By JENNIFER O'BRIEN, FREE PRESS REPORTER
The London Free Press (London, Ontario, Canada)
In the summer, they frolicked in the Thames. A pack of boys, shirtless and shoeless, they would race from their Oakville Avenue apartments down to the river bank.
"Those were great days," says Chetra Peo, his eyes lighting up 20 years later in a downtown coffee shop. "We were all Cambodian and we'd go there for the whole day -- fishing, swimming, everything.
"I love those memories," Peo says.
He has only two memories from before.
They are foggier.
Visions of a terrifying, gaping hole in the ground that was much larger than the usual toilet in the refugee camp. And a sweeter vision of showering in the rain in that same place.
Peo spent his first three years in that refugee camp in Thailand. His parents had fled war in Cambodia.
In the early 1980s, dozens of Cambodian families -- including Peo's -- came to London.
---
"I have no idea what my parents went through before we got to the camp. We don't talk," says Peo, now 25, over coffee in London's Galleria mall.
He prefers Tim Hortons, he says, but this is OK. He has just gotten out of class, part of a blueprints program offered through Fanshawe College.
This day, Peo wears a sideways AC/DC cap over his long black hair. The short sleeves of his plaid button-down reveal a tattoo of a cross, a professional one that covers the blue of something he'd tattooed himself years ago.
"They were traumatized," he says of his parents. "Whatever happened to them was so bad that they are just scarred.
"It's like they can't even care about anything anymore. They don't understand."
---
"I wanted to play hockey so bad," Peo says. "It was Grade 6 and all the kids were starting to join hockey teams."
But there was no way.
"We had no money for that kind of stuff. We were on Oakville (Avenue). We had nothing."
Did he even ask his parents?
He laughs at the suggestion.
His dad had already left the family, and his mom didn't understand, he says.
"We kids were trading hockey cards every day, and seeing hockey on TV, but she had no idea what hockey would have meant to me."
That was just one kick, one cultural/financial reminder that he was not really part of this society, he says.
There were other reminders after Peo started high school at John Paul II. By then, schoolwork had become so difficult he seldom went to class.
"We'd all just hang out. We did whatever we wanted," he says of his neighbourhood friends. He'd already been smoking for two years.
"Our parents weren't involved," he says.
His mom worked midnights, six nights a week at a factory and didn't speak English.
Peo's high school memories are peppered with fistfights and stealing video games from a Zellers store.
He stole his first car at 15.
"I wanted to drive so bad," he says. "Lots of kids were stealing cars. They would ask me to come.
"At first you say 'no,' but they say they'll let you drive and you're like, 'Yeah, OK.' "
He transferred to Montcalm secondary, but was kicked out in Grade 10 after a fight.
---
It's Sunday afternoon and volleyballs are flying in the Chippewa public school gymnasium.
Peo is among 14 men at the practice. They meet here every Sunday for two hours.
The men range in age from 16 to 25 and they are a strong-looking group -- mostly muscular and many tattooed.
The coach is working them hard. He has to. These are going to be the role models.
"These guys can be role models. That's something the community has never had," says Born Heng, founder of the Cambodian Youth Group.
"I'm trying to pull Cambodian kids off the street," says Heng, who is married to Peo's sister.
"Our community was starting to look bad because so many kids were partying, drinking, (break-ins), drugs . . . some of our kids know every lawyer in the courthouse."
Heng, who came to Canada at 13, says there's a divide between parents who survived war in Cambodia and kids born in Canada.
"My generation -- kids who came here as teenagers -- we all realized what we were coming for and what we were coming from."
---
Cambodia was ravaged by the Khmer Rouge government, which used savage force to take power in 1975, then, under the rule of dictator Pol Pot, murdered about two million Cambodians, targeting the educated in attempts to create a peasant society.
About 300,000 Cambodians sought refuge in Western countries after living for years in Thai refugee camps.
---
Heng came to Canada with his dad and four siblings.
Trying to make ends meet, Heng's dad rode an old bicycle. He had pedalled out toward the grocery store one day when he was hit by a car.
He's been nearly blind since, Heng says.
Heng tried to stay in school, where he was getting by as an English as a Second Language (ESL) student, but the family needed extra money.
Heng gave up his goal -- to be a police officer -- and got a job in a factory.
"That's the reason this is important to me," he says of his push to get kids back on track, starting with sports. "At the time, I felt like I had to drop out of high school, and now I regret it. So I look at these kids dropping out and I just say, 'you kids have no excuse for that.'
"All it does is make your parents look bad and make our whole culture look bad. Then the next generation is going to follow your footsteps."
Not if he can help it. The volleyball team is just one small step, he hopes, toward a youth club for boys and girls.
"Because so many parents are worried," says Heng.
"With boys it's crime, with girls it's running away."
---
When her eldest daughter started high school, Vanna Ouch set the rules.
"I told my daughter, 'Don't dye your hair, don't wear too much makeup, don't wear a mini-skirt,' " says Ouch, a Cambodian immigrant who came to Canada in 1980 as a single mom with two girls.
"What I learned was that she just filled her locker with those things and changed when she got to school."
Ouch was suspicious. Someone said they saw her daughter wearing makeup. So she secretly followed the girl to school one day.
"It was true," she says. "I was so angry. I couldn't believe she would lie to me."
Ouch didn't know what to do. In Cambodia, her father had been strict, "spankings, and lectures every day," she says. Here, she couldn't control her children.
"When she came home I yelled at her and she yelled back, and I got so frustrated. And even though I knew the laws in Canada, I pulled her hair. And I hit her," she says.
The next day, her daughter moved into a friend's house.
Ouch went to get her, but when she arrived at the home, the woman wouldn't let her see her daughter.
"Imagine that you can't get in to talk to your own daughter? Can you imagine?"
---
Twenty-five years after the Cambodian community arrived in London, many first-generation Canadian children are graduating from university and college.
Others, like Peo are working hard to catch up.
More established families are buying houses, getting into business.
Ouch now works as an interpreter for Across Languages and helps run a drop-in group that provides soup and social services in northeast London.
Her oldest daughter works at the bank. every family she knows has at least one child in post-secondary education.
"I think our community is really booming," Ouch says.
Though parents who arrived in the early 1980s weren't necessarily highly educated after years of persecution, it's highly valued in the community, says Ouch.
And while many adults in the community still struggle with language, there's comfort at area factories, such as Sun Valley Foods, which has many Cambodian employees.
Despite this, some community members say dozens of Cambodian immigrants have been unable to get off welfare, or have been stuck in low- paying jobs.
---
It costs $1,000 to rent out the Chippewa gym for two hours on Sundays from January until May. Too much, especially considering the place is empty on weekends. But the community has no centre.
There are gatherings at the Cambodian Buddhist Temple on Fanshawe Park Road, but that's not a place for kids to gather, or to play sports.
In the past, Ouch headed an association, but she says it was difficult to run or organize events with no place to go.
The volleyball team was made possible, partly by London's Intercommunity Health Centre, part of the North East London Community Health Partnership that runs the Monday drop-in group at Church of Christ.
"The idea is to have a Cambodian youth group, which could provide much needed activity and entertainment, especially for youth in the Oakville Avenue area," says Shannon Calvert of the intercommunity health centre.
---
Last year, in a report called Welcoming Cultural Diversity, the city included a study that highlighted five ethnic communities as being "at risk."
One of them was Cambodian, the study said, noting many parents in the Cambodian community had experienced terror and torture and were still in "survival mode."
"It's true," says Peo.
"Hopefully it will change," he says, adding he turned his own life around after a joyride ended with a night in jail.
"I felt like an animal behind those bars," he says. "I decided this was not the way."
"I realized now, I'm grateful to be living in Canada, to have the opportunity to make it somewhere in life.
Peo hasn't seen his dad for years. He doesn't want to see him until he finishes college.
"I want to prove to him that I am not a failure," he says. "They went through hell and back. It wasn't for nothing."
LONDON'S CAMBODIAN COMMUNITY
How many: Community members estimate about 1,500 Cambodians in London.
Arrived: Many arrived in the early 1980s from refugee camps where they had fled to avoid persecution by Khmer Rouge forces.
Settlement: Community has grown and dispersed over the years, but largest proportion of Cambodian families settled in northeast London.
Language: Cambodian.
Religion: Buddhist, Christian.
Saturday: Survivors - Abeny Kuol's courageous journey to London from Sudan. Part 1 of 2.
Sunday: The 'boat people' of Vietnam have a rock-solid presence in London, but it wasn't always that way.
Yesterday: At Risk - London's Somalian community is shrinking, its young heading west for better-paying jobs.
TODAY: Survival Mode - A quarter-century later, the barbaric grip Pol Pot had on Cambodia is still felt in London.
Tomorrow: A Great Divide - The north-south split that divides Sudan haunts London's Sudanese community.
Thursday: Survivor - Part 2 - Abeny Kuol, now the mother of five, faces new hardships in her new home in the Forest City.
"Those were great days," says Chetra Peo, his eyes lighting up 20 years later in a downtown coffee shop. "We were all Cambodian and we'd go there for the whole day -- fishing, swimming, everything.
"I love those memories," Peo says.
He has only two memories from before.
They are foggier.
Visions of a terrifying, gaping hole in the ground that was much larger than the usual toilet in the refugee camp. And a sweeter vision of showering in the rain in that same place.
Peo spent his first three years in that refugee camp in Thailand. His parents had fled war in Cambodia.
In the early 1980s, dozens of Cambodian families -- including Peo's -- came to London.
---
"I have no idea what my parents went through before we got to the camp. We don't talk," says Peo, now 25, over coffee in London's Galleria mall.
He prefers Tim Hortons, he says, but this is OK. He has just gotten out of class, part of a blueprints program offered through Fanshawe College.
This day, Peo wears a sideways AC/DC cap over his long black hair. The short sleeves of his plaid button-down reveal a tattoo of a cross, a professional one that covers the blue of something he'd tattooed himself years ago.
"They were traumatized," he says of his parents. "Whatever happened to them was so bad that they are just scarred.
"It's like they can't even care about anything anymore. They don't understand."
---
"I wanted to play hockey so bad," Peo says. "It was Grade 6 and all the kids were starting to join hockey teams."
But there was no way.
"We had no money for that kind of stuff. We were on Oakville (Avenue). We had nothing."
Did he even ask his parents?
He laughs at the suggestion.
His dad had already left the family, and his mom didn't understand, he says.
"We kids were trading hockey cards every day, and seeing hockey on TV, but she had no idea what hockey would have meant to me."
That was just one kick, one cultural/financial reminder that he was not really part of this society, he says.
There were other reminders after Peo started high school at John Paul II. By then, schoolwork had become so difficult he seldom went to class.
"We'd all just hang out. We did whatever we wanted," he says of his neighbourhood friends. He'd already been smoking for two years.
"Our parents weren't involved," he says.
His mom worked midnights, six nights a week at a factory and didn't speak English.
Peo's high school memories are peppered with fistfights and stealing video games from a Zellers store.
He stole his first car at 15.
"I wanted to drive so bad," he says. "Lots of kids were stealing cars. They would ask me to come.
"At first you say 'no,' but they say they'll let you drive and you're like, 'Yeah, OK.' "
He transferred to Montcalm secondary, but was kicked out in Grade 10 after a fight.
---
It's Sunday afternoon and volleyballs are flying in the Chippewa public school gymnasium.
Peo is among 14 men at the practice. They meet here every Sunday for two hours.
The men range in age from 16 to 25 and they are a strong-looking group -- mostly muscular and many tattooed.
The coach is working them hard. He has to. These are going to be the role models.
"These guys can be role models. That's something the community has never had," says Born Heng, founder of the Cambodian Youth Group.
"I'm trying to pull Cambodian kids off the street," says Heng, who is married to Peo's sister.
"Our community was starting to look bad because so many kids were partying, drinking, (break-ins), drugs . . . some of our kids know every lawyer in the courthouse."
Heng, who came to Canada at 13, says there's a divide between parents who survived war in Cambodia and kids born in Canada.
"My generation -- kids who came here as teenagers -- we all realized what we were coming for and what we were coming from."
---
Cambodia was ravaged by the Khmer Rouge government, which used savage force to take power in 1975, then, under the rule of dictator Pol Pot, murdered about two million Cambodians, targeting the educated in attempts to create a peasant society.
About 300,000 Cambodians sought refuge in Western countries after living for years in Thai refugee camps.
---
Heng came to Canada with his dad and four siblings.
Trying to make ends meet, Heng's dad rode an old bicycle. He had pedalled out toward the grocery store one day when he was hit by a car.
He's been nearly blind since, Heng says.
Heng tried to stay in school, where he was getting by as an English as a Second Language (ESL) student, but the family needed extra money.
Heng gave up his goal -- to be a police officer -- and got a job in a factory.
"That's the reason this is important to me," he says of his push to get kids back on track, starting with sports. "At the time, I felt like I had to drop out of high school, and now I regret it. So I look at these kids dropping out and I just say, 'you kids have no excuse for that.'
"All it does is make your parents look bad and make our whole culture look bad. Then the next generation is going to follow your footsteps."
Not if he can help it. The volleyball team is just one small step, he hopes, toward a youth club for boys and girls.
"Because so many parents are worried," says Heng.
"With boys it's crime, with girls it's running away."
---
When her eldest daughter started high school, Vanna Ouch set the rules.
"I told my daughter, 'Don't dye your hair, don't wear too much makeup, don't wear a mini-skirt,' " says Ouch, a Cambodian immigrant who came to Canada in 1980 as a single mom with two girls.
"What I learned was that she just filled her locker with those things and changed when she got to school."
Ouch was suspicious. Someone said they saw her daughter wearing makeup. So she secretly followed the girl to school one day.
"It was true," she says. "I was so angry. I couldn't believe she would lie to me."
Ouch didn't know what to do. In Cambodia, her father had been strict, "spankings, and lectures every day," she says. Here, she couldn't control her children.
"When she came home I yelled at her and she yelled back, and I got so frustrated. And even though I knew the laws in Canada, I pulled her hair. And I hit her," she says.
The next day, her daughter moved into a friend's house.
Ouch went to get her, but when she arrived at the home, the woman wouldn't let her see her daughter.
"Imagine that you can't get in to talk to your own daughter? Can you imagine?"
---
Twenty-five years after the Cambodian community arrived in London, many first-generation Canadian children are graduating from university and college.
Others, like Peo are working hard to catch up.
More established families are buying houses, getting into business.
Ouch now works as an interpreter for Across Languages and helps run a drop-in group that provides soup and social services in northeast London.
Her oldest daughter works at the bank. every family she knows has at least one child in post-secondary education.
"I think our community is really booming," Ouch says.
Though parents who arrived in the early 1980s weren't necessarily highly educated after years of persecution, it's highly valued in the community, says Ouch.
And while many adults in the community still struggle with language, there's comfort at area factories, such as Sun Valley Foods, which has many Cambodian employees.
Despite this, some community members say dozens of Cambodian immigrants have been unable to get off welfare, or have been stuck in low- paying jobs.
---
It costs $1,000 to rent out the Chippewa gym for two hours on Sundays from January until May. Too much, especially considering the place is empty on weekends. But the community has no centre.
There are gatherings at the Cambodian Buddhist Temple on Fanshawe Park Road, but that's not a place for kids to gather, or to play sports.
In the past, Ouch headed an association, but she says it was difficult to run or organize events with no place to go.
The volleyball team was made possible, partly by London's Intercommunity Health Centre, part of the North East London Community Health Partnership that runs the Monday drop-in group at Church of Christ.
"The idea is to have a Cambodian youth group, which could provide much needed activity and entertainment, especially for youth in the Oakville Avenue area," says Shannon Calvert of the intercommunity health centre.
---
Last year, in a report called Welcoming Cultural Diversity, the city included a study that highlighted five ethnic communities as being "at risk."
One of them was Cambodian, the study said, noting many parents in the Cambodian community had experienced terror and torture and were still in "survival mode."
"It's true," says Peo.
"Hopefully it will change," he says, adding he turned his own life around after a joyride ended with a night in jail.
"I felt like an animal behind those bars," he says. "I decided this was not the way."
"I realized now, I'm grateful to be living in Canada, to have the opportunity to make it somewhere in life.
Peo hasn't seen his dad for years. He doesn't want to see him until he finishes college.
"I want to prove to him that I am not a failure," he says. "They went through hell and back. It wasn't for nothing."
LONDON'S CAMBODIAN COMMUNITY
How many: Community members estimate about 1,500 Cambodians in London.
Arrived: Many arrived in the early 1980s from refugee camps where they had fled to avoid persecution by Khmer Rouge forces.
Settlement: Community has grown and dispersed over the years, but largest proportion of Cambodian families settled in northeast London.
Language: Cambodian.
Religion: Buddhist, Christian.
Saturday: Survivors - Abeny Kuol's courageous journey to London from Sudan. Part 1 of 2.
Sunday: The 'boat people' of Vietnam have a rock-solid presence in London, but it wasn't always that way.
Yesterday: At Risk - London's Somalian community is shrinking, its young heading west for better-paying jobs.
TODAY: Survival Mode - A quarter-century later, the barbaric grip Pol Pot had on Cambodia is still felt in London.
Tomorrow: A Great Divide - The north-south split that divides Sudan haunts London's Sudanese community.
Thursday: Survivor - Part 2 - Abeny Kuol, now the mother of five, faces new hardships in her new home in the Forest City.
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