By Day, His Job May Be Routine --but by Night, He’s a Celebrity

Six weeks ago, Dr. Haing S. Ngor won an Oscar for best supporting actor in “The Killing Fields.”

The next day, the 36-year-old Cambodian refugee was back at work as usual--as a $400-a-week job counselor in Chinatown.

And he is still there, but his life now is filled with contrasts. He spends his days at the Chinatown Service Center, trying to find jobs for Indochinese refugees. He lives simply in a small apartment at the edge of Chinatown.

Yet, at nights and on most weekends, he is often the “celebrated guest speaker,” the “Academy Award winner.” He has recently been to Taiwan, has made several local appearances and traveled to Washington state and Ohio.

At the office, there is little evidence of this. Ngor has stuck a tiny color photograph of himself, holding a British award he won for best actor, on the wall near his desk. A paperback copy of “The Killing Fields” is next to a French-English dictionary.

One recent morning, the phones were ringing as usual, and Ngor, who had been a physician in Cambodia and speaks nine languages, switched back and forth from Mandarin Chinese to Vietnamese and Cambodian as he dealt with calls from refugees looking for work.

Another Cambodian, Sin Lek, sat quietly in a plastic chair beside the desk, waiting for Ngor to return to his problem. The 51-year-old refugee, who had come to the United States in 1980, as Ngor did, had just been laid off from a job on an assembly line making lawn mowers.

In “The Killing Fields,” Ngor, who had never acted before, played the part of Dith Pran, the Cambodian assistant to New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg.

The factually based movie depicts the fall of Cambodia in 1975, the torture of Pran at the hands of Khmer Rouge soldiers and his eventual escape to Thailand.

Carries Signs of Torture

Ngor’s own experiences under the Khmer Rouge were similar to Pran’s, and he still carries the signs of torture. He has a long scar above one ankle, and the top of the little finger on his right hand is missing. An inch was cut off his finger and his leg was slashed, he explained, after his arrest for calling his girlfriend “sweetheart” and for trying to find extra food to eat because he was hungry.

Under the rules of the Khmer Rouge 1975-to-1979 “peasant revolution,” he was supposed to use the word “comrade,” he said, and to be content with the small amount of rice doled out in the countryside communities where he was forced to live.

More than 1 million Cambodians are thought to have died, starved or been murdered during that period. Ngor was arrested twice more and finally escaped into Thailand in 1979.

All that remains of his family, he added, is one younger brother, who lives in Van Nuys, and a niece, who lives with him.

“We didn’t know much about his life at all,” Irene Chu, director of the center, which provides social services, job training and placement for about 30,000 Chinese and Indochinese each year, said of her celebrated employee.

Ngor has worked there since he arrived in the United States. “It was after the movie, and the interviews came out, that we found out,” Chu said.

All they knew was that Ngor, an ethnic Chinese, had been a doctor in Phnom Penh and was working at the center until he could get his American medical license.

It is not unusual for Indochinese to keep inside themselves what they have been through, Chu said: “They try to put it behind them.”

Wants No Pity

Ngor, for his part, said he had not wanted anyone to pity him, or think that he was looking for a handout.

But holding back bad memories is a largely unrecognized psychological problem among refugees, Chu said. “If they don’t have the chance to ventilate, it will all come back to them later.”

Ngor, she added, “is lucky. Now he can share his story, and people are listening to him.”

Ngor said he got the film role “by accident.” In 1982, news was circulating on “the Cambodian grapevine” that a movie was being made, and Cambodians were being sought to play in it. But Ngor paid little heed.

He had completed studies at Los Angeles City College, he said, and was planning to enroll at UCLA for medical studies. “I tell you, the movie business in Cambodia is very low-class people,” he said in heavily accented English. “Doctors are like pretty high.”

Having come from a family that during his childhood grew from miserable poverty to considerable wealth in the lumber business, he never considered trying out for a such a “low-class” thing, he added with a laugh.

But then he went to a Cambodian wedding in Oxnard. The casting director was there, taking pictures, names and telephone numbers of the guests, and took his as well. After several interviews and an offer of $1,300 a week, he went to Thailand for five months of shooting in 1983. Up to that point, he said, he did not know the size of the part he had.

“They didn’t tell me,” Ngor said, “until Bangkok. They said, ‘Haing, you play this part,’ and I said, ‘Oh, my God.”’

He considers acting, he said, “not really difficult,” and hopes for other movie roles.

He still wants to be a doctor here, he said, although “because of the movie” he has not actually started studying for his American license.

He plans to continue sponsoring Indochinese families to come to the United States, he said. He has personally sponsored nearly 80 Indochinese refugee families so far, and spends a lot of his personal time helping them.

“A lot of people ask me, why do I keep this job,” he said. “I really like to help refugees. I know the suffering.”