- Cambodian Refugees and Michigan Sponsors: One Story of Non-Kin Relationships in Refugee Resettlement
Introduction
“Me-chicken” was a magical, faraway land to me as a child. Growing up in the warm-weathered, multicultural part of urban Southern California, I heard stories about the white powdered snow that fell during the cold, dark winters in the Midwestern state of Me-chicken. I also heard stories about the people there, also white like snow, the Christian sponsors who helped my mother and her family adapt to life in the United States after resettling as Cambodian refugees in 1981. Although they did not stay in Me-chicken very long, their memories about their formative first year in the United States sparked my curiosity and affinity for this mythical place. Long before I finally set foot in the state in my twenties, I claimed it as a second home because it was there that my mother and many of my relatives began a new chapter in their lives, the American chapter.
I was also drawn to Michigan because it was, in my mind, vastly different than what I was accustomed to in my birthplace and home, an incredibly diverse Californian city—ethnically, culturally, and linguistically. Located in a low-income, predominantly immigrant neighborhood, my elementary school had bilingual teacher aides whose backgrounds matched the students’ backgrounds and who were on hand to interpret at parent-teacher conferences. My birthplace is also home to the largest Cambodian diaspora in the United States, so I never felt out of touch with Cambodian culture because of the abundance of Cambodian supermarkets, [End Page 121] restaurants, Buddhist temples, and Cambodian-owned businesses. These factors drew my family to California after living in Michigan for a year.
But there was another side of my California life that I became ashamed of as I grew older, including, as I will explore in more detail below, my family’s poverty. Although my parents felt some sense of belonging in my neighborhood, I sometimes felt out of place. Having parents who depended on government assistance, residing in cramped apartments where living rooms doubled as makeshift bedrooms, and experiencing neighborhood theft were all normalized. As I grew older and advanced academically, I perceived a different side of “America” through my middle-class peers and through the media, which, then as now, inadequately represents the nation’s citizenry, especially in terms of class, race, and work ethic. When I heard Americans praise undocumented immigrants as hard workers who pay taxes and when I read news articles admiring Cambodian refugees who overcame trauma to open donut shops, including my aunts and uncles, I saw examples of immigrants who were welcomed. Because I had never seen sympathetic accounts about immigrants who, like my mother, did not work and remained on welfare assistance, I began to believe that our lifestyle was unconventional, wrong, and un-American, and I felt alienated from a larger, dominant vision of American culture and its fantasy of the American Dream. As a youth, I did not yet realize that such a vision of self-sufficiency and meritocratic upward mobility was a myth fostered by those already economically secure, to justify and protect their status. I also did not know that such praise for hardworking immigrants contributed to the model minority myth. Instead, like many, I saw the American Dream as real and equally attainable by all, even immigrants and refugees who went through trauma.
My family’s ties to Michigan, then, gave me a connection to that purportedly stereotypical, Middle American lifestyle as a child. At the same time, the ties made me wonder and indeed worry how our Michigan sponsors would feel about the way in which my mother’s life had panned out. For much of my life, I longed to understand my family’s past in Michigan, their relationship with their sponsors, and, most importantly, whether the sponsors felt any ill-will about our departure. Looking back, I see now how my questions and worries were shaped by entrenched narratives about America as a benevolent, humanitarian haven for refugees, who in turn were immeasurably indebted to their host country.1 My particular story, I show...