Prayers for a Once Gentle Land

In 1981, Leesokun and Sovanna Thach arrived at Los Angeles International Airport without a suitcase or a hint of what lay ahead. They survived genocide in their native Cambodia and had been homeless since 1975, living in jungles, prison farms and finally a Thai refugee camp. In two days, they would be homeless again, this time in America.

Sovanna’s sister greeted him and his young family at the airport and took them to her home in Long Beach, where they spent the night--12 people in one room.

The next day, they were told of a nearby abandoned house, a shack really. It was December and cold. Leesokun’s daughter from a previous marriage, Moni Noy, was 6. Stephen was less than 2 months old. They lay on the floor, listening to new silence and new sounds, strange voices in the night.

They had become Christians in the refugee camp, so they had faith. They had $800 given them by a charity to start new lives. They had cold running water. And that was all. The thing about America, they say, is that it was enough.

There are four children now. Stephen, 15, Stephanie, 13, and Tiffany, 10, are students at Cambodian Christian School, where Leesokun is a volunteer. Moni, 22, is in college. Sovanna, after studying English and earning a two-year degree in auto mechanics at Long Beach City College, sells insurance.

In Long Beach, the Thach family lives among the largest population of ethnic Cambodians outside their native land.

For many, the horrors of Cambodia have been followed by another struggle in America. A 1996 survey conducted by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles concluded that ethnic Cambodians remain the poorest, least-educated Asian Pacific group in Los Angeles County.

This month’s gunfire and coup by then-Co-Prime Minister Hun Sen shattered a fragile peace and brought back piercing memories for survivors of the genocide.

Leesokun has returned to Cambodia three times. Each visit, she hopes to find softness returned to the lives of her people. It was a gentle country before war, before 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took control and more than 1 million people perished to violence, disease and starvation. She hopes it can be gentle again.

In 1995, she and Sovanna had a well dug in the small village where Moni was born in exile. Each visit, they deliver medicine and food. Their last trip ended on July 5.

They were in Phnom Penh admiring new tall buildings, people in business suits and other signs of economic recovery. People seemed happy, they say, optimistic about the future. But less than four hours after their plane departed, gunfire returned to Cambodia, closing the airport and triggering fear of another full-scale civil war.

Once again, Leesokun, 48, and Sovanna, 46, crossed the ocean to America, caught between prayers of gratitude and desperation. This time, they were coming home.

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As a child, Leesokun cooked, cleaned and cared for 10 brothers and sisters. She sold food in the streets, sometimes giving it away to the hungry at the risk of being punished when she returned home.

She grew up in Phnom Penh but moved to Batdambang in the mid-1960s. Leesokun, known to those around her as Sokun, was never close to her father, who worked in a hog-processing plant. Her mother died in 1970.

It was a hard life, and she was 14 the first time she tried to kill herself. She swallowed 32 pills, the color of a peach, in four steady gulps. She didn’t know how to write, and she wanted to explain herself, so she gathered her younger brothers and sisters, too young to understand, and said goodbye before changing into her best clothes to die.

Days later, she awakened in a hospital, sad to see life again. She went to live with an uncle and was forced to marry at 17. It was an abusive relationship requiring more hard labor. She suffered two miscarriages and had three children before divorce. Her husband took the children.

“I walk alone everywhere,” she says. “I sit on bridge one day and want to jump off. I want suicide too that time.”

An old woman stopped her and showed her kindness. She had a son, and he, too, was kind. In time, Leesokun married the son and for a brief time, lived happier than she had ever been. She was pregnant with Moni when the Khmer Rouge herded people from the cities and began their reign of terror.

Leesokun and her husband were forced in different directions. Not knowing if he was dead or alive, she would spend years searching for him. A soldier assisting Americans fighting the North Vietnamese in Cambodia, he was an early target of the Khmer Rouge. The educated, the wealthy and the soldiers were the first to die.

Imprisoned on work farms, death--as brutal as death can be--was all around Leesokun. Soldiers arrested her cousin one day, and she tried not to watch as his chest was split open and hands of soldiers reached inside him to rip him apart. A rifle was pointed at her head, and she was ordered to open her eyes. To witness the horror of the killing fields.

On the prison farm, she heard that her husband had fled to Thailand, so she escaped in darkness to the jungle, hiding from soldiers and carrying Moni in a desperate attempt for freedom. Land mines were everywhere, and at one point, a woman 15 feet away stepped on one.

“I fell down, and that lady, I cannot see the body. All on the trees, hair on the trees. . . . Sometimes people sleep and die. You talk to them. In morning you see the body--no breathe, no more talk to you. You cannot help them.”

She walked 10 days carrying Moni, lethargic from sickness, a small pot, two spoons and a fistful of rice. As she approached the Thai border, she came upon a river separating her from an area safe from enemy soldiers. With gunfire closing in, she stood helpless, unable to swim.

An old woman came with a raft fashioned from the trunk of a banana tree, and Leesokun placed Moni on the wood. The woman pushed her to safety, then returned for Leesokun. The sounds of Khmer Rouge guns were getting closer. She was too big, too scared for the raft and told the lady to go--to take care of Moni.

The woman spotted a huge pot nearby, and Leesokun pulled it to the water and held on to it while the woman pushed her across the current to safety. Thai soldiers guarded the border, so Leesokun waited for camp officials to drive across and take her into Thailand. A group had gathered and were preparing to kill a captured Khmer Rouge soldier. Leesokun pleaded with them to spare his life.

“It must end,” she said. “My husband gone, your husband gone, your brother gone. You cannot bring them back by killing him. After you kill, his family come and kill you. Back and forth. Never end. Forgive.”

The man’s life was spared. Soldiers from the camp came and Leesokun and Moni entered the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in 1979. She never found her husband.

One day, a man saw her and Moni, sick and hungry. He gave them food. Sovanna had survived his own tragic journey, which claimed more than 100 relatives. Within shadows of terror, it was an unlikely time and place to find love. Sovanna and Leesokun were married in 1980 and soon found themselves bound for America.

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They were at the Social Security office one day when Leesokun became thirsty. She studied people as they walked to a fountain and drank. She waited patiently then approached the fountain herself, lowered her head and opened her mouth. No water came out, so she sat back down.

She watched another man approach the fountain, bumping it with his stomach before drinking. She tried again, giving it a solid thump, bending over and opening her mouth a second time. Still, no water. It must only serve Americans, she concluded.

“No eyes, no ears, but it knows I’m Cambodian,” she thought. Learning about America was not easy.

Betty and Richard Shadburn met the Thach family through their church and helped them adapt to American ways. They took them to a park and explained that it was OK for the children to play there. They helped the family celebrate its first Christmas here.

“I wasn’t aware of how little they had,” Betty says, “but they never complained about anything. They were always positive about how things could be.”

The Shadburns played the role of grandparents to the children. Before his death two years ago, Richard asked that Stephen be paid for coming to the house on Saturdays to work in the yard “and take care of Grandma.”

Sovanna and Leesokun discovered they could earn money by collecting and selling cans. Sovanna searched for them at Long Beach City College, and Leesokun roamed the neighborhood, terrified of getting lost.

She found clothes in trash cans, and soon Moni was wearing men’s pants, cinched around her waist and ankles with string. When she started school, Leesokun made her a sign with “Stop” written on it. Each time Moni crossed the street, she held the sign above her head.

In trash cans, Leesokun found chicken necks, which she boiled with cabbage. She found coats that became beds. The abandoned house was cold, and Stephen became sick. Scared, Leesokun took him to see a doctor.

Dr. Maurice Decuir didn’t ask about insurance, didn’t ask about money. He treated Stephen for bronchitis and gave him medicine. Decuir grew up in the deep South and knew what it was to be poor. He hired Leesokun to clean his office, and when Sovanna graduated from college, he hired him to translate for the growing number of Cambodians coming to his office. Decuir leased them a car and paid for the gas and insurance.

“I didn’t do it out of pity,” he says. “I could tell they were good people. They needed a car because not only did they not have one, no one in their community had one.”

Decuir’s kindness was a turning point in their lives. Sovanna eventually found work as an assistant with a life insurance company and was promoted to agent. In 1988, they bought a three-bedroom home in Long Beach. They also own rental property. They worked hard to build this new life, and lost in the shuffle was Moni.

By the time she was 15, drawn by peers and caught between cultures, Moni had drifted away from her parents. An aunt told Moni when the girl was 9 that Sovanna was not her father, and it made her feel less a part of the family. Mostly, she wanted her life to be like the ones she saw on television.

“We never had relationships. My parents were raised in Cambodia, and they didn’t come from close families,” she says. “I didn’t know their story, and I wondered why we couldn’t be like the families on television that hug and kiss. Every kid wants that.”

Pastor Joe Esposito of the Cambodian Baptist Church intervened and found Moni, who had run away and joined a street gang. Esposito has 15 young men living in his house, most of them trying to leave gangs.

The Long Beach Police Department has identified about 600 Southeast Asian gang members, most of them of Cambodian ancestry. Sovann Tith, executive director of the United Cambodian Community Center, estimates that as many as 5,000 have been in gangs at some point in their lives.

Esposito made arrangements for Moni to attend a Christian boarding school in Indiana for a year before coming home to rejoin her family. It’s hard to say, Esposito says, who changed more--Moni or her parents.

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Leesokun and Sovanna began spending more time with their children, talking to them and showing their affection. Moni left the gang and now attends Hyles-Anderson College in Crown Point, Ind., where she is an education major.

The church is at the center of the family’s life. Sovanna and Leesokun open their doors to runaways or other young people who need a place to stay. They talk to parents to help them resolve family problems.

As the Thach family moves forward, lost pieces of their past continue to emerge. They are still searching for members of their families. In 1992, Sovanna found his mother and brought her to Long Beach. In 1995, Leesokun found a daughter from her first marriage. Two children are still missing. Last year, she discovered that her second husband, Moni’s father, was still alive.

Moni made her first trip to Cambodia last summer, traveling with her mother to meet her half sister and father and to see the village where she was born. It was difficult for her to see beyond the poverty, and it wasn’t until she returned to the United States that she understood what she had seen.

“My mother told me not to look down at people because they are poor,” she says. “She told me that I once lived like they lived and that I should be thankful.”

One image remains vivid in her memory from the trip. It’s of a frail old man without legs, his skin dirty and hanging loosely from his bones, his eyes set deeply. “My mom gave him money. I think about him a lot,” she says.

Her goal now is to return to Cambodia and open a school, perhaps in the rural village where she was born, to cross the ocean separating her two worlds and, like her parents, bring softness to a country longing to be gentle once again.