“When you are old enough to get married–– when they have a party, call a meeting, they take all the single women and let her be taken by a soldier. You know, the one ‘fighting for liberty for the communists,'” Choi told the Signal Tribune during a phone interview last week. “Those guys come and select you. ‘I like this girl. I like this girl.’ You have to get married to them. You cannot say no. If you say no, you will be in trouble, they will kill you.”
Choi and the other young, unmarried women she was living with at the time had already been separated from their parents by the regime.
The leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, tried to turn Cambodia into an entirely self-sufficient agricultural state in the 1970s , with all citizens of the country being forced to live in rural communes. To achieve this goal, the Cambodian family structure was undermined as people were assigned groups to live with based on age and gender.
“During communism, the parents and the children live separate. If [they] are after 10, 11 years old, some of the kids are moved out already,” Choi said. “They remove them out. By the time I was 18, I was not living with my mother anymore. We were moved out already. We had a group. […] We didn’t live with parents anymore. We were working apart, farming.”
The Khmer Rouge wanted the people of Cambodia to dedicate their time and effort to furthering the communist state rather than family responsibilities.
“You have to go, otherwise they kill you.” Choi said. “You cannot say anything. You cannot say, ‘Oh no, my mom’s old, I cannot go, I have to take care of my mom.’ No. They will kill you. They tell you ‘sit down,’ you sit down. They tell you ‘get up,’ you get up.”
Besides breaking up the traditional family unit for the sake of its political ideology, the Khmer Rouge also tried to nationalize the personal possessions of all citizens.
This meant that Cambodian citizens had no right to private property under the Khmer Rouge and had to go to extreme lengths to hide their few remaining possessions from the state.
“If you wear something–– you wear a watch, you wear jewelry, if they see you and tell you to give it to them, you have to give it to them,” Choi said.
She said that while Cambodian civilians were out working in the fields, soldiers would search the homes of anyone who had previously been wealthy for items of value that they may have hidden. Those found to be keeping personal possessions from the government were executed.
A significant portion of the Cambodian population found a small amount of relief when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were driven out by the invading Vietnamese army in 1979.
Choi recalled that while the invading army wasn’t perfect, overall the Vietnamese soldiers were far more humane towards Cambodian civilians than the Khmer Rouge had been.
“Honestly, they never hurt us, anyone of us,” Choi said of her experience with Vietnamese soldiers. “Some even came and gave some medicine to the sick people. Some [of them] gave us some food too. But some of them stole a lot of stuff from us too.”
The Khmer Rouge had restricted travel in and out of Cambodia while it controlled the country, but once the party was toppled by the Vietnamese, many Cambodian people were given the opportunity to leave and saw this as a way to escape the violence and starvation they had experienced.
Although traveling outside of Cambodia became easier after 1979, Cambodian refugees still risked their lives while crossing into Thailand. Even after the United Nations and the Thai government reached an agreement wherein Thailand would accept the refugees, the border between the two countries remained rife with buried land mines.
Dr. Sorpong Peou, Full Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University in Ontario, Canada, is among the Cambodian immigrants who crossed the land-mine riddled border to enter refugee camps in Thailand.
Peou told the Signal Tribune that while the refugees who were able to escape from Cambodia during the time the Khmer Rouge was in power were few in number, that amount greatly increased after the Vietnamese invasion.
“One can make the case that they were different to the extent that those who fled during Khmer Rouge years were small in numbers and they fled because of the killings/repression. Those who fled after the Vietnamese invasion decided to do so because they did not trust the new communist regime and they had a chance to do so without great risks. But they risked their lives by walking across minefields (my case). So more Cambodians left for Thailand in 1979 and after,” Peou wrote in an email.
After the ousting of Pol Pot from the capital city Phnom Penh, the communist and pro-Vietnam Kampuchean People’s Revolutionary Party became the dominate political power in Cambodia, but guerrilla warfare from Khmer Rouge factions taking refuge in the jungles still plagued the nation.
Eventually, the United Nations took control of the Cambodian government after the Oct. 23, 1991 signing of The Comprehensive Cambodian Peace Agreement in Paris, and led the country towards its first democratically held election in 1993. For this reason, the nation of Cambodia celebrates Oct. 23 as a public holiday each year.
But during the years of turmoil and political uncertainty Choi’s family was so motivated to escape Cambodia that they didn’t give much thought to how the United States would be before they arrived in 1982. Choi, her sister, step-sister, mother and grandmother relocated to California because they had family members living here who could help arrange sponsorships for them.
“We didn’t think we had a choice, and I never knew if America is a good country or a bad country.” Choi said. “[During] that time, as long as we pass the interview, any country, we just go.”
Choi had most of her family in the US already, so for them, it was a more favorable choice.
While Choi decided not to accept government assistance upon settling in California, she and other single Cambodian refugees were eligible for $247 a month for the first 18 months after their arrival to support them while they looked for employment.
Choi, like many Cambodian immigrants in Signal Hill and Long Beach, found work, paid for her own education and started a family. She has achieved a lengthy career in the United States Postal Service and now lives in Signal Hill with her husband and two adult children, who attend Long Beach City College and University California Los Angeles.
Cambodian immigrants and their families have contributed to the culture and history of the local area, with Long Beach now having the most Cambodian people of any city outside Cambodia. To recognize the achievements made by the Cambodian community locally, in July 2007 the Long Beach City Council voted 8-1 to name the portion of Anaheim Street between Atlantic Avenue and Junipero Avenue “Cambodia Town,” according to an article by the Press Telegram published in July 2007.
Within Long Beach’s Cambodia Town, the Mark Twain Neighborhood Library contains the most expansive collection of Khmer books located outside of Cambodia. The library also serves as a community center for Long Beach and Signal Hill’s Cambodian population with ongoing events, such as bilingual Khmer story time for children, Khmer language classes and senior exercise classes with Khmer music playlists being held to promote and preserve Cambodian culture locally.
