Late Mass. Monk's Poems Recall Khmer Rouge Horrors

In this Nov. 20, 2008 file photo, Samkhann Khoeun holds at the Glory Temple, in Lowell, Mass., a Khmer language manuscript of poetry by the Buddhist monk Ly Van Aggadipo that features his photo on the cover. On April 1, 2010, friends and followers will release a bilingual edition that includes an English translation of his poetry. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

'Beautiful' poems by Cambodian monk who led Mass. temple tackle horrors of Khmer Rouge regime

By RUSSELL CONTRERAS
The Associated Press
LOWELL, Mass. March 20, 2010

During Buddhist monk Ly Van Aggadipo's final days, he wrote often in a notebook. Temple followers knew the nonagenarian spiritual mentor to many local Cambodian refugees was recording some sort of personal history, but they weren't sure what.

"He told me, 'When I'm gone, make sure others read this so people don't forget what happened,'" follower Sokhar Sao said. "I didn't really understand until he was gone."

Next month, friends and followers will release a book of poetry by Ly Van, who survived the brutal communist Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and later led the Glory Buddhist Temple in Lowell from 1988 until his death in January 2008. The book, entitled "O! Maha Mount Dangrek," is a collection of two lengthy poems: one an autobiographical piece on the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, the other about a friend's story of love in the time of genocide.

The title in English means "Oh Mighty Mount Dangrek" and refers to the mountainous plateau between the Cambodia-Thailand border that refugees were forced to climb in order to escape the Khmer Rouge regime.

Organizers plan a 14-city tour to promote the book with readings and accompanying musical performances by two young Cambodian artists. The tour will begin April 1 at a Middlesex Community College reading in Lowell and continue with stops in Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Paul, Minn., and Long Beach, Calif.

The publication of Ly Van's work, printed in its original Khmer and in English, completes a two-year project by followers. The day he died, a follower found the poetry tucked under stacks of old Buddhist texts inside the temple.

On worn pages were handwritten, carefully crafted poems describing Ly Van's memories of labor camps, starvation and infant executions and his dreams of escaping to America.

"We all said, 'Wow ... we have to publish this,'" said Samkhann Khoeun, who studied under Ly Van and served as the book's editor. "Here was something so beautiful describing something so horrible. It brought tears to our eyes."

Khoeun then went on a campaign to get the book published. The Glory Buddhist Temple and local nonprofit groups Light of Cambodian Children and Cambodian Expressions agreed to help with the publication cost, while Khoeun worked on translation with other refugees.

Ly Van was born in 1917 in a small Cambodian village where he and his family lived through the 1970s rule of the Khmer Rouge regime, which perpetrated one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.

An estimated 1.7 million people died from starvation, disease and executions due to the group's radical policies. According to the temple's biography of Ly Van, he was forced to work on farms and public projects 14 hours a day. It was during this time that he witnessed mass executions and large-scale starvation.

In early 1979, when Vietnamese soldiers invaded Cambodia, Ly Van and thousands of others fled to Thailand through dangerous terrain where he and others ended up at refugee camps while hoping for asylum to the U.S. with the help of the U.N.

He and his family were granted asylum and resettled in Lowell, an old mill city less than an hour's drive northwest of Boston.

Today about 20,000 Cambodians live in or around the city, making it second only to Long Beach for the largest number of Cambodians living in the United States.

As a refugee in Lowell, Ly Van helped establish the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association, which promotes educational, cultural, economic and social programs for Cambodian-Americans and other minorities, before leading the Glory Buddhist Temple until his death of old age at 90.

But while counseling his fellow refugees and performing volunteer efforts, Ly Van quietly worked and reworked his long poems about horrific moments in his life that he rarely shared.

Besides the epic poems, the new book also features photos of Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia and of refugee camps in Thailand.

Some of the photos are from the collection of photojournalist Jay Mather, whose images helped earn him a 1980 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting with reporter Joel Brinkley while at The Courier-Journal newspaper of Louisville, Ky. Others come from refugees' personal collections and the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has documented Khmer Rouge atrocities.

Khoeun said he wanted readers to see images related to Ly Van's poetry.

"We have to face it," said Khoeun, 47. "This is what we went through."

Sao, who has a bullet wound on one of his calves from being shot at a refugee camp, agreed.

"It's painful to see and remember," said Sao, also 47. "Every time I hear the words Khmer Rouge I get a little emotional. So you can imagine what's going on when I read this poetry and see these images."

Around 3,000 copies of the book are planned for the first printing, with proceeds going to costs for a planned second printing, Khoeun said.

The goal is not to make money, Ly Van's followers said, but to share the story of Cambodian refugees with others.

"I think my own children don't believe what we went through to get here," said Sao, a father of four children who were born in the U.S. "I don't talk about it much and can't put it into words like this."

Cambodian-American Phalen Lim wins $25,000 California Peace Prize! Outstanding!

Phalen Lim says the main value she tries to instill into children is self esteem. The director of youth programs for Santa Ana's Cambodian Family organization is being honored with a $25,000 Peace Prize from California Wellness. (JEBB HARRIS, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER)

Santa Ana youth leader wins $25,000 peace prize

Tuesday, October 27, 2009
By DOUG IRVING
The Orange County Register

She escaped the brutal Khmer Rouge and now works to inspire children.

SANTA ANA – A community leader who has made it her life's work to inspire young people in one of this city's most desperate neighborhoods has won a $25,000 California Peace Prize.

Phalen Lim speaks from experience when she tells the kids at The Cambodian Family that they can make a better future for themselves. She escaped with her family from the killing fields of Cambodia and came to Santa Ana as a refugee with almost nothing.

She's 36 years old now, with a master's degree in counseling, and on Wednesday she will become one of three Californians to be recognized with the peace prize this year. But she spent her childhood on a work commune in Cambodia, under the brutal regime of the Khmer Rouge, and her earliest memory is of hunger.

"Look at what you have, rather than what you don't have," she tells the kids at The Cambodian Family, a service organization that encourages leadership, health and academics. "Work with what you have."

The California Wellness Foundation, a private group whose mission is to improve the health and wellness of Californians, will present the peace awards on Wednesday night in San Francisco. It applauded Lim as an "integral leader in an agency that combats gang violence and promotes cultural pride and understanding in Santa Ana."

Lim is the fourth Orange County winner of the California Peace Prize and its $25,000 cash award. Her brother, Chea Sok Lim, won in 1997 for his work with The Cambodian Family. An attorney from Brea received the prize in 2005 for her work on firearms regulations, and a Santa Ana school principal won in 1995.

Lim oversees youth programs at The Cambodian Family, helping first-graders with their homework and high-school seniors with their life goals. Most of the kids come from the surrounding neighborhood in east Santa Ana, where drugs are common and gangs are a way of life.

"She's passionate, and she has a lot of compassion," said Sundaram Rama, the executive director of The Cambodian Family. "She's an amazing woman. She does great work."

She was born in Cambodia, and was 2 years old when the Khmer Rouge began clearing the cities in 1975 and ordering people into the countryside to work. She remembers that there was never enough porridge to eat. Her mother tells her that she cried constantly, terrified by the sound of gunfire.

Her family was fortunate. Her mother and father, her three sisters and four brothers – all survived. By some estimates, close to 2 million people died under the Khmer Rouge, victims of execution, starvation and forced labor.

She escaped with the rest of her family. They slipped across a river into territory held by the Vietnamese, then made their way to refugee camps in Thailand, then Indonesia, then Singapore. Lim still remembers the first apple she ever had, at a camp in Singapore, and how strange it tasted after her sparse diet of porridge.

They reached Santa Ana in 1981 and found two one-bedroom apartments for all ten of them and a cousin. Lim enrolled in the third grade, even though she couldn't yet speak English. And she started going to a community center for help with her homework or dance lessons – The Cambodian Family.

She's been there ever since, first as a volunteer helping to organize holiday toy drives, later as a youth counselor and program director. The names and faces have changed – The Cambodian Family now serves many more Latinos than Cambodians – but Lim's message to them has not.

She talks about the importance of family, because it was family that got her out of the bloody Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge. And she talks about working hard to get somewhere, because she knows what it's like to start with nothing.

She works with about 60 kids at any given time, but she points to four of them as a measure of the mark her organization makes. Those four graduated from high school this year. Three have already enrolled in college, and the fourth is planning to next year.

Lim plans to invest some of her peace prize money in her son's education, and spend some on the kids at The Cambodian Family. For days after she got the call telling her that she had won, she worried that it had all been a mistake, that they had the wrong person.

"I must have done something good to deserve it," she says now. But she's quick to add: "It's not just about me. It's about the work that I did and about the people that I serve."

Contact the writer: 714-704-3777 or dirving@ocregister.com

Khmer Rouge victim was saved by her children [-SRP activist Sophany Bay

Sophany Bay at a Cambodian temple in San Jose Wednesday Oct. 21, 2009. Bay is a refugee of the Khmer Rouge killing fields so long ago in Cambodia. After losing almost her entire family, she's rebuilt her life in San Jose, but the recovery wasn't easy and she's still tormented by occasional nightmares. Dozens of local survivors like her will tell their stories this weekend in hopes their testimony reaches a tribunal in Cambodia that is currently looking at the sins of Pol Pot's henchmen. (Photo by Patrick Tehan/Mercury News)

10/22/2009
By Joe Rodriguez
Mercury News Columnist (San Jose, California, USA)

Testimonies from Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge will be taken from 1 to 6 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 24, and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 25, at Wat Khemara Rangsey temple, 1594 Cunningham Ave., San Jose 95122. For more information go to www.apa.nyu.edu/. Click on "research— then "special projects."

The most surprising thing about Sophany Bay is how much at peace she looks. The nightmares haven't tortured her delicate face or turned her hands shaky. Dressed in a purple blazer and silk scarf, she looks every bit a professional and educated woman, the kind who were not supposed to survive the killing fields of Cambodia.

"The only reason I am here today is because my children saved me,'' Bay said at the Wat Khemara Buddhist temple in East San Jose. She tapped her shoulders for emphasis and added. "My children, they would not tell the Khmer Rouge who their father was, who their grandfather was. I would have been executed immediately."

Tomorrow, the 63-year-old will join dozens of local Cambodians invited to the temple to tell their stories of surviving one of the 21st century's worst genocides. Human rights activists and university researchers will collect their testimony and, as part of a national effort, send their accounts to an international tribunal judging the acts of four Khmer Rouge leaders. The tribunal hasn't yet decided if it will use these testimonials in its deliberations.

"This is a fitting time for their stories to be heard, whether or not the tribunal will accept the testimony'' says Leakhena Nou, a medical sociologist at California State University Long Beach and one of the key organizers of the testimonial campaign. In studying the lingering, emotional damage of the murderous, social-engineering inflicted on Cambodian immigrants in the 1970s, she has found that even their American-born children can feel stigmatized, isolated, depressed and suspicious of government and police.

"They're not getting healthier,'' Nou said. "They're getting sicker. Why is this happening with all the health services here?'' The answer to that question won't come any time soon, but it never will if the mass murder is forgotten or worse, denied by tyrants today and in the future.

Brutal regime

Bay grew up in Kompong Chuang, a small fishing village, with her five siblings, policeman father and stay-at-home mom. Growing up, she dreamed of becoming a judge.

"Even as a little girl in a village, I saw there was no justice at all in society,'' she remembered. "But for some reason, God changed my plan.'' Instead, she became a schoolteacher after college and moved to the capital, Phnom Penh. There she met and fell for a young Cambodian army officer, whom she married in 1966. They started a family.

Meanwhile, the Vietnam War raged next door and would soon spill into Cambodia, giving the fanatical ultra-communist Khmer Rouge an opening. They toppled the government in 1975 intent on building a communist utopia from scratch. To do this they would purge the population of intellectuals, former government officials, policemen, lawyers, journalists and anyone else deemed a threat to their revolution.

Bay was lucky in one way — her husband had been sent to the United States for training one year earlier. He was safe, but he would not know what horrors awaited his wife and their three, young kids.

What Bay remembers from the day the Khmer Rouge took control were the gunshots in the morning.

"They kept firing into the air, telling everyone, 'Go, go, go!' into the forest, that the Americans were going to bomb the city.''

She grabbed her six-year-old son, Paul, her 5-year-old daughter, Pine, and 2-month-old baby girl, Pom. Escorted by Khmer Rouge soldiers, they marched until exhausted, and again for days, deeper into the country.

One day, she lifted her emaciated, sick baby to a soldier and pleaded for help.

"The soldier, he injected something into her head,'' Bay remembered. "She died immediately. She was so happy and beautiful before, my baby.'' She buried Pom that night. But her two older children kept leaving the camp to visit Pom's grave. Fearing this would anger the soldiers, Bay escaped with them but was caught and sent to a nastier, forced-labor camp.

To root out their enemies, soldiers often interrogated children while their parents worked in the fields, irrigation ditches or rock quarries.

At night, Bay would whisper instructions to Paul and Pine.

"When the soldiers ask you about your father," Bay urged, "tell them he was a teacher like me. Do not tell them he is in the army.''

Roughly 2 million Cambodians were starved, executed or worked to death by the Khmer Rouge. Bay isn't sure how her son and daughter died, from starvation, beatings, torture, or some combination.

"They tied my son's hands and made him stand in water up to his waist,'' Bay said. "They asked him questions. 'Who is your mother? Who is your father?''

Paul died at age 7. Bay's daughter, Pine, died soon after. She had been caught scavenging for food left by soldiers and then beaten. Bay can still hear her final words:

"Mom, take me to the clinic. When does father come home? You have to look for him, Mom!''

Life struggles

Vietnam, itself a communist state, finally invaded Cambodia and deposed the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Bay didn't think life under the Vietnamese would be any better, so she fled through the jungle to Thailand, eating tree leaves and remembering a friend's advice in camp.

"Life is a struggle,'' Bay quoted her. "I kept thinking that life is always going to be a struggle, and that's what kept me alive.''

After 10 months in a refugee camp, where she used her French to become a relief worker, she was reunited with her husband. By then blood clots in his brain had left him partially paralyzed. Everyone in their immediate families had died. After all these years, Bay still suffers from occasional nightmares.

Today she's a mental health counselor with the Gardner Family Health Network, in San Jose a non-profit clinic where she helps low-income Cambodians. Her husband is a medical technician at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, a public hospital. They had no other children.

Three decades later, many Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge will not testify out of fear or the pain of memory.

"I am not scared,'' Bay said. "If I don't see justice done, I will not be able to close my eyes when I die. I try to be courageous about it, to talk about it, to let the world know the story of the Cambodian killing fields.''

The teacher, mother and survivor who once wanted to become a judge still wants her day in court.

Nath Keo, a Cambodian-Canadian male bellydancer and teacher

Nath Keo: Profile of a Cambodian Bellydancer

Nath Keo performs with some of the participants from his Saturday workshop during a performance at the Gibraltar Room Saturday evening. Keo, a Cambodian bellydancer based out of Victoria, was in the lakecity teaching workshops on Saturday and Sunday. (Photo: Alison Shepherd)

Bellydancer enjoys teaching workshops

April 01, 2008
By Alison Shepherd
Williams Lake Tribune (British Columbia, USA)

If the whistling and applause from the crowd Saturday night and the smiles from participants Sunday after the workshop are any indication, bellydancer Nath Keo made quite the impression on the lakecity.

Keo spent the weekend teaching workshops and performing Saturday night before a crowd of more than 60 people at the Gibraltar Room.

Some of Keo’s original choreography was performed Saturday night.

“It’s so flattering to return to a town and see your choreography performed,” he says.

Keo was last teaching and performing here more than four years ago and he says he is happy to be back.

“I love coming to smaller towns because it feels like half work and half visit,” he says.

Keo spends most weekends traveling around the world teaching and performing and he says when he wants a weekend to himself, he has to schedule it well in advance.

“I’m booked through to fall 2009,” he says.

Keo will be performing in Seattle this weekend, then he is the featured performer at the International Bellydance Conference of Canada held in Toronto a week later.

He will also spend three months touring, teaching and, performing in Singapore, Indonesia and Hong Kong.

Keo spends approximately half of his weekends teaching and performing and says if people put in time to put on an event to further dancers’ skills, he is always happy to be a part of it.

When he is not teaching, performing or traveling, Keo works at a senior’s residence in Victoria and he laughs that the seniors keep him sane.

“Where I come from [Cambodia] we keep our family so it’s part of my culture to be with seniors. They’re great and I really enjoy working with them,” Keo says.

In addition to his work with the seniors, his teaching and performing, Keo is also a writer, having recently completed his first novel, and a musician.

He has produced an album and one of the songs he danced to Saturday night was written and performed by him.

Local bellydance instructor Faith Andre says the weekend workshops went well.

“It’s always fun, informative and interesting when Nath comes to town. I think the women in the workshops learned a lot and I’m looking forward to having him return again,” she says.

Keo says he would like to return to the lakecity and will be talking to Andre about his next visit.

“She was saying something about a weekend retreat. I’m always open to new ways to teach so this could be a lot of fun,” he says.