Jim Davis/Globe Staff, At programs like the United Teen Equality Center in Lowell,
(participant Johnny Chheng is shown here), organizers hope to turn
around the lives of young Cambodian Americans and others.
The number of “Khmericans” being sent back to their homeland is on the rise. Meet one young man yearning for the old days in Lowell, Massachusetts, but committed to starting over.
The Boston Globe Correspondents
January 27, 2013
SOKHA CHHIM rarely heads to work without a black Red
Sox cap propped on his head. He makes sure his Nikes stay flashy and
white, that the legs of his baggy jeans drape at just the right angle.
Sometimes he’ll don a royal blue jersey featuring Tom Brady’s No. 12.
But in a concession to his new homeland, Chhim hangs a black and gray
scarf called a krama around his neck instead of the gangster chain he wore on the streets of Lowell.
Chhim is an outcast, one of 30 or so Cambodian-Americans lawbreakers
from Massachusetts sent back to Cambodia in the last 10 years. He was
deported to Phnom Penh in May 2011 after violating probation in the
shooting of a rival drug dealer, arriving penniless and unwanted. He
speaks broken Khmer, has no family to lean on, and needs a map to
navigate this zigzagging city of nearly 2 million. Yet he is putting
down roots in native soil he never knew. And unlike most exiled
“Khmericans,” who seethe over their loss of American residency, he is
finding his own redemption.
“When I first arrived, I was stunned,” the 31-year-old Chhim says of
life in Cambodia’s capital, an enchanting but fractured city that teems
with amputees, beggars, and mutts, yet features glorious French Colonial
architecture, fine European restaurants, and fleets of Lexus SUVs.
“America is all I knew. Everything about me was American.”
But “Cambodia opened my eyes,” he says. “I’ve found a reason to live.”
As federal officials broaden efforts nationwide to seize and deport
immigrants with criminal records, the streets of Phnom Penh will
inevitably see more Massachusetts exiles like Chhim. Some 600
Cambodian-Americans, virtually all of them male and a majority convicted
criminals, have been shipped to Asia’s most traumatized nation since
2002, when Cambodia signed a repatriation agreement with the United
States. Federal data show that deportations averaged 41 per year from
2001 through 2010, only to leap to 97 in 2011 and 93 last year. “People
are getting picked up left and right,” says June Beack, a lawyer at Neighborhood Legal Services in Lynn who has defended Cambodian-Americans facing deportation.
Cambodians have long posed a deportation dilemma for the United
States. Brought here as victims of the Vietnam War and the Killing
Fields of the Khmer Rouge, most were dropped into ghettos in Lowell,
Lynn, and Long Beach, California, and left to overcome cultural and
language barriers with little support from the government that took them
in. While illiterate adults fell into low-pay work, their children
stumbled through crowded public schools or took to the streets in
violent gangs. Many of those eventually deported had become hardened
felons, but others were exiled for first-time misdemeanors like
shoplifting or check fraud. A major reason for their expulsion is that
they never obtained citizenship, an option open to them as war refugees.
Chhim was in that category, and the result of his blunder was a one-way
trip to an unknown land.
“All of them want to become citizens,” says Rasy Ross An, director of the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association of Lowell, a nonprofit group. “But it’s not easy to learn English, and it’s expensive when you are struggling to survive.”
Lowell’s 13,300 Cambodians form the second-largest concentration in
the nation, after Long Beach, with 50,000. (Lynn has 3,500.) They
account for 13 percent of Lowell’s population, according to city data.
Since settling there in the 1980s, they have taken notable strides,
owning dozens of small businesses and seating the City Council’s second
Cambodian-American member, Vesna Nuon, last year. But there are
well-documented problems. For two decades, Southeast Asian gangs lured
Khmerican teens living in Lowell by the hundreds, offering them a sense
of belonging they could not find elsewhere. Jean Sherlock, a high school
teacher in Chicopee who studied Lowell’s Cambodian gangs in graduate
school, was a mentor to Chhim. She recalls him as an “upbeat,
gregarious” teenager. “I remember there is one photo of a birthday party
at our house and there he is, at the back of the photo, holding up a
peace sign,” she says. Some of the fault for his fate, she says, belongs
with the state’s education and justice systems, which do too little to
steer young people like Chhim and his peers away from gang life. “The
system isn’t set up to give these kids what they need. It’s set up to
lock them up.”
***
CHHIM STARTED LIFE as a lucky survivor of the murderous
revolutionaries known as the Khmer Rouge. He was born in 1981 in a
refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, where he contracted a
bacterial infection. Chhim’s mother, who remained in Cambodia, asked his
aunt and uncle to take the ailing baby to Western Massachusetts, where
they were being sponsored by a local couple. “I guess I was a cute baby,
but I was sickly,” he says. As he came of age in Amherst, Chhim built
up a resentment toward the endless list of responsibilities that came
with being the sole English speaker in his home. “I felt like the whole
world was on my back,” he recalls. “I got tired of always waiting for
the cable guy.” He began skipping school, getting into fights, and
smoking marijuana. His first run-in with the law was at age 14, when he
spent a night in jail for driving a stolen vehicle. He soon quit school
and moved to Lowell on his own to find work. “Lowell was just worse,” he
says. “Everybody around you was drug dealers, gangbangers.” Chhim
joined up, eager to make money for that “new pair of Jordans,” he says.
After tapping into a drug network, he moved back to Amherst to take
over a profitable piece of turf near the state university. Conflicts
with other dealers flared, and in 1998 Chhim decided to make a statement
by robbing a rival at gunpoint. During a standoff, he fired, striking
his victim in the neck. “If I could take it all back, I would,” Chhim
says. “I have to live with that crime my whole life.”
The rival dealer survived to testify, and Chhim received a 10-year
sentence. In prison, remorse at disappointing his aunt ate at him. His
worst day came in 2002, he says, when he learned she had died of a heart
attack. (Chhim’s uncle has suffered poor health since 2000.) Despite
poverty, diabetes, and dialysis, his aunt had routinely visited him
behind bars, Chhim says; she would travel for hours by bus and then weep
softly as he rubbed her tired feet and work-worn hands. “I would
usually cry after her visits,” he recalls, tearing up. “That’s when I
really started to experience love.”
It was also when he decided he could turn his life around. He
obtained his GED in prison and took anger management and resume-writing
courses. Prison “taught me how to grow up,” he says. Still, after
serving nine years and four months, Chhim failed to transition to the
clean life he imagined and began violating probation. Fearing the
inevitable deportation, he began a year underground. “It was just keep
running and trying to survive,” he says.
Chhim knew only horror stories of his homeland: a quarter of the
population diseased, starved, or put to death by the Khmer Rouge; a life
of tilling fields from dusk till dawn; a sweltering climate and
authoritarian system in which the privileged crush and exploit the
impoverished. And worse. “Everybody heard stories about Cambodian
jails,” he says.
Lowell police caught up with Chhim in 2010. He spent 15 months in
jail and detention centers and in May 2011 was flown to Phnom Penh.
There, he could have tumbled into a life of crime, substance abuse, and
resentment, the fate of many returnees. But the affable,
broad-shouldered Chhim does not believe in “thinking backwards.” Sipping
a Coke on a 99-degree day in Phnom Penh, he says: “A lot of deportees
are bitter. We have to break that cycle.”
Chhim works six days a week as a projectionist at a movie theater,
husbanding his $300 or so in monthly income by sleeping in a cheap room
provided by the theater owner. “I’ve never worked this hard in my life,”
he says. “I’m really proud of myself and wish my [aunt] could see my
potential.”
***
THAT POTENTIAL IS SOMETHING the Rev. Bill Herod has
been trying to unlock for years. An Indiana minister who has lived in
Cambodia since 1994, he started the Returnee Integration Support Center
in Phnom Penh in 2002 to help deportees like Chhim obtain documents,
housing, jobs, and drug treatment. He knows of 12 returnees who have
died, several from suicide or drug overdoses. Another 17 are in prison.
Some arrive without the medical paperwork required under the US-Cambodia
repatriation agreement, which Herod believes is crucial for their
physical and emotional well-being. All are left to fend for themselves.
“Most do not transition easily into Cambodian life,” says Herod. He
lost an eye when drain cleaner splashed into his face as he tried to
tear the poison from the hands of a suicidal returnee. “Most have strong
resistance to the country, the people, the food, the society, the
traditions, the language,” he says. Those who succeed must choose not to
give up.
Jim Davis/Globe Staff
United Teen Equality Center employees Sakieth “Sako” Long, left, and Siborak “Eric” Ponn take a break.
“Virtually all of these individuals lived in the US during their
formative years,” says Herod, “and whatever trouble they got into was
the result of their time in the United States, not Cambodia. It is
unfair to penalize these people, and the people of Cambodia, for the
failures of the US refugee resettlement program.”
In Lowell, the effects of poor integration, lack of education, and
bad decisions continue to plague the new generation of
Cambodian-Americans. Gregg Croteau, executive director of the United Teen Equality Center
in Lowell, which offers work and study opportunities for at-risk
youths, has seen it firsthand. Many come from broken homes, have
criminal records, and do drugs. His newly refurbished center is trying
to battle this epidemic, Croteau says, by helping these kids “trade
violence and poverty for social and economic success.”
Opened in 1999 and serving 1,000 teens a year, a third of them
Cambodian, the center is a haven from gang violence and life on the
fringes. Located in an old Methodist church, it offers training in the
building trades, culinary classes, counseling, and GED preparation.
Cambodian youths stop by after work or school to learn carpentry, play
foosball, shoot baskets, and hone their music skills in a new recording
studio, part of a recent 8,000-square-foot addition inaugurated by
Governor Deval Patrick in mid-November.
The center is a place of redemption for men like Sakieth “Sako” Long.
A mentor and program leader at the center, the 33-year-old Long arrived
in Lowell from Cambodia as a child and grew up with street gangsters
for role models. He got into trouble with the law in the late 1990s, but
a few years later connected with the center and got a job there. He has
since focused on saving young Cambodian-Americans from crime, gangs,
and a life of regret. “You can leave the gang life and be successful the
hard blood-and-sweat way instead of hustling,’’ he says.
But without people like Long to put them on the right path, many
Cambodian-Americans lacking US citizenship end up back in a homeland
they never knew. Nationwide, nearly 1,900 have final orders of removal,
according to federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials,
meaning they can be expelled at any time, while 669 are in deportation
proceedings.
The ones facing exile can look to Chhim, whose odyssey from
Massachusetts to the Mekong has led to a paycheck and a budding hip-hop
career. He hopes to try out for Cambodia’s national baseball team, and
he released a mix tape titled “Take Over” in September. “It feels good
to be appreciated for doing the right thing, and it took Cambodia to do
that,” Chhim says. Under his musical moniker, Dolla, he pens melancholy
lyrics like these: Can’t go back, go back, to a place that I call home. Exiled American is who I am, a one-way flight wasn’t part of the plan.
It is a far from ideal fate, and Chhim rues the fact that he will
never experience another live Patriots game or night of clubbing and
fast food in Boston. Still, he has no choice but to call this troubled
nation home. “I failed the test,” Chhim says of his squandered American
experience. “They didn’t believe in me anymore, and now I get a chance
to show them that I am somebody.”
Olesia Plokhii is an Ottawa-based journalist, and Tom
Mashberg writes from Newton; they reported last year from Cambodia. Send
comments to magazine@globe.com.
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