Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States (review)

It has become a truism that, for survivors of genocide, the destruction does not end when the killing stops. The obliteration of families, communities, entire ways of life; the persistence of flashbacks and nightmares; continuing efforts to achieve some semblance of justice and establish appropriate remembrance; the retrieval of remnants of the world before; the multiple tasks of recreating life and livelihood (which are much more difficult in a new language and culture): all of these factors make "survival" not a fact but a process that is negotiated and renegotiated throughout the years.

If this is the experience of genocide survivors in general, Sucheng Chan's excellent study teaches us why it has been true in particular for those survivors of the Cambodian genocide who have resettled in the United States. At the center of their story are the horrors of the destruction itself: an eruption of atrocity sustained by a virulent mix of racism and ideology, and a system of terror that leveled everything—marriage, religion, education—that undermined total obedience to the state. By the end of the "Democratic Kampuchea" (DK) regime in 1979, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge had killed 1.7 million people, or 20 percent of the Cambodian population; many more had been beaten, tortured, and raped. Virtually everyone had been forced to witness the brutality. According to one survivor, "We were timid and lost. We had to [End Page 143 be silent. We not only lost our identities, but we lost our pride, our senses, our religion, our loved ones, our souls, ourselves" (p. 16).

The silence imposed by the Khmer Rouge was echoed by that of the world. Although a handful of scholars and activists—Craig Etcheson, Ben Kiernan, David Chandler, and others¹ —have worked to document the destruction, the Cambodian disaster remains perhaps the least well known of the "major genocides" that have followed the Holocaust. As Chan notes, multiple factors are involved: the atmosphere of secrecy within which the destruction was conducted; the fact that the DK regime, horrific as it was, covered only four years of the nearly three decades of civil war in Cambodia; and the interweaving of Cambodia's fate with the wider geopolitical context of America's war in Vietnam and the subsequent abandonment of Cambodia to the machinations of international realpolitik. In Cambodia itself, efforts to memorialize the genocide and to seek justice have been recent and vacillating. None of the major perpetrators has been tried successfully. Public memory of the destruction remains of uncertain valence; impulses to retribution and reconciliation compete for dominance as ruling factions (whose members include several former Khmer Rouge officials) vie for power.²

The sense of being "lost," described by the survivor quoted above, thus can be seen as a representation of the wider sense in which the Cambodian genocide itself—its particulars and its implications—remains lost. Displaced persons mirror displaced events—horrors that have found no clear locus in public memory. After summarizing the events, Chan shifts her focus to the experiences of the victims. She notes, for example, that, were it not for the genocide, there would be few Cambodians in the United States. Unlike the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, for example, Cambodians had no prior history of emigration to the US, and thus only very few—students, diplomats, and others—happened to be here when the terror began in 1975. Unlike the Vietnamese "boat people," whose ordeal was difficult enough, the Cambodian "land people" aroused little interest, although it was in Cambodia that the predicted "blood bath" was actually taking place. While some Cambodians reached Thailand during the genocide, it was only in 1979, as they fled toward any available security when Vietnamese forces were overrunning the DK regime, that large numbers of Cambodians found their way to UN High Commission for Refugees camps on the Thai border.

Chan outlines the range of the refugees' experiences in the border camps and the complex politics of refugee policy in the US...