A Change of Guard

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Sunday 3 June 2012

Navy finds safe harbour in Forbes [The happy life of a Cambodian family in rural Australia]

Navy Yem (front) with her grand daughter Josephine Mao McKenzie and daughters Thanet and Nin Mao.


MICHAEL BUSHELL
The Forbes Advocate
New South Wales,

02 Jun, 2012 
Australians sometimes joke that their teenage years were a nightmare, but for Forbes resident Navy Yem, that description is all too real.Navy has recently moved to Australia from Cambodia where she lived for nearly 50 years. For about 15 of those years, she lived under the murderous regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
The Khmer Rouge, meaning the Red Khmers, was the name given to the followers of Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea, which ruled the country from 1975 to 1979.
According to Wikipedia, the party’s policy of social engineering directly resulted in the deaths of more than 1.5 million men, women and children.
The Khmer Rouge regarded anyone with an education or differing political views as a threat and they were executed or forced into labour camps.
In 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took control of the country, 13-year-old Navy and her family were among some two million Cambodians to be forced out of the capital city, Phnom Penh, to work in agricultural prison camps.
The Khmer Rouge camps segregated men and women, boys and girls, so the young Navy did not know if her parents and her two brothers were still alive.

After a year at a prison farm, word got to Navy that her mother and younger brother had been killed.
“She thought her father had died as well because the Khmer Rouge had separated them,” said Navy’s daughter, Nin Mao, who also now lives in Forbes.
“She thought she had one brother left alive,” Nin said.
Some time later she was told her older brother was also dead, but in truth he had managed to escape from his prison farm.
Navy somehow survived the Khmer Rouge years and in 1979, when the more moderate Vietnamese Communists invaded Cambodia, she was reunited with an uncle.
Nin said her mother’s uncle found her living in a small banana tree plantation, where she had been sheltering.
To her surprise she learned her elder brother was still alive, and then about a year later, she was also reunited with her father, very much alive but now remarried.

Life almost returned to pre-Khmer Rouge days and Navy followed her musician father into the arts, becoming a traditional dancer for the new Cambodian government.
Navy had three daughters after her retirement from dancing, two of whom have also moved to Australia.
Middle daughter Nin is married to Forbes man Doug McKenzie, and was instrumental in Navy’s decision to leave Cambodia.
Nin met Doug when she was working at a restaurant in Phnom Penh and after about a year communicating by email, Doug proposed marriage.
Nin said ‘yes’ and she moved to Australia in March 2009.
Later that year Navy visited Nin and her new family in Forbes for three months and then last year returned for a longer stay.
While in Forbes Navy met local man Daniel Carr, and romance also blossomed for Nin’s mother.
The two are to be married in Victoria Park next Sunday, June 10.
Nin said life is now much easier for the family.
In Cambodia, Navy was an unmarried mother who had to work hard to look after her three daughters.
Nin and her younger sister Thanet work together at the Ben Hall Motor Inn and Thanet hopes to soon start studying accountancy and business at TAFE.
Nin said her mother worked extremely hard to support her family back in Cambodia and she deserves happiness with her husband-to-be.
“She worked very hard for us and to have her dream come true,” she said.
“She did everything. She was not only our mother but our father.
“I tell her, when she comes to Australia she not work anymore.
“She do everything for us so I try to do everything for her to make her happy.”
Navy will soon have all her family by her side, with her eldest daughter also planning to move to Forbes to marry local man, George Gorham.

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