Aid a Way of Life for Some Cambodians

Say Leng’s past in Cambodia is a nightmare of gunfire, bombs and rotting bodies scattered on unpaved roads. But now that she and her family are safe thousands of miles from home, the future poses a much different problem: how to survive if the welfare checks stop coming.

The 45-year-old refugee, a divorced mother who lives with 10 children and grandchildren in a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment, has been on welfare since arriving in Orange County from the killing fields of Cambodia in 1983. No one in the household works.

“There is nothing special about my family and how we live,” Leng said one day in her native Khmer language, through an interpreter. “Around here, a lot of my friends and neighbors, their situation is like [my family’s].”

Leng is among an estimated 4,000 Cambodians who live in the Minnie Street area, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Orange County. Approximately 85% of them receive some form of welfare payment, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children or Supplemental Security Income for the disabled. Overall, about 65% of the 8,000 Cambodian refugees in Orange County receive welfare payments.

The latter figure has actually declined from the year before. Some of those who have escaped welfare dependency are former Minnie Street area residents who have found ways to leave and better their lives.

But amid the neat rows of old apartment buildings in this area bordered by Standard, McFadden, Grand and Chestnut avenues, it is common for Cambodian families of a dozen people to cram into one- and two-bedroom dwellings. They are drawn to the area, where first-generation immigrants have established a sizable Cambodian community.

Many of the adults are physically or mentally disabled, uneducated and unable to speak English. These grim facts have never been more worrisome for social workers helping the refugees, now that the federal government is about to overhaul the welfare system that has been an economic crutch for many of these emigres for so long.

Two proposals in Congress would significantly restrict welfare benefits for legal immigrants. A House measure would reduce welfare benefits for immigrants already in the country, while a Senate bill would restrict benefits for naturalized citizens who immigrate after its enactment.

“Whatever the outcome . . . it’s going to be very dramatic, and in many cases devastating, for the people in the community,” said Rifka Hirsch, executive director of The Cambodian Family Inc., a nonprofit social service agency in Santa Ana. “They will adjust. But given their history and the trauma they’ve been through, we don’t know how long it will take.”

Some, however, choose welfare as a way of life.

Leng and her four teen-age children receive about $1,000 a month in food stamps and welfare payments. Her oldest daughter, 23-year-old Souen Long, is married and has four children of her own. Long’s family, which shares the $725-per-month apartment with Leng and Long’s siblings, receives about $1,600 in welfare payments and food stamps each month.

Long has no plans to go to work any time soon. “Maybe someday when my kids grow up, I can go to work,” she said. “But now, I want to stay on welfare until my kids get older.”

Community leaders and government officials say that attitude concerns them, especially because it indicates a second generation of welfare dependency.

“Given that the Cambodian families have been on AFDC for years now and some of their children are now heading down the same path, something is not working,” said Toyo Biddle, director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Refugees. “The reality is that things are going to have to change, because the system is not working and it cannot continue to support this kind of dependency.”

Like the Vietnamese emigres who fled their war-torn country, the 140,000 Cambodians who entered the United States in the 1980s came as refugees. They followed their Southeast Asian neighbors first into camps in Thailand and the Philippines, then to the United States under immigration law that granted them political refugee status.

But the similarities between the two groups end there.

Unlike the first wave of Vietnamese refugees, who were mostly educated, wealthy and skilled workers, most of the Cambodians were peasant farmers. Most were illiterate and had no skills marketable in an industrial society. Even now, many cannot spell their own names in Khmer.

“In Cambodia, the basic needs are minimal--bare feet and bare hands would do,” said Him Chimm, executive director of the Cambodian Assn. of America, which is based in Long Beach, where 18,000 Cambodians, the largest enclave in the United States, have settled.

Despite living well below the federal poverty line of $15,150 in annual income for a family of four, many do not consider themselves poor in comparison to their standard of living in Cambodia, social workers said.

“In Cambodia, I lived in a small hut [covered by] coconut leaves,” Leng said. “Here, I have enough. A real home. I don’t have much money, but I get enough to buy food and pay bills. That is enough.”

Another obstacle to the Cambodians’ ability to adapt to life in the United States, Chimm and others said, is the trauma they suffered at the hands of Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

From 1975 to 1978, nearly 2 million Cambodians died from disease, starvation or execution by the Khmer Rouge.

Social workers also believe that many Cambodians do not understand the dire consequences awaiting them if the welfare cuts are enacted.

“For many of our people who came from the rural villages, they do not have notions of long-range thinking,” Chimm said. “They don’t know what next month looks like. They’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow.”

Indeed, Leng said she doesn’t want to think about welfare cuts. “I don’t understand what they all mean,” she said one afternoon, sitting on the floor of her living room, which is covered by straw mats. “I don’t understand why welfare would be taken away from us. How would we get food? How would we pay our rent?”

Long, her husband and their four children live in one bedroom of Leng’s cramped apartment. Three of her siblings share the other. One of her brothers sleeps on a cot set up in the living room, and Leng sleeps on an old couch in the same room.

The families have no savings and at times must borrow money or groceries from other relatives and neighbors. But they make do with what they have, and are content, they said.

Leng has tried to take English classes, but said she gets headaches and can’t retain the lessons for long.

“I have tried in some ways to fit in with the outside world,” said Leng, who sometimes still has nightmares about the days when she dodged Khmer Rouge bullets while walking over dead bodies strewn on the road. “But I’m not comfortable there. I don’t understand what the people are saying.

“I feel safer in my world,” she added, spreading her arms wide to indicate her apartment and beyond it, a grassy courtyard where Cambodian children were running and laughing. “I hope it doesn’t change too soon. I don’t know what to do if it does.”