LONG BEACH -- Wilson High student Kunthea "Meme" Sin often feels lonely. Amanda Em, a Poly High student, sometimes wondered what was wrong with her parents and why they acted as they did. Sure, these could be the stories of almost any teenagers growing up through history.
The difference is that as Cambodian-Americans and children of refugees, Sin and Em carry a difficult legacy.
Many must deal with the fallout from a damaged generation of survivors who are now raising families, still struggling to fit into a new culture and inadvertently passing along much of the pain for their children to sift through.
Much of Long Beach's Cambodian population escaped from the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime that left about 2 million dead between 1975 and 1979. Virtually all of those survivors witnessed and suffered through unimaginable atrocities. They carry invisible scars and struggle with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

And their children have borne trauma passed on from parents. They experience symptoms that can range from extreme anxiety to emotional numbness, from violence to withdrawal, from hyper-arousal and activity to clinical depression.
"My parents gambled and drank," Em said. "I just thought they were being crazy Asians."
Em has since learned that her family displays many classic symptoms of PTSD.
"(My parents) were always stressed out," Em said. "Even when they had nothing to be stressed about."