The Western Front
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
For some young Cambodian Americans, staying in touch with their culture is hard in a place so radically different from their homeland.
At Western, some of these students have formed a place where they can celebrate their culture.
For Channy Kong, a sophomore born in Cambodia, the Khmer Students Association is a place to keep her traditions alive.
“It helps me keep my culture on my mind,” Kong said. “It’s important to stay in touch with your roots and to really care for your culture because it’s the responsibility of the individual to carry on the culture, the culture isn’t going to carry on itself.”
On April 9, the first annual Cambodian New Year’s dinner was held in the Viking Union Multi-Purpose Room. The dinner, an event put on by the recently revived Khmer (pronounced “k-mai”) Student Association, was a celebration of Cambodian heritage and culture. It included traditional dances, songs, a martial arts demonstration and a speech by a Cambodian genocide survivor.
The group had been inactive for five years until vice president and founder, Vidal Men, brought it back in spring 2010. They seek to raise awareness about Cambodian culture and bring ethnic Khmer and other students together.
The Khmer people are the ethnic majority in Cambodia, accounting for about 90 percent of the country’s 14.8 million people, according to the CIA World Factbook.
Men came to Western expecting there already to be a club for Cambodian students already in place but was saddened to find that it had dissolved years before his arrival.
“Going throughout the year I saw other clubs meet and build that sort of community, have their dinner, have their culture represented, and I felt like mine wasn’t,” he said.
The new club is comprised of mostly non-Khmer students who participate in the group’s meetings and learn about the culture, Men said.
Kim-Chau Huynh, a junior who is Vietnamese, said she feels the club has taught her a lot about Cambodian culture and at the same time made her appreciate her own more deeply.
“The different foods and language reminds me of my own language,” she said. “It makes me appreciate their culture.”
Men said the reaction from Khmer students has been positive and they say their college experience is better because of it.
“They talk about how it’s a world of difference from previous years when they didn’t have a student association that belonged to them,” he said.
The old Khmer Student Association would put on statewide conferences at Western that attracted Cambodians from all over the Northwest. The group became too big to handle, and the members felt the club was too focused on big events rather than Cambodian culture.
So the club dissolved, Men said.
This time around, the club is more focused on community-building activities. The group has quarterly outings and plans for many picnics and barbecues at parks around Bellingham this spring. They also plan on going on a trip to Canada to have a large picnic in Vancouver’s Stanley Park with Cambodia native foods, Men said.
Kong said she feels here in the United States, it’s easy to lose sight of what is going on in her homeland. For her, the club has helped her stay on top of what’s happening back in the country where she was born.
“The club has opened my eyes to issues in my country,” Kong said. “People are only focused on America. Young Cambodian individuals aren’t really paying attention to what’s going on over there.”
The Khmer Student Association meets from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., Tuesdays, in the Academic Instructional Center, Room 303.
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