Word: cambodians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Asian Americans. "They have almost a maniacal attitude that if they just work hard enough, they can do it," says Counselor Ilse Junod of New York's Baruch College. To some Asian Americans (and their parents), being only "very good" is tantamount to failure. In 1982, Leakhena Chan, a Cambodian student at South Boston High School, overwhelmed by the pressure of school and adjustment to a new country, tried to take her own life. She was one of eight Cambodians at South Boston who attempted suicide that year. Now a student at Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass., Leakhena can talk...
...serve the poor; another twelve headed for Appalachia's "Valley of Despair" to plant fir trees and work on construction and furniture-building projects. Says Vanderbilt Senior Ethel Johnson, 21, who stayed in Nashville with another team sowing gardens, making curtains and teaching English in a community of Cambodian refugees: "Students are vastly underestimated. They have a real desire to get out there and do something to try to help and to have their eyes opened...
...singular achievement of Cambodian Witness, a quiet, devastating memoir of this genocide, is to reveal the faces behind the numbing statistics and, more terrifying, to show how familiar they look. The fanatics who unleashed the bloodbath were usually, it seems, the people next door...
...Cambodian Witness begins, happily enough, with an easeful and exotic tour of prerevolutionary life in the capital of Phnom Penh, where May's father was a doctor. The narrator's earliest memory is of fighting with his siblings for the free toy inside his mother's packages of Tide, and the household he describes with clear-eyed affection is governed by all the rites of any middle-class family anywhere -- watching TV on weekends, anxiously awaiting exam results, going for picnics in the countryside. The narrator himself appears to have been a regular little scamp who delighted in gambling with...
...behind the placid routine lie the very particular shadows and superstitions of Cambodian culture. May sets his story against the backdrop of his country's night world, a place of sorcerers and omens, in which dreams of blood mean money on the way and the hooting of an owl portends miscarriage. One day he drops in on a friend to find the boy spouting gibberish while a cross-legged magician tries to exorcise his "evil spirit" with the branch of a star-fruit tree...