This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 3:01 am and is filed under Khmer-Related, Travel, Personal, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Upcoming trip to Cambodia
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Loading ...My wife and I will be making another trip to Cambodia at the end of the month. Lately, we have been making a habit of shuttling back and forth between Cambodia and the U.S. every few months or so. This will be our seventh trip. Cambodia is just like a second home to us now. We hope to eventually settle there someday so we would not have to travel back and forth so often.
I made my first trip to Cambodia in 1999, after having been away for 20 years. My family fled Cambodia into Thailand shortly after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. We stayed in various refugee camps in Thailand and the Philippines before finally arriving in Rhode Island in 1981.
On my first trip back to Cambodia I really did not know what to expect. Since I left at the age of just nine years old, my memory of Srok Khmer was at best limited to bits and pieces of events that took place in the Killing Fields. I could recall being hungry and having to work all the time, but I could remember very few details about our whereabouts or what was happening around us, certainly not enough to write a book about.
Arriving in Cambodia I immediately sensed a strange and overwhelming connection with the land and the people. It was a profound and irreversible bond which would draw me back to my native country time and time again. Ironically, I felt very much at home in a country that in many ways had become alien to me.
To this day I often regret not having returned to Cambodia sooner. To be sure, I had been very much tied up with school and work to travel abroad. Another reason, I confess, was that I somehow grew distant from my native homeland while trying to find a place in mainstream America. I certainly did not expect to find in Cambodia in a few days what had remained elusive in America for the previous 20 years– a sense of belonging and, perhaps, a sense of identity.
As human beings we tend to take for granted things that are always available to us but are also essential to our well-being. For instance, the air we breathe, while absolutely essential for life, is something we haven’t learned to fully appreciate because it’s always there. Having a mother and father around, while not necessarily life-sustaining, is another thing many people take for granted. Having a land to call one’s own is also something that tends to get noticed only its absence.
That’s why as Cambodians we must learn to cherish what we already have, rather than to chase what’s “out there.” With all the focus on the negative aspects of Cambodia, we still have a country that we can call “home.” This is not a privilege enjoyed by everyone– including the Chams, the Khmer Krom, or even the Cambodian Americans.
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:55 pm
Good posting, you can take Khmer out of Cambodia, but you can take Cambodia out of khmer.