-
Chapter 4: Lost Chapters and Invisible Wars: Hip-Hop and Cambodian American Critique
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
· 149 ·· ChapTer 4 · Lost Chapters and Invisible Wars Hip-Hop and cambodian american critique He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse. —Khmer rouge saying, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar My brother started talking about our culture and where he came from.Heopenedup,talkingabouttheKhmerRouge.Hetalkedabout being in camp, where he had to sneak out to get food knowing that if he would have been caught, it was an automatic death sentence. Something changed. I mean, I heard about this stuff before, but my parents never talked about it. . . . I’m sure every time they mention it they get flashbacks. I mean . . . imagine seeing your relatives, your brothers, and your sisters killed in front of you . . . [and] there’s my brother telling me that you have to know where you come from to know who you are. —Prach Ly (aka prach), in “Hip Hop Memoirs: an interview with Khmer american rapper prach” Approximately twenty miles from downtown Los Angeles, Long Beach‘s business district is a veritable “Little Phnom Penh.” Located on Anaheim Street between Atlantic and Junipero Avenues, “Cambodia Town,” as it is officially known by city planners, visitors, and residents, boasts numerous Khmer-owned jewelry stores, clothing outlets, donut shops, and restaurants.1 Civically, culturally, and demographically, Long Beach contains a Cambodian consulate (one of only three in the United States), Theravada Buddhist temples, and the largest Cambodian 150 Lost cHaPters and invisibLe Wars American population in the United States.2 Approximately fifty thousand Cambodians and Cambodian Americans live in Long Beach, making the SoCal port city a certifiable Cambodian mecca.3 It is therefore not surprising that Long Beach is also home to the biggest Cambodian New Year celebration in the United States. Each April, Long Beach’s Cambodia Town and El Dorado Park become primary destination points for an estimated twenty thousand celebrants who flock to see mile-long parades, participate in communal religious ceremonies , partake in outdoor community barbecues, and attend live performances .4 Itwasagainstthisfestivebackdrop—duringthe2000Cambodian New Year celebration—that twenty-one-year-old Khmer American rapper praCh (neé Prach Ly) distributed copies of his debut album, Dalama: The End’n Is Just the Beginnin’.5 A self-described “child of the Killing Fields,” praCh—the Lys’ seventh child—was born on May 5, 1979 in a Democratic Kampuchean labor camp.6 As the Khmer Rouge struggled to hold power in the face of Vietnamese invasion and seeming liberation, praCh’s family (his father, mother, sisters, and brothers) escaped from Veal Srae K’prach (near Battambang) to a Thai refugee camp in the early 1980s.7 In 1983, after months of bureaucratic red tape, the Lys finally secured U.S. sponsorship and initially settled in Jacksonville, Florida.8 Four years later, the family made their way west to El Monte, California, and lived in what praCh describes as “the ghetto of all ghettos.” In an interview with Sharon May, praCh elaborates: “It was like a project—apartments on top of apartments—and the school was in the back of the apartments . In the alleyways there were drug deals, and every night we heard helicopters and shoot-outs.”9 Faced with economic uncertainty and impending violence, the Lys relocated to Long Beach in 1989, where praCh spent much of his early teens in an apartment complex on Long Beach Boulevard, just north of the San Diego Freeway (Interstate 405), a few miles outside Compton. Although the complex had a sizeable Khmer/ Khmer American population, praCh remembers that once “we went outside , to the stores or the park, no one knew who Cambodians were. We didn’t have an identity. They called us Chinese, chinky eyes, gook. I guess that just made me stronger.”10 Notwithstanding an outwardly hopeful journey from the Killing Fields to the Promised Land, the Lys repeatedly encountered what praCh would lyrically characterize as a de facto “war on the streets,” an image that aptly encompasses an amnesiac terrain of systemic racism, limited [18.222.23.119] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:03 GMT) Lost cHaPters and invisibLe Wars 151 socioeconomic opportunity, and profound gang violence.11 In a 2003 Los Angeles Times interview with Nancy Wride, praCh explicitly asserts, “Many Cambodian kids, and my friends of other races, can second this opinion, but it’s kind of like ‘West Side Story’ here. Only instead of fights over turf and girls, it’s fights over girls and turf and money.”12 According to the...