By Colin Eatock
Published Thursday, June 14, 2012
www.chron.com 
Composed by American John Glover, "New Arrivals" tells the real-life
story of Houstonian Yani Rose Keo and her escape from the Khmer Rouge in
Cambodia.
Photo: TODD SPOTH
/ Todd Spoth
April 3, 1975, is etched forever in Yani Rose Keo's memory. That was the day - just two weeks before Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge - she received a call from the U.S. Embassy advising her to leave the city immediately.
The
Khmer Rouge were targeting educated people; Keo's husband was a
high-ranking official, and she was a volunteer with an international
refugee agency. After contacting her husband and scooping up her son,
she headed for the airport to catch a flight to Bangkok, in
neighboring Thailand.
"There were only three of us on the plane,"
she recalls. "We had only the clothes we were wearing. Bangkok is less
than one hour from Phnom Penh, and I thought we'd come back in a few
days. I never dreamed I'd become a refugee."
Keo lost just about
everything that day: her possessions, her home, her friends and her
place in the world. She never saw her parents again. Her entire extended
family was wiped out in the killing fields of Cambodia.
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