[Tlc] C-NY Times article about Cambodian Americans

[justinm at ucr.edu]

Thanks,
justin

The New York Times 
January 20, 2008
 

Urban Tactics

Little Cambodia, Growing Still Littler
By DAVID SHAFTEL
 

Vibol Sok Sungkriem, a 31-year-old aspiring filmmaker, had
invited a few friends

over for dinner, and his apartment just east of the New York
Botanical Garden

was flooded with camaraderie and the aroma of spicy Southeast
Asian food.

Like Mr. Sungkriem, who wears a whisper of a mustache and
favors baggy clothes,

most of the half-dozen guests were Cambodians who came to New
York as refugees
in the 1980s.
 

Over katiev, a spicy Cambodian noodle soup made with beef,
shrimp and fish

balls, they told stories about escaping from Khmer Rouge
soldiers in Cambodia as

they fled to refugee camps in Thailand. They talked about
running from thugs on

Fordham Road when they were younger, when violence was a fact
of everyday life
in many Bronx neighborhoods.
 

As they ate, Mr. Sungkriem opened his laptop and switched on
its video instant

messaging so that two absent friends could join the party.
Within the past few

years, both had moved from New York to Cambodian communities
elsewhere in the

country; one, a police officer, to Los Angeles, for a better
job, the other to
Stockton, Calif., after a particularly harrowing mugging.
 

Those two departures tell a broader tale. Not long ago, Mr.
Sungkriem and his

friends held such parties frequently. But since the mid-'90s,
a growing number
of Cambodians have left the city, and the parties are held
less often.
 

Data from the 2000 census shows that the city's Cambodian
population decreased

by 31 percent from 1990 to 2000. According to a census
analysis by the Hmong

Studies Internet Resource Center, the decline occurred as
nearly all the
country's other Cambodian communities were expanding.
 

At the high-water mark of 1990, census figures show, 2,565
Cambodians lived in

the city, primarily in the Fordham, University Heights and
Bronx Park East

sections of the Bronx. Most were refugees who were resettled
in New York after

fleeing the repressive Khmer Rouge regime, which fell in 1979
and claimed nearly

two million lives. According to an analysis of 2005 numbers
prepared by the
Census Bureau, barely 1,000 Cambodians then remained in the city.
 

"Everybody is leaving," Mr. Sungkriem said recently at an IHOP
restaurant near

his apartment. "It used to be if you walk down Fordham Road,
you would bump into

lots of Cambodians walking or shopping. Now you can be driving
up and down all
day, and you never see any."
 

Trials are finally expected to start sometime this year for
five major Khmer

Rouge figures who were detained and will face a special
tribunal backed by the

United Nations, but many of New York's dwindling number of
Cambodians are
focusing on more immediate problems.
 

"In the '80s, people didn't understand what Cambodians were,"
Mr. Sungkriem

said. "They just called us Chinos. But if you said you were a
gangster, you were

a star. A lot of people have grown out of that, though, and
there are no jobs,
no community services. So a lot of people left."
 

Among those eager to leave is Paul Keo, 36, who moved to the
Bronx when he was
11 and grew up with Mr. Sungkriem.
 

Mr. Keo, who recently married, works as a technical
administrator for Pratt

Institute, and the other day, dressed in corduroy pants,
fleece jacket and

running shoes, he could easily have been mistaken for a Pratt
student, save for
the ring of keys on his belt.
 

Although he enjoys his work, he is increasingly weighing the
options. "The

community here is broken," he said in an empty Pratt
classroom. "I really don't
want my children to grow up in the same difficult environment
I did."
 

For many Cambodians who came to the city in the '80s, the high
school years were

tainted by crime and violence, and poor schools left them
prepared only for the

manufacturing jobs that had already begun leaving the city.
Mr. Keo said his

solution was to "steal" his education. "After high school," he
said, "I would go

to colleges and sit in on classes and observe the material
without registering."

 

The problems of Cambodians in New York were compounded because
the community,

small to begin with, became established during a decade when
the city struggled
on many fronts.
 

"The violence they experienced during the Khmer Rouge was
similar to the

violence they saw every day in the Bronx," said Chhaya Chhoum,
director of the

Youth Leadership Project at CAAAV, formerly the Committee
Against Anti-Asian

Violence. "So they were never able to move away from their
trauma." The group

occupies a former convent on Valentine Avenue near Fordham
Road that it plans to
make a Southeast Asian cultural center.
 

In the turbulent Bronx, few of the Cambodian cultural,
religious and community

centers that have formed in places like Long Beach, Calif.,
Lowell, Mass., and
Minneapolis took root.
 

Groups like the Vietnamese fared better. Although many of them
came to the Bronx

roughly around the same time as the Cambodians, they arrived
in larger numbers.

And unlike the Cambodians, a culturally isolated people, the
Vietnamese forged

bonds with the city's large Chinese population, with whom they
share cultural
ties.
 

One result of the exodus of the city's Cambodians is a
widening generation gap.

Cambodians who remain in New York tend to be older and in
failing health; those

who leave are typically younger emigrés who attended school in
the United States

and have the ability or the resources to find jobs elsewhere,
often in hotels or
garment factories.
 

One emigré, Siek Chanty, 51, who is unemployed and spends time
at the center,
said she wanted to leave the Bronx but had nowhere to go.
 

Many who were separated from their families during the war
have located

relatives in places like California or Texas. But, Ms. Chanty
said through an

interpreter, "I haven't found anyone."[End]

______________
Dr. Justin McDaniel
Dept. of Religious Studies
2617 Humanities Building
University of California, Riverside
Riverside, CA 92521
951-827-4530
justinm at ucr.edu