Little Cambodia, Growing Still Littler

Fordham Road in the Bronx, where many Cambodians who came to New York as children initially settled. (Photo: RJ Mickelson for The New York Times)

January 20, 2008
By DAVID SHAFTEL
The New York Times

VIBOL SOK SUNGKRIEM, a 31-year-old aspiring filmmaker, had invited a few friends over for dinner, and his apartment just east of the New York Botanical Garden was flooded with camaraderie and the aroma of spicy Southeast Asian food.

Like Mr. Sungkriem, who wears a whisper of a mustache and favors baggy clothes, most of the half-dozen guests were Cambodians who came to New York as refugees in the 1980s.

Over katiev, a spicy Cambodian noodle soup made with beef, shrimp and fish balls, they told stories about escaping from Khmer Rouge soldiers in Cambodia as they fled to refugee camps in Thailand. They talked about running from thugs on Fordham Road when they were younger, when violence was a fact of everyday life in many Bronx neighborhoods.

As they ate, Mr. Sungkriem opened his laptop and switched on its video instant messaging so that two absent friends could join the party. Within the past few years, both had moved from New York to Cambodian communities elsewhere in the country; one, a police officer, to Los Angeles, for a better job, the other to Stockton, Calif., after a particularly harrowing mugging.

Those two departures tell a broader tale. Not long ago, Mr. Sungkriem and his friends held such parties frequently. But since the mid-’90s, a growing number of Cambodians have left the city, and the parties are held less often.

Data from the 2000 census shows that the city’s Cambodian population decreased by 31 percent from 1990 to 2000. According to a census analysis by the Hmong Studies Internet Resource Center, the decline occurred as nearly all the country’s other Cambodian communities were expanding.

At the high-water mark of 1990, census figures show, 2,565 Cambodians lived in the city, primarily in the Fordham, University Heights and Bronx Park East sections of the Bronx. Most were refugees who were resettled in New York after fleeing the repressive Khmer Rouge regime, which fell in 1979 and claimed nearly two million lives. According to an analysis of 2005 numbers prepared by the Census Bureau, barely 1,000 Cambodians then remained in the city.

“Everybody is leaving,” Mr. Sungkriem said recently at an IHOP restaurant near his apartment. “It used to be if you walk down Fordham Road, you would bump into lots of Cambodians walking or shopping. Now you can be driving up and down all day, and you never see any.”

Trials are finally expected to start sometime this year for five major Khmer Rouge figures who were detained and will face a special tribunal backed by the United Nations, but many of New York’s dwindling number of Cambodians are focusing on more immediate problems.

“In the ’80s, people didn’t understand what Cambodians were,” Mr. Sungkriem said. “They just called us Chinos. But if you said you were a gangster, you were a star. A lot of people have grown out of that, though, and there are no jobs, no community services. So a lot of people left.”

Among those eager to leave is Paul Keo, 36, who moved to the Bronx when he was 11 and grew up with Mr. Sungkriem.

Mr. Keo, who recently married, works as a technical administrator for Pratt Institute, and the other day, dressed in corduroy pants, fleece jacket and running shoes, he could easily have been mistaken for a Pratt student, save for the ring of keys on his belt.

Although he enjoys his work, he is increasingly weighing the options. “The community here is broken,” he said in an empty Pratt classroom. “I really don’t want my children to grow up in the same difficult environment I did.”

FOR many Cambodians who came to the city in the ’80s, the high school years were tainted by crime and violence, and poor schools left them prepared only for the manufacturing jobs that had already begun leaving the city. Mr. Keo said his solution was to “steal” his education. “After high school,” he said, “I would go to colleges and sit in on classes and observe the material without registering.”

The problems of Cambodians in New York were compounded because the community, small to begin with, became established during a decade when the city struggled on many fronts.

“The violence they experienced during the Khmer Rouge was similar to the violence they saw every day in the Bronx,” said Chhaya Chhoum, director of the Youth Leadership Project at CAAAV, formerly the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence. “So they were never able to move away from their trauma.” The group occupies a former convent on Valentine Avenue near Fordham Road that it plans to make a Southeast Asian cultural center.

In the turbulent Bronx, few of the Cambodian cultural, religious and community centers that have formed in places like Long Beach, Calif., Lowell, Mass., and Minneapolis took root.

Groups like the Vietnamese fared better. Although many of them came to the Bronx roughly around the same time as the Cambodians, they arrived in larger numbers. And unlike the Cambodians, a culturally isolated people, the Vietnamese forged bonds with the city’s large Chinese population, with whom they share cultural ties.

One result of the exodus of the city’s Cambodians is a widening generation gap. Cambodians who remain in New York tend to be older and in failing health; those who leave are typically younger emigrés who attended school in the United States and have the ability or the resources to find jobs elsewhere, often in hotels or garment factories.

One emigré, Siek Chanty, 51, who is unemployed and spends time at the center, said she wanted to leave the Bronx but had nowhere to go.

Many who were separated from their families during the war have located relatives in places like California or Texas. But, Ms. Chanty said through an interpreter, “I haven’t found anyone.”