OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA From 1983 to 1985 I was a student at Franklin Middle School, a half-mile from what would officially be designated “Cambodia Town” in 2007.  One year—I really can’t remember which one—there were new students in every one of my classes: new, truly new, looking either stone-faced or bewildered, relaxing bit by bit as they found one another, but still very different. From us. They were poor. They were also serious, not a single goofball among them. We figured that they were studious; fright and trauma never occurred to any of us.

I’d absorbed vague information about a migration of Southeast Asians in the late 1970s, when news footage showed thousands upon thousands of mostly Vietnamese refugees—brutalized, traumatized and starving—dragging half-drowned children as they stumbled through heavy surf, and falling in ragged heaps on the wet sand of beaches. I was too young to extrapolate what it meant to be a refugee, how hard a life it must have been and how hard life would likely remain. It just seemed odd. The people even had a funny name: Boat People.

For the most part their English was excellent, but so filled with the remarkable bending vowel sounds of Khmer that frequently we had to ask them to repeat themselves. We thought it was very cool that they were bi-, tri-, and quadrilingual, so my friends and I would pass the time before the bell asking them how to say “pencil” in “Cambodian,” in Vietnamese, in Laotian.

And that was about all “we”—white students, African-American students, Latino students, even Asian students, anyone who had lived in the United States for as long as they could remember—really knew or thought about the new Cambodian students.  For awhile.

I CAN REMEMBER TWO INCIDENTS that gave me some clue that I had no clue.

The first occurred sometime in the middle of the school year—rumors that one of the Cambodian girls in my art class was pregnant. “Pregnant!” I said, and my best friend Mary responded grimly, “Well, you know she’s married, don’t you?” 

 “But she’s too young to get married!”

 “Not in Cambodia.”

 “But she’s not in Cambodia!”

 Mary was savvier than I, and more thoughtful, which meant she was frequently grumpy. “For Christ’s sake, Rachel, she didn’t have a choice. Calm down.”

The girl—whose name I cannot recall—was not pregnant. She completed the school year. But though everyone felt sorry for her, no one had the courage to ask if she was somebody’s wife.

The second incident was a conversation with a classmate whose name I do remember—Duc—about how he came to learn four languages. He explained that he didn’t simply board a plane in Phnom Penh and fly to the United States, that he and his family had traveled as refugees through Southeast Asia, crossing borders and trying to go unnoticed by the soldiers—and there were soldiers everywhere. Duc explained that being identified as a foreigner was the surest way to get killed.

Duc said the first three days in a new region were always the most perilous. While his family hid in small villages, Duc’s father went out to talk to the local farmers—and by the fourth day he had learned enough of the local language to coach the rest of the family so they could pass through cities with some chance of survival.

THINGS STARTED HAPPENING AT SCHOOL. Some bullying, and it was apparently escalating. A Cambodian girl in my PE class was surrounded in the locker room by a group of girls who laughed at her and called everyone over to see that she was wearing boy’s underwear. It was awful. 

I said something to Mary about the Cambodian girl being too poor to have her own underwear. Mary rolled her eyes. “Do you know how much a pack of underwear costs? It has nothing to do with money.”

 “What do you mean?”

“She’s from Cambodia. Underwear is underwear. If you’re from Cambodia, having different underwear for boys and girls probably seems crazy. It’s underwear, and it fits, so she’s wearing it. People need to just shut the fuck up.”

Yes, we sometimes talked like that in middle school.

THE PRINCIPAL OF FRANKLIN MIDDLE SCHOOL was Wayne E. Piercy, and—there is no other way to say this—he was the whitest of white men. Yet Piercy appeared to know every kid and every family at the very multi-ethnic Franklin, and he seemed to know everything that went on among the students.

Piercy learned very quickly of the problems the Cambodian students were having, and he dealt with it in the most extraordinary way—he gathered some number of the Cambodian students together and asked them to write down their stories. They did. Then with almost no fanfare—no edicts. announcements or sensitizing chats initiated by teachers—the entire student body was herded into the auditorium.

Piercy’s introduction was brief, something like,  “Your fellow students have some amazing stories to tell, and you should hear them.” One by one the Cambodian students stood up and read what they had written on notebook paper.

One girl told of reaching a bridge with her extended family after walking for days. Before they could cross they had to negotiate with soldiers. When the soldiers learned the family had no money, they demanded every piece of clothing worn by every member of the family. Babies were undressed, ancient grandparents stripped, and the clothes were heaped at the feet of the soldiers. The family began to cross the bridge—naked, carrying children and a few belongings. When they reached the middle of the bridge, the soldiers opened fire. The girl recited the family members who were killed, she described watching her grandmother’s body fall into the river below. This girl—the girl reading at the podium—had been on that bridge. Somehow, she was alive.

Another student told of hiding under a bridge with her family, water up to their necks, standing in soft mud for hours—if not days—while soldiers passed overhead. The student remembered that she had begun to cry because she was so hungry; she had been a very little girl at the time. Nothing would quiet her, and discovery meant slaughter. So her father, desperate, picked up a rock and bashed her in the head, knocking her unconscious. The crying stopped, the family survived the day, and at night they crossed the bridge.

These are the only stories that I remember. Some students were so nervous that, between the stammers and their accent, few could understand them. But they read anyway, uninterrupted. I wish I could remember how the assembly ended, if the auditorium was quiet, if any of us talked about it later that day. I don’t even know if the bullying stopped completely, though I never heard of further incidents.

THESE THINGS I DO KNOW: 

Long Beach is home to as many as 50,000 Cambodians. It is the largest population of Cambodian immigrants outside of Southeast Asia; Long Beach even has its own Cambodian consulate. 

The general youth of the population of the nation of Cambodia means that most of its citizens have no memory of the Khmer Rouge. That’s not true of Cambodians in Long Beach, many of whom escaped the Killing Fields themselves, leaving behind friends and family who would join the millions who died by execution or from starvation. When they see any of the now-famous photos of the piles of skulls they must wonder.

It has been about 30 since the slaughter in Cambodia was running at full frenzy. Everyone has known who the  responsible parties are, known for decades, but until today no one had ever been prosecuted and sentenced.  Last night, at approximately 9:30, the war crimes tribunal of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia found Kaing Guek Eav (“Duch”) guilty of crimes against humanity, murder and torture.  He was sentenced to 35 years,  but thanks to time already served he will go free in 19 years.  Possibly sooner.  All across Cambodia, former Khmer Rouge victims are expressing anguish and disappointment.

Duch managed the most notorious of the Khmer Rouge detention centers, S-21 Tuol Sleng, where as many as 16,000 prisoners were tortured and killed: his efficiency was so spectacular that he received personal praise from Pol Pot and only 12 survivors have ever been found. I wonder if one of them lives in Long Beach.

I WROTE THIS STORY IN A CAFÉ, on my laptop. I hadn’t written much when a middle-aged woman came to sit down at the table next to me. She may have been Cambodian, she may have been Vietnamese—I have no idea. She put her purse in her lap, buried her face in her hands, and didn’t move for 30 minutes.

A friend stopped by my table, curious about what I was working on. I explained things: Duch’s sentence, the chilling reactions from two people I know who lived under the Khmer Rouge—the woman who runs my favorite donut shop and the man behind the counter at Sophy’s Restaurant.

As I spoke, the woman with her head in her hands got up and walked away. When my friend left, she came back, sat down again—it was the only empty table—and covered her face with her hands again. She didn’t move. She was still sitting there, in that same position, when I packed up to leave.