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From The Asian Reporter, V17, #16 (April 17, 2007), page 7.
What’s wrong with Savi
The following, taken from Polo’s community law practice, is only one aspect of the immeasurable impact Khmer Rouge Cambodia had on families in that sad country and in ours. Millions of lost souls, another million landmines still lying low, and Asia’s most openly corrupt regime, are among Pol Pot’s legacies.
Tan Savi’s not a bad man. He’s a sad one. Lost in sadness. So lost.
This happens to us. This happens a lot to our Old World folk, maybe more so to our men, so stubborn — another way of saying so stuck we can be. We cannot move on, not from our ugly pasts.
If a human heart is a rolling stone then that thumping part of me and you stopped back then, back when the badness and then the sadness broke us. Our beating hearts, these stubborn bones. It’s how men are.
Women seem to move along easier. Women are more practical. Their babies, their sisters, their men stuck on our impatient rolling-rolling-rolling planet need them lucid. Present. Al’hamdulilaah. Thank God for women.
Tan Savi lost his wife. I don’t mean he lost her to Uncle Pol Pot, that bloodthirsty demonio. During Cambodia’s dark Dark Years. I mean she left him.
And he deserved it, her slamming their silver Nissan’s doors, kids packed in back, and not stopping until she got to Long Beach, California. One thousand miles away from her very bad man. I mean: sad man.
When we say he deserved it, no one means he deserved her, because he didn’t. She was a good wife and mother and daughter-in-law. No matter, he still got crazy with her. Hit her. He beat her bad. He beat their big boys too, as if he were fighting ferocious soldiers. Khmer Rouge. And that’s the odd thing about it, about Savi.
You see, everyone knows Savi’s a nice guy. Humble, a hard worker at the plant. He’s tender, a quiet storyteller to his baby girls. Savi’s always a reliable helper at Lord Buddha’s Temple, he never says no to driving anyone’s grandma to her doctor appointment.
The Craziness
Savi has The Craziness. Savi has it bad, like lots of men his age. Ask anyone. They got it from those wild Khmer Rouge Army boys. Guns as tall as them. Always screaming. Screaming while separating mas from kids, separating men from women. Go-go-go. Now-now-now. Quickly kneeling someone too slow or too sick and shooting him behind his ear, or sticking her belly with a sharp bayonet, or hacking both with a dull machete. Dark year in, dark year out. Death, yours or your grandpa’s, or your pa’s or your brothers, always near. Morning till night. In your sleep too. And not a thing you can do, say, or pray. Four years, uncountable ones. Millions perished, no one can say how many. Without Buddha’s blessings. In shallow graves, who knows where.
When the Khmer Rouge withdrew into their hilly jungles, The Craziness was born.
The Craziness came to America with boys and men. It smuggled onboard. The Craziness did not need a cardboard U.N. tag. It was not checked out and stamped fit by U.S. Immigration guys. Families did not get an extra room or food stamps or OJT, to house or feed or employ it, when they settled in Portland, Oregon. The Craziness lived off them, fed on them.
The Craziness got away with it. Unlike that decrepit Pol Pot, it still lives in Khamput communities along I-5 from Seattle to Portland to Long Beach. It thrives in Houston and Chicago, across our new continent in Boston, even up in Providence, Rhode Island.
The Craziness is not the same as PTSD. A disability so well studied and discussed, so well diagnosed then treated by those kind doctors on top of OHSU’s hill. Everybody knows those weary men and women. They shudder when doors slam. They dream awful at night, daytimes too.
The Craziness is different, about it no one says much. You see it walking around Cambod households as if nothing’s wrong. The Craziness just goes off like Tan Savi. Like so many other guys do. Of course they do.
Savi’s boys too
And here’s the word, though everyone’s sure it’s not the last word on The Craziness. Savi’s sons got it too. Tall, strong, American-born boys. The cops got them behind bars. Now Immigration’s getting them one-way tickets back to where The Craziness all began.
Who can say how it jumped across generations. Aunties say mangos never fall far from their tree. Monks say karma burns and burns until our sins are exhausted. But many folks say we better start looking at when it started, looking at Kampuchea’s nightmare. Five thousand miles and thirty years distant now.
The Craziness is a public health menace. And a contagion. It costs Cambodian families so much sorrow on top of sorrow. Women suffer and families splinter and another generation is infected. It’s hard to know how The Craziness will end but it’s easy to know where we need to begin.
On April 27 and 28 the Cambodian- American Community of Oregon will present a forum of genocide survivors, scholars, authors, musicians, and activists. All events are free. Everyone is encouraged to participate. These two days of interactive symposia are intended to prepare Cambodians, their advocates and allies, for the U.N.-sponsored Crimes Against Humanity Tribunal to be held in Phnom Penh sometime this summer. Exposing the ugly past, confronting those awful demons, can start an exploration of all the damage done to Cambodian communities and families, in the Old World and our new one too.
We can fix Savi Tan.
To read more by Polo, visit <www.MarginalButTrue.com>.
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Khmer Rouge Tribunal – Public Forum:
A Peace and Reconciliation Project
Friday, April 27, 6:00 to 9:00pm
IRCO (Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization)
10301 N.E. Glisan Street, Portland
Saturday, April 28, 10:00am to 6:00pm
Smith Memorial Student Union Ballroom, Room 355
Portland State University, 1825 S.W. Broadway, Portland
Welcome: Portland City Councilman Sam Adams
Moderator: Civil rights attorney and author Ronault (Polo) L.S. Catalani
Speakers:
* Sichan Siv, former U.N. Ambassador
* Loung Ung, author of First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers
* Daran Kravanh, internationally renowned traditional musician
* Beth Van Schaack, legal advisor to Documentation Centre of Cambodia
* Rath Ben, program manager at OHSU’s Intercultural Psychiatric Program
* Alex Hinton, Rutgers University, author of Why Did They Kill?
Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide
* Leakhena Nou, sociology professor at California State University, Long Beach
For complete symposia information, please visit <www.CACOregon.org>
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