Economics, Not a War, Split Refugee Family of 5

Through privation and war and genocide in Cambodia, nothing could tear apart Sipon Pok’s family.

Not the Khmer Rouge soldiers who forced the harbor pilot and his wife and children into brutal labor camps, where Pok’s starving elder son snatched up lizards and cockroaches to eat.

Not the months of walking stealthily through rugged, forested mountains, eluding the Khmer Rouge--sometimes by only a mile or two--to reach a refugee camp in Thailand.

Not even the Thai government, which tried to stop the flow of Cambodian refugees, and bused Pok and his family out of the camp, dumped them at the border and forced them to walk back into Cambodia across a mine field, where the Poks were bespattered with splinters of bone and gobbets of flesh as their fellow refugees were blown to bits around them.

Even when death was “only a breath away,” nothing, it seemed, could break up Sipon and Sikoun Pok and their three children--except the rigid realities of life in the United States. Simple economics has accomplished what years of war and hardship could not.

It has separated the Poks.

At 40, Sipon Pok--the top-notch harbor pilot who during the Vietnam War used to help U.S. military ships make it up the difficult Mekong River to Cambodia’s second-largest harbor, the man who graduated at the top of his class in Cambodia’s maritime academy, who studied computer programming when he came here and made thedean’s list at California State University, Los Angeles--is on welfare, and he hates it.

He has worked all his life, even fashioning bricks by hand under the gun muzzles of the Khmer Rouge--more bricks than anyone else in camp. And now, with training and skills enough for two men, it seems no one in America will hire him.

So his wife, Sikoun, has had to leave her family and go to Texas to join a relative, to work as a computer assembler, just to get her start. As the Poks explained carefully to their children, now ages 11, 10 and 8, perhaps in six months she can be transferred to California, and live with them again in their little rented Monterey Park home.

“To get her experience, we are willing to sacrifice,” said Pok. His wife, like the rest of the family, has passed the tests but is still awaiting citizenship papers, without which Sikoun could not find work in Southern California’s defense-dominated computer assembly industry.

Their children “understand the problem. They . . . know after enough experience she can come here,” Pok says. And perhaps by then, Pok too will have a job, after nearly six years here.

He doesn’t know why it has been so hard, and he is puzzled that after doing everything by the book, he is still unemployed. American freedom, Pok has found in his six years here, is a two-edged knife.

Maybe it’s because there is still something in him of the man the Khmer Rouge had forced him to become: reserved, withdrawn, careful in his movements. Even beyond the Cambodians’ centuries-old cultural deference to authority, Khmer labor-camp life had pounded out of him the kind of self-assurance, the eye contact and hearty, confident demeanor that Americans take for granted, and American employers demand.

Only a few years before, an idle remark, an errant glance, could have gotten him killed. “To survive you had to (keep a low profile),” Pok said. “When you see something, you pretend not to see anything. When you hear something, you pretend not to hear anything.” But now, “I think I’m more aggressive; there is a lot of competition. If I act like that, the employer won’t like me.”

Maybe there is even an element of racism, he wonders. He was signed up to work on a research ship until he met the captain, who abruptly told him there was no job open. An anonymous phone call came from a crew member to Pok’s American friend, who had gotten him the job interview: “ ‘Tell your friend he’s a victim of discrimination; the captain said he doesn’t want any gooks on his boat.’ ”

Maybe it is the admittedly poor and intensely competitive maritime job market, where, he is told, “even native-born have to look for a long time.”

Every day for nearly three months, he rose before 5 a.m. to take the bus to the deckhands’ and dockworkers’ hiring hall in San Pedro, paying his monthly registration fee out of his welfare check, and watching as his number worked its way up the hiring lists--but never high enough to get him called to work.

Went Back to School

Even his merchant marine documents were not enough, and after about six months of fruitless hunting for some job on the water, he took his a friend’s advice: rather than wind up as a dishwasher who speaks three languages, he should go to school, get a new skill.

From city college to university, he earned his computer programming degree in five years, doing odd jobs after class in the campus print shop to help make ends meet.

But even with his new ability in computer programming, he has had no luck. Every day he pores over the newspaper want ads, or visits the Cal State L.A. job placement office, or trudges from company to company, resume in hand. Sometimes he gets the interview, but never has he gotten the job.

He voices the quandary of every new job-seeker:

“I go to get a job, they say you need skill and education. So I get skill and education--now they say I need experience. Maybe if I get experience, they’ll ask for citizenship. When I get that (which is imminent), what will they ask for?”

‘A Different System’

In Cambodia, he said, it was “a different system.” The Poks had earned their middle-class life: an apartment, a stove, a motorbike, French-language books. There, “once you get higher education, you get the jobs. I expected it’d be hard (here) because I know that here is a lot of competition. I still love it here. I like competition, but they don’t allow me to get into that position. If only they opened the door to me, I’d like the challenge of a position to make it grow.”

Pok’s story is atypical in some ways; most of the Cambodians who emerged as refugees after 1979 were peasants, since many among the educated class, like Pok, had been killed off by the Khmer Rouge. But much of his experience--facing the prospect of a lower-level U.S. job than one of his skills would expect--is typical of educated refugees in general.

Jim Martois, director of refugee programs at Long Beach City College, where they teach refugees everything from filling out job applications to firm handshakes, says Pok’s dilemma is “very similar to the whole (Asian refugee) community’s,” although his education and language ability give him a distinct advantage.

But there is a glut on the market of computer programmers, and often, people graduate and just can’t get a job. Many refugees go into it because it demands less English-language ability than other careers, and it promises good wages to a displaced middle-class person striving to regain lost status and life style. As a result, “what they (employers) are hiring are people with lots of skill, lots of experience,” says Martois.

Kept Family Alive

It has all been exasperating and frustrating for a man who thought the worst was over when, for the second time, he brought his family out of Cambodia’s killing fields, alive and united, and into a refugee camp, where he wrote his story on paper napkins in French and in English to the embassies of any government that might accept the Poks.

He had been responsible for his family then: under the Khmer Rouge, he kept them all silent and invisible, from the rambunctious children to his spontaneous wife, stopping them short with a murmured warning or a single glance when he saw them about to do something that could get them all killed.

On their treks through untracked forests toward freedom, navigating by his sailor’s knowledge of the stars, he found them food, he found them water--once waiting all day at a mountain crevice as water filled his teaspoon, one slow drop at a time.

He even found them medicine, tetracycline and quinine pills--priceless commodities, since the Khmer Rouge had banned them as “imperialist” and treated the sick with coconut milk. They were pills he had smuggled at the risk of his life, pills he had hidden in the thatched roof of his hut and slipped to his children as they fell ill, pills he finally bartered for a chicken or a bowl of rice on their long walk into Thailand.

Discouraged, Bitter

And now, Pok is discouraged and even bitter that all he can do to support his family is endorse a welfare check.

After his harrowing serendipity of survival, it is even more perplexing to him that things have gone so hard here.

His wife has only been gone for about three weeks now, and each day, when he is done with his round of job interviews, Pok comes home to cook dinner for the children.

His job-hunt paper work litters a table-top. His textbooks on computer programming fill the bookcase in the breakfast nook, and stuck back into one corner of a shelf, almost as though he were trying not to remind himself of them, are battered copies of “Mariner’s Notebook” and “Piloting, Seamanship and Small Boat Handling.”

“My big dream is still to be a harbor pilot, but I think to get that dream I have to pass a lot of barriers. . . . Right now I am thinking to be a programmer; that’s the best shot for me.”

Happiest Moments Here

His Cal State certificates hang on the wall above his children’s goldfish tank. On one cork-covered wall are tacked Pok’s college graduation pictures, and some snapshots of him piloting his American friend’s boat--his happiest moments here.

Here, too, are his children’s schoolwork and honors. His elder son, Rith, won second place in a school district essay contest, writing about the family’s long odyssey out of Cambodia.

And there is something else, a fifth-grade objet d’art by his son Rapok, one of those pre-printed drawings that schoolchildren fill in with colors for art class.

It is a picture of that symbol of industry and foresight, the squirrel, holding an acorn between his paws, and below it, Rapok has written his own moral: “I like school because I like to learn so when I grow up I could get a job easier.”