-
16. Back to the Past: Oregon State, Siem Reap, and Phnom Penh
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
166 16 The news sent arctic chills down my spine. A miraculous peace deal in Paris was to be followed by another miracle: Cambodia would have a democratic election that would install a parliament. If the news was true, then decades of warfare, genocide, and economic ruin were about to end for Cambodia and its traumatized people. This meant the end of Vietnamese invasions, liberations, and occupations; the end of freedom fighters, refugees, and infighting among the countless factions. After three decades, there would be peace by way of Paris. In October 1991, Cambodia’s warring factions, including the Khmer Rouge, signed the Paris Peace Accord. To help Cambodia get back on its feet, the United Nations was to spend $3 billion and send 25,000 peacekeepers, and about the same number of bureaucrats. The new foreign intervention in Cambodia was to begin in earnest. How mind-boggling! I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime. Here I was living in Bend, Oregon, and my homeland was going through a huge change. At long last, the Vietnamese conflict in this troubled region ended with pen strokes by twenty-one nations, which, ironically, included most of the countries that began it all: the United States, China, the former USSR, Vietnam, and many others. The news awakened the frightened boy in me. He’d been asleep, in a comatose state, really, for over a decade. No longer. Buried beneath the challenge of making it in America, years of suppressed memories broke out. For months I found myself crying often. Raw pain and anger assailed me with voices and screams. Thavy often woke me up because I was crying in my dreams and in my sleep. Now I understood why I didn’t feel comfortable with this easy life in good old Oregon, USA. I had been running away from my shadows. I wasn’t at peace. Back to the Past Oregon State, Siem Reap, and Phnom Penh BACK TO THE PAST 167 I had much anger and pain inside me. My past still haunted me, and now it had caught up with me. I must heal something inside me, I thought. This is something I cannot do in America. I must return to where it all began, to Cambodia, whatever is left of it, I thought to myself. I realized that I couldn’t deny my history any longer. It was time to reconcile with my past. I accepted the fact that terrible things did happen to me. I used the voices and screams to fuel me when I ran low. I tried to figure out who I was and why I was still here. And I began to know that I’d been a victim, and now a survivor. I had been many things, but I hadn’t been myself. I began to speak out. I talked to strangers, to kids, to audiences at community forums near my home in Bend, Oregon. I cried openly, something I couldn’t do before. People shared my grief. I communicated via newspapers and television about what had happened to my people, my family, and me. I wrote short essays of my bitter experiences. Later, after my first trip back to Cambodia in 1992, I wrote “The Tonle Sap Lake Massacre.” This story was published by Yale University Press in Dith Pran’s 1997 anthology Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields. I began to feel worthy of being alive again. I began to return to my past. I started with the Chens because I felt that I still owed them. Since 1984, Thavy and I had visited once a year at the Chens’ house on the East Coast, some 3,000 miles away. Later, the kids went with us. The Chens still love and care for me, and I feel the same about them. They love my children very much. I’m a bit jealous that Thavy gets along with them so well. Cousin Chun and I became close again. The couple was proud of my accomplishments . When I told them I wanted to see the old country, they questioned my sanity and feared for my safety. Since the big migration of 1975, the Khmer have just not returned to Cambodia. “We escaped with our lives,” said Cousin Khen. “No matter how much we miss Cambodia, we do not go back. We just don’t.” My siblings objected, too. “We can’t understand why you’d risk everything for a trip to that...