Tiny Toones to visit Philadelphia

Sat, Apr. 25, 2009
By Robert Moran
Philly Inquirer Staff Writer (Pennsylvania, USA)

They are being called the first generation of hip-hop stars in Cambodia. Some were street kids from homeless families. Others were abandoned or orphaned.

They are Tiny Toones, a troupe of break-dancers - B-Boys and B-Girls in street lingo - and seven representatives are to arrive in Philadelphia today as part of their first tour of the United States.

How they got to Philly is a story with roots in Phnom Penh and in Long Beach, Calif., and involves a notorious street gang, YouTube, and the Cambodia Association of Greater Philadelphia.

Tiny Toones was founded by Tuy "KK" Sobil, 30, a Cambodian who was born in a Thai refugee camp and grew up in Long Beach, where, as a teen, he became a popular break-dancer.

He also became a member of the Crips gang, and eventually was incarcerated on an armed-robbery conviction.

Afterward, he was deported to Cambodia. He found himself living in a poor country he had never been in before.

As he tried to find his way in Phnom Penh, his western apparel and many tattoos captivated local youths.

"The word got out with the kids that KK knew how to break dance and that he was a famous break-dancer," said Mia-lia Kiernan, 25, youth advocacy program coordinator for the Cambodia Association of Greater Philadelphia.

KK told them he wasn't interested.

"He was already pretty depressed about being in Cambodia in the first place, as he had to leave his family and everything, but eventually gave in," she said.

"The Cambodian kids are finding hip-hop as a voice to express their feelings and their stories," said Vyreak Sovann, 28, a Cambodian American who helped organize the Philadelphia part of the tour.

Sovann, who like Sobil was born in a Thai refugee camp and came to United States as a toddler, discovered Tiny Toones on YouTube while doing Internet research about his Cambodian heritage.

"I was so moved by it, because I saw these kids break dance in Cambodia without shoes, and I was like, 'Wow!' " said Sovann, a former break-dancer.

At first, Sobil taught a handful of children in his apartment. As Tiny Toones gained recognition, it got funding from an international aid organization called Bridges Across Borders to open a multi-service center.

"We have helped Tiny Toones develop a child-protection and education program that has benefited thousands of vulnerable children and youth in Phnom Penh," said David Pred, director of Bridges Across Borders Southeast Asia, in an e-mail from Cambodia.

"It is a shame and somewhat ironic that KK was unable to obtain a U.S. visa to be there with the kids," Pred wrote.

The Tiny Toones multi-service center offers classes in English and Khmer, HIV/AIDS awareness, and job and computer skills.

And, of course, lessons in break dancing.

Kiernan has been following KK and Tiny Toones for four years, and she got to meet Sobil on one of her annual trips to visit her mother in Cambodia.

In fall, she saw an article in the New York Times about KK and Tiny Toones. It mentioned simply that the club had been invited to the United States.

"I e-mailed KK right away and said, well, if you're going to be in the U.S., why don't you come to Philly?" Kiernan recalled.

Kiernan was paired with Sovann, and they have helped to organize a series of performances, fund-raisers and workshops with local break-dancers.

Tiny Toones' first appearance will be at a fund-raiser at noon today at the Khmer Art Gallery at 319 N. 11th St.

The troupe of teenagers includes (using their B-Boy names) Fresh, Homey, T-boy, Khay, Suicide, and K'dep, a rapper. The lone B-Girl is Diamond.

Kiernan yesterday planned to pick up the Tiny Toones in New York and bring them to Philadelphia today on a Chinatown bus.

During their visit here, which will last until Wednesday morning, the dancers will be staying at Kiernan's South Philadelphia home.

"My whole living room is going to be one big air mattress," she said, laughing.

Break Dancing, Phnom Penh-Style

A former gang member from Long Beach, California, teaches break dancing to at-risk youths in Cambodia.

U.S. Deportee Brings Street Dance to Street Boys of Cambodia

Tuy Sobil, or K.K., right, a former gang member from Long Beach, Calif., founded the club after being deported in 2004. (Photo: Stuart Isett for The New York Times)
Tach Piseth, 11, practiced spinning on his head at the Tiny Toones break dancing club in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The club teaches about 150 youngsters. (Photo: Stuart Isett for The New York Times)

November 30, 2008
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — It may be the only place in Cambodia where the children are nicknamed Homey, Frog, Floater, Fresh, Bugs and Diamond.

And there are not many places like this small courtyard, thumping with the beat of a boom box, where dozens of boys in big T-shirts are spinning on their heads and doing one-hand hops, elbow tracks, flairs, halos, air tracks and windmills. And, of course, krumping.

It is a little slice of Long Beach, Calif., brought here by a former gang member by way of a federal prison, an immigration jail and then expulsion four years ago from his homeland, the United States, to the homeland of his parents, Cambodia.

The former gang member is Tuy Sobil, 30, who goes by the street name K.K. The boys are Cambodian street children he has taken under his wing as he teaches them the art he brought with him, break dancing, as well as his hard lessons in life.

K.K. is not here because he wants to be. He is one of 189 Cambodians who have been banished from the United States in the past six years under a law that mandates deportations for noncitizens who commit felonies. Hundreds more are on a waiting list for deportation. Like most of the others, K.K. is a noncitizen only by a technicality. He was not an illegal immigrant. He was a refugee from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge “killing fields” who found a haven in the United States in 1980.

He was an infant when he arrived. In fact, he was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and had never seen Cambodia before he was deported. But K.K.’s parents were simple farmers who failed to complete the citizenship process when they arrived.

Like some children of poor immigrants, K.K. drifted to the streets, where he became a member of the Crips gang and a champion break dancer. It was only after he was convicted of armed robbery at 18 that he discovered that he was not a citizen.

Like many deportees, he arrived in Cambodia without possessions and without family contacts. He was a drug counselor at first and then founded his break dancing club, Tiny Toones Cambodia, where he now earns a living teaching about 150 youngsters and reaching out to hundreds more.

With the financial support of international aid groups like Bridges Across Borders, based in Graham, Fla., he has expanded his center into a small school that teaches English and Khmer and computers in addition to back flips, head stands and krumping, or crazy dancing.

Some other deportees have found work that uses their fluency in English, particularly in hotels. Some have reunited with families. But many have slipped into unemployment, depression and sometimes drug use.

“Some were doing well initially but now over time have become unemployed or never did get employment, and just got discouraged,” said Dimple Rana, who works with Deported Diaspora, which is based in Revere, Mass., and helps deportees adjust.

“I know of a whole bunch of returnees whose mothers were sending money from their Social Security,” she said. “Now, with the economy in the United States, it is very hard and families are not able to send even $100 or $150.”

K.K. stands out as a success, both in finding a calling and in embracing his fate. He has a fair command of the language, unlike some deportees who arrived with no knowledge of Khmer.

“I think it was meant for me to be here, even though I lost my family,” he said. “And my kid is there, Kayshawn. He is 8.”

K.K. is in touch with his relatives in Long Beach but has not seen them since he was deported.

“Right now, you know, these kids are my family,” he said. “I don’t have a kid here, but I adopted one, a street kid. His mom and dad are on drugs.”

The boys and girls leaping and spinning here are the children of Cambodia’s underclass, like thousands who fill the slums of Phnom Penh — children who spend their evenings, as K.K. put it, “begging and digging through garbage to find food.”

K.K., whose youth was not so different from theirs, said he teaches them to find pride in who they are. A wall of his center is marked with students’ graffiti: “I want to be a rapper,” “I want to be a D.J.,” “I want to be a doctor.”

“I try to tell them not to judge people by the way they look,” he said. “I still have a struggle here in Cambodia. People judge me. People see me with tattoos and think I’m a bad guy.

“Sometimes it’s, ‘Come on, we’re going to kill some Americans,’ ” he said, describing threats from street toughs. “I’m not American. I’m Khmer, man.”

His journey between identities reached a point of strangeness when he was invited last December to perform with some of his students at a Christmas party at the United States Embassy.

“The American ambassador gave me a handshake and a hug, and asked me one day when his kid is a little older he wanted to put him in my school,” K.K. said.

The ambassador at the time, Joseph A. Mussomeli, recalled the performance as “great fun,” but he said the piquancy of the moment had not been lost on him.

“You are right that there is a certain wonderful irony to him being ‘rejected’ or at least ‘ejected’ from the U.S. and still landing on his feet — or shoulders and head — dancing,” Mr. Mussomeli said in an e-mail message.

“While watching him I was reminded of that great patriotic speech by Bill Murray in ‘Stripes,’ ” he added, “where he talks about Americans as being rejects from all the good, decent countries of the world! K.K. is/was an American in everything except in law — and he has shown this by his creativity, tenacity, and undying optimism.”

Now another irony is in store for K.K. His club has been invited to send dancers to perform in the United States — Cambodian boys who speak no English and have never left their country.

The real American among them, K.K., deported and excluded from the United States for the rest of his life, must stay behind.

“I can’t go,” he said over the thump of the boom box, as his boys jumped and bounced around him like tiny springs. “I can understand that they deported me here. I’d like to go visit — only visit, because I live here now. I have a brand new life.”

Cambodian-Americans are changing their parents' homeland

Tiny Toones performs most Sunday afternoons in the parks along Phnom Penh’s riverfront. The events draw curious onlookers as well as street kids to see the group perform. Such events are used as outreach to the city’s poor and young. (Photo: Stuart Isett)
Phnom Penh, Cambodia -- The Tiny Toones break dancing troupe was founded by Tuy Sobil (shown here at a show along Phnom Penh's riverfront), a 30-year-old Cambodian deported from the United States in 2004. Working out of a shop house in Phnom Penh's Tonle Sap neighborhood, which doubles as a makeshift community center and dance studio as well as Tuy's home, the group now has 600 members. (Photo: Stuart Isett)

They're giving at-risk youth a break with dance lessons

April 25, 2008
By ATHIMA CHANSANCHAI
Seattle P-I REPORTER (Washington State, USA)

Click here to view the photo gallery of the B-boys of Massive Monkees

Next time the Massive Monkees mesmerize you with their break dancing, check out the lanky boy with the waves of curly hair, nicknamed Peanut, the one known for his windmills.

He's also the one moving to a country he never visited before last year, the country his parents fled during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror.

Peanut, whose real name is Phanna Nam, is following a dream to dance in Cambodia and teach poor kids the moves that have been second nature to him since he was a child growing up in Mount Baker. The Franklin High School grad, 23, was born in Tacoma and visited Cambodia for the first time in 2007, for a month.

Behind the moves of Massive Monkees, one of Seattle's top B-boy groups (B-Boy is hip-hop slang for break dancer), is the story of how Cambodian-Americans like Nam are changing their parents' homeland. Although Nam is going back by choice, others forced back by deportation are finding redemption in a country torn apart by genocide, war and violence.

Nam and his crew -- the tight-knit 19 or so young men and women of Massive Monkees -- perform Saturday night at the Greenwood Collective. Proceeds will go toward Tiny Toones, an organization in Cambodia's capital of Phnom Penh that reaches out to about 600 at-risk and street children through break dancing.

Tiny Toones uses any donations it receives to provide food, shelter and education to these kids, who learn about HIV, sex and drugs -- and how those things can't fit into a life of dancing. Kids also meet with other volunteers/deportees and the group's founder, Tuy Sobil (nicknamed KK) every day after he gets off work to practice moves, which can last all night. Nam met Sobil in January on his second monthlong visit to Cambodia -- and they hit it off.

Sobil is an ex-Crips gang member from Long Beach, Calif., who, after a felony conviction for armed robbery at 18, spent a decade in jail and immigration detention centers. He wasn't even born in Cambodia, having come into the world in a Thai refugee camp.

His story isn't so different from that of Many Uch, 32, a local Cambodian man whose life has been in limbo as he waits to be deported. He served 40 months in prison because, at 18, he also was involved in an armed robbery -- as a getaway driver -- and also was running in a local gang. Uch spent an additional 28 months detained by immigration officials after his release from prison in 1997.

"I regret making poor choices, but not that I went to prison. Prison changed my life, in a way that it saved me," said Uch, who will speak at Saturday's fundraiser. "Not religiously, but mentally, in growing up."

Uch is no longer in custody, but his situation hangs over his head daily. As coordinator for the Seattle-based Refugee Justice Project, he works closely with other Cambodian-Americans facing deportation.

The father of a 21-month-old daughter, Uch is engaged to be married and has a full life in this country with all the family he has ever known. He arrived in the U.S. when he was 4, and says he has no memory of Cambodia.

"I feel for KK. He mentioned one time that he would be hanging out in the streets if he was in America and would likely fall back in jail," Uch said. "I admire people that try to make a difference in children's lives. Most deportees are not really making it in Cambodia, and KK tries really hard to change his life and others.

"We made poor choices when we were younger and that's what I can relate to. I spent time in prison and now changed my life. But Immigration doesn't understand that and won't give me another chance. What else can you do but make the best out of it?"

Although he's never been in the kind of trouble that sent Sobil back to Cambodia, Nam knows what it's like to grow up in a rough neighborhood, and is able to relate to the kids in Phnom Penh.

"It's just like the projects, but a lot worse. You gotta be street smart," he said. "I realized I was more Cambodian than American. I don't go to McDonald's. I eat pho or Thai food. I always prefer Asian food. When I was in Cambodia, I ate like a Cambodian, went to the bathroom like one, rode mopeds like one."

Growing up surrounded by other Cambodians, Nam retained his culture and traditions, kept them close. The oldest of four children -- all of whom dance -- he set an example for his siblings by staying out of gangs and finding work taking care of mentally disabled clients. But dancing has always been in his life and being part of Massive Monkees has exposed him to other crews around the world. They've even been world champs, once, in London, in 2004. But Nam jokes, "We're like the Seahawks, we're the masters of second place."

"Seattle B-boys and girls are world class, there's no doubt about it," said Charles Peterson, a counterculture photographer best known for capturing grunge. Later this year a new book on break dancing, "Cypher," comes out. Peterson will be at the fundraiser Saturday, showing his work.

"A large part of the scene are Asian and Hispanic-Americans, and we have such a big Asian-American community here," he said. "There's always a Seattle contingent. They definitely hold their own."

Stuart Isett, another Seattle photographer, who's been working on a 15-year photo essay about Cambodian gangs in the U.S. and the deportation of young Cambodian refugees to Cambodia, also will be showing his work.

Isett's work has concentrated more on B-boys like Sobil, and not as much on B-boys like Nam who choose to go back.

Nam says he will miss his crew in Seattle, but he feels his place is halfway around the world.

"I always had this calling, this sense of destiny to go back to Cambodia. My mom thinks I'm crazy and my dad just tells me to stay safe. But I'm tired of the American dream. It's a fantasy. I feel more real living in the 'hood," said Nam, who's going to Alaska this summer to make money fishing, then making the big move abroad.

"I don't know how to do anything else but break dance. If I'm gonna shed tears, blood and sweat, it might as well be for Cambodia. I can't change Cambodia, but these kids can. ...Through dancing, these kids are going to be inspired to do more."

COMING UP TINY TOONES B-BOY BENEFIT FOR CAMBODIA

WHAT: Performances by Massive Monkees and an address by Many Uch; photographs for sale by Charles Peterson and Stuart Isett
WHEN/WHERE: 6 p.m. Saturday, Greenwood Collective, 8537 Greenwood Ave. N.
COST: $5 donation
MORE INFO: goto.seattlepi.com/r1403, tinytoonescambodia.com.

P-I reporter Athima Chansanchai can be reached at 206-448-8041 or athimachansanchai@seattlepi.com.

In exile, a former gang member finds a reason to dance

Horng Sopheaktra learned his skills from Tuy Sobil (left), a child refugee from Cambodia's killing fields who was deported from the US to Cambodia because of criminal convictions as an adult. (Photo: Luke Duggleby)

Breaking out: Tiny Toones dancer Horng Sopheaktra shows off his skills in a Phonm Penh park. (Photo: Tibor Krausz)

Deported to Cambodia for criminal convictions, Tuy Sobil saves street kids – and himself – with break dance

October 23, 2007
By Tibor Krausz
Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Tuy Sobil, a sinewy 30-year-old with a ponytail, a pierced eyebrow, and gangland-style Goth tattoos, is watching over a group of excited kids crowded around a linoleum mat laid out in a city park. To the beat of a 1980s American hip-hop remix emanating from a boombox, one of Mr. Tuy's protégés, "Floater," lets it rip – twisting, turning, and spinning like an animated marionette. Cheers erupt from a crowd of curious onlookers.

Then it is Tuy's turn in this Sunday break-dancing battle.

Sporting a rapper's stocking cap despite the humid heat, he does a series of "pikes," "flares," and "butterfly kicks," slumping to the ground, wheezing, when he's finished.

"I'm old and rusty, but I need to do it for the kids," he pants.

Once a gifted break-dance wannabe in Long Beach, Calif., Tuy has lately resurrected his old passion – to help save Cambodian street kids from the sort of dead-end detour he took.

And the kids, many neglected, some orphaned, lionize him for it.

"KK looks after us," says 14-year-old Floater, aka Chea Sokchen. "I don't want to be just a street kid," he adds with boyish zeal. "I want to become a b-boy [break dancerr]."

That's the career Tuy feels he should have pursued, too. Instead, wanting to "be cool," Tuy – alias "KK," gang-style initials for "Crazy Crip," – joined the notorious Crips gang in California and dropped out of school. An armed robbery conviction when he was 18 sent his life spiralling downward. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1977 to escapees from the Khmer Rouge killing fields and taken to the US as a tot, Tuy never became a US citizen, and the felony conviction was followed by a decade in jail and immigration detention centers.

He was deported in 2004 – the coda to what he now knows were misplaced aspirations.

"I never let anybody take my gang down," Tuy says of his teen-aged tribalism. "But say this: As I grew older, I started to think, 'My gang ain't got me nowhere, but cost me everything – my family, my life [in the US], my son.' "

He wants to steer his protégés clear of similar bad choices. "I made a mistake as a kid," he explains, "but I'm not gonna let these kids destroy their lives, too."

Sprawling across Tuy's lower back is a tattoo of Angkor Wat, the monumental 12th-century temple and Cambodia's national symbol. It was a handy sign of his ethnic affiliations in America's gang culture, but having never even seen his "homeland," it was also just about the deepest link he had to that place.

So his "repatriation" was no homecoming. It was exile for life to a remote, impoverished, war-ravaged land he'd never seen. Like many of the other 160-plus Cambodian Americans forced to return under a US law that allows deportation of noncitizens with criminal convictions – from shoplifting to murder – Tuy spoke Khmer badly (he still can't read or write it) and was viewed as a stranger.

"I knew no one here. I thought I wasn't gonna make it," he recalls.

In Cambodia, returnees cope the best they can. Many fall back on crime; others like Tuy reinvent themselves. Some started new families and, according to the Returnee Integration Support Program, a charity run by a US-based organization of Vietnam War veterans, some even became Buddhist monks.

Even so, Tuy testifies, "every deportee I know still has a pain in his heart."

Not that his life in the States was idyllic. He grew up in a family of seven in Long Beach, where his jobless, unschooled parents made ends meet by scavenging. Out of place in the affluent southern California milieu, he became a regular in playground brawls and soon a crack addict. (He'd kick his addiction in prison.)

Yet he craved acceptance, and his daredevil stunts in break dance – an improvisational street ballet of jerky moves and acrobatics – earned him accolades. In one face-off, Tuy reminisces, he even bested "Pose," the neighborhood's finest "breaker."

Today, there is another "Pose" in Tuy's life – a bashful, diminutive AIDS orphan with delicate features and dyed hair. Inspired by TV clips of foreign break dancers, the 13-year-old HIV-positive boy and his friends approached Tuy to teach them. The "American" brushed them off; but they persisted. And Tuy's difficult transition in exile became life-transforming as he developed the Tiny Toones dance troupe.

These days Tuy's Chinese shophouse-style quarters in the city's Tonle Sap neighborhood double as a makeshift community center. Upstairs in an unfurnished room, dozens of street kids gather every evening for break dance practice.

The group has 600 members. Drug users and glue sniffers aren't welcome unless they clean up first. Tiny Toones are drilled in discipline, honesty, and solidarity. They also learn English from volunteers – other deportees from the US.

"This is many kids' only chance to stay out of trouble," says Hin Roatnak, another former Crip from central California, who says he was deported for a gang murder and now helps out with the group. "Sometimes, we see kids eating leftovers from garbage bins, so we bring them here and give them food and a shower."

Tuy has also "adopted" five homeless teens, who sleep in the hall outside his cramped bedroom. In his room is a photographic tableau of his 6-year-old son in California, whom he may never see again.

Tuy's open-door policy has its dangers. Recently, his new stereo and laptop were stolen – both cherished possessions earned from his $400-a-month salary as an antidrugs and AIDS campaigner for a foreign nongovernmental agency . But Tuy doesn't blame the kids. "It could have been the smokers next door."



His legs shriveled by polio, Ean An sits slumped in his makeshift aluminum wheelchair, watching his deaf but able-bodied friends show off their new moves at a recreational program sponsored by a British charity in Kampot Province, 100 miles south of Phnom Penh.

He doesn't languish there for long, though. Tuy coaxes the boy out of his wheelchair and challenges him to a handstand competition. An wins it on his third try. Tuy then shows him some "power moves" he can do without using his legs.

"In our culture, people think we're of no use," explains Ponh Denh, a 21-year-old ninth-grade student in a rusty wheelchair. (In Buddhist Cambodia, disability is often associated with bad karma incurred by wrongs done in previous lives.) "But if we try," he says, with pride, "even handicapped people like us can dance."

So can orphans. Tuy holds regular dance classes in a Phnom Penh orphanage where the youngest "b-boy," a 2-year-old, is already an avid spinner.

"On the surface, it's only break dance, but all these kids need is someone to motivate them," says Dara Chan, a Khmer-American student from Michigan volunteering at Tiny Toones.

"KK is very charismatic, and the way he plays he has the heart of a 10-year-old," adds Mr. Chan. "Kids like to jump on his back and play with him all day. He's like a big brother to them. They need him."

Tuy needs the kids, too.

"This is my home now and Tiny Toones are my family," he says. "When they cry, it hurts me. I'll do my best to help them."