Cambodian American Heritage Museum exhibit mirrors archivist's life story

Retired teacher's items chronicle life under the Khmer Rouge

September 4, 2008
By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah
Chicago Tribune reporter

When Ty Tim, his wife and daughter survived the Khmer Rouge's brutal regime and came to the United States as refugees in 1982, they brought with them two things from Cambodia: a small ivory Buddha he found while searching for food in the jungle and a copper coin his mom gave him before she died in a forced labor camp. Both were hidden from Khmer soldiers in the pockets of his daughter's pants.

Since 2004, Tim, who lost four of his five children during the Khmer Rouge's murderous rule from 1975 to 1979, has been returning to his homeland, bringing back what he couldn't before.

Tim, 65, has acquired wooden carvings, ancient Cambodian instruments, sacred texts on palm leaves, etchings from the Angkor Wat temple, children's toys and fishing traps. Some of the treasures—novelties and replicas of ancient works because Cambodian law bans removal of historical artifacts—grace the walls of his Skokie home.

But many of them made up the core of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum's exhibit last year on the arts and culture of Cambodia and are part of the exhibit opening Sunday on every day life in Cambodia.

The exhibits at the museum, 2831 W. Lawrence Ave., are in partnership with Northern Illinois University.

Tim, a retired teacher and the museum's archivist, says the exhibits help Cambodian-Americans remember aspects of their culture they may have forgotten. Many refugees came to the U.S. from Cambodia ready to put tragedy behind them and quickly faced the challenges of learning a new language and making a living, he said. The exhibits also can teach non-Cambodians and a new generation of U.S.-born Cambodian-Americans who may know little about Cambodian traditions.

"They need to know something about their culture," Tim said.

Although the ivory Buddha and copper coin, used by Cambodians as a massaging tool, are not on display, Tim's own story appears to echo through the exhibit.

His father was a farmer. Tim grew up harvesting rice and catching fish using the basketlike traps his father made. A fish trap like the one he used is in the exhibit, as are some of the different types of rice he helped harvest.

Knowing a bit about farming came in handy under the Khmer Rouge, which took power in 1975. The regime, which sent the population to work in rural farms and killed more than 1.5 million people, was anti-intellectual.

So teachers such as Tim often hid their profession, claiming instead to be illiterate farmers.

But the Khmer soldiers would still test them, ordering his family to grow vegetables on infertile land and forcing him to plow rice fields.

He has brought back Khmer-language textbooks and toys used by children in schools. A wooden toy that mimics the toad mating call comes from Tim's own collection. Nearby, a ceremonial silver tea set and wedding conch used to pour holy water on the couple's hands are also on loan from him.

Today, his life in America is quite different than that life in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge forced millions like him and his family to march from Phnom Penh into the jungle. On the march through the jungle, his father died. At the farming camp, his mother and four youngest children died of starvation.

"They kept 1,200 people in that one village," Tim recalls. "When we got out from that village, there were only 400 of us left."

When Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge, the family returned to Phnom Penh. Tim started work again as a teacher.

But when friends told him officials were upset over his refusal to learn Communist ideology, he and his family fled again.

This time, they walked for two months back through the jungles, without a map, desperate for water, evading land mines and soldiers of all kinds.

They eventually reached a refugee camp in Thailand.

It's a history he feels younger Cambodians such as his three youngest children—one born in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia and two in Chicago—at times fail to grasp.

So he fills his home with reminders of his native land.

And he hopes the museum exhibits will help educate them.

nahmed@tribune.com

Khmer Here

Ty Tim - Paul l. Merideth (portrait)

King Jayavarman VII posed as Buddha - Paul l. Merideth (portrait)

Food caravan bas-relief - Paul l. Merideth (portrait)

A new collection in Chicago shows there’s more to Cambodian culture than the Killing Fields.

October 18, 2007
By Deanna Isaacs
Chicago Reader (Chicago, Illinois, USA)

Ty Tim was a high school teacher in Cambodia in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took over. The country, which had suffered years of strife during the Vietnam war and massive U.S. bombing in its wake, now fell victim to Pol Pot’s efforts to transform it into a land of peasant farmers. The plan called for the eradication of religion, culture, and history, and it was brutally enforced. The calendar was reset to year zero, temples were destroyed, educated city dwellers were declared the enemy. Capital city Phnom Penh was emptied—“turned into a ghost town,” Tim says. He and his family were among the thousands forced to trek through the jungle to labor camps, where they were subjected to inhumane conditions and fed a starvation diet. During the three years and eight months of the Khmer Rouge regime, about 1.7 million Cambodians—more than 20 percent of the population—died. Tim and his wife lost four children, as well as his parents and two brothers.

When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, the Khmer Rouge enforcers abandoned the camps and the workers dispersed. Tim, his wife, and a daughter eventually made their way to Thailand. In 1982, with the help of a sponsor in Mokena, they came to Illinois. Tim, who’d specialized in Khmer (Cambodian) literature, culture, and philosophy, found work as a bilingual teacher, and he and his wife had three more daughters.

Retired from full-time teaching, Tim now works as the archivist at the Cambodian American Heritage Museum, which opened in 2004 as a project of the Cambodian Association of Illinois. Started by a few refugee families in the western suburbs 31 years ago, the association has been located in Chicago since 1980, providing resettlement help and basic social services to Cambodian immigrants. In 1999 it purchased and moved into an old building at 2831 W. Lawrence with an empty lot next door. It also began a capital campaign, not only to add office space but to build a dream: a museum that would tell Cambodians’ story, honor their dead, and display their culture. It would be for the public but also for the elders forced to leave everything behind and for their American children, making their way in a very different society.

The golden age of Khmer culture lasted from the 9th century through the 13th century, when the Angkor empire included all of current Cambodia and extended into what are now Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. An agricultural and artistic society rooted in the cycles of the Mekong River, it was characterized by tall, elaborately decorated stone and brick temples (or wats) and temple cities. The most impressive of them was the fabulous 500-acre Angkor Wat, built in the 12th century and dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. The arts of the period included ritual music and dance and the masterful stone bas-reliefs and sculptures still visible in the temples.

After raising $1.3 million, the Cambodian Association added a handsome 4,000-square-foot museum to its building three years ago. It opened with a permanent Killing Fields memorial and a text-and-photo exhibit that explained what had happened to Khmer Rouge survivors, but it had no collection of its own—none of the ancient artifacts.

A member of the museum board, Northern Illinois University anthropologist Judy Ledgerwood, suggested that the museum and the university might partner on a grant proposal. NIU is home to a center for Southeast Asia studies, started in 1963 to train Peace Corps volunteers, and the university was looking to mount an exhibit on Cambodia’s current economic and cultural recovery. Ledgerwood’s research has been focused on that part of the world, and in the past she’d received funding from the Henry J. Luce Foundation, which she says has a history of supporting projects on Southeast Asia and an interest in helping young institutions. They submitted a proposal with three components: an exhibit for NIU, a collection of art and artifacts and staff training for the museum, and an oral history. The Luce foundation gave them $116,000, and in June 2006 Tim set off with NIU’s anthropology museum director, Ann Wright-Parsons, on a buying trip to his homeland—only his second visit since he and his family had fled.

Even with the money, however, Tim wouldn’t be acquiring any ancient treasures: Cambodian law now prohibits taking them out of the country. He’d be shopping for reproductions. Tim says that, with the $6,000 he had to spend, he was determined to find the items most deeply connected to the Cambodian spirit. “Before the infiltration of the Indian religion,” he says, “we had our own culture. We worshipped the parents—the living god as the mother and father, mother as earth and leader, father as water and protector.” If Cambodians lose their reverence for these traditional things, he says, “we lose our identity.” The core pieces of the 16-item collection he brought back—which includes finely hewn musical instruments, a pair of dazzling costumes, and a 12th-century caravan in bas-relief—are a large, flawlessly crafted wood carving representing the mother and two banners like waterfalls representing the father.

Both the NIU exhibit and the museum show opened within the last few weeks; in the spring they’ll change places for six months or so. (The project’s final component, the Killing Fields oral history, is scheduled for completion by 2009.) Ledgerwood says both exhibits are about Cambodia’s recovery under what is still a relatively authoritarian government: the rebuilding of temples, the resurgence of arts and crafts, and the emergence of an economy that, besides rice growing, includes the mass manufacture of clothing and a booming tourist business. Museum chairman Leon Lim, another Killing Fields survivor, says the gleaming new collection is a way for people who lost their homeland, families, belongings, and culture to claim their identity and celebrate the lives they’ve found in Chicago.

Meanwhile, back in Cambodia, recovery aside, the wheels of justice barely turn: Pol Pot’s second-in-command was arrested only last month; no other Khmer Rouge officials have ever been brought to trial.

Khmer Spirit: Arts & Culture of Cambodia

Through June 2008: Mon-Fri 9 AM-5 PM, weekends by appt., Cambodian American Heritage Museum, 2831 W. Lawrence, 773-878-7090, ext. 201. Free

Cambodia Born Anew

Through May 2008: Mon-Fri 9 AM-5 PM, Anthropology Museum, Northern Illinois University, Stevens Building, DeKalb, 815-753-0246. Free