Local Cambodians Have Cause To Celebrate

It was a day for celebration, as spring winds tore at lace dresses while red banners proclaimed the beginning of the new year.

Yesterday, at Wat Khemarak Pothiram, a Buddhist temple in Seattle's South Park neighborhood, about 400 Cambodian Americans from throughout the Puget Sound region gathered for the community's annual new-year celebration.

It was a time for dressing up, for folk dancing and for sharing dishes of rice, curry and vegetables and skewers of barbecued beef.

And it was a time that Pol Pot's bloody Khmer Rouge regime - the reason many of the festival-goers had immigrated to the United States - seemed to be fading into history books.

Last week in Cambodia, many wept in disappointment that the 73-year-old ousted despot had died of heart failure before he could be prosecuted in a war-crimes tribunal. But yesterday in South Park, his death was remarkable only in its absence from conversation.

"This is a happy day," said Moeun Kang, president of the Sahak Knemararam Buddhist Association. "We don't talk about sad things. I'm glad to keep my people together."

On other days, "at every gathering you talk about politics, especially the old people," said Sorath Ngeth, a University of Washington student who sometimes is at odds with older members of the Cambodian community for his failure to join in condemning Pol Pot's Marxist revolution.

"But today," Kang said, "we let the political people talk about it, not us."

"It's an emotional issue," added Ngeth.

As music drifted from the blue shadows of the tent where young girls in satin danced barefoot, other young people played choung toss, a circle game that pits men against women.

Meanwhile, adults lined up to place incense and small colorful banners in five small sand hills, symbolizing the mountains of Cambodia, and to pray. Each fluttering banner warns evil away, said Malon Mao. "They say, `This is our celebration.' "

For many of the young, the new year's celebration is the only link to their roots.

Dressed in bright blue satin and lace, 17-year-old Lisha Doung, standing with her boyfriend near a pagoda housing a gold Buddha, talked about the tradition of wearing one's finest at the beginning of the new year.

She and her sister Linda You were born in the United States but have heard stories of Cambodia from their parents. "They went through communism and very many people were killed," she said.

Because Pol Pot's body was cremated before it could be autopsied, Doung said, her parents think the former dictator might still be alive and hidden to avoid being handed over for prosecution.

As flower petals from pagoda bouquets drifted in the wind, Doung's boyfriend, Pep Hun, 19, told how his parents escaped the Khmer Rouge by fleeing to Bangkok, Thailand, where he was born.

But, he said, "today is a peaceful day for everybody. Today there's no more violence."

Nancy Bartley's phone message number is 206-515-5039. Her e-mail address is: nbar-new@seatimes.com