Cambodian New Year Festival to feature music, traditional food [in Oakland, California]

04/05/2012
By Cathie Gatison
Oakland Tribune (California, USA)

The Cambodian community will ring in the new year at an outdoor celebration April 21 at the Peralta Hacienda Historical Park.

Under the banner, "Rhythm of the Refugee: A Cambodian Journey of Healing," the celebration will feature traditional food, activity booths, games for kids and adults, crafts for sale and a big lineup of performers.

Ninety-two-year-old Nhep Prok, one of the sole surviving master musicians of pre-Pol Pot Cambodia, will play with his youth ensemble. A new generation of Cambodian hip-hop artists will perform a unique dance style, and Raymond Sin will sing Cambodian pop and karaoke.

Festival goers can tour the exhibit "Rhythm of the Refugee" between performance.

Admission is free. Peralta Hacienda Historical Park is located at 2465 34th Ave.

For more information call 510-532-9142 or visit www.peraltahacienda.org.

Oakland's Cambodian community holds anti-violence march

A large group from the Cambodian community march through Oakland to speak up against community violence in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, March 31, 2012. The event also featured safety tips and a speech from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and other public officials. (Doug Duran/Staff)

A large group from the Cambodian community march down International Boulevard to speak up against community violence in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, March 31, 2012. The event also featured safety tips and a speech from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and other public officials. (Doug Duran/Staff)

Carlos Cordova, 17, left, and Mona Chhit, 19, both of Oakland, hold a large sign as they lead a march through Oakland to speak up against violence in the Cambodian community in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, March 31, 2012. The event also featured safety tips and a speech from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and other public officials. (Doug Duran/Staff)

Pysay Phinith, of Berkeley, left, Assistant Project Director for the Asian Community Mental Health Services, talks to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan before the start of the Cambodian community's march to speak up against community violence in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, March 31, 2012. The event also featured safety tips and a speech from Mayor Quan and other public officials. (Doug Duran/Staff)

Dancer Malena Rim. 14, of Oakland, left, gets some help with her outfit from Kong Kolap, of Oakland, for a blessing dance before the start of the Cambodian community's march to speak up against community violence in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, March 31, 2012. The event also featured safety tips and a speech from Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and other public officials. (Doug Duran/Staff)

April 1, 2012
By Alan Lopez
Contra Costa Times (California, USA)

OAKLAND -- Almost 40 years after the Khmer Rouge unleashed a genocide in Cambodia, natives to that country in Oakland still feel the aftershocks.

Violence is plaguing the community of about 2,700, with shootings, robberies and thefts occurring weekly, say community organizers.

The problem of violence in the Cambodian community is exacerbated by mental health problems and a fear of speaking out, which affects refugees of the 1970s Cambodian genocide, said Talaya Sin, a research assistant with Cambodian Community Development Inc.

"I'm scared, to be honest," said Sin, whose extended family members have been the victims of violence. "It doesn't feel safe (in Oakland)."

The Oakland Cambodian Community March 4 Peace held Saturday was meant to bring Oakland Cambodians together and quell the violence.

Kanitha Matoury's Spice Monkey cafe

Night Owl: Food is beautiful at Spice Monkey

11/20/2008
By Angela Woodall
Oakland Tribune (California, USA)

I HOPE THE DAY will arrive when finding Saturday-night quality entertainment in Oakland on a Wednesday evening won't send me into spasms of exuberant optimism.

But for now I am grateful. I am grateful for the music and laughter that bubbled up Wednesday night like percolating coffee at the Spice Monkey cafe as patrons sat shoulder-to-shoulder sipping wine under the glow of dangling Moroccan lamps.

Lunch is still Spice Monkey's strongest suit, but owner Kanitha Matoury has created a little island of life after sunset in the otherwise dark patch of downtown east of Broadway.

I stumbled across Spice Monkey by chance, which is how Matoury found the shimmery art deco gem that once housed the Robert Howden & Sons tile factory.

She had been searching without luck in San Francisco for the right place to put a restaurant. So she decided to cruise through downtown Oakland and happened across a building at 16th and Webster streets that beckons like a siren robed in incandescent black and ocher tiles.

"It was love at first sight," Matoury said.

Spice Monkey beams with feel-good vibes that match its neighbors: a taqueria boasting "the world famous happy burrito" across the street from the Take It Easy Thai restaurant. The Sunny Relax Center is down the street.

But Spice Monkey is one of the few spots east of Broadway to stay open after the lunch crowd leaves. Closing time is 10 p.m., though sometimes the bar stays open later.

The building is so beautiful it should be a destination point, Matoury said as an explanation for staying open late. She was sitting at the custom-built redwood bar she installed during what would be the real estate version of "Extreme Makeover."

Matoury excavated the Mediterranean glory of the tile showroom turned Indian restaurant that was hidden under layers of paint, grime and neglect. Tiles, walls, arches and even doorknobs were freed from layers of paint a color best described as a cross between magenta and psychedelic circus pink.

She knocked down walls, opened airy light-filled spaces and fixed the majestic fireplace, bearing a cedar forest in its stone tiles, which stands to the right of the entryway. Water bubbled again from the tiled fountain in the center of the downstairs floor. Matoury could have fit four more tables in that space, but the trade-off is worth it, she said, comparing the restaurant to a diamond in the rough: "You have to polish it to make it beautiful."

Long days of trial and error have passed since opening day May 1.

"It's not glamorous, but at the end of the day, food can make people happy," Matoury said.

The menu has been narrowed so that ingredients overlap, even though the recipes come from different continents. Appetizers include empanadas stuffed with guajillo chili-braised Niman Ranch beef, raisins and caramelized onions; polenta pie; and macaroni and cheese made with cheddar, mozzarella and Parmesan. The choices change every six months to match the season.

"We make everything with love, even our own mayo," Matoury said.

Dishes are made from scratch, including the spices, which are dried and blended to create signature concoctions. Thyme, sage, lemon grass, basil and mint put the "spice" in Spice Monkey.

The monkey part of it goes back to Cambodia, where Matoury was born and raised until she was granted political asylum in the U.S. at age 14. Now 28, she has a business degree and stint in the U.S. Air Force under her belt.

She also has worked as a line cook, saucier, sous chef and pastry chef.

In Cambodia, monkeys are sacred, Matoury said. Monkeys also are associated with being fun, wild and creative — the same association she is trying to conjure up in her eclectic menu, which is accompanied by "Happy Monday" or "OMG Booze!" (the restaurant recently got its liquor license) and a heart on the board outside announcing Spice Monkey's lunch specials. Those included vegan black bean chili, four-cheese veggie pizza, chili-infused brownies and black mango iced tea.

Signature dishes include Spice Monkey potatoes, monkey Cobb salad and monkey pilaf. On the dinner side are seared snapper, slow pork, a weekly market special ("the best of the market paired with the best from the butcher") and hippie chicken, described as grilled marinated chicken breast served on a bed of sauteed veggies and exotic rice.

"Some people think the menu is confused," Matoury said, but she exudes the sort of thoughtful, decisive determination of someone who spends a lot of time methodically checking and adjusting her calculations.

"People don't need much. You need food, water, love, hugs, smiles, friendship, and you're good to go."

That's all for now, ladies and gentlemen. But if you have a cool shindig, e-mail me at awoodall@bayareanewsgroup.com or visit the Night Owl blog www.ibabuzz.com/nightowl for more events and oddities.

If you go

• what: Spice Monkey cafe
• where: 1628 Webster St., Oakland
• when: Weekdays 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 to 10 p.m.; Saturdays 5 to 10 p.m.; closed Sundays
• contact: 510-268-0170

Congratulations to Elizabeth Sy: 1st Generation Cambodian Winner of the Agape Award (Rising Peace Maker Prize)

Elizabeth Sy

1st Generation Cambodian Wins Agape Award

Winner Elizabeth Sy talks candidly about Sex Workers in the Bay.

Video, Ann Bassette, Chris Vargas,
YO!Youth Outlook Multimedia, Sep 30, 2008

Click here to watch Elizabeth's interview

Editors Note: From 2002-2003 the Oakland police department made 218 arrests of Sex workers. The epidemic of sexual exploitation in the Bay Area is nothing new, but the push towards changing the policies that effect how sexually exploited minors are perceived.

At the head of this movement is Elizabeth Sy a 26 year old first generation cambodian woman who recently won a rising peace maker prize for her work with young women involved in the sex trade. YO! Recently talked with Sy and found out how she feels about winning and what steps she feels must be taken for future of sexually exploited minors.

The Iranian Therapist and Her Cambodian Clients

Photo courtesy of Hamid Shafie

03/18/08
Payvand Iran News

Book by by Lonny Shavelson and Fred Setterberg
Excerpt from UNDER THE DRAGON - California's New Culture by Lonny Shavelson and Fred Setterberg
Source: Center for Empowering Refugees & Immigrants (CERI)

Dr. Mona Afari studied Lay's impassive expression as the translator rendered his words from Cambodian into English. "My mother and father," she heard the translator repeat, "…the Khmer Rouge take them. I never see again."

Mona watched Lay's eyes spark with pain as he recounted the story of his parents' murder, and she asked herself the question that had haunted her since founding the weekly therapy group: Could she— an Iranian-born, female therapist—breach the chasm separating her from these six middle-aged male survivors of the Cambodian holocaust and provide the help they desperately needed?

The Cambodian men had spilled into Oakland's largely Latino Fruitvale District like victims thrown from a terrible traffic accident—uneducated villagers battered physically and psychologically, utterly unprepared for life in America. In stark contrast, Mona was the upper class daughter of an Iranian industrialist, an educated urban cosmopolite, a Jew from a Muslim nation, and a willing immigrant to the United States.

Mona concentrated on the tone of Lay's voice. She did not understand the Cambodian language, but neither was she completely comfortable in English. She had grown up speaking Farsi—the only language that conveyed to her ears the deeper, wilder sea of feeling that churned beneath words. Lay spoke in a somber monotone about his long months shackled to fourteen other prisoners in an underground punishment cell, the terrible stench of the slop bucket, the weekly beatings that shattered his ribs—and how the soldiers pursued him in his nightmares, even now, two decades after leaving Cambodia.

Mona sat across from Lay, trying to imagine the full measure of his suffering, and she reminded herself that his story replicated, in similar horrific detail, that of each of the six men gathered around the small wooden table.

"I think, this morning," Mona announced, "we will all paint."

The translator repeated Mona's instructions and passed out sheets of cream-colored construction paper, brushes, and several sets of watercolors. The men busily daubed their canvasses with bright globs and streaks in a painterly routine that had grown familiar over the past nine months.

Mona had begun working with the Cambodians as a staff psychologist with the refugee program of Jewish Children's and Family Services—an effort founded originally to resettle Russian Jews. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the stream of new arrivals slowed to a trickle and the Jewish refugee program faced a choice: close up shop, or offer its expertise to people from other backgrounds and faiths. The agency reached out to Muslims from Bosnia, Afghans fleeing their nation's civil war, and finally, the most traumatized people that Mona had encountered in twenty years as a psychotherapist, the Cambodians.

In the corner of the room, Mona's boom box thrummed a Chopin nocturne. She slowly circled around the table, stopping at last to inspect Lay's painting.

Lay had drawn a series of thatched brown huts nestled amid profuse greenery—his village back in Cambodia. At the far left border, he had inserted a volley of furious red slashes. Mona understood that the violent strokes indicated the approach of the Khmer Rouge and the end of everything in Lay's life that had promised peace, contentment, love, and hope.

Mona let escape a small, wistful sigh. This sense of foreboding and loss—it was her story, too. For twenty-five hundred years, her own family had lived in Iran. Yet as a Jew, she had always felt a stranger in her native country. In 1977, she moved to California to attend college. Two years later, from the safety of her new home, she received heartbreaking letters about the Islamic Revolution rapidly transforming Iran. Her friends were languishing in prison, enduring barbaric tortures, slated for the firing squads. Mona longed now to tell Lay and the other Cambodians about the tragedy of her own birthplace. Most of all, she wanted to convey that she, like them, still did not feel at home in America.

On a warm Saturday afternoon in April, soon after the first break of spring, Mona drove to Wat Dharmararam Buddhist temple in Stockton to celebrate the Cambodian New Year.

She arrived alone at the front gate of the temple grounds—a sprawling, nine-acre, plain-mowed field squeezed between several acres of strawberry patch and the area's recent swell of housing tracts. Once inside, Mona hesitated, feeling suddenly conspicuous and out of place among the crowd of one thousand Cambodians or more. Monks wearing sun-orange robes zigzagged along the pathway, their floor-length hems dragging in the dirt as they recited endless verses of Buddhist prayer. In the far corner, the fairgrounds loudspeaker boomed out shrill and unintelligible blessings.

Mona wandered across the temple grounds, not certain what direction to take. It felt strange to stand in the midst of such a large gathering of Cambodians—and yet most days, there was seldom a time when she did not find herself thinking about her Cambodian clients. Her agency's funding for the men's group had recently ended, but Mona continued to work with them, compelled by an urgency she found difficult to explain. She had even borrowed fifteen hundred dollars from her parents to subsidize her office rent. Mona told herself that people took out loans all the time to purchase a house or attend the university. For her, working with the Cambodians had become a similar necessity.

Within a few minutes, Mona spotted a familiar face—Lay, standing alongside some other men from her group and their families. They had all found seats on the picnic benches under a shade tree. Lay waved her toward the tables. Mona forced her face into a smile and ambled slowly in their direction.

She clapped Lay's extended hand between her two palms, squeezed, bowed, and smiled. Then she repeated the gesture with each of the men from her group and several of the women and children who stood alongside them. She wasn't certain which children belonged to whom, but she could see that everybody standing around the picnic tables knew who she was. Lay spoke rapidly in Cambodian, repeating Mona's name several times, causing each face in the crowd to turn toward her and appreciatively grin. One of the Cambodian women—tiny, wiry, perhaps fifty years old—opened a large picnic basket and began to ply Mona with treats. Mona pecked at her heaping plate of shrimp salad and sweet rice in coconut milk. When the woman handed her a steaming cup of lemongrass soup, Mona thought how familiar its sharp scent had become in recent months.

After eating, Mona thanked everybody profusely, backing away into the crowd as she waved goodbye. Lay stepped forward to shake her hand once again.

She knew that Lay trusted her; she was his only "American" friend. It didn't matter that he understood almost nothing about her background: few other Americans did either. In the center of the temple grounds, Mona recalled that when she first arrived in California, people confused Iran with Iraq; they thought Persians were Arabs. This kind of anonymity increased her remoteness, compounded her sadness. Only twenty years old when she left Iran, Mona had plunged into a deep depression. She had stopped eating, spent days in bed, withdrawn from college. Even now, years after fighting her way through her darkest, most immobilizing episodes, she still sometimes perceives the world to be lost in a haze. Mona thought of herself as someone who perpetually mislaid her glasses and could not quite bring life's contours and details into focus. The great benefit, gone unrecognized until now, was that this affliction gave her some idea of how the Cambodians viewed their own existence.

Mona snaked a path along the busy walkway, straining to get her bearings as she peered over the sea of shoulders and heads. Soon she was caught in the irresistible drift of the crowd, and it delivered her to a story-high statue of a reclining Buddha. The sandstone figure sprawled across half the length of a basketball court, his eyes closed as though sleeping or dead. Mona had learned from the previous week's men's group that Cambodian New Year presents an opportunity to discard the year's sorrows and start over again. Alongside the reclining Buddha, a half-dozen children and adults doused one another with bowls of water tinted red, pink, and yellow—a playful ritual of washing away the past with a bright rinse of the future. A small round man about Lay's age laughed uproariously as his children soaked his starched white shirt and sharply creased black slacks.

Mona slipped out of the crowd and wound her way to the bandstand. A Cambodian pop band twanged electric guitars, while trap drums pounded out a rock-and-roll dance beat. Scores of Cambodian couples gyrated across the dance floor—the young men and women twirling and flailing their arms, amiably colliding with middle-aged couples primly executing a two-step. Mona saw in the faces of these dancers the sheer pleasure of belonging; they took for granted that whatever they had suffered in the past was understood by everybody in their midst. It was a feeling Mona rarely experienced.

She felt a hand clasp her wrist. It was the Cambodian woman she had met at Lay's picnic table, and she now pulled Mona onto the dance floor. Mona felt shy, frightened, slightly ridiculous. But she smiled graciously, throwing up her hands toward the sky in a facsimile of joyous abandon. Together she and the woman bobbled back and forth, locked together in no particular step as the guitars rang out and the drums pounded on.

In recent months, Mona had felt a change in her life. As a young woman, she had defined herself almost entirely in opposing terms—a Jew out of place in Muslim Iran, an Iranian lost in America. The hours, weeks, and months she had spent helping the Cambodians had put an end to this enduring discord and dissatisfaction. Mona knew that everything she'd given to the Cambodians had been handed back to her. In their company, she was even beginning to feel rooted in what had always been the cold soil of America. Sometimes Mona wondered: who was the healer and who was being healed?

Mona Afary is the Clinical Director for Center for Empowering Refugees & Immigrants (CERI).

CERI is a grassroots, non-profit organization founded in 2005 by a small group of bilingual/bicultural mental health professionals. It is dedicated to providing culturally competent mental health and other social services to refugee and immigrant families with multiple layers of complex needs, exposure to violence and trauma both in their current environment and in their native countries, and weakening intergenerational relationships.

The agency's focus is on individuals of Afghan, Bosnian, Burmese, Cambodian, Iranian, Mien, Laotian and Vietnamese descent. Presently the majority of our 200 clients are Cambodian and Afghan refugees living in Oakland and Concord, California.

Murder conviction upheld on appeal [in the case of slain Cambodian immigrant mother of 3]

Friday, December 28, 2007
Henry K. Lee San Francisco Chronicle (California, USA)

A state appeals court has upheld the conviction of an Oakland man who shot and killed a Cambodian immigrant mother of three as she prepared to deliver The Chronicle with her husband.

Rondell Johnson was sentenced to 75 years to life in prison in Alameda County Superior Court for the Oct. 3, 2000, murder of Sareth So, 43, in front of her home on the 6200 block of Seminary Avenue in East Oakland.

Johnson, who was 20 at the time of the slaying, was also convicted of attempted murder, attempted robbery, robbery and assault with a firearm. Those involved a spree of robberies in the days before So was killed. The victims were picked at random, police said. Johnson was arrested on the day So was slain.

In his appeal, Johnson's lawyers said the police lineup procedure was unreliable and "unduly suggestive." But in a ruling Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the First District Court of Appeal rejected the claims.

"The record provides absolutely no basis to question the reliability of the evidence identifying defendant as the perpetrator of the many crimes for which he was convicted," wrote Justice Stuart Pollak.

Cambodian-American man gets 50 years for killing girlfriend

Oakland man gets 50 years for killing girlfriend

11/06/2007
Bay City News Service (California, USA)

An Oakland gang member and drug dealer was sentenced today to 50 years to life in state prison for shooting his 16-year-old girlfriend in the head at point-blank range two years ago after she said she wanted to break up with him.

Loeun Sa, 22, who has a prior conviction for possessing marijuana for sale and told police he belonged to the Asian Street Walkers gang, was convicted Sept. 26 of first-degree murder, using a firearm and being an ex-felon in possession of a gun for the Aug. 27, 2005, death of Nancy Nguyen at 52nd Avenue and East 10th Street in Oakland.

Nguyen was just beginning her senior year at the Life Academy High School of Health and Biosciences in Oakland and would have celebrated her 17th birthday the next week.

After Sa was sentenced, his lawyer, Spencer Strellis, said, "He's a kid and he threw his whole life away for nothing and also took her life. This case is a tragedy."

Strellis said there was no question that Sa killed Nguyen, but he thought that Sa acted in the heat of passion and should have been convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

In her closing argument in Sa's trial, Deputy District Attorney Stacie Pettigrew said Sa shot Nguyen after she told him to calm down following an incident in which he fired a gun into the air to break up a fight that involved 10 to 20 people and then told him that their relationship was over.

In his opening statement in the trial, Strellis admitted that Sa killed Nguyen but said the key issue in the trial was Sa's state of mind at the time.

"It's clear that there was a lover's quarrel and emotions ran high," Strellis said.

Pettigrew said Nguyen and Sa got into a "really loud" argument after Sa fired two shots into the air but their friends tried to ignore it because they figured it was just "a girlfriend-boyfriend spat."

But the prosecutor said Sa then turned toward a group of onlookers and said in Cambodian, "Do you want to see her die?"

Pettigrew said, "Tragically for Nancy, no one took him seriously" and tried to stop him.

The prosecutor said Nguyen, who was Vietnamese-American, probably didn't understand what Sa was saying so "she didn't know what was coming."

Pettigrew said the area where the shooting occurred is heavily Cambodian-American and there's a Cambodian temple nearby.

Pettigrew said Sa dragged Nguyen around the corner to a deserted cul-de-sac and a few moments later, witnesses heard Nguyen say to Sa, "Why are you hitting me? It's over."

Pettigrew said the witnesses then heard Sa tell Nguyen, "You can't run from me. You can't get away."

After that, the witnesses heard the gunshot that took Nguyen's life, Pettigrew said.

The prosecutor said Nguyen and Sa had dated for about seven months and there had been no indication that they'd had problems or that she had wanted to break up with him.