Student Essays Recall Refugee Trail of Horrors

Like many American junior high school students, Ngoc Vo adores Disneyland. Last year, she recalled, her family ran out of gas en route to the amusement park, coming to a halt about five miles from its destination.

But the Roosevelt Junior High ninth-grader also remembers less pleasant trips.

Ngoc wrote recently: “In Vietnam, Communists didn’t give us freedom. I came to America for freedom. I left Vietnam in a boat. It had 72 people in it. Pirates stopped us, but they didn’t do anything. They gave us some food and water and showed us how to go to Malaysia.”

Would Send Pizza

Sombath Math likes to make jokes and kid around with his friends at Roosevelt. When asked what he would like to send back to relatives still in Cambodia, he answered, “Pizza.”

But like Ngoc and other Indochinese students, Sombath harbors a wellspring of memories and emotions far deeper than those of his peers at Roosevelt.

He wrote recently about escaping from the terror in Cambodia: “Then I worked one or two weeks, and the Cambodian army took my family to Thailand. The first days that I came to Thailand, my family (six people) had no food to eat. Then two or three of the Thailand soldiers gave my family some food to eat. . . . Cambodia is my homeland. Goodby my homeland.”

Those essays, along with writings of other classmates, began earlier this spring as an assignment to work on English skills in the social studies class of teacher Chris Schatzle. But as the students searched their memories and talked to parents and relatives about their pasts, the essays turned into more than simple academic exercises.

With resource teacher Cat Xander helping to channel pent-up energies at the computer writing lab, the students honed their pieces into polished works--and added original drawings--for a special magazine, titled Home to America. The school scraped together enough money to print 150 copies, all of which were quickly snapped up by other Roosevelt pupils and teachers interested in the personal accounts of students who in many ways are enigmas to them.

Many of the stories had never been told in English because the parents of most of Schatzle’s students are unable to read and write English and depend on their children for translation. And though the students have talked about snippets of their experiences with others, this is the first time, as Quan Cuong said, “that I’ve told as much of my story.”

Srey Chhoeun sketched several Cambodian village scenes of pastoral life for the magazine. But he recalled the time of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communist army that killed an estimated 3 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979, as one of extreme deprivation.

“The Khmer Rouge had taken my three sisters away to work in different villages far away from home,” Srey wrote. “They never let them come back and visit home. . . . One evening when I came back from a farm, I saw my mother crying and I asked her why. She said that the Khmer Rouge took my father to kill. The Khmer Rouge said that my father was a soldier. For about one year, we didn’t see our father and our neighbor said he might have died.

No Medicine

“Things got really bad. My mother and my brother were sick, and there was no medicine or hospital. We didn’t have enough food to eat. . . . During the year of 1979, it was so hard to live since there was no food, so my family decided to leave our country.

“After walking for about two or three weeks, my family came to Thailand. On the way I saw a lot of people die. Some were hung on trees. A lot of babies sat by their dead parents. Many children lost their parents.”

After his essay was published, several students asked Srey if events really happened the way he and others have described.

“Yes, we tell them, it’s true,” he said, adding that his brother was hanged on a tree by the Khmer Rouge.

Added Khamseng Lalap, who wrote of her family’s walk to Thailand from their native Laos: “Everyone says it’s hard to believe.”

Srey’s brother died, but his father, inexplicably, came back a year later.

The memories remain vivid for many, such as Quan Cuong.

“In 1975, the Communists came into Saigon, where we were living, and they forced us to move away from our farm to an old temple and told us we had to stay there. It was raining, and the roof leaked. After four days, some people didn’t have enough food to eat, or money to buy food. When they went back to get their things, they were shot by the Communists. My brother was shot when he went back to get food. . . .

‘Gave Them Our Gold’

“There were over 100 people on the boat, including four from my family. . . . We saw another boat (pirates) coming to get our gold. They said that if we gave them our gold, they would let us go. They had lots of guns, and that scared us, so we gave them our gold. Some people went with them. A woman went with them, and her husband tried to get her to stay with us. The pirates shot him and threw him in the water. The rest of us got away, but we didn’t have any food to eat or water to drink because the pirates took it. Some people died because they didn’t have anything to eat . . . (but) a big boat came along and rescued us.”

Quan still has a brother in prison in Vietnam.

It was not easy for the students to put their thoughts on paper. But to a person, they all expressed pride in what they have accomplished and expressed gratitude to the United States for the chance to reconstruct their lives, to attend school, to plan a future, to be able to laugh once more.

“Dec. 21, 1980--I came to America!” Samane Singo wrote. “There are eight people in my family. I have four brothers! I arrived at the airport in Hershey, Pa. My sponsor picked me and my family up to go to his house. We had five sponsors and our sponsors separated us from each other, until our sponsor could find a house for us.

“Then our sponsor, Ellen, found a house, and Ellen told us that we were going to be living together again. My mother was very happy when we saw each other again. Our sponsor bought us clothing, shoes, food, beds, tables, chairs, and everything else that we needed.”

‘Help Kids in Trouble’

Said Samane today: “I’d like to learn more about English. I’d like to learn other languages as well, get a scholarship, and I’d like to help kids in trouble in schools.”

The students do hope to be able to return to their homelands to visit one day, when there is no more war. Their generally upbeat demeanor turns sad at the thought of relatives still caught in the maelstrom of hardship and death, especially the grandparents and the aunts and uncles who cared for them when they were small, who were too old to make the dangerous trip to freedom, who died, as Samane said, “while trying to do a lot for you.”