In the jungles of Cambodia I lived in a refugee camp. We didn’t have good sanitation or modern conveniences. For example, there were no inside bathrooms–only outside ones made from palm-tree leaves, surrounded by millions of flies. When walking down the street, I could smell the aroma of the outhouse; in the afternoon, the 5- and 6 year-olds played with the dirt in front of it. It was the only thing they had to play with, and the “fragrance” never seemed to bother them. And it never bothered me. Because I smelled it every day, I was used to it.
The only thing that bothered me was the war. I have spent half of my life in war. The killing is still implanted in my mind. I hate Cambodia. When I came to America nine years ago at the age of 10, I thought I was being born into a new life. No more being hungry, no more fighting, no more killing. I thought I had escaped the war.
In America, there are more kinds of material things than Cambodians could ever want. And here we don’t have to live in the jungle like monkeys, we don’t have to hide from mortar bombing and we don’t have to smell the rotten human carrion. But for the immigrant, America presents a different type of jungle, a different type of war and a smell as bad as the waste of Cambodia.
Most Americans believe the stereotype that immigrants work hard, get a good education and have a very good life. Maybe it used to be like that, but not anymore. You have to be deceptive and unscrupulous in order to make it. If you are not, then you will end up like most immigrants I’ve known. Living in the ghetto in a cockroach-infested house. Working on the assembly line or in the chicken factory to support your family. Getting up at 3 o’clock in the morning to take the bus to work and not getting home until 5 p.m.
If you’re a kid my age, you drop out of school to work because your parents don’t have enough money to buy you clothes for school. You may end up selling drugs because you want cars, money and parties, as all teenagers do. You have to depend on your peers for emotional support because your parents are too busy working in the factory trying to make money to pay the bills. You don’t get along with your parents because they have a different mentality: you are an American and they are Cambodian. You hate them because they are never there for you, so you join a gang as I did.
You spend your time drinking, doing drugs and fighting. You beat up people for pleasure. You don’t care about anything except your drugs, your beers and your revenge against adversaries. You shoot at people because they’ve insulted your pride. You shoot at the police because they are always bothering you. They shoot back and then you’re dead like my best friend Sinerth.
Sinerth robbed a gas station. He was shot in the head by the police. I’d known him since the sixth grade from my first school in Minneapolis. I can still remember his voice calling me from California. “Virak, come down here, man,” he said. “We need you. There are lots of pretty girls down here.” I promised him that I would be there to see him. The following year he was dead. I felt sorry for him. But as I thought it over, maybe it is better for him to be dead than to continue with the cycle of violence, to live with hate. I thought, “It is better to die than live like an angry young fool, thinking that everybody is out to get you.”
When I was like Sinerth, I didn’t care about dying. I thought that I was on top of the world, being immortalized by drugs. I could see that my future would be spent working on the assembly line like most of my friends, spending all my paycheck on the weekend and being broke again on Monday morning. I hated going to school because I couldn’t see a way to get out of the endless “Live hard and die young.”
I hated America because, to me, it was not the place of opportunities or the land of “the melting pot” as I had been told. All I had seen were broken beer bottles on the street and homeless people and drunks using the sky as their roof I couldn’t walk down the street without someone yelling out, “You f–ing gook” from his car. Once again I was caught in the web of hatred. I’d become a mad dog with the mind-set of the past: “When trapped in the corner, just bite.” The war mentality of Cambodia came back: get what you can and leave. I thought I came to America to escape war, poverty, fighting, to escape the violence, but I wasn’t escaping; I was being introduced to a newer version of war-the war of hatred.
I was lucky. In Minneapolis, I dropped out of school in the ninth grade to join a gang. Then I moved to Louisiana, where I continued my life of " immortality" as a member of another gang. It came to an abrupt halt when I crashed a car. I wasn’t badly injured, but I was underage and the fine took all my money. I called a good friend of the Cambodian community in Minneapolis for advice (she’d tried to help me earlier). I didn’t know where to go or whom to turn to. I saw friends landing in jail, and I didn’t want that. She promised to help me get back in school. And she did.
Since then I’ve been given a lot of encouragement and caring by American friends and teachers who’ve helped me turn my life around. They opened my eyes to a kind of education that frees us all from ignorance and slavery. I could have failed so many times except for those people who believed in me and gave me another chance. Individuals who were willing to help me have taught me that I can help myself. I’m now a 12th grader and have been at my school for three years; I plan to attend college in the fall. I am struggling to believe I can reach the other side of the mountain.
