Cambodian Refugees -- Time And Distance Can't Bury Memories Of The Killing Fields

------------------------------------------------------------------ FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER the fall of one of the most murderous regimes in modern times, Cambodian refugees continue to be a wounded people. Yet their plight is largely unrecognized. As survivors of a holocaust, they are a distinct refugee group with stories still untold - pent up by barriers of language, fear and karma. ------------------------------------------------------------------

Patient A has a stomach ache. It never goes away. It keeps her awake at night and tired during the day. She can't work or play or enjoy sex. For three years she goes from doctor to doctor, subjecting herself to tests. The tests find nothing. She insists on the pain. The doctors are baffled.

One doctor, acting on a hunch, refers her to Asian Counseling and Referral Service in Seattle's International District. "What for? I'm not chakourt!" says the patient, a 26-year-old Cambodian refugee. Chakourt is the Cambodian word for "crazy." Chakourt is anathema among Cambodians. The pain persists and she heeds her doctor's direction.

After a month of counseling, her story starts to come out: One day in Cambodia, Khmer Rouge soldiers took her family to a field. They ordered them to dig a hole and line up at the edge. A soldier shot several family members in the head. The soldier ran out of bullets. He hit the others with a rifle butt. He stabbed Patient A. The family - mother, father, seven children - crumpled one by one into the hole. Some were still alive. The soldiers covered the hole with dirt. Patient A survived. She crawled out of the hole. On foot she crossed the border into Thailand. She was raped by Thai soldiers.

Eventually, she came to America. She now lives in a cramped, government-subsidized apartment in West Seattle.

Still wounded

Like so many of her people, the most brutalized of all Southeast Asian refugees, Patient A left the killing fields, but the killing fields did not leave her.

Fifteen years after the end of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's murderous regime, Cambodian refugees still live as a wounded people.

An estimated 2 million died out of a population of 7 million, the result of Pol Pot's campaign to wipe out dissidents and to remake the country, starting at "Year Zero." Memories of slaughter, compounded by upheaval and uprootedness and culture shock, continue to take a toll on survivors.

Patient A's counselor finds that her stomach ache is a physical symptom of an incomprehensible emotional trauma.

The trauma is still working its way through her psyche, just as the trauma of genocide is still working its way through the collective psyche of the Cambodian people.

Cambodians represent 4 percent of King County's Asian population but make up 20 percent of the clientele, the largest client group, at the Asian counseling service. It is a scenario found in communities all over the country where Cambodians have settled.

A Department of Mental Health study says that two out of three Cambodian refugees in the U.S. have experienced the violent death of a close family member - the highest percentage of any refugee group.

Furthermore, studies done within the past year show that at least half of adult Cambodian refugees in the U.S. suffer from depression or post-traumatic stress; a quarter have severe difficulty functioning in society. Many will never recover.

Yet they suffer in almost complete obscurity, their plight hardly a blip in American mainstream consciousness.

Unlike the Jewish holocaust (6 million were killed in Nazi concentration camps) which has been given its historical due, the stories of its survivors chronicled and documented, even celebrated, the Cambodian holocaust has only seemed to dim in memory, even as survivors live and struggle in our midst.

The dimming is evident in the dwindling of federal aid for refugees.

The Refugee Act of 1980 originally provided 36 months of financial support to refugees as part of a transitional period. That was cut to 18 months in 1982, to 12 months in 1989, to eight months in 1992.

It's evident in the way Cambodians are routinely unacknowledged as a separate people with a distinct story, but are lumped together with Laotians and Vietnamese in contradictory stereotypes: as clinging parasites and overachieving threats, today's welfare grunts and tomorrow's nuclear physicists.

Cambodians, one doctor says, are an "invisible people."

`Totally unprepared'

Patient B is a Cambodian widow. She has been in the U.S. for several years. One day she goes to a psychiatric clinic because she is "feeling sad day and night."

The doctor's inquiries unearth nothing extraordinary. Then after six months of therapy, she reveals that Khmer Rouge soldiers had disemboweled her parents in front of her.

The doctor is stunned, and later writes in a medical journal: "Our traditional American psychiatric training left us totally unprepared to deal with these tragedies."

The psychiatric care of survivors of mass violence is a nascent field, but one fact is clear: the trauma can and often does remain alive in the survivor, often manifesting as a constellation of complaints known as post-traumatic stress disorder: recurrent nightmares, depression, flashbacks, sweats, distress and paranoia.

"There are long-term effects that our society is going to have to deal with," says Jennifer White-Baughan, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, who works with Cambodian refugees.

"Who knows how long it will take? It's not just the generation that experienced the holocaust but also the children who are living with these shattered adults."

Clinicians say many refugees carry their wounds and memories dormant inside them for years before something awakens them. The trigger could be anything: a loud noise, an image, a face, a scene in a movie. This latency period may last years or even decades.

Says Sandy Lew, the clinical supervisor at the Asian counseling service: "We have Cambodian clients who've been here 10 years and are just now starting to tell their stories."

Ravaged by ideologues

For many Americans who did not watch the 1984 movie "The Killing Fields," what happened in Cambodia blurs with all the internecine fighting in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and '70s.

From 1975 to the end of 1978 the communist Khmer Rouge, a heavily armed peasant group of ideologues, galvanized in part by years of U.S. bombing during the Vietnam war, tried to turn Cambodia into a giant agrarian commune.

They forced city-dwellers to the countryside and systematically killed anyone who might pose a threat to their ideology: intellectuals, professionals, religious and civic leaders, indeed, anyone wearing glasses, which was considered a mark of a thinker. In the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, 40 percent of the population of 2 million either died or disappeared, the bodies of victims later unearthed from hundreds of mass graves outside the city.

In the countryside, people died of disease, starvation and executions.

"Under the mango trees, the skulls and bones of the old and young lay in an obscene carpet of death," writes Cambodian author Nayan Chanda.

Cambodians flooded out of the country starting in late 1978, when a Vietnamese invasion ousted the Khmer Rouge. Most fled to Thailand, whose initial response was tragic: Thai soldiers pushed back some 40,000 Cambodians through mined slopes and shot those who tried to return. Thousands died.

After an international outcry, Thailand granted haven.

Nisay Nuth, 39, was one of those forced through the mine fields. He is now an outreach counselor for the Khmer Community of Seattle-King County (Khmer is the dominant ethnic group in Cambodia). He recalls walking through forests for two days before reaching the minefields. Twenty people began the journey with him. Five survived.

"I was one of them," says Nuth, who, like other survivors, wonders with some guilt why he made it while so many others did not.

Nuth eventually made it to a Thai refugee camp, where tens of thousands of Cambodians languished for five years or longer before being resettled in a new country.

About 150,000 Cambodian refugees came to the United States between 1975 and 1992, settling in such disparate communities as San Diego, Minneapolis, New York City, Raleigh, N.C., Portland and Seattle. (Cambodian immigration to the United States has dropped to near zero in the past year, since a U.N.-supervised election last May has allowed repatriation of refugees.) The largest number settled in California.

About 15,000 Cambodian refugees live in Washington state, including 7,000 to 8,000 in King County, mostly in the Rainier Valley, West Seattle and White Center.

About 4,000 Cambodians live in Pierce County; 1,000 in Snohomish County, and about 600 in Olympia. Most live in government-subsidized housing and receive public assistance.

Unlike the Vietnamese, the vast majority of Cambodian refugees come from subsistence farming backgrounds with no formal education. Many cannot read or write in their own language and do not know the basics of language structure, making it doubly hard to learn a complex language such as English.

The leap in consciousness required of Cambodians and other Southeast Asian refugees from preliterate, preindustrial backgrounds is possibly greater than that of any group in history.

Trying to forget

The Cambodian story is not part of the active memory of the American people partly because Cambodians themselves have not fully articulated it. Most of those who would be spokesmen and spokeswomen - teachers, intellectuals, writers, artists - were killed by the Khmer Rouge.

But another reason for the silence has to do with a world view that sees nothing beneficial in dredging up painful memories, a view contrary to the Western psychiatric tenet that remembering is one of the first steps toward healing.

Patient C, a 40-year-old Cambodian man, is typical: "Why talk? You can't do anything . . . . Sometimes I have nightmares. Soldiers burying people. Dead or not dead, they would bury them. I don't like to think of that. I don't think it would help to remember. When I think of my brother, how he was killed, I get in trouble. Sometimes it makes me crazy. So I try to forget."

Cambodia's culture of fear also fostered a "societal silence." The Khmer Rouge killed dissidents without hesitation, but also killed were people who simply used the wrong word at the wrong moment. Grief was not allowed, nor anything that could be interpreted as dissatisfaction.

"The best way to survive was to shut up," says Lee Lim, a 31-year-old Cambodian who works as an Asian liaison for King County police.

Clinicians agree that the majority of Cambodian refugees suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress have not sought psychiatric help. And the relatively few who do must learn a whole new way of understanding mental health, a concept that has no equivalent in the Cambodian language.

Likewise, clinicians must work toward understanding the Cambodian world view, a largely pantheistic view that does not make easy separations between spirit, body and mind; natural and supernatural; past and present lives. Ask Cambodians if they have had conversations with dead relatives and many, perhaps the majority, will answer yes.

One remarkable characteristic documented by clinicians is the almost total absence of anger in Cambodian refugees toward their antagonists, be it Pol Pot or the Khmer Rouge or the Thai.

It was the anger of Jewish survivors of the Nazi holocaust that fueled the telling and re-telling of their story to the rest of the world.

Not so with Cambodians. And the reason is revealed in the way Cambodians understand terms such as "trauma" and "torture."

The English derivation of the word "torture," for example, is from the Latin root torquere, which means to cause to twist or turn, or to cause physical pain.

The Cambodian term, in contrast, is associated with the Buddhist concept of karma, or fate.

"The way they fit it into their consciousness is that they believe they must have done something in their past that brought this suffering on them," says Dr. David Kinzie, who runs an Indochinese mental health clinic in Portland.

"The idea is, `Maybe we deserve this. . . .' "

Prayers for the dead

On a recent Saturday, members of the Cambodian community congregate at the Boys & Girls Club at White Center for a celebration and prayer.

The celebration marks the age-old Cambodian tradition of canoe racing under a full moon, the memory of which harkens back to the long, tranquil time before war.

Food is prepared in the back of the room. Rattan mats are spread on the floor, and the crowd of about 70 seat themselves facing the Buddhist monks in orange robes at the front of the room. Presently, a prayer begins, the crowd joining with hands clasped.

"It is a prayer to God for people who have died," says Buntha Cheam, interpreting in a whisper.

Cheam is a refugee assistance counselor who has helped organize this gathering. "It is a prayer asking for peace for the people who have died. We offer food to the monks, the monks offer the food to God and to the dead."

The prayer lasts a half-hour.

The hope for the future of Cambodians can be found in certain aspects of this gathering. In the shattered families who have rallied around one another, creating new families: A young person who has lost her parents, for example, is simply taken in by another family. There are no orphans.

Cambodians bring with them a dedication to community rarely found now in Western cultures, according to Dr. Evelyn Lee, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Francisco who works with refugee populations. The definition of "self" in Cambodian includes community.

It can be found in their emphasis on devotion and discipline, as well as in their unshakable belief in fate, which helps in the acceptance of cataclysmic events.

Cambodians and other Southeast Asian refugees, Lee says, are products of one of the oldest cultures, cultures that emphasize trust in neighbors, gratitude for the smallest gestures, and patience with hardship - characteristics that, Lee says, Westerners would be wise to learn from.

Finally, it can be found in the children and young adults. Some of the older Cambodians, too tired to forge a new life in a strange world, only hope for their children and grandchildren.

Children like Bunthoen Rim, 15, a sophomore at Evergreen High School in White Center. Rim was only four when she left Cambodia, too young to be scarred by the horrors of the old country.

Rim's father was killed and four of her siblings starved to death, facts that she recalls now without heavy emotion. In school, she is a top student, not content with her 3.8 grade-point average.

"My goal is to be a 4.0," she says with a Western candor and confidence. "I want to try my best because I look forward to the future. It's just me and my mother now, and I want a good life for us."

But Rim and her peers have other, newer obstacles in front of them. Many Cambodian teenagers, inheriting some of their parents' transcultural disequilibrium as well as absorbing the ethos of the housing projects, are finding their niches in street culture. Cambodian youth gangs have emerged in cities throughout the West Coast.

The young are moving on to an American future, problems and all, while the old still grieve the past. This generational gap, too, is evident at the Boys & Girls Club, where, during the prayer, some of the teenagers disengage from the proceedings and begin wandering and chatting in the lobby.

Even after the group prayer ends, a few of the older Cambodians continue to pray silently as the others move to the banquet table.

"Still praying for the dead," Cheam whispers, looking over at them. They chant and pray near a corner, their bodies forming figures of grief inconsolable and permanent.