Community organizer and author Marin Yann stands next to the Cambodia Town mural in Long Beach. | Photo: Elson Trinidad
There are immigrant stories, comprised of themes of hope, opportunity, and dreams.
And then there are refugee stories, where hope is drowned out by
fear, where the only opportunity is for survival, and instead of chasing
dreams, it's running away from nightmares.
Long Beach's Cambodian American community is the largest in the
United States with a population of some 50,000, but only a small
fraction of them are actual immigrants. The vast majority have refugee
origins, stemming from the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge, which ran
Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and killed an estimated two million of its
own people in a genocide consisting of executions, famine, and disease.
It was all in the name of the Khmer Rouge's social engineering programs,
which forced a nationalist, isolationist form of agrarian communism
upon the country. Death was a certainty to those who didn't -- or
couldn't -- comply. The regime was the topic of the Oscar-nominated 1984
motion picture "The Killing Fields," which brought that era to Western
mainstream consciousness for the first time.
The community, largely based in Long Beach's
Cambodia Town district along Anaheim Street, has thousands of refugee
stories; not very many have been told, and much less heard or even
understood by the white, African American, Latino, and other Asian
residents of "The International City." But Long Beach resident and
community organizer Marin Yann has decided, after an entire decade of
writing about it, to tell his.
Yann's recently released book, "The Last One," details his childhood, living under the Khmer Rouge and his accounts of survival.
"I wrote the book because I was tired of answering everyone's questions," Yann said, half-jokingly.
Yann is "probably around 42" years of age: His birth records were
lost or destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. But his greatest loss was being
orphaned from his own family. As a child, his mother died of disease,
his sister eventually vanished and his father "was invited by the Khmer
Rouge to build a water canal, and never came back," Yann said.
Yann described his relationship with the Khmer Rouge as
"complicated." Though they killed his family, they spared Yann his own
life.
"I was 'adopted' by the Khmer Rouge," said Yann. "They could have just killed me. But they decided to raise me instead."
In 1979, the Khmer Rouge fell to their enemy -- The Vietnam People's
Army (the same ones who fought against U.S. forces in the Vietnam War),
and Yann, after a period begging and stealing on his own, was joined
with an adoptive family, one of several over the years, and fled
Cambodia to refugee camps in Thailand and The Philippines.
His book ends before his arrival to the United States. But the unwritten sequel is no less worth telling.
An Australian American named Luke who spoke fluent Cambodian from
working there in the 1960s sponsored Yann and his adoptive family
through a church group and brought them to Salt Lake City, Utah in the
mid-1980s.
For Yann and his adoptive family, migration and relocation were
already the norm. From Utah, the family moved to San Diego, and again
across the country to Boston, home of the second largest Cambodian
enclave in the U.S.
But when Yann heard stories about Long Beach, and its large Cambodian
community, he headed west in 1991 with a roommate who started a music
company that sold reproduced Cambodian records and tapes in compact disc
format.
"We drove across the country, with a U-Haul trailer," Yann recalled. "It was also my frist time driving anything."
Yann enrolled himself at Long Beach City College, where he
unsuccessfully studied architecture, and then criminal law, which became
valuable in the early 1990s, as Cambodian gang violence and ethnic
tensions were at an all-time high, and Yann became a liaison between the
Cambodian community and the Long Beach Police Department. He later
worked for the city of Long Beach doing community development and served
his own community as a youth and family counselor for a Cambodian
non-profit social service organization.
Today, Yann holds a master's degree in business administration and
educates high school youth on the dangers of substance abuse. He said
that underage drinking is a serious problem in the Cambodian community,
among many.
"Cambodians are the most-exposed [group] to violence," said Yann,
with many dealing with psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress
disorder. He also added that gun violence within the community is
another serious issue, even today.
He also saw education, or the lack of it, as a big concern in the
community. Unlike other communist regimes, the Khmer Rouge actually
banned schools and all educational institutions. Educated people, and
even those who appeared so, were considered enemies of the state, and
were executed. The repercussions of that still linger today.
"We were down to the ground already," Yann said. "Getting back up is difficult."
But Yann sees hope in the future of his community, having grown from a
single Cal State Long Beach student who arrived here in 1961. He
pointed to the ubiquity of Cambodian-owned donut shops across Southern
California as a testament to the success of an acquired-skills
propagated within the community. And while driving down the street, Yann
pointed to Cambodian and African American youths hanging out with each
other, illustrating the relaxation of ethnic tensions, and the greater
acceptance of Cambodians in the city.
A
public art sculture at a Metro Blue Line station in Long Beach, written
in English, Spanish and Khmer. | Photo: Elson Trinidad
Yann and I have lunch at a Cambodian restaurant on Pacific Coast
Highway. Upon entering, he exchanges greetings with the waiter, and a
middle-aged Cambodian woman waves at him and briefly converse in
English. He takes out a copy of his book for her to pore over. Toward
the end of our lunch, he excuses himself to visit another table, where a
professor at nearby Cal State Long Beach is eating. Later on, he told
me that he's being invited to speak at the professor's anthropology
class. Yann's cellphone rings on a couple of occasions, mainly inquiries
for his book launch event this week.
Life is busy and chaotic for Yann these days, but he seems to enjoy
the momemtum his book is building, or at least has acclimated to his
role already.
I asked him if he, a person who appears well-connected, and has
already impacted the lives of many, considers himself a community
leader. He humbly brushed off that notion.
"I'm just a person in the community, trying to survive," Yann said.
"I don't know what classifies being a 'leader.' It's just a title.
From someone of my background, I accomplished a lot. I could have
gotten into gangs -- people have tried to sell guns and drugs to me. I
ended up studying. I took the opposite route. I got good jobs. I can set
a good example, I can be a role model, not a 'leader.'"
More on Cambodia Town: Rapping the Message of Long Beach's Cambodia Town
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