At Southeast Asian conference, Rhode Island youth are told they must understand their history

Sunday, May 16, 2010
By Karen Lee Ziner
Providence Journal
Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE –– Socheata Poeuv (pictured) did not really understand who she was until her mother revealed a family secret she’d been hiding since fleeing the Khmer Rouge holocaust decades ago. The secret: Poeuv’s two sisters are actually her biological cousins; her brother is actually her half-brother — all folded into their family after the war.

“My family was essentially formed by Cambodian genocide, and I didn’t even realize who I was, or who my family was,” Poeuv said. That revelation during a family meeting one Christmas prompted Poeuv to travel to Cambodia “to uncover my family story.” She tells that story in her award-winning documentary, “New Year Baby,” a story “of love, joy and pardon,” broadcast nationally in 2008 on Independent Lens.

Poeuv was the keynote speaker at Saturday’s opening of a two-day conference, “S.E.A. The Future,” at the Met School. More than 70 people attended.

Sponsored by the Providence Youth Student Movement, the conference stressed that Southeast Asian youth must understand their history, help bridge generational gaps and move their communities — Hmong, Laotian, Cambodian and Vietnamese — forward in society. The conference continues Sunday at 9 a.m. at 362 Dexter St. in Providence.

Poeuv, born on the Cambodian New Year in a Thai refugee camp, said she always asked her parents, ‘Who are the Khmer Rouge?’ — the Pol Pot regime responsible for the deaths by murder, starvation and disease of a quarter of the country’s population.“But they always dodged my questions. I was left to my own imagination,” she said. That is, until her mother called a family meeting one Christmas “and told us a secret she’d been hiding for 25 years. I felt like I didn’t know my own family and wondered, ‘What are the secrets they left behind in Cambodia?’ ”

Poeuv said, “I think I was like a lot of you. I had grown up in America and created a life that would transcend that of my parents and their history.” But she eventually realized that no matter how hard she might try to move beyond that, that history “affects how I operate in the world and how the world sees me.”

She advised her youthful audience that “understanding your history helps you understand yourself.”“What does it mean to be authentically Southeast Asian? My advice is to take the best of it — family culture, respect for elders, the hard work,” and leave behind the worst, including “fear of the outside world, family silence, toxic family dynamic. Find the opportunity to hold onto family history and culture as much as you can,” she said.

Poeuv said, “I also want to smash this idea that in order to succeed in America, you need to leave your community.”

Noting that many in the room are on the verge of adulthood, Poeuv said, “No matter what you may choose to do or study, you have an opportunity to serve a community that needs you the most, which is the Southeast Asian community. We have to start taking responsibility for our own community.”

The conference also marks the release of the Providence Youth Student Movement’s report, “For Justice and Love, The Quality of Life for Southeast Asian Youth,” based on interviews with Southeast Asian youth, as well as U.S. census data, Providence Journal archives, academic journals and numerous other reports.

Its policy recommendations include that state and municipal agencies and publicly licensed health-care institutions collect and report data by ethnicity — not just race. It urges the City of Providence and the state to “support and invest in a translation and interpretation infrastructure to provide equal access for the Southeast Asian community.”

Conference emcee Jimmy Chareunsouk said although Rhode Island’s Southeast Asians share the trauma of war, genocide and survival, they remain divided.

“No one is going to change the community for us. The ones who must change it are those of us in this room.” He quoted the proverb, “You make the road by walking.”

To learn more about the Providence Youth Student Movement, visit www.prysm.us

kziner@projo.com