Love of Country in the Bronx
A wounded community rebuilds
by Robert Hirschfield

Rathanak Choun, an 18-year-old-boy in a turned-around baseball cap, introduces me to his mother, Leakena Tep. She is glossy-cheeked, tiny. I had seen her previously at the Jotanaram Temple in the East Bronx, where she goes regularly to feed the resident monk. By preparing food for Sol Mang, Tep, a devout Buddhist, gains merit for herself far from Battambang.

Most of the Bronx’s 2,000 Cambodians are from Battambang, in Northwest Cambodia. Battambang is green, hilly. Inner-city Bronx is synonymous, of course, with all that is dilapidated and dangerous in big-city life. But Tep is not complaining.

Following the Khmer Rouge takeover in April of 1975 (Cambodians refer to the dawn of the genocide in shorthand – April 17), the woman was banished to rural labor camps, where she lived the normal Cambodian life for that time: hard labor, hunger, beatings, the threat of execution. She recites for me her family death toll: One of her sons was killed, two of her sisters starved to death, three of her uncles were executed. Nearly two million people, it is estimated, were killed by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979.

Tep’s apartment building on Father Zeiser Place, defaced with graffiti, stands beneath Tolentine Cathedral, the brawny heart of the Catholic Bronx. It is a building I must have passed hundreds of times in my youth. Our family lived on Davidson Avenue, a few blocks away.

The neighborhood then was mainly Jewish. It is now overwhelmingly Hispanic, with a tender sprinkling of Cambodians and Vietnamese, who first began arriving in 1981, when President Reagan opened the doors of the U.S. to Southeast Asian immigration.

In Tep’s apartment is a computer (her three sons are computer nerds), a map of Cambodia, and a sack full of rice just in case.

Rathanak mentioned to me that a Khmer Rouge soldier had once tried to kill her by dropping a heavy sack of rice on her emaciated body.

"What about the Khmer Rouge still in Cambodia?" I ask her. "How should they be treated? Should they be arrested, tried, punished?"

"They should be given a second chance," she answers, without a moment’s hesitation, through Rathanak. "According to Buddhist teachings, if you take revenge on those who mistreat you, you tie yourself to their karma."

I talk to Sara Phok, a Cambodian mental health worker, about anger. The Cambodians I interview are almost always soft-spoken, their voices acting as gentle nets to trap emotions below the surface. "Even when you mention the most awful things to me," I say, "you never sound angry." She just laughs. "I hide it well, don’t I ?"

It is not easy for Danny Ouk, sitting behind his computer in the sprawling red-brick building that houses the Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation, to flick his mind back to his childhood land. He saw his father starve to death when he was seven (he is now 30), when he himself was starving to death. "Everything around me was destroyed. Before my father died, my brother was shot by the Khmer Rouge." Danny’s features are miraculously smooth, clear, gentle, as if cultivated in another environment and grafted on to him when the genocide was over. He arrived in the Bronx with his mother and his four sisters, from the Philippines, when he was nine. Fordham Bedford, for whom Danny works as business manager, is an organization that acquires and rehabs abandoned, city-owned buildings in the Bronx. The apartments are then rented at low rents to low-income families, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Vietnamese and Cambodian. Bright new dwellings blossom within formerly ruined shells. "It’s great to be able to turn some of those old, broken-down buildings I have always had to look at into decent places for people to live. It’s my way of giving something back to the community that gave us homes when we had no homes. After Cambodia, the Bronx is the only home I have known." Three of Danny’s sisters have moved away, two to Ohio, a third to the state of Washington. Mainstreaming by uprooting. His fourth sister, because of Khmer Rouge mistreatment, is physically handicapped, and can go nowhere. Danny lives with her, supports her. It’s the Cambodian way. Even in New York.

The Cambodian community is a well-kept secret in this city of affluent Asian communities. It is poor. Many receive SSI (Supplemental Security Income) disability checks, or welfare checks. It is linguistically trapped, Khmer being the only language the majority of older Cambodians speak. It is curled up in its own shadows.

In the beginning, I would sit hour after hour in the temple, whose shades are perpetually drawn against the outside world, waiting to be acknowledged, waiting to ask the questions no one wanted to answer. Finally, possibly because I had come such a long way by subway, the Cambodians relented, spoke, gave me their memories.

"It is hard for us here," Kulen Lang laments. Lang, a garrulous man of 60, is the president of the Khmer Buddhist Society. He works as a clerk in the Medical Records Department of Montefiore Hospital. "City officials – they don’t care about our needs. Our community way too small. Not important."

Before the Vietnam War intensified, and neutral Cambodia was dragooned into the conflict, Lang was a farmer. Most older Cambodians here were farmers.

Lang recalls for me his slavery days after April 17: "They [the Khmer Rouge] order you to go somewhere with heavy sack. You are so weak you fall down. [A cup of gruel, twice a day, was his diet.] They beat you. They say, ‘You are tricky! You fall on purpose, just to rest.’ Even when you have diarrhea, they still beat you. They scream, ‘You are CIA!’ We don’t know what CIA is." Lang is not without hope.

"Old people like me, we are not important. Our young people, they are important. They will make a difference. You will see."

Borann, who is missing a couple of front teeth, doesn’t look 17. A Tibetan once gave him a button of the Dalai Lama. Over it he affixed a button of Che Guevara. He admires both men, but he is less a Buddhist than a political activist.

The boy is a Bronx organizer for CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence.)

"The name," he says to me in the library of Our Lady of Refuge Church, where CAAAV has its office, "is a little bit misleading. We don’t just organize around the issue of anti-Asian violence. We help Asians who are poor, and who don’t know their rights, or anything about the system, obtain benefits, like welfare."

"How did you get involved with CAAAV?" I ask him.

"I was invited to a film CAAAV was showing. A film against patriarchy. As a Cambodian, that really interested me. Cambodia is a matriarchy, where women set down the rules of the family. Even here, women are the ones who take charge. I am all for that. Women should be in charge."

Borann was raised by his mother. His father abandoned the family after it moved to the Bronx. Borann was four.

Most Cambodian youths are not to be found anywhere near the temple. Cambodian Buddhism in New York, severed from its cultural context, just doesn’t tabulate for them. Not amidst the pull of fast food, fast music, the fast life.

Rathanak Choun, who loves fast food, does go to the temple. He is laid-back, sleepy-eyed. A west-coast type who loves California for its cyber allure. When he was six months old, he and his family set out for America from a refugee camp in Thailand.

He remembers learning about the Holocaust as a boy in school, and thinking, "That’s a great atrocity, what happened to the Jews. My family never went through anything like that, forgetting that we came here because of the Khmer Rouge."

Tactical forgetting was necessary for his survival. When he grew older, he heard the story of the sack of rice. The story of how his mother was once ordered into icy water for two days, without food or sleep, to help block a dam that had broken. A feat that makes Rathanak shake his head in awe, the way others his age might react to the bat speed of Derek Jeter.

"Me, I can’t even stay awake half the night when I have a school essay to write." (He attends Fordham Prep, a Buddhist boy at a Jesuit learning outpost.)

The boy teaches young Cambodians computer programming in the temple basement. His course is free. His students are slim, smart, unshadowed. Rathanak moves among them with gangly, warm-hearted authority.

"In order to program the computer," he says, "you have to speak the language of the computer."

Rathanak speaks this language fluently. The youngsters are half-terrified by his ability. He finds that funny.

"I am not here to intimidate you. I am here to educate you, so you can intimidate others."

What is he intimidated by? He mentions Holocaust movies.

"I look at the Nazis bulldozing the bodies of the Jews. The fact that human bodies are that small and skinny and have died like that – that bothers me."

Leakena Tep sits me down in a chair in front of the VCR. The first thing I see, on the video she shows me, is a pile of stones at the bottom of a hill in Northern Cambodia, near the Thai border.

The stones were the embryos of her "project." A number of Cambodian emigres undertake projects to help rebuild some aspect or other of their war-fractured homeland. Those stones now form part of a meditation center for Buddhist nuns on top of the hill. Tep’s concern is spiritual rebuilding. Thousands of monasteries, thousands of monks, were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge. Virtually all that remained of Cambodian Buddhism was its silence.

"How much does it cost to build a meditation center?" I ask Tep. She lives on an SSI check. She has a serious heart condition.

Tep throws open her book of receipts. "It cost us almost a hundred thousand dollars. Almost all the contributions came from poor Cambodians living in America. A factory worker in Pittsburgh contributed his life savings, seven thousand dollars."

The center stands beneath an enormous sky on a remote hill. A small white dot above a lush green carpet.

"The center," Tep tells me, "was built on a Khmer Rouge execution site. The Khmer Rouge used to kill people there who were trying to flee to Thailand."

Writer Robert Hirschfield lives in New York City.