Dear Meeng Thavary, I don't live in the US, I live in Canada, but in Canada this weekend starting Saturday Oct 9 is also a long weekend, but it's not because Monday is Columbus Day, d'ohh!! it's because in Canada it's Thanksgiving Day.
Dear Meeng, yeah yeah it requires a book to describe the escape of the Cambodians to Vietnam during 1975-1979 and their lives in Vietnam. However I can tell you here a few things about their escape and their lives in Vietnam: - officially only people who could speak Vietnamese were allowed to enter Vietnam, no matter what their skin color was and no matter how they looked (Vietnamese, Khmer, Chinese, or whatever), as long as they could speak Vietnamese - for my family, consisting of more than a dozen members, only my mother could speak Vietnamese fluently; so my mother had a strategy; we were in a group of about 20 families, arriving at the border; my mother`s strategy was that we would be the last family to be interviewed by the Vietnamese border guards (it was around mid- August 1975, there was no war yet between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge); then after all the other families had entered into Vietnam, it was our turn for the interview; my mother talked to the border guard in Vietnamese, implored him to let us in, she wept, cried, wept, cried, ..., for about 15 minutes, begging him to let us in; then he asked to talk to other members of our family; when it was my turn, he asked me something in Vietnamese; I uttered eeh ooh eeh ooh ,,,, d'ohh, I didn't understand what he said and couldn't say anything in Vietnamese; so he asked me some questions in Khmer and I responded in Khmer, including that I was a university student in Phnom Penh; ..., then afterwards my mother talked to him again (in Vietnamese), imploring him to let us in; she wept, cried, wept, cried, ..; luckily, about 1 hour after the interview started, he let us in; note: every other family in the group took only about 3 minutes to be let in; my mother's strategy was this: being the last to be interviewed would give her all the time she would need to implore and beg him and make him have compassion for us and thus to make him let us in; fortunately it worked - in Saigon, I met lots of other Cambodian refugees, including dark- skinned ones, who could hardly speak Vietnamese at all; I didn't know how they got in; I didn't ask them how, for fear they were upset; I could only guess that they entered through un-guarded areas; among us Cambodians we spoke only Khmer; some of the Cambodian guys I met in Saigon are now in Canada also, since more than 25 years ago, just like me - we Cambodian refugees could live wherever we wanted to; the Vietnamese government didn`t harass us at all, it even gave us the right to maintain being Cambodian and the right to emigrate abroad; it issued us Cambodian ID cards, which were very valuable, because they gave us the right to move abroad, and virtually all the Vietnamese people in urban areas wanted to move abroard - after the war between Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge broke out, some Cambodian families were rounded up into refugees camps by the Vietnamese government; my family and lots of others that we knew weren't, I didn't know why some were and some weren't; however the folks in the camps still had the right to be sponsored to emigrate - the Vietnamese people in Saigon didn't hate the Cambodian people, or at least the Cambodian refugees back then, d'ohh!! they even liked us!! yeah yeah I had a couple Vietnamese girlfriends back then - some Vietnamese who used to live in Cambodia up to 1970 even said they didn't like Vietnam or even the Vietnamese people in Vietnam, that they liked to live in Cambodia, that they would return to Cambodia once they could - my own father, just a few months after we arrived in Vietnam, claimed he suspected Vietnam was behind the massacres of the Cambodian people by the Khmer Rouge; I opposed his view; yeah yeah back then, 35 years ago, I already opposed this view; I opposed his view, not him, he`s my father - lots of Sin Si Samouth songs were brought to Vietnam by the Cambodian refugees, including my family; the songs have found their way back to Cambodia All Right. Deer Meeng, this is only a brief summary of the story of the Cambodian refugees in Vietnam during 1975-1979. (There were also Cambodians who escaped to Vietnam after Vietnam destroyed the Khmer Rouge regime in January 1979). If you have questions, please feel free to ask. Pheng -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cambodia Discussion (CAMDISC) - www.cambodia.org" group. This is an unmoderated forum. Please refrain from using foul language. Thank you for your understanding. Peace among us and in Cambodia. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/camdisc Learn more - http://www.cambodia.org
