(Sources: Lonely Planet, Human Rights Watch)
Cambodia has been riddled with political strife since the beginning of time. Crafty politicians, shifting alliances and its geographical location have made Cambodia a fertile ground for riots, civil wars and genocide. The Cambodian empire once reached great heights - it was the most powerful political force from the 9th to the 13th centuries. However, the sack of Angkor by the Siamese of the Thai Kingdom, the encroaching of the Vietnamese from the east, France's colonization of Cambodia in 1863, and the secret bombing of Cambodia by the U.S. in 1969 have reduced Cambodia in size and spirit. But the event that has had the most effect on Cambodians psychologically is the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge, a group of Cambodian communists, who murdered around 1.7 million people (21% of the country's population) in four years.
The leaders of the Khmer Rouge had been fortunate enough to receive scholarships for study in Paris. They came from middle class, well-educated families with the right connections. During the late 40s and early 50s, many of these students became enamored with left-wing French intellectualism. Among these student activists, a handful of them joined the French communist party. One would become the infamous Pol Pot, who would later destroy his homeland and his people.
My parents, Sinell Sambour and Sovanna Yin left Cambodia twenty-two years ago, leaving behind a ravaged land and a broken people. Their stories are intimately intertwined with the Khmer Rouge genocide, whose legacy still lingers today, even though its victims may be scattered across time and space.
Sinell Sambour was born in a little village called Thmor Khol, twenty-five kilometers to the west of Battambang, Cambodia. The village is so small it cannot be found on any map. His father, a prominent figure in the village, was killed in a bus accident when Sinell was about one year old. Consequently his mother and his maternal grandmother raised him. He describes his grandmother as "tough" and she disciplined him often, physically and verbally. Coming from an upper middle class family, she had rules about whom he could associate with and she often warned him not to talk to the "rowdy kids" in the village--meaning the poorer children who did not go to school. Sinell was conscious of the emphasis she placed upon 'them' and 'us', based on societal class conventions, but he never spoke back to her. Nevertheless, he still found ways to disobey her, without her finding out. Whenever he could, he would sneak out of school to join the village children to climb trees, jump into lakes and find frogs in the rice paddies.
His school peers used to maliciously tease Sinell about his lack of a father figure. They taunted him by yelling, "you have no father, you must be dumb kid, your daddy died, you're not good." Unfortunately for them, Sinell was not afraid to beat up anyone who teased him. There was one incident in which he stabbed a classmate in his head with a pencil. Despite his violent nature, teachers were lenient in disciplining him. The village children--the same children who were now Sinell's teachers--knew Sinell's father, who had been the equivalent of a mayor in the village, for giving money and sweets. Out of pity for Sinell and respect for his father, they often turned a blind eye to his antics.
In elementary school, Sinell learned math, French and Cambodian. The English language was taught one hour a week. His village did not boast a high school. Therefore, when he graduated from the village school, he left his mother and grandmother and traveled to Battambang to attend Preah Monivong High School, a prestigious high school in the area named after a Cambodian king who ruled from 1927 until 1941. He stayed with some relatives who lived a few miles outside of the city area. While living with them, he found out that he had distant relatives nearby. He visited them one day and met his ninth cousin, Sovanya Yin, who was fourteen at the time.
Sovanya Yin, or 'Ya' as she was called, grew up three miles outside Battambang city. She was the second daughter out of nine children. Her father, Bun Yin, worked as a bank manager; her mother, Loeub Ouk, was a housewife. Sovanya went to school, came home to do chores and worked on the family farm. Sometimes, when she didn't have school, she helped her neighbors in the rice field. She always "like[d] to see the field, the farm, the forest." Being one of the older children, and a daughter at that, she often had to take care of her little brothers and sisters.
In March of 1970, the prime minister at the time, General Lon Nol, launched a successful coup d'etat. The National Assembly was hastily convened and voted unanimously to depose Sihanouk as the head of state. This was the beginning of the Cambodian Civil War, which lasted for five years. This war began as a class war--Sihanouk and the peasants rioting against Lon Nol and the middle-class. Later, the war dragged Cambodia into the vortex of a wider struggle. The escalating conflict pitted government troops initially against the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, well known for their role in the Vietnam War.
The year Sihanouk was overthrown, Sinell was in the 11th grade. When the Cambodian Civil War broke out, many of Sinell's classmates decided to join the army. Sinell had read Karl Marx and Mao Zedong's The Red Book and was turned off by the ideology these two men espoused. After all, the French had imposed its ideologies on the schools in Cambodia so Sinell's Western-inspired education promoted capitalism. He did not see how Communism could work in practice. As he says, "Then the lazy one...is equal to you. There is no incentive for them to work hard. Everything is equally distributed anyway."
He joined the army and was sent to Vietnam to train. Battle was "typical of Third World wars...no pity, no press coverage." He fought until 1973, then quit so he could finish high school.
In school, Sovanya learned math, American and Cambodian history, and as was standard, she learned how to read, write and speak in Cambodian and French. Once or twice a week, she was taught a little bit of English. She did well academically. However, outside circumstances dictated that she not graduate from high school.
On New Year's Day of January 1975 the Khmer Rouge launched what it hoped was the final assault on Phnom Penh. The now-fanatical Khmer Rouge, strengthened by a steady stream of supplies from Hanoi and emboldened by surviving years of sustained US bombardment, made their push into the Phnom Penh suburbs. Five days later, on April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge forces marched unopposed into central Phnom Penh. At first the residents of the city celebrated - the siege was over, there would be no more fighting. But within hours, the joy would turn to horror as the Khmer Rouge began to implement their barbarous plan for a utopian communist society. April 17, 1975 was Day Zero for the new Cambodia - two thousand years of Khmer history were now meaningless.
The Khmer Rouge attempted to completely transform Cambodia overnight, by organizing the country into farming cooperatives, demanding total devotion to the state and wiping out any remnants of the old regime. That meant shutting off all contact to the outside world, eliminating loyalty to friends or family, emptying the cities, eliminating the Buddhist religion, and creating a fearsome central authority, the "Angka" or "organization," that punished any deviation with torture and death.
Right before Sinell could take his exit examinations and go to France to study medicine, the Khmer Rouge came to power. He and millions of other Cambodians were sent outside the city to work in farms constructed hastily by the Khmer Rouge. The only color they were allowed to wear was black, to symbolize unity and equalness. He was at times a construction worker, a tractor driver, a farmer--he did whatever they asked because "if you protest, they kill you." When the Khmer Rouge asked him about his background he lied and told them that he had quit school at an early age and became a taxi driver. If a person knew a foreign language, had worked for the French or Americans, or dared to express feelings of love, he or she was a target for execution. Sinell remarks that, "in their rhetoric, they always said...they don't want the intellectuals to survive. They take Karl Marx's theory to the extreme. They tell the farmers 'Look, these are the class that dominate[d] you for centuries. Now it's your turn'."
Sovanya was separated from her parents and sent to work on one of the many farms dotting the countryside. When they asked about her background, she lied and told them she dropped out of school early to work on her family's farm. "They asked me to multiply, and I said I didn't know." Because of her pretended ignorance, the Khmer Rouge ignored her and ordered her to leave home and work. The routine was simple but hard: get up at 4 am, work in the farm, eat one scoop of rice or porridge, work some more, and if she was lucky, sleep for a few hours. She never talked unless they asked her a question. She recalls, "You have to shut your mouth all the way. You have to pretend you don't know anybody. Mind your own business...work, work, work." She remembers the isolation she felt, surrounded by silent workers who were afraid to make eye contact. Sovanya didn't know what was going on. There were "no radio, no news, no journalism...nothing, we don't hear from anybody, any country."
She hardly ever saw her family, except on certain occasions. Every few months she would ask a Khmer Rouge farm manager if she could go home to visit. Depending on his mood that day, he would grant her wish or send her away. On one occasion, in 1978 she came home to find that her father had been taken away by the Khmer Rouge. She knew that she wasn't ever going to see him again because they had most likely killed him. "They told him to go get something and then he left...he didn't know. Then they killed him, he never came back." She cried for 15 days. When the Khmer Rouge saw her display an excess of emotion, they threatened to take her away too. "When I cry, they see me cry, they almost kill me. So I stopped crying." She was taken to another farm. Her oldest sister, who was living at home with her mom, died from starvation at 19 years of age. Sovanya became the eldest.
Sinell didn't have many friends and he didn't trust many people. He kept his mouth shut most of the time because if you "don't talk much, don't argue much, they leave you alone." He was part of the mobile team--a group of single men and women who were forced to move from one farm to another, as per the Khmer Rouge's orders. They allowed each person to bring one book bag. If you had too many belongings, they would kill you: "your mind is still capitalist." They would routinely pick ten men and ten women from the mobile team and have a huge wedding celebration, which they called en masse marriages. On these wedding days, everyone was given extra food, a handful more than the usual scoop of rice.
Sinell was asked if he wanted to marry. One of the Khmer Rouge soldiers was a young man who had dropped out of Sinell's high school. Although they could not show that they were friends, this man helped Sinell avoid marriage. He also sent Sinell on driving jobs all over the countryside so that the Khmer Rouge was more likely to forget about him.
The Khmer Rouge was a fractured group. In 1978, another Khmer Rouge group from the Southwest killed all the soldiers in the Northwest group. According to Sinell, the Southwest group was a lot "nicer." But the Khmer Rouge was struggling to keep their foothold in Cambodia. In 1979, the Vietnamese stormed in and suppressed the Communists. They installed a government controlled by exiled Cambodians.
The next few months was a blur of traffic as people from all over the countryside walked back to their hometowns, trying to locate loved ones on the way. Sinell stopped by Battambang on his way to Thmor Khol. While he was there, he ran into some of Sovanya's family, who told him that she was alive and not married. He was surprised because he thought the Khmer Rouge would have married her off already.
He asked her mother if he could marry her. He thought, "she seemed to be from a good family." Class was very important to his family--to his society, in general. He would never have been able to marry someone who was from a class lower than his. In a way, this value of marrying within class or marrying into a higher class was a practice the Khmer Rouge sought to abolish with their en masse marriages. However, Sinell and Sovanya saw nothing wrong with marrying in the same class. It had been ingrained in them since they were both very young. In August/September of 1979, Sinell and Sovanya got married.
He started a business transporting goods from one province to another by water. Local Cambodian officials, appointed by the Vietnamese, lacked clear rules and organization from the installed government and wrongly accused him of smuggling contraband. So he left Sovanya to go to the border of Thailand and Cambodia, where a temporary illegal camp was set up, called Chum Rum Tmei. Ironically, he started a smuggling business in order to make money. He smuggled medication, food, rice, and motorcycle parts. He had built a huge hut on top of a hill near the border and whenever someone wanted something, he would have to go to Sinell's hut, explain what he needed, then stay however many nights it would take for Sinell to go across the border and get the item. It was a lucrative business. Sinell was not stopped often because the commander who patrolled the border studied with him in the army. Eventually, Sovanya came to live with Sinell in the camp. She never felt safe there. "It's scary...there were robbery, fights."
Living alongside the smugglers was a group of freedom fighters--a pocket of resistance against the Vietnamese installed government. They fought with the Vietnamese and with the leftover Khmer Rouge. Sovanya remembers, "I saw a lot of bomb[s], all over the place. People didn't know where to go." In the midst of all the fighting, the Khmer Rouge burned Sinell's hut. It was time to move on. He had heard about a refugee camp deep in the heart of Thailand. He sent someone to get his cousin and his mother. When they arrived, they all jumped in the back of an open truck, which took them to Khao-I-Dang, which means 'white mountain' in Thai. Sovanya describes the camp as "a jungle. We have to build our own house from bamboo and some kind of grass to put on the top." The camp was divided into neighborhoods of about 3000-4000 Cambodian refugees. Sinell was elected to be the neighborhood leader because he did well on an English test the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) administered to those who could speak English. He had taken classes when he was in the army. Being a neighborhood leader meant that he gave out food, spoke with the UNHCR and the Thai authority on behalf of the residents. He also taught eight English classes a day and tutored English at night, making a lot of money in the process. At that time, Sovanya was expecting their first child. Unfortunately, she miscarried at eight months due to her anemia. Although she cried a little, she says she doesn't remember feeling too sad. Death became such a part of life that most people were desensitized to it. "We saw a lot of people dead, killed. It was normal."
Someone from an N.G.O. spread the word around the camp that certain countries were accepting refugees from Southeast Asia. Families rushed to fill out forms for resettlement. Sinell filled out forms for the U.S., Australia, France and Belgium.
Although the U.S. has a long-standing tradition of accepting people fleeing oppression in other countries, many Americans were not in favor of admitting numerous Southeast Asian refugees, most likely because it would remind them of the Vietnam War. However, President Gerald Ford and other public figures, including people who had been opposed to the war, strongly supported the refugees. Congress allocated resettlement aid and passed the 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Act which allowed refugees to enter the U.S. under a special migration and "parole" status.
Sinell and Sovanya knew nothing of the U.S. and actually wanted to go to France. But the U.S. was the only country that accepted their family, which consisted of Sinell, Sovanya, Sinell's mother, Sinell's cousin and Sovanya's cousin by marriage. They had no sponsor in the U.S. so the family flew to a Philippines processing camp in 1980, where they learned English and how to use the toilet. Besides Cambodian refugees, Sovanya remembers that there were also Vietnamese, Laotian and Hmong refugees. Since there was no one language uniting the different groups, each kept to themselves, sharing food and information only with those who knew how to speak their language. Each family had one house, which consisted of one room. For every twenty houses, there was one bathroom.
While in the camp, Sinell heard word from a friend in Australia. His friend's father was willing to sponsor him. So he sent another form to the Australia embassy. It took them 8 months to reject his request for resettlement. Meanwhile, the U.S. was still willing to grant asylum to Sinell and his family. Not knowing anyone made the decision to go hard, but they went anyway. A church agency from Rhode Island (World Relief) sponsored a few families, Sinell's being one of them. Father Dunning was their local sponsor. They arrived in the U.S. in August 1981. As they were filling out their forms to enter the U.S., one immigration officer misspelled Sovanya's name. So Sovanya became Sovanna. On December 2, 1981, their second daughter after the miscarriage was born at St. Joseph's Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. They named her Jennet.
In 1983 Sovanna had another daughter, whom they called Jenneen. Three months later, she applied for a job at the Providence School Department. She knew little English, but she said her co-workers were very nice people who were patient with her. She was placed at Asa Messer School, an elementary school, as a teacher's assistant. She would go to the classrooms and help the children. There were a lot of Cambodian children at this time--"three classrooms full!" Sovanna remembers.
Sinell had taken his G.E.D. to get the equivalent of a high school diploma. When Jenneen was born, he enrolled at the Community College of Rhode Island, School of Nursing. He became a full registered nurse and worked at the local hospital. However, he didn't like it much so after three years, he left to go work for New York City's Health Department. But the commute took considerable time away from spending time with his family. He then got a job at the Massachusetts Human Services Department, where he was a social worker.
In 1985, Sovanna and Sinell had another daughter, Jennella. A year later, their first son, Kennell was born. Sovanna worked for the school department for sixteen years. She left it to open an Asian fruit and produce market in 1997. Sinell, after trying a multitude of different jobs, finally found one to his liking. In 1994, he opened up a seafood exporter business in Maine. He lived above his business during the days and commuted to Rhode Island on the weekends. This put a strain on Sinell and Sovanna's marriage so in 1999, they filed for divorce, something that is virtually unheard of in the Cambodian community.
Sovanna is still working at the store. Sinell is still working in Maine, but he comes to visit his children and his mother often. Their children give them much joy and tribulation; hopefully more of the former than the latter. Sinell and Sovanna readily admits that Jennet, Jenneen, Jennella, and Kenny can be a handful but they'll keep them anyway.