On April 17, 1975, my family boarded a boat on the southern shores of Cambodia when news crackled through my mother’s shortwave radio that the Communist Khmer Rouge regime had taken power. My father worked for the U.S.-backed Lon Nol regime back then — a benign role as an accountant in the Cambodian Navy. He knew what it meant for the Communists to have seized control. To stay would have surely meant death for our family because of my father’s job. To leave and be cleaved from our country was another kind of dying. “At least we got out alive,” my mother said once when I asked how she experienced that moment. As in, We should be lucky to have avoided the fates of so many left behind.
The decision to flee permanently altered the trajectory of our lives, as much as it saved our lives. Over four hopeless years after we left, so many of my relatives and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians would be slaughtered, starved and tortured to death. By then, my family and I had started new lives in the hypnotic hush and unrushed everyday of bucolic Corvallis, Ore.
My father got a job washing dishes at Burton’s diner downtown while my mother worked the swing shift at Oregon State University. My siblings and I went to school, made new friends and took turns riding my brother’s BMX bike — donated by a local church — to the 7-Eleven near our house to buy Jolly Ranchers and Chick-o-Sticks, shoving sugar in our mouths when our parents weren’t looking. We learned the Pledge of Allegiance and our tongues bent so urgently toward English over the coming months and years that we stopped speaking Khmer entirely. If it broke my parents’ hearts to know their children had lost their mother tongue, they never said. Instead, my father hung an American flag under the eaves of our home on the Fourth of July and, once we became citizens, he and my mom registered to vote. They haven’t missed a single election.
My parents embraced self-determinism and humble labor as key facets of the American identity. Our lives seemed to prove it. With freedom came education and with education came jobs and careers. My siblings and I grew up and bought homes, cars, vacation packages. We thrived.
But back in Cambodia, a horror story was unfolding. Neighbors told on neighbors, trying to curry favor with the new regime, which rewarded sycophants and punished anyone who was “impure” or disloyal. Civil and political rights were abolished and minorities persecuted as the government imposed its vision of how the country should look and behave. Teachers and journalists were among the first to be slaughtered, because knowledge and the truth were considered dangerous.
The depravity of the Khmer Rouge regime included converting a high school in the middle of the capital, Phnom Penh, into a prison where an estimated 18,000 Cambodians were tortured to death.
Economic mismanagement led to widespread famine, and the country became an international pariah. By the end, an estimated 2 million people died.
I was 16 years old when I first visited Cambodia with my mother. She had wanted to travel back to our birth country to make her own accounting of relatives who had survived and those who had died. It was during a visit to the high school-turned-torture-prison-turned-museum that the docent led us down darkened hallways haunted with death. He stopped and pointed at two cells and said: “Two journalists died there.” When I asked, “Why?” he said, “Because they were trying to tell the truth.”
That was the moment I knew I wanted to become a journalist.
I couldn’t have imagined that 50 years after my family fled Cambodia, we would find ourselves in America facing the beginnings of the same darkness that unfolded in our homeland. Or that here, teachers would be censored, minorities actively erased from government histories, journalists deemed the enemy and doctors targeted for helping people make decisions about their own bodies.
These days, my parents watch the news with palpable tension, in a way I’ve never seen before. My father sits upright, bent toward the screen, astonished at the 49% tariffs this government has placed on Cambodia. My mother sits in her recliner, pressing her back against a heating pad to relieve the pain from too many years lifting gallon pots of soup and gravy in the campus dormitory at OSU, where she retired as a cook. She wonders if she’ll lose her Medicare, and with it, the ability to pay for prescriptions.
They are worried we might one day have to flee again, this time from a country that was the place we fled to for hope and safety. I have no words and no way to convince them that we’re safe. Instead, I tell them this: “At least we still have our lives.”
