Cultural Wall Confines Cambodians

Oh Kampuchea! How I dream of you.

My heart is broken and lies in pieces . . .

. . . unmarked and unsung.

--From ‘Thoughts of a Khmer Refugee,’

by Mam Sophan of Van Nuys

Sok Thapanah, a Cambodian refugee, describes the Van Nuys apartment complex where he lives as a “little piece of Phnom Penh.”

“When I close my eyes, I can see it,” he said while standing in the courtyard of Valerio Gardens on Valerio Street near Van Nuys Boulevard. “In some ways it is similar. You might be surprised.”

Thapanah, 31, has good reason to compare his home to the capital of Cambodia, or Kampuchea. Set in the midst of a working-class Van Nuys neighborhood, this 96-unit complex has quietly become a magnet for Cambodian refugees driven here by years of war in their Southeast Asian homeland.

In the past five years, in fact, nearly 400 Cambodian refugees have moved to Valerio Gardens, sharing it with a smaller group of working-class Latinos. Some of the refugees were placed here by international relief organizations. Others have come to join friends or relatives.

Almost without exception, these people are the victims of war. There are no former Cambodian generals living in Valerio Gardens, and no politicians biding time in exile. There are no wealthy businessmen and no movie stars.

Instead, there are former farmers, driven from their homeland by warring armies. There are large, broken families that spent years in Thai refugee camps. There are infantrymen from defeated armies and bureaucrats from a government long since destroyed.

By chance, these refugees are now living in close quarters in the middle of the San Fernando Valley, distanced from both their new neighbors and the country they left behind.

According to refugee resettlement officials, the complex is home to more than half of the Cambodian refugees living in the San Fernando Valley.

And the new life seems both a blessing and a struggle. Dependent upon government programs and sometimes strained by uneven relations with their Latino neighbors, the Cambodians on Valerio street seem vaguely in limbo, sitting midway between two worlds.

“We are starting the new life slowly,” said Thapanah, who has lived here with his family since 1981. “Maybe it is hard to explain.”

The new life: On weekday afternoons and weekends, the courtyards at Valerio Gardens are packed. Children appear to be everywhere, yelling, playing games and riding bicycles.

Moody-looking teen-agers cruise slowly down the driveways, past older men in work clothes who talk among themselves. Grandmothers stare out windows while ice cream vendors make the rounds.

Talk in the courtyard is mostly Khmer, one of the languages of Cambodia. The smells, for the most part, are a heavy mix of fish and boiling rice. Music coming out the windows is a cross between Cambodian and Latin, with a steady dose of American rock.

“That’s what it’s like in this place,” said Tony Justiniano, who manages the complex. “People live outdoors here. There’s a lot going on.”

Valerio Gardens, essentially, is a maze of two-story stucco buildings surrounding a set of courtyards. Bordered on three sides by a low cinder-block wall, the buildings run back from Valerio Street along an asphalt driveway. The complex contains two aging pools and a dirt enclosure with swing sets and a slide.

The complex is owned by a Lawndale investment firm, Amalgamated Investments Inc., and contains one- and two-bedroom apartments, with a two-bedroom unit renting for $515 a month.

Since roughly 1980, Justiniano said, the Valerio complex has attracted about 40 extended Cambodian families that are largely supported by the federal government. The first of these families, apparently, was placed in the company of a handful of Vietnamese residents, who have since moved away.

The newcomers are part of a so-called “second wave” of Cambodians who came to this country from refugee camps on the eastern edge of Thailand near the Cambodian border. Statistically, these survivors tend to be poorer and less educated than their predecessors, who left Cambodia before it fell to the communist Khmer Rouge army.

Some of the refugees at Valerio Gardens say they moved here from other states to join relatives, or simply to escape bad weather. Thapanah, for instance, said he lived in both Texas and Massachusetts before a brother told him of a vacancy at the Van Nuys apartments.

But others simply arrived. Heang Khem, for instance, walked with his family of 10 off a flight from the Philippines four months ago. Once a successful farmer, Khem entered a Thai refugee camp five years ago after his land was seized by soldiers. Because he had a cousin at Valerio Gardens, a Los Angeles-based relief organization eventually arranged for an apartment there.

Khem, 56, said recently that he had never heard of either Van Nuys or California until he and his family were assigned there. Before he arrived, his relative had died of leukemia and his wife had borne three children in the refugee camp. Khem himself had developed liver trouble after an extended bout with malaria.

Since arriving, Khem’s family has been paying its rent with Refugee Cash Assistance money provided by the federal Welfare Refugee Act of 1980. An 18-year-old son has enrolled in a school for dental technicians, and three of his daughters are attending public schools.

Because of his age and infirmities, Khem spends most of his time at home, occasionally visiting swap meets with friends.

For the most part, however, the Cambodian men at Valerio Gardens spend their days in job-training programs or at blue-collar jobs. About a dozen are enrolled in auto mechanic classes at the West Valley Occupational Center, and 10 others work on bird-feeding crews at a parrot-breeding ranch in the Santa Clarita Valley. Some of the women do sewing in local garment factories.

“We travel in groups,” said Thapanah, who is studying for a real estate license. “It is easier to work with your friends.”

To mark her 65th birthday, the widow Sath Chung recently asked two Buddhist monks to visit her Valerio Gardens apartment. On the day they arrived, a makeshift altar had been carefully built on a table in the living room, and the kitchen had been stocked with food and drink.

For the next two days, the monks received a steady stream of visitors from the complex, along with offerings ranging from robes to cigarettes. In the mornings and evenings they presided over a series of communal chants, praising Buddha and his followers.

On the same weekend, one of Chung’s Latino neighbors held a birthday party for her son. A pinata stuffed with candy bobbed up and down in a courtyard where blindfolded children tried to break it with a baseball bat.

As the events progressed, a few of Chung’s Latino neighbors poked their heads into the doorway of her apartment. Cambodian children, in the meantime, gathered around the edges of the birthday party crowd.

No one objected to being watched, but neither group joined in the other’s activities.

By most accounts, this episode typifies the uneven relationship between Latino and Cambodian tenants at Valerio Gardens. It is a relationship marked by a general wariness set against a background of crime in the neighborhood.

Manager Shot to Death

Justiniano, for example, said he first took over as manager when his predecessor was shot to death in a nearby bar in early 1980. Justiniano himself says he recently completed a 14-month prison term, which followed a late-night incident involving a sawed-off shotgun.

“There was a man stealing car batteries, and I shot it at the sidewalk,” he said. “The man was a stranger. The police said the gun was illegal.”

There are also widespread rumors. A Latino gang that takes its name from Valerio Street is centered in the neighborhood, according to some who live in the complex. Bicycle thefts and car burglaries are also said to be common.

Speaking privately, some talk of persistent tension between the Cambodians and their Latino neighbors. The Latinos, it is said, resent the Cambodians, who in turn refuse to have anything to do with them.

When pressed, however, Justiniano blames crime at the complex on “strangers” who live in the neighborhood. And, although he agrees that the Cambodians and Latinos have little or no contact, he bristles at talk of racial tension.

“There is no bad trouble,” he said as he walked through the complex one Sunday afternoon. “There are two groups, but we have no fights . . . People just keep to themselves.”

Justiniano, a native of Mexico City, said the Latinos at Valerio Gardens are immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador. Like the Cambodians, most work at blue-collar jobs in and around the Valley.

Language Problems

But at the complex, he said, relations between the two groups are frequently stifled by language problems. None of the Cambodians speaks Spanish and few of the adults speak fluent English.

The Cambodians, for their own part, are reluctant to discuss the subject. One man said his car had been scratched. Another said his wife had been heckled on her way to work.

“But I will tell you it is no big deal,” said Thapanah. “The women sometimes say they are scared, but for the men it is nothing.”

If anything, Justiniano said, the relationship between the two groups is improving. At night, he said, Cambodian and Latino children sometimes join for mass games of tag or hide-and-go-seek. A few months ago, a group of Cambodian teen-agers played a game of soccer against Latino residents of the complex.

And, here and there, some friendships are said to be forming. Sath Chung, for instance, sometimes spends her afternoons speaking badly broken English with her next-door neighbor and fellow grandmother, Victoria Jimenez.

“We talk about our grandchildren,” said Jimenez, from Mexico City. “She’s been through a lot . . . There’s plenty to talk about.”

In his five years in a refugee camp near the border of Cambodia and Thailand, Heang Khem taught classes on Khmer language and culture. But there are no such classes at Valerio Gardens, and this bothers Khem.

“He says he misses his country,” said Heang Sambath, Khem’s 18-year-old son. “He says he is afraid that his children will forget.”

Sambath, in fact, says much of his life on his father’s farm is a blur today, except for the day the soldiers arrived from a nearby town in his province.

“We ran five days to the border,” he said. “That’s all I know. I was young.”

The gaps between the memories of Khem and his eldest son appear to be widely reflected in day-to-day life at Valerio Gardens. In a manner typical of most immigrant groups, children at the complex appear to be at ease in their new environment, while their parents remain unsettled.

The parents, for instance, are wary of strangers and many prefer not to talk about their lives. At home, many of the men continue to wear a traditional skirt and many will eat only Cambodian-style food.

When asked to appear in a picture, one of the men politely declined, explaining that he was “ashamed” because his family had only secondhand clothes.

The children, on the other hand, speak far better English and wear far more familiar clothing. Some of the teen-agers favor jeans and T-shirts carrying the names of prominent rock stars. On a recent visit to the complex, one wore a shirt with the slogan “Peace Through Superior Firepower.”

Although there are hundreds of Cambodian children living at Valerio Gardens, one age group is conspicuous by its absence. According to the records of a volunteer social worker who frequents the complex, there are only a few children born in 1975 or 1976.

Those children died in Cambodia, mostly of starvation.

“That was the time of ‘The Killing Fields,’ ” said Thapanah, referring to the recent movie that described the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge revolution.

There are some signs that the Cambodian community is taking root around the Valerio Gardens area. Although many of the families living in the project have been on welfare for years, a few have begun moving out, buying houses nearby. Others have joined the loosely knit American Indochinese Assn., which is centered in the San Fernando Valley.

Today, in fact, that organization is staging a Cambodian New Year party at a city park on Vanowen Street in Van Nuys. The party, between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., will revolve around two Buddhist monks and a Cambodian band from Long Beach. Organizers say they expect hundreds of Cambodians to attend, including most who live at the complex.

The celebration comes two days after the 10th anniversary of the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh.