Starting Over : For Cambodian Merchant, It’s Not Question of If, but How

Samath (Sam) Yem does not spend a lot of time trying to figure out the reasons why someone burned his Long Beach store. To Yem, that would be like trying to figure out a typhoon, or an earthquake or a tidal wave.

The important thing to Yem is to figure out how to start over again. That he will, to Sam Yem, is an article of faith.

“Of course I will start over,” Yem said, standing in the rubble of his blackened store, the Khemara Gift Center and Travel Agency, on East Anaheim Street near Raymond Avenue in Long Beach.

“I want to stay here. I like Long Beach. It’s like my homeland.”

Still, Yem realizes there are many problems to face and much uncertainty ahead. He is still not sure how much insurance he had on his estimated $200,000 inventory of audio and videotapes, toys, watches, clothing, cosmetics, shoes and other merchandise that was destroyed when fire swept through his store at the tail end of the riots. He fears that not much of it was covered.

He asked his mortgage company to give him a little leeway on his house payments because of the disaster, but they have not told him yet if he will be allowed to miss a payment or two. He went to the federal disaster relief center on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue to see about a Small Business Administration loan, but he does not know yet if he will qualify. He does not know if his landlord will rebuild, or if he will have to find another site for his store.

Neither does he have any outside income to tide him over--no extra money from other working family members. His whole family worked, all right, but they all worked at the now-charred store: all eight of them--Yem, his wife, his sister and brother, his sister-in-law and brother-in-law, his nephew, his son.

The family Yem was the Khemara Gift Center and Travel Agency, and the Khemara Gift Center and Travel Agency was the family Yem. Without it they have nothing.

Another man might throw up his hands in bitter despair. But Yem, a 41-year-old with a quick smile, has seen far too much adversity to worry about temporary setbacks. Compared to where he was 20 years ago, compared to where he could have been today, he said he does not have much to complain about.

Back in 1970, Yem was a soldier in the Cambodian army, a young draftee plucked out of school to fight the resurgent communist Khmer Rouge rebels. He also spent a few months with a Cambodian army contingent in South Vietnam in 1971, fighting the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.

In both circumstances it was a losing fight. When the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, Yem, like hundreds of thousands of other Cambodians, gathered up his family and headed on foot for refuge in Thailand.

Some of the refugees traveling with the Yems were caught by the Khmer Rouge and never seen again. Yem’s wife’s family disappeared in the years of murderous terror that followed the fall of Cambodia--terror that claimed countless lives.

Yem and his family were luckier. They made it to a refugee camp in Thailand, where they waited six months before getting permission to emigrate to America.

“When my country was taken over by the communists, I knew there was only one place I wanted to go--America,” Yem said. “It’s better than any other country.”

Even in Los Angeles, it was tough in the beginning. Hard work was called for. Yem trained as a welder and moved to Utah where he practiced his trade at a medical supplies company for several years before moving back to L.A. Here, he worked at a social service agency for Southeast Asian refugees. He became a U.S. citizen in 1987.

Yem saved and borrowed enough money--about $250,000--to open his own business.

The borrowed money did not come from a bank but from the informal financing that is common in Cambodian and other Asian communities. The money is loaned on a handshake, at zero interest. Later, when he is able, the borrower is expected to become a zero-interest lender to others of his community who need business financing.

Yem chose a 6,000-square-foot, $1,800-a-month commercial space in a one-story building on East Anaheim Street, in the heart of the Long Beach Cambodian business district. It is a place where Cambodian script vies with Western lettering on every other storefront sign, a place filled with names like Heap Seng Market, Bang Kom Market No. 1, Hak Heang Restaurant. Yem named his store the Khemara Gift Center.

From the start, the Yem family members poured all of their time and effort into the store. They built the shelves, the partitions, the glass cases. They stocked it with merchandise. They worked from morning until night, and then some. The family opened Khemara Travel Agency in part of the store, handling mostly travel to Thailand and other Southeast Asian destinations. Yem often served as a tour guide for groups going to Bangkok.

“It was a good business,” Yem said, good enough to support his family, good enough to enable him to buy a small house on a tree-lined street in Lakewood. It is nothing fancy, just an average tract house, in an average neighborhood. The thing that distinguishes Yem’s house from the others on the street is the American flag proudly affixed to the front door.

The Yems get along well with their neighbors, Sam Yem said, both at home and at work. For example, they regularly exchanged gifts with the African-American family that lived in a house behind the store. Later that family helped the Yems clean up their burned-out shop.

“We never had any trouble,” Yem said. Then he added, in an offhand way, as if it really wasn’t anything to complain about, hardly worth mentioning, “We did get robbed one time--just one time.”

Then the riots came to Long Beach, riots that left one person dead, 361 injured, 159 buildings damaged or destroyed, more than 1,200 people arrested and the Yem family’s livelihood in ruins.

Yem was in Bangkok as a tour guide when the riots first broke out. His brother Sao got a gun and guarded the store on Thursday and Friday nights, at the height of the burning and looting. Although several nearby businesses were hit by looters, the Khemara Gift Center was undisturbed.

By Saturday night things seemed to have cooled down, so Sao Yem left the store untended. At about 10 p.m. fire broke out in the store. Long Beach Fire Department officials say witnesses reported hearing glass breaking and saw several people running from the scene, and the flames erupted moments later. The fire is being investigated as an arson.

The alarm company notified the Yems, but by that time the store and travel agency were a total loss. Yem’s wife Sophath called him in Bangkok and told him the news.

“I asked her how bad it was,” Sam Yem recalled. “She said everything was gone. I felt very sad, because this business is our life.”

The Yems were only one of many Cambodian families hard hit by the destruction. According to Bryce Chy of the Cambodian Assn. of America, a nonprofit Long Beach organization that represents the Cambodian community, 35 Cambodian-owned businesses in Long Beach were destroyed or seriously damaged in the civil unrest.

Sam Yem does not really understand the riots. He knows about the Rodney King verdict, of course, but he says he can’t understand why, in America, the people would start to fight each other.

“The United States is like a hundred different nations all joined together,” he said. “That’s why they call it united.”

The sentiment is spoken by a man who came from a country torn apart by real war, by slaughter unimaginable to most Americans. In a country such as this, Yem believes, what is there to fight about?

So he blames no one, curses no one. He looks ahead, not back.

“I have to wait to see about the insurance, and the loans,” Yem said. The Cambodian business community was hit so hard by the riots, he said, that the informal banking system he used to get started is no longer an option. Too many people need too much money, so this time he may have to use a more conventional loan.

“I have to look for work to support the family until the store can open. There are many difficulties.”

Still, if the Yem family--Samath (Sam) Yem, wife Sophath, sister Sem Yem, brother Sao Yem, sister-in-law Srey Yem, brother-in-law Neaker Thach, nephew Tuch Sen and sons Matt and Sophai Yem--have anything to say about it, one thing seems certain.

Someday, some way, and probably somewhere in Long Beach, the Khemara Gift Center and Travel Agency will rise again.