Refugee opens museum, memorial to Cambodia's 1970s killing fields
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"I am very upset," he said.
Thach, the Seattle Police Department's liaison to the Asian community, was among a few dozen guests Friday at the newly opened Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial. He was reminded that history's lessons can be as painful as they are valuable.
Thach said several of his relatives were murdered during the Khmer Rouge genocide that claimed 2 million Cambodian lives from 1975 to 1979 during the regime of Pol Pot. Looking back is difficult. But he and a companion, Peter Truong, a community-service officer for the King County Sheriff's Office, both said the museum is needed for local Cambodian youth who know little of what their elders endured.
"Young people, especially, can see what the country went through and appreciate what they have in this country," Truong said. "People born here don't know anything about it."
The museum in White Center officially opens to the public today and is the pet project of Dara Duong, a Cambodian refugee. Last fall, Duong quit his job as a counselor at a social-service agency to devote himself full-time to his dream.
Duong's efforts have taken his collection of items documenting the horrors from his cramped garage in SeaTac to a modest, but accessible, location. Before, some doubted the legitimacy of Duong's project. Now, he says, local shop owners are happy to accommodate his donation boxes.
"Before, it was a project based in a garage," he says proudly. "Now it is a real project, and everybody can come see the real history of the killing fields, the real history of Cambodian culture."
The museum features a library focusing on that culture, with some of his 300 books on history, tradition and religion. Another rack is aimed at kids, with youth-oriented, Cambodian pop-culture magazines.
Art and sculptures line boxy, glass shelves along several walls around a stage — a remnant of the location's former life as a nightclub. Duong plans to use the stage for Cambodian youth to perform traditional dance.
But the wounded heart of the place is the Killing Fields Memorial, where images of war and atrocity surround visitors — the mass graves, austere bearings of Khmer Rouge henchmen, rows and rows of terror-stricken faces. They are the morbid mug shots of people about to be executed.
Duong, 33, first saw the faces in 1999 at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, when he returned to the country he had fled as a boy. His father and grandfather both were killed during the genocide. And he vaguely recalls days of forced labor.
Still, the magnitude of the atrocity was so terrible that Duong felt compelled to share the story with the world, so in subsequent trips to Cambodia he brought items home with that intention in mind: photographs, drawings and other evidence of the crimes that defiled his native land.
The work of assembling the collection he mostly has done himself, with glue, display boards and hours spent at copy shops. He has also had help from Ryker Labbee, a well-traveled 30-year-old who met Duong a year ago and has contributed photographs of modern Cambodia to the exhibition.
"Dara's great," Labbee says. "He has a great vision. But he's going to need help."
Duong has spent $10,000, most from his own savings, to prepare what he says is just a seed of what he envisions: a $1.5 million cultural center and museum in a better location. He hopes that might happen within five years.
Duong also says people in the community told him they don't have time to teach their kids about Cambodian culture, about how they came to America. They told him the children don't believe their recountings of the genocide. They told him to open his museum so the young people could see what really happened.
At Friday's invitation-only grand opening, a documentary on the Khmer Rouge played on a large screen while a hammer, shovel and electric wires were mounted on an easel nearby. Items like those were used to torture people.
When Duong first started talking about his project, some worried for his safety: With history's participants still around — including former members of the Khmer Rouge — the genocide is a delicate issue. He told people he makes no judgments; he wants to simply show things as they were and let visitors decide for themselves.
He says he hopes it can be a lesson for everyone, Cambodians and Americans alike. For Cambodian youth, he says, the museum can be a push to get on the right track.
"It's kind of like a message that can help them change," he says.
Marc Ramirez: 206-464-8102 or mramirez@seattletimes.com
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