Slowly, Cambodians speak out

Apr 17, 2000Jeff Hodson
Seattle Times staff reporter

At 22, Many Dan is too young to remember the Khmer Rouge, but he can't forget his mother's stories.

She told him of thousands who "disappeared" before her eyes. Of severed heads in trees. A harrowing escape from Cambodia.

"I had no words for it," said Dan, of Tacoma. "It left images that most 7-year-olds don't have."

Many other Cambodian Americans can't find the words, either.

"Our parents, they don't want to talk about it," said Tula Habb, a 19-year-old University of Washington student who has turned to history books instead.

In both cases, Dan and Habb want answers. They are a part of the first generation of Cambodian Americans born to parents who survived the brutal policies of the despot Pol Pot, who started his rule in Cambodia 25 years ago today.

Many were raised in refugee camps, and most have never seen their homeland. As they come of age, they yearn to know what happened to their relatives and why. Most of all, they don't want to forget those who died during four years of chaotic revolutionary rule.

"The memories of 2 million people can't go unnoticed," said Chanvatey Yin, 21, a senior at the University of Washington. "That can't be allowed. Not in today's world."

Yin and other Cambodians from across Puget Sound will mark the 25th anniversary with a candlelight vigil tonight on the University of Washington campus.

The event, sponsored by the university's Khmer Student Association, at first raised a few eyebrows. The students concede some of their elders didn't see the point in observing April 17, 1975, the day Khmer Rouge tanks rolled into Phnom Penh and forced 2 million residents into the countryside.

But Lianna Ly, 18, one of the student organizers, said tonight's rally is to show respect for the lives that were lost. By the time Vietnamese-backed forces ousted Pol Pot in early 1979, scholars say, an estimated 1.7 million people had died of disease, hunger or overwork, or were executed.

Ly and vigil co-organizer Phatry Pan, 20, were inspired by author Loung Ung. In a visit to Seattle last month, Ung recounted her ordeal under the Khmer Rouge as laid out in her new book, "First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers."

In a telephone interview, Ung said many young Cambodian Americans find it hard to learn about the civil war because it is too painful for their parents to recount.

"We don't talk about it," said Ung, of Washington, D.C., who turns 30 today. "We want to put it behind us, make some money and send it back home."

Ung lost both parents, two sisters and 20 other relatives to the black-clad Maoists, who targeted the educated and professionals as class enemies. Writing the book, she said, helped her find the voice she lost as a child. "We didn't speak," she said. "We just said `yes' and `no.' " It was too dangerous to say anything else.

Her book, Ung said, is used as an excuse for young Cambodian Americans to broach the topic of genocide with their parents.

Work in the `killing fields'

Just last week, Yin, the UW senior, called her father, who has returned to Phnom Penh to live and work, to ask him how he fled the Khmer Rouge. She has poked and prodded her aunt, Duot Prim, to talk about the strict policies of the Marxist movement. And she is gleaning stories from a second cousin in Lynwood who toiled in the "killing fields."

The cousin, 35-year-old Savouth Keo, can't shake the terror.

She remembers working in the fields as a 12-year-old. During a break, her best friend, Phalla, swam across a lake to get some sugar cane because she was hungry. Keo warned her not to go.

Phalla was caught, tied to a post and denounced as a thief. Villagers were ordered to spit on her. When Keo approached, her friend begged for a drink of water.

"She was so thirsty," Keo said. "I couldn't give it to her because I was afraid. They killed her the next day."

Keo eventually escaped through the jungle to Thailand, but not before 12 of the 50 people in her group were shot by soldiers or had stepped on land mines. She's still too scared to go back to Cambodia.

"It makes me angry, hurt, to know this happened," Yin said. But facing the past and honoring the victims at tonight's vigil, she says, is a "way to come out of the ashes to look forward to the future."

Going back `like a dream'

Many Dan, who graduated from Tacoma Community College and plans to continue his education, is raising money for victims of land mines. About 5 million mines still lurk in Cambodian soil.

With help from other Tacoma students, he hopes to raise $1,000 for the American Red Cross to buy prostheses.

He would like to return to Cambodia, where he was born in 1977 and escaped a year later. But he's still a poor refugee, he said.

"It's like a dream to go back and see my people and Angkor Wat, the great city," he said. "I'll do anything to help my people."

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Candlelight ceremony

The 25th anniversary of Cambodia's fall to the Khmer Rouge will be marked with a candlelight vigil from 7 to 9 tonight at Red Square on the University of Washington campus. Monks will chant, students will speak, and Cambodians will be invited to record the names of loved ones who died in the "killing fields."