July 27, 2007
By Jennifer Torres
Record Staff Writer (Stockton, Calif., USA)
Cambodia scholarshipsSTOCKTON - Sophanary Sok's parents fled Cambodia before she was born.
With $5,000 from Western Union, Stockton's Asian Pacific Self-Development and Residential Association is awarding five scholarships that will help students visit Cambodia. Scholarship applications are available at the APSARA office, 3830 N. Alvarado Ave. The forms can also be requested by phone: (209) 944-1700. Applications will be accepted through the end of August.
"All they talk about is during the Khmer Rouge how they struggled," she said.
They told her of hunger, fear and scattered families.
But, she said, they also taught her to love their homeland.
The Asian Pacific Self-Development and Residential Association, or APSARA, manages the Park Village apartment community where Sok and many more of Stockton's Cambodian residents live. On Thursday, the organization announced that, with $5,000 from the Western Union company, it could provide scholarships to help five students visit Cambodia this fall.
Sok said she will apply for one of them.
For many of her peers and their parents, she said, the tug of homeland is stronger than the ache of memory.
According to Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program, about 1.7 million people - 21 percent of the country's population - were killed in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 when Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge forces took over the country. Thousands of others fled.
Sok's parents were among them. As she grew up, they enrolled her in Cambodian language and dance classes. That was good, she said, because "they thought the Cambodian history was gone."
But she wants more.
"I want to see what Cambodia is really like," she said, "I want to see the history of it."
Children in baseball caps and sports jerseys whispered near the front of APSARA's community center Thursday, and gray-haired residents nodded toward the back as representatives from both the center and Western Union described the scholarships.
The program is open to Stockton-area Cambodian-American students who are at least 18 and enrolled in a college or university. Applications will be evaluated for academic performance and community service. The five students selected for a scholarship will take a three-week trip to Cambodia this fall. While abroad, the students will travel with Cambodian hosts.
Echo Huang of Western Union said the company tries to support projects that benefit communities it serves. Western Union launched wire transfer services in Cambodia about eight years ago.
Phath Teu, 65, fled Cambodia in 1975. "It was hard," she said. "People were scared."
She said she hopes to return to the country - "You miss it. You were born there, you know?" - and is glad some students at the center will visit it.
"They've grown up here," she said. "They don't know what it's like over there."
Phany Yinn, an 18-year-old student studying at California State University, Stanislaus, said has heard from her parents about what it is like. She said she wants to see Cambodia's countryside, rice fields and children.
"I just want to see the homeland that my parents come from," she said. "They like that we're interested in going over there, to actually see it for ourselves, understand it ourselves."
Contact reporter Jennifer Torres at (209) 546-8252 or jtorres@recordnet.com.
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