Leaving the House of Ghosts

Leaving the House of Ghosts PDF Author: Sarah Streed
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786481934
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
On April 17, 1975, after five years of civil war, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas invaded Cambodia's major cities and forced the residents on a mass exodus to the countryside. Their leader, Pol Pot, established a government based on terror to bring about his dream of an agrarian society where work was done by hand--without what he believed to be corruptive influences. By the time the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh and ended this brutal experiment in communism in 1979, an estimated two million Cambodians were dead and hundreds of thousands had begun to flee the country for refugee camps in Thailand. Survivors of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge now living in the Midwest tell their stories in this work. Many of them were children during that time, unable to comprehend exactly what was happening and why, but now able to reveal the trauma they experienced. Noeun Nor and Sinn Lok recollect being wrenched from their families and put into labor camps around the age of five. Prum Nath talks about her mother encouraging her to eat the last grains of her family's rice. Sokhary You remembers giving birth on a mountain without a doctor or hospital and using rusty scissors to cut the umbilical cord.

Leaving the House of Ghosts

Leaving the House of Ghosts PDF Author: Sarah Streed
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 9780786481934
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
On April 17, 1975, after five years of civil war, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas invaded Cambodia's major cities and forced the residents on a mass exodus to the countryside. Their leader, Pol Pot, established a government based on terror to bring about his dream of an agrarian society where work was done by hand--without what he believed to be corruptive influences. By the time the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh and ended this brutal experiment in communism in 1979, an estimated two million Cambodians were dead and hundreds of thousands had begun to flee the country for refugee camps in Thailand. Survivors of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge now living in the Midwest tell their stories in this work. Many of them were children during that time, unable to comprehend exactly what was happening and why, but now able to reveal the trauma they experienced. Noeun Nor and Sinn Lok recollect being wrenched from their families and put into labor camps around the age of five. Prum Nath talks about her mother encouraging her to eat the last grains of her family's rice. Sokhary You remembers giving birth on a mountain without a doctor or hospital and using rusty scissors to cut the umbilical cord.

Survivors

Survivors PDF Author: Sucheng Chan
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252071799
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In this clear, comprehensive, and unflinching study, Sucheng Chan invites us to follow the saga of Cambodian refugees striving to distance themselves from a series of cataclysmic events in their homeland. Survivors tracks not only the Cambodians' fight for life lives but also their battle for self-definition in new American surroundings. Unparalleled in scope, Survivors begins with the Cambodians' experiences under the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, following them through escape to refugee camps in Thailand and finally to the United States, where they try to build new lives in the wake of massive trauma. Their struggle becomes primarily economic as they continue to negotiate new cultures and deal with rapidly changing gender and intergenerational relations within their own families. Poverty, crime, and racial discrimination all have an impact on their experiences in America, and each is examined in depth. Although written as a history, this is a thoroughly multidisciplinary study, and Chan makes use of research from anthropology, sociology, psychology, medicine, social work, linguistics and education. She also captures the perspective of individual Cambodians. Drawing on interviews with more than fifty community leaders, a hundred government officials, and staff members in volunteer agencies, Survivors synthesizes the literature on Cambodian refugees, many of whom come from varying socioeconomic backgrounds. A major scholarly achievement, Survivors is unique in the Asian American canon for its memorable presentation of cutting-edge research and its interpretation of both sides of the immigration process.

Unsettled

Unsettled PDF Author: Eric Tang
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 9781439911648
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by years of confinement to international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and ‘90s. Unsettled chronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty. Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of these refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the “hyperghetto.” He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life. Unsettled views the hyperghetto as a site of extreme isolation, punishment, and confinement. The refugees remain captives in late-capitalist urban America. Tang ultimately asks: What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery’s afterlife?

Braving a New World

Braving a New World PDF Author: Marycarol Hopkins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313033919
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This ethnography, based on a five-year field study, presents a holistic view of a nearly invisible ethnic minority in the urban Midwest, Cambodian refugees. Hopkins begins with a brief look at Cambodian history and the reign which led these farmers to flee their homeland, and then presents an intimate portrait of ordinary family life and also of Buddhist ceremonial life. The book details their struggles to adjust in the face of the many barriers presented by American urban life, such as poverty, dangerous neighborhoods, and unemployment, and also by the conflict between their particular needs and American institutions such as schools, health care, law, and even the agencies intended to help them.

Beyond the Killing Fields

Beyond the Killing Fields PDF Author: Usha Welaratna
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804723725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In 1975, after years of civil war, Cambodians welcomed the Khmer Rouge. Once in power, the regime closed Cambodia to the outside world. Four years later, when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and defeated the Khmer Rouge, the world learned how the Khmer Rouge had turned the country into killing fields. After the Vietnamese takeover, thousands of Cambodians fled their homeland. This book presents the Cambodian refugee experience through nine first-person narratives of men, women and children who survived the holocaust and have begun new lives in America.

Grace after Genocide

Grace after Genocide PDF Author: Carol A. Mortland
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785334719
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Grace after Genocide is the first comprehensive ethnography of Cambodian refugees, charting their struggle to transition from life in agrarian Cambodia to survival in post-industrial America, while maintaining their identities as Cambodians. The ethnography contrasts the lives of refugees who arrived in America after 1975, with their focus on Khmer traditions, values, and relations, with those of their children who, as descendants of the Khmer Rouge catastrophe, have struggled to become Americans in a society that defines them as different. The ethnography explores America’s mid-twentieth-century involvement in Southeast Asia and its enormous consequences on multiple generations of Khmer refugees.

Cambodian Refugees in Ontario

Cambodian Refugees in Ontario PDF Author: Janet McLellan
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802099629
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Janet McLellan uses ten years of ethnographic fieldwork, including extensive interviews, to highlight the difficulties Cambodians have faced in Canada.

Buddha Is Hiding

Buddha Is Hiding PDF Author: Aihwa Ong
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520238249
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This work tells the story of Cambodians whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. We see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values.

Refugees as Immigrants

Refugees as Immigrants PDF Author: David W. Haines
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The purpose of this book is to provide the reader with access to an important body of information taken from surveys on the initial adaptation of South East Asian refugees to the United States. The material, devided into eight chapters with numerous tables, is an extension of the findings presented at a panel on the experiences of South East Asian refugees, held in May 1986 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The book, according to the editor, serves as an introduction to a specific kind of research on the adaptation of these refugees as one recent set of immigrants to the United States. The introductory chapter gives some general characteristics of the immigrant population, the contexts of refugee adaptation, and an overview of research on South East Asian refugees. Chapter 2 describes the annual surveys sponsored by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and its predecessors, especially those between 1981 and 1985. Chapter 3, entitled 'Differential reference group assimilation among Vietnamese refugees', reports the findings of a three-year panel study of Vietnamese refugees conducted from 1978 to 1981 in Northern California and the central Gulf Coast. Two other chapters deal with the period 1975-1979, concentrating on adaptation within specific areas of the United States. A separate chapter describes a survey of Indo-Chinese refugees in San Diego, California, between 1975 and 1981. Another survey concentrates on the general pattern of refugee achievement, the socio-cultural basis for the economic and educational success of South East Asian refugees. The last chapter gives the result of a comprehensive longitudinal study by the Indochinese Health and Adaptation Research Project (IHARP) in San Diego, California. It encompasses the major 'waves' from 1975 to 1983 and all of the main ethnocultural groups of South East Asian refugees in the United States. It includes sections on English proficiency, occupational adaptation, economic adaptation, health status, psychological adaptation, economic self-sufficiency, education, fertility and adaptation, and depression and adaptation.

Ethnic Origins

Ethnic Origins PDF Author: Jeremy Hein
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610442830
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Immigration studies have increasingly focused on how immigrant adaptation to their new homelands is influenced by the social structures in the sending society, particularly its economy. Less scholarly research has focused on the ways that the cultural make-up of immigrant homelands influences their adaptation to life in a new country. In Ethnic Origins, Jeremy Hein investigates the role of religion, family, and other cultural factors on immigrant incorporation into American society by comparing the experiences of two little-known immigrant groups living in four different American cities not commonly regarded as immigrant gateways. Ethnic Origins provides an in-depth look at Hmong and Khmer refugees—people who left Asia as a result of failed U.S. foreign policy in their countries. These groups share low socio-economic status, but are vastly different in their norms, values, and histories. Hein compares their experience in two small towns—Rochester, Minnesota and Eau Claire, Wisconsin—and in two big cities—Chicago and Milwaukee—and examines how each group adjusted to these different settings. The two groups encountered both community hospitality and narrow-minded hatred in the small towns, contrasting sharply with the cold anonymity of the urban pecking order in the larger cities. Hein finds that for each group, their ethnic background was more important in shaping adaptation patterns than the place in which they settled. Hein shows how, in both the cities and towns, the Hmong's sharply drawn ethnic boundaries and minority status in their native land left them with less affinity for U.S. citizenship or "Asian American" panethnicity than the Khmer, whose ethnic boundary is more porous. Their differing ethnic backgrounds also influenced their reactions to prejudice and discrimination. The Hmong, with a strong group identity, perceived greater social inequality and supported collective political action to redress wrongs more than the individualistic Khmer, who tended to view personal hardship as a solitary misfortune, rather than part of a larger-scale injustice. Examining two unique immigrant groups in communities where immigrants have not traditionally settled, Ethnic Origins vividly illustrates the factors that shape immigrants' response to American society and suggests a need to refine prevailing theories of immigration. Hein's book is at once a novel look at a little-known segment of America's melting pot and a significant contribution to research on Asian immigration to the United States. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology