, the children can sense the sadness and tension at home. For children who were born during the Khmer Rouge or in refugee camps, they don’t even know why they are distressed because their parents keep silent about their experiences .

“They’re afraid that if kids hear what happened in Cambodia, those thoughts would affect them psychologically,” she says. “The more the parents hide their anger and worry, the more they pass [it] onto the kids. And the kids act out. They’re angry at the parents.”

Children of Cambodian refugees also suffer from depression and loneliness. Parents often work more than one job, leaving kids to an empty house. When parents are at home, however, they are so preoccupied with their own problems that they don’t have the energy to help their children, Kuoch says.

“When I talk with the kids, they’re acting out because they’re not secure,” she explains. “They care about their parents, but they don’t know what to do.”

She describes a seven-year-old child who holds so much anger in him that he says he wants to kill everyone. Every night, he checks his family’s bed to see if they are still alive and safe. Only after Kuoch spoke with him did she find out that at the age of three, he witnessed his brother’s death.

“It’s amazing; they have so much anxiety in them and they’re so young,” she says. According to KHA, these children often experience breakdowns later in life.

The unspoken memories have also manifested themselves in attempted suicide and violence on the streets. Statistics from KHA show that in the 1990s, 40 percent of the 64 Cambodians in jail in California were serving sentences for killing someone. Approximately 11 percent were there for assault. KHA also cites examples of brutal crimes such as a mother who was shot through the heart while nursing her baby and a boyfriend who attacked and murdered his partner’s three children.

In the past, a number of Cambodian American youth have formed gangs. KHA reports that “in California, Cambodians have been rumored to have the highest murder rate of all the Asian groups.” Kovan Tun, vice president of the Cambodian Buddhist Society works with families in the community. Oftentimes, worried parents first go to their religious leaders — Buddhist monks — for help.

The community is very concerned about young people joining gangs, Tun says.

When children want to leave home, parents feel lonely, and become depressed. In Cambodia, families follow strict hierarchical patterns. Traditionally, parents and elders are respected and children follow their advice without question. In the United States, however, children are encouraged to speak out.

“There’s different communication; the children grow up here, they don’t have tradition. The parents feel they lose respect,” Tun explains.

Though the Cambodian family structure is threatened, many remain optimistic.

Says Kuoch: “I have a lot of hope for the young generation. Their mind is very young and strong. They are willing to collaborate with Cambodians and others.”

One Day at a Time

Kiyomi Price says of the role art plays in therapy, “It’s not only art, it’s much deeper than that.”

Bright light shines through the windows at the community center in East Oakland. Sauyuth Tep’s friendly face is illuminated — either by the daylight or her own joy — as she surveys what she affectionately calls “her group.” On one side of the room, a group of women gather around computers, learning how to download Cambodian music and navigate the Internet. On the other side, Kiyomi Price, the art instructor, hauls out containers of wood carving tools and blocks of linoleum. Several women sit down and begin their projects.

Tep, the family counselor at the Neighborhood Learning Center, explains that the center is trying to get more computers so the students don’t have to share.

“[The parents] come here, they educate themselves, then teach their children.” Tep says.

The Neighborhood Learning Center began approximately three years ago. Today, Cambodian American women meet to socialize and learn skills that will help them find jobs, as well as to attend parenting and drug and alcohol prevention classes.

“We help build self-esteem and strengthen the family,” Tep says.

One client breaks into a grin as she spots Tep.

“I like it here. I come here, feel happy, and want to learn more. I want myself to get better and better,” she says, forming her words carefully so that she correctly pronounces each one.

Meanwhile, Price shows off her students’ color prints, framed along the wall. She describes one student she is particularly proud of, saying, “He didn’t think he could do anything … now look! I don’t have to help him anymore.”

Art therapy is one of many methods of healing at the Neighborhood Learning Center.

“The main thing is that [the students] build up their motivation. They feel as if they accomplished something. It makes them feel so good,” Price says. “They can come, see their friends [who] know their experience and have the same pain … They can talk to each other.”

Across the country, similar organizations continue to reach out, healing the wounds caused by the Khmer Rouge. At the same time, many advocates who work on behalf of the Cambodian Americans describe their work as cathartic.

“I see my role,” Kuoch says. “I heal them and they heal me.”

Tep frowns slightly as she notices some students missing, but as she explains, the recovery process is different for everyone.

“It’s really hard work, but we don’t give up.”