Many Uch stands in front of a print of the iconic Cambodian temple Angkor Wat. Uch, a Cambodian refugee, is facing deportation and fixing up this White Center pool hall in the meantime. (All Photos by Thomas James Hurt/The Seattle Times)
Uch flips through a family photo album during a visit with his mother, Hoeung Luy, at her home.
Many Uch, a Cambodian refugee awaiting deportation, talks with friends outside a White Center doughnut shop.
This class picture of Uch as a fourth-grader hangs on a wall in the pool hall.By Florangela Davila Seattle Times staff reporter (Washington, USA)
The pool hall, dark and ragged, is on the upswing. A fresh coat of bright orange paint has helped.
So have a couple of couches and various wall hangings: white tigers, Cambodian dancers, the temple Angkor Wat. Two pool tables beckon. A karaoke machine sits at the ready in a corner.
The pool hall in White Center is Many Uch's main preoccupation these days. Four walls with a frayed carpet anchoring his present. And that's just fine with him.
It's not that he doesn't care that one day he'll be deported to his native Cambodia, leaving behind his mother, two brothers and a pregnant fiancée. It's just that the here and now is something he can grasp and control. The pool hall needs fixing up, and that's Uch's immediate plan.
Outlaws and the law
You could say Uch's future was set in 1994, when he was an accomplice in an armed robbery. He served 40 months in prison. "I came out a different person than when I went in," says Uch, who used to run in the Local Asian Boyz gang. "Best thing that ever happened to me."
The reality, though, is that Uch's fate and the fate of some 1,500 other Cambodian offenders from throughout the country was sealed in 1996, when the United States stiffened its immigration laws.
New rules expanded the list of so-called "deportable" crimes for anyone who wasn't a U.S. citizen. It didn't matter whether the person had committed that crime before 1996, or whether he had already served his sentence and had remained clean. And gone, too, was any legal appeal.
Filmmakers David Grabias and Nicole Newnham spent three years following three Seattle-area Cambodian refugees at different stages in the deportation process. The documentary is called "Sentenced Home," and it screens in Seattle on June 12. In the documentary, Kim Ho Ma and Loeun Lun are expelled back to Phnom Penh. Uch hovers in the wings.
"It's only by watching these guys experience the process that you really understand what it's all about and what it all means," Grabias says. It was Newnham who first learned about the deportations while working on a different project. Then as the pair researched the deportations, Grabias says, they were especially struck by the fact that their three subjects had already served their prison sentences.
"Double punishment," is how he puts it. And it's especially onerous, he continues, given the context of how the Cambodians first arrived here.
Immigration to expulsion
Many Uch arrived as a refugee in 1984, one of thousands of Cambodians who had fled civil war and survived the Khmer Rouge genocide. The Puget Sound area is home to the third-largest Cambodian population in the country. Uch was 8 years old when he and his family settled in the nearby Park Lake Homes public-housing complex.
A class picture of Uch as a fourth-grader in Mr. Huppe's Mount View Elementary class hangs on a pool-hall wall.
He was a cute kid back then. But by the time he was 14, he was a cute kid who also ran in a gang.
About that, Uch says he was just going along with his friends. "You never sit down and think about your future."
The crime, he says, was "spur of the moment," something he "got caught up in." He was an 18-year-old high-school student at the time, the getaway driver in an armed robbery at a home.
A felony conviction marked Uch, but immigration laws worsened his situation. During the years when the United States didn't have a repatriation agreement with Cambodia, deportees like Uch were jailed indefinitely.
On the day Uch completed his jail sentence for the robbery, he was immediately shuttled to immigration jail, where he spent an additional 28 months. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled against such jailings, which freed him and the others. Then, when a repatriation agreement was signed with Cambodia in 2002, the deportations began.
A total of 151 Cambodians, all men except for one, have been expelled to date from throughout the country.
A new venture
In their documentary, filmmakers Grabias and Newnham show how Lun and Ma arrive "stateless" in Cambodia and are incarcerated there for a time. Lun has left behind a wife and two daughters. Ma hangs onto his gang identity. Both men regard themselves as outsiders, which is exactly how the Cambodians eye them.
Ma grew up in White Center; he and Uch have been friends since childhood.
Another pool-hall photo: Ma, the deportee, living in Cambodia. That'll be Uch some day. He's on some deportation list, but it's a mystery how far down, or how high up, his name appears.
When Uch got out of jail, he made it clear to the other gang members that he didn't want to get pulled back in. But he didn't distance himself from them, either, he says, because you don't turn your back on your own kind.
When Uch was running a Little League team for Cambodian kids (team photo also on pool-hall wall), he asked some of the guys for money to buy equipment, and they pitched in.
Until recently, Uch operated his own courier service, and he'd drive throughout the state, mostly overnight. Now he's invested in the pool hall, a popular haunt for Cambodian youth.
Taking responsibility
Many Uch — "Ooch" to some of his friends — is 30 and lanky, with a long goatee that he sometimes braids or strings with beads. Absent is any street swagger or tough-guy bluster. His demeanor is laid-back and cool.
He is introspective in the film, Grabias points out, especially in talking about the guilt he feels in having let his mother down.
He's like that in person, too. And when you ask him about the deportation, Uch is resolute.
"If it happens, it happens. If they send me back, I won't cry," he says.
He's agreed to be the sort of unofficial "face" of the deportation policy because it's his responsibility.
"Because if I don't, who will?"
But with his mom in White Center, or at home in Des Moines with his fiancée, he says, "We don't talk about it." Even some of the locals — the elders from a nearby doughnut shop, his friends at the pool hall, the people who see him almost daily — don't know that one day he'll be gone.
Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com
The pool hall, dark and ragged, is on the upswing. A fresh coat of bright orange paint has helped.
So have a couple of couches and various wall hangings: white tigers, Cambodian dancers, the temple Angkor Wat. Two pool tables beckon. A karaoke machine sits at the ready in a corner.
The pool hall in White Center is Many Uch's main preoccupation these days. Four walls with a frayed carpet anchoring his present. And that's just fine with him.
It's not that he doesn't care that one day he'll be deported to his native Cambodia, leaving behind his mother, two brothers and a pregnant fiancée. It's just that the here and now is something he can grasp and control. The pool hall needs fixing up, and that's Uch's immediate plan.
Outlaws and the law
You could say Uch's future was set in 1994, when he was an accomplice in an armed robbery. He served 40 months in prison. "I came out a different person than when I went in," says Uch, who used to run in the Local Asian Boyz gang. "Best thing that ever happened to me."
The reality, though, is that Uch's fate and the fate of some 1,500 other Cambodian offenders from throughout the country was sealed in 1996, when the United States stiffened its immigration laws.
Coming up
"Sentenced Home," a documentary about
three Seattle-area Cambodian refugees
who are drawn into gangs, jailed and face
deportation to their homeland.
7 p.m. June 12 at the Egyptian Theater;
$10. www.seattlefilm.org.
"Sentenced Home," a documentary about
three Seattle-area Cambodian refugees
who are drawn into gangs, jailed and face
deportation to their homeland.
7 p.m. June 12 at the Egyptian Theater;
$10. www.seattlefilm.org.
New rules expanded the list of so-called "deportable" crimes for anyone who wasn't a U.S. citizen. It didn't matter whether the person had committed that crime before 1996, or whether he had already served his sentence and had remained clean. And gone, too, was any legal appeal.
Filmmakers David Grabias and Nicole Newnham spent three years following three Seattle-area Cambodian refugees at different stages in the deportation process. The documentary is called "Sentenced Home," and it screens in Seattle on June 12. In the documentary, Kim Ho Ma and Loeun Lun are expelled back to Phnom Penh. Uch hovers in the wings.
"It's only by watching these guys experience the process that you really understand what it's all about and what it all means," Grabias says. It was Newnham who first learned about the deportations while working on a different project. Then as the pair researched the deportations, Grabias says, they were especially struck by the fact that their three subjects had already served their prison sentences.
"Double punishment," is how he puts it. And it's especially onerous, he continues, given the context of how the Cambodians first arrived here.
Immigration to expulsion
Many Uch arrived as a refugee in 1984, one of thousands of Cambodians who had fled civil war and survived the Khmer Rouge genocide. The Puget Sound area is home to the third-largest Cambodian population in the country. Uch was 8 years old when he and his family settled in the nearby Park Lake Homes public-housing complex.
A class picture of Uch as a fourth-grader in Mr. Huppe's Mount View Elementary class hangs on a pool-hall wall.
He was a cute kid back then. But by the time he was 14, he was a cute kid who also ran in a gang.
About that, Uch says he was just going along with his friends. "You never sit down and think about your future."
The crime, he says, was "spur of the moment," something he "got caught up in." He was an 18-year-old high-school student at the time, the getaway driver in an armed robbery at a home.
A felony conviction marked Uch, but immigration laws worsened his situation. During the years when the United States didn't have a repatriation agreement with Cambodia, deportees like Uch were jailed indefinitely.
On the day Uch completed his jail sentence for the robbery, he was immediately shuttled to immigration jail, where he spent an additional 28 months. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled against such jailings, which freed him and the others. Then, when a repatriation agreement was signed with Cambodia in 2002, the deportations began.
A total of 151 Cambodians, all men except for one, have been expelled to date from throughout the country.
A new venture
In their documentary, filmmakers Grabias and Newnham show how Lun and Ma arrive "stateless" in Cambodia and are incarcerated there for a time. Lun has left behind a wife and two daughters. Ma hangs onto his gang identity. Both men regard themselves as outsiders, which is exactly how the Cambodians eye them.
Ma grew up in White Center; he and Uch have been friends since childhood.
Another pool-hall photo: Ma, the deportee, living in Cambodia. That'll be Uch some day. He's on some deportation list, but it's a mystery how far down, or how high up, his name appears.
When Uch got out of jail, he made it clear to the other gang members that he didn't want to get pulled back in. But he didn't distance himself from them, either, he says, because you don't turn your back on your own kind.
When Uch was running a Little League team for Cambodian kids (team photo also on pool-hall wall), he asked some of the guys for money to buy equipment, and they pitched in.
Until recently, Uch operated his own courier service, and he'd drive throughout the state, mostly overnight. Now he's invested in the pool hall, a popular haunt for Cambodian youth.
Taking responsibility
Many Uch — "Ooch" to some of his friends — is 30 and lanky, with a long goatee that he sometimes braids or strings with beads. Absent is any street swagger or tough-guy bluster. His demeanor is laid-back and cool.
He is introspective in the film, Grabias points out, especially in talking about the guilt he feels in having let his mother down.
He's like that in person, too. And when you ask him about the deportation, Uch is resolute.
"If it happens, it happens. If they send me back, I won't cry," he says.
He's agreed to be the sort of unofficial "face" of the deportation policy because it's his responsibility.
"Because if I don't, who will?"
But with his mom in White Center, or at home in Des Moines with his fiancée, he says, "We don't talk about it." Even some of the locals — the elders from a nearby doughnut shop, his friends at the pool hall, the people who see him almost daily — don't know that one day he'll be gone.
Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com
7 comments:
Sorry for them. Now they can feel the suffering of their victims, (when you were rubbe of your freedom.)
You call American is a land of freedom, but what freedom is that when you don't give people a second chance to prove to you that they've changed and got their act together. No chance for these Khmer people to proof.
Sad and un-just
That good exemple for other Khmer kids!
Who did they rubb I sure anoyher Khmer! coward!
Another thug, another problem for Cambodia. We locals dont deserve to have this kind of ppl in the country as we have enough thugs in HS and gangs.
Please keep them there, keep them to where they belong, not in Cambodia.
oop.
Oh well, Everybody expose to the same ulgliness in life but some people choose to pick up the ungliness and throw away the goodness. Many of these youngsters have low self-esteem and can be easily led and manipulated! Who do we blame? We can blame the parent but these youngster spend 80% to 90% at school or outside their home getting all the bad influence. We can blame the school system for promote bad behavior, but the school often blame the parent for all kinds of problem caused by these youngster. Now that we are going back to square one! who else do we blame? Most Cambodian parent are afraid to spanking their children to do the right thing with fear that they will go to jail for abusing their children! At the end, the real victim are these youngster who grew up to be gangster because nobody dare to tell them anything!
I will say with all my heart that now we can blame on the society!!ahah
to the KhmerRougeSurvivor, and I hope you will read this.
You probably don't know but there's only about 250k of Khmers in the U.S. And we as people forget that the immigration Laws has gotten tougher on legal immigrants because of,educated people like yourself, never bother or care to contest certain immigration law that intend to break family apart.
Of course deport ex-criminal. He has no burden on America anymore. How about their families, the childrens that he/she is leaving behind. Its a burden on society already. He/she is the head of household and deporting them will only make the problem worse.
Something to remember: Congress or Government can not make laws that break family apart.
about your brother, sorry to hear. Maybe move forward and start loving your people.
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