A Cambodian Family Is at Last Reunited

Kalyana Sei, 18, tried to picture her mother’s face just minutes before the plane landed. Except for a brief period in 1979, Kalyana had not seen her mother since she was 7.

“I still see her like she was when I was 7; I can’t really picture her as she is now,” said Kalyana Sei as she and her 25-year-old brother, Rith, waited impatiently on the observation deck at John Wayne Airport for a glimpse of the jet that was bringing their mother to them.

Alternately excited, tense and fearful, Kalyana and Rith recalled their flight from Cambodia, now the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, after the Khmer Rouge forces led by Pol Pot overthrew the United States-backed Lon Nol government in April, 1975.

But on the airport Tarmac Tuesday evening, the painful memories of the past 11 years faded as the brother and sister embraced their mother, 64-year-old Sarann Kan Sei, in a tearful reunion.

Sei was accompanied by three other daughters, two sons and a grandson, whose mother had died. Years of anguish, longing and uncertainty dissolved as the reunited family and a group of about 15 friends and relatives sobbed and hugged.

“My mother has been through so much,” Rith said with a loving glance at the petite woman, who seemed weary from the long flight from Thailand. “She has been under a great deal of stress.”

Rith said the family became separated in 1975, and it was not until 1979 that they briefly found each other again. But out of fear that the teen-aged Rith would be drafted, he said he and Kalyana, with another sister, Sonida, literally walked out of Cambodia.

The trio escaped the dreaded labor camps that had stopped Dith Pran, whose flight from Cambodia was depicted in the 1984 film “The Killing Fields.”

Called ‘Very Fortunate’

In a telephone interview from New York, Dith Pran said Tuesday that despite the assassination of Sarann Sei’s husband, Oeung Sei, a well-known brigadier general in the Cambodian Republican Army, the Sei family “is very fortunate.”

“She is so lucky because in some places they (the Khmer Rouge) assassinated the wife along with the husband,” Dith Pran said.

Pran, who escaped Cambodia about seven years ago by walking to freedom in Thailand after Vietnamese forces conquered his country, said his own brother, a colonel in the Cambodian army, was assassinated along “with all his family, including his wife and four children.”

As for the Sei family, Pran said he was “extremely happy” that after all these years, they could finally be reunited.

According to William J. Lasley of Fullerton, who is co-sponsoring the Sei family, the children “marched on foot” from Kampuchea’s capital city, Phnom Penh, to the Thailand border after their father was assassinated by officers of the Pol Pot regime “as part of a death march in their killing fields.”

Smooth Transition

“They pretended they were going to the next village until they got to Thailand,” said Lasley, who was on hand at the 7 p.m. reunion at the airport.

Rith and Kalyana now live with cousins in Santa Ana. Sonida, 29, is married and lives in Oakland. The transition for the children, who arrived in the United States in July of 1981, has been relatively smooth, they said Tuesday.

All graduated from high school and Rith is expected to graduate with a degree in accounting from Cal State Fullerton in May. Kalyana, who recently finished high school, is a part-time student at Orange Coast College and an auditor for a fast-food chain.

The rest of the family is among the last of an estimated 23,000 refugees to leave Khao-I-Dang Refugee Camp, the last United Nations refugee camp in Thailand.

Their mother, who was with the Red Cross in Phnom Penh, was one of the hundreds of thousands of fleeing Cambodians who sought refuge at Khao-I-Dang Refugee Camp, which was little more than a collection of rickety, thatched huts with walls made of sticks.

The Thai government ordered Khao-I-Dang closed Dec. 31, claiming that Western countries were moving too slowly in resettling its residents. The camp was once a symbol of hope for Cambodians, many of whom fled persecution under the former Khmer Rouge government.

Refugee Camps

According to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, nearly 210,000 Cambodians passed through the doors at Khao-I-Dang and several smaller camps over the years, nearly 140,000 of them en route to the United States.

On Tuesday evening, with life in the refugee camp firmly behind her now, Sarann Kan Sei seemed somewhat overwhelmed by the foreign surroundings But as she clutched a black shawl around her shoulders, she said in a soft voice, “My primary goal was to come to America.” With Rith translating her words into English, she added, “Yes, I am excited about being here.”

The four sisters were a jumble of arms as they hugged and kissed one another. And Rith playfully punched Sereivuth,) a younger brother he hadn’t seen since 1979, in the arm.

“Look at him. The last time I saw him, he was much shorter than me. Now just look at him,” he said of the 17-year-old youth, now the taller of the two.

Most of the family will settle in a two-bedroom town house in Costa Mesa and at least one of the sons will probably move in with their sister in Oakland, Rith said.

“I want them all to at least get a BA,” Rith said. “That is almost a prerequisite in this country.”

But first, he said, they will learn English.