Monita Chhun, 19, studies English at Lower Columbia College and works at the Golden Palace restaurant in Longview. Monita arrived in the United States in 2005. (Photo: Roger Werth)Dec 19, 2006
By Cathy Zimmerman
The Daily News (Longview, Washington, USA)
Well-off Americans rig up fantasy television shows to play at the skills of survival. For the Chhun family of Longview, no acting was required.
"When I sit in the airplane the first time I came here, I very need the water," said Chenda Nhem Chhun. "My throat is dry."
She had left her two young children with her mother in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to seize the chance to come here, and now she had no word for water and no courage to pantomime her thirst.
She tried pointing to other passengers, but they were drinking alcohol or drinks she did not recognize.
"Over 20 hours, no water!" said Chenda.
That was in 1997. Today, the 50-year-old woman drinks from the well of a new life, working as a dealer at a downtown casino and keeping house in west Longview with her second husband, Sambol Nhem, and her children ChanSopheak and Monita.
Each has learned a foreign alphabet and language, taken a series of tough jobs and pursued American citizenship. Sam and Chenda are now Americans; their children will follow the process.
ChanSopeak Chhun, left, tutors his American friend, Teapsaroon Mith. While ChanSopeak, 21, is learning English at LCC, he's in turn helping Teapsaroon, who was born here, learn Cambodian, the language of their ancestors. (Photo: Roger Werth)
Sambol, who goes by "Sam," got out of Cambodia in 1975, escaping the Communist takeover in the nick of time because he worked for the American Embassy. After time in the refugee camps in Indonesia and six months at Camp Pendleton in California, he was connected to a sponsor family in Baltimore.
From there, a friend invited him to Tacoma, where Sam attended Clover Park Technical College. "I know nothing, nothing," he said of that time. "Everything is different, everything is complicated."
He missed the traffic-jammed streets of Phnom Penh, his diet of rice and Asian seasonings, his family. He fixed lawnmowers and with welfare checks of $125 a month, lived in a room with four friends.
"I had to find a job," Sam said, and when a friend told him there was work in Longview, he moved and began washing dishes at the Tea House Restaurant. From there he went to work on the green chain for Weyerhaeuser.
"Wow, that's a hard job," Sam said. "In the snow and the rain, we had one hour of work, 10 minutes break, back again to work."
After a year and a half at International Paper he was laid off, and finally landed a job at Reynolds Metals, where he worked 22 years before the company closed.
"I had no medical, nothing. I was too young to retire, too old to find another job," Sam said. "I worked at the casino with her" until he turned 62 and retired.
Chenda had become a whiz dealing at the Cadillac Ranch, where she's a whiz in her pink outfit, keeping poker games stoked through the wee hours. "The customer is right," Chenda said. "Most people is nice. They try to help me. That's why I like them ...
"I know how they feel (if) they lose money. I can hope, but I can't control the cards."
Card games are a far cry from the challenges of her early adulthood.
As a young woman, Chenda survived the savage four-year reign of Communist dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who in the late 1970s murdered 3 million Cambodians for being intellectual and "bourgeois."
"I almost died," Chenda said, working 15 hour days with "one tablespoon of rice soup a day, some days, nothing."
Her husband did die. In 1997, she came to the United States to care for a sick uncle, Chenda said, leaving Monita and ChanSopheak, then about 9 and 10 years old, with relatives.
The uncle, who lived in Baltimore, knew Sambol, and Chenda met and married him. In Longview, she went to English as a Second Language classes at Lower Columbia College and worked cleaning houses, then at Hart C's restaurant (owned by a fellow Cambodian), and then at Foster Farms before landing the casino job.
"When I came, I ride the bus by myself," she said. "He worked graveyard; I could not drive. I'm afraid, and I didn't know how to say 'Stop.' The bus passed far away and I walked all the way home.
"I tried to improve my English for getting a job." She went to LCC every day and found a tutor at the Longview Public Library, she said. "It is very hard for me!"
The Nhem Chhuns spent years on the paperwork that would allow her two children to come to the U.S. They were reunited here in 2005.
ChanSopheak (Chon-So-PECK), 21, has been here barely a year. He speaks some English, works all night at the casino, and helps to tutor a young Cambodian-American student who was born here and wants to learn his native language.
Lorraine Luciano-Singer, an instructor in the ESL classes at the college, praised ChanSopheak. "With less than six months of English classes, he took his drivers test and went to work at Cadillac Ranch," she said. "He learned intricate card games and vocabulary, all on his own."
ChanSopheak, enunciating with care, said the ESL program has "helped me learn pronunciation and conversation, reading and listening ... how to take the bus, go to the Post Office and the market, how to find the food in the store and talk on the phone," one of the hardest vehicles of conversation for a new English speaker.
His goal is to get his GED and enter the construction trade, he said. He has made a huge transition in a short time.
"I miss my grandmother and friends, but now I have friends, now I have a job, not miss it like before."
Monita studies daily at LCC, learning from field trips to the fire station and theater and lessons in keyboarding and computer use. "Now I type faster," she said quietly. "I like it."
According to ESL instructor JoAnn Workman, Monita's "language is good enough that she can be spontaneous and clever."
Monita works busing tables at the Golden Palace five evenings a week.
The Nhem Chhun family are Buddhists who strive to preserve their native traditions. One of those is the Asian ritual of the engagement party, when the families of a woman and man who plan to marry throw an elaborate, day-long celebration.
This fall, Sam and Chenda returned to Cambodia with Monita, who was betrothed to marry Vannak Mok. She wore many exquisite outfits as her future inlaws heaped gifts on her parents. The young couple exchanged rings and were formally acknowledged by a throng of relatives before a culminating feast.
"Both families get to know each other, the old people talk to both the children, and they tell the city" about the betrothal, said Sam. "The Cambodian tradition is to meet and be together forever. Not to be wild, like here."
Monita hopes that Vannak can join in her in two years or so. "I want to learn English more, get my GED and be a makeup technician" before marrying.
"I like to live in the United States because it's a better life, good education," she said. "I like to study."
Sam beams over his family, their lovely house and the promise of their future. "Here, there's freedom and peace," he said. "You can learn a lot of things. ... Everything is OK now."
"When I sit in the airplane the first time I came here, I very need the water," said Chenda Nhem Chhun. "My throat is dry."
She had left her two young children with her mother in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to seize the chance to come here, and now she had no word for water and no courage to pantomime her thirst.
She tried pointing to other passengers, but they were drinking alcohol or drinks she did not recognize.
"Over 20 hours, no water!" said Chenda.
That was in 1997. Today, the 50-year-old woman drinks from the well of a new life, working as a dealer at a downtown casino and keeping house in west Longview with her second husband, Sambol Nhem, and her children ChanSopheak and Monita.
Each has learned a foreign alphabet and language, taken a series of tough jobs and pursued American citizenship. Sam and Chenda are now Americans; their children will follow the process.
ChanSopeak Chhun, left, tutors his American friend, Teapsaroon Mith. While ChanSopeak, 21, is learning English at LCC, he's in turn helping Teapsaroon, who was born here, learn Cambodian, the language of their ancestors. (Photo: Roger Werth)Sambol, who goes by "Sam," got out of Cambodia in 1975, escaping the Communist takeover in the nick of time because he worked for the American Embassy. After time in the refugee camps in Indonesia and six months at Camp Pendleton in California, he was connected to a sponsor family in Baltimore.
From there, a friend invited him to Tacoma, where Sam attended Clover Park Technical College. "I know nothing, nothing," he said of that time. "Everything is different, everything is complicated."
He missed the traffic-jammed streets of Phnom Penh, his diet of rice and Asian seasonings, his family. He fixed lawnmowers and with welfare checks of $125 a month, lived in a room with four friends.
"I had to find a job," Sam said, and when a friend told him there was work in Longview, he moved and began washing dishes at the Tea House Restaurant. From there he went to work on the green chain for Weyerhaeuser.
"Wow, that's a hard job," Sam said. "In the snow and the rain, we had one hour of work, 10 minutes break, back again to work."
After a year and a half at International Paper he was laid off, and finally landed a job at Reynolds Metals, where he worked 22 years before the company closed.
"I had no medical, nothing. I was too young to retire, too old to find another job," Sam said. "I worked at the casino with her" until he turned 62 and retired.
Chenda had become a whiz dealing at the Cadillac Ranch, where she's a whiz in her pink outfit, keeping poker games stoked through the wee hours. "The customer is right," Chenda said. "Most people is nice. They try to help me. That's why I like them ...
"I know how they feel (if) they lose money. I can hope, but I can't control the cards."
Card games are a far cry from the challenges of her early adulthood.
As a young woman, Chenda survived the savage four-year reign of Communist dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who in the late 1970s murdered 3 million Cambodians for being intellectual and "bourgeois."
"I almost died," Chenda said, working 15 hour days with "one tablespoon of rice soup a day, some days, nothing."
Her husband did die. In 1997, she came to the United States to care for a sick uncle, Chenda said, leaving Monita and ChanSopheak, then about 9 and 10 years old, with relatives.
The uncle, who lived in Baltimore, knew Sambol, and Chenda met and married him. In Longview, she went to English as a Second Language classes at Lower Columbia College and worked cleaning houses, then at Hart C's restaurant (owned by a fellow Cambodian), and then at Foster Farms before landing the casino job.
"When I came, I ride the bus by myself," she said. "He worked graveyard; I could not drive. I'm afraid, and I didn't know how to say 'Stop.' The bus passed far away and I walked all the way home.
"I tried to improve my English for getting a job." She went to LCC every day and found a tutor at the Longview Public Library, she said. "It is very hard for me!"
The Nhem Chhuns spent years on the paperwork that would allow her two children to come to the U.S. They were reunited here in 2005.
ChanSopheak (Chon-So-PECK), 21, has been here barely a year. He speaks some English, works all night at the casino, and helps to tutor a young Cambodian-American student who was born here and wants to learn his native language.
Lorraine Luciano-Singer, an instructor in the ESL classes at the college, praised ChanSopheak. "With less than six months of English classes, he took his drivers test and went to work at Cadillac Ranch," she said. "He learned intricate card games and vocabulary, all on his own."
ChanSopheak, enunciating with care, said the ESL program has "helped me learn pronunciation and conversation, reading and listening ... how to take the bus, go to the Post Office and the market, how to find the food in the store and talk on the phone," one of the hardest vehicles of conversation for a new English speaker.
His goal is to get his GED and enter the construction trade, he said. He has made a huge transition in a short time.
"I miss my grandmother and friends, but now I have friends, now I have a job, not miss it like before."
Monita studies daily at LCC, learning from field trips to the fire station and theater and lessons in keyboarding and computer use. "Now I type faster," she said quietly. "I like it."
According to ESL instructor JoAnn Workman, Monita's "language is good enough that she can be spontaneous and clever."
Monita works busing tables at the Golden Palace five evenings a week.
The Nhem Chhun family are Buddhists who strive to preserve their native traditions. One of those is the Asian ritual of the engagement party, when the families of a woman and man who plan to marry throw an elaborate, day-long celebration.
This fall, Sam and Chenda returned to Cambodia with Monita, who was betrothed to marry Vannak Mok. She wore many exquisite outfits as her future inlaws heaped gifts on her parents. The young couple exchanged rings and were formally acknowledged by a throng of relatives before a culminating feast.
"Both families get to know each other, the old people talk to both the children, and they tell the city" about the betrothal, said Sam. "The Cambodian tradition is to meet and be together forever. Not to be wild, like here."
Monita hopes that Vannak can join in her in two years or so. "I want to learn English more, get my GED and be a makeup technician" before marrying.
"I like to live in the United States because it's a better life, good education," she said. "I like to study."
Sam beams over his family, their lovely house and the promise of their future. "Here, there's freedom and peace," he said. "You can learn a lot of things. ... Everything is OK now."
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