WHAT IS YOUR IMMIGRATION STORY?

My mother told me my name is Sounun, which means Noble Knight in Khmai. My family's immigration story began on April 17th, 1975, the day the Communist regime captured the capital city; one of the darkest days in Cambodian history known as the Fall of Phnom Penh. My mother remembers that day vividly when she and the entire city population was forced to leave their homes, families, friends, and all things behind to walk out towards the Cambodian countryside. Not having any idea what was to come and for how long they would be subjected to forced labor, concentration camps and genocide. Brutalized over the course of six years, Cambodian journalists and survivor Dith Pran would coin the experience as "the killing fields."

Having endured and survived years of atrocities, my mother and family would somehow escape the Khmer Rouge and find their way into Thailand in the Khao I Dang refugee camp. There my mother would marry another survivor, my biological father, in that same refugee camp. I was born and named soon roughly a year later in 1982. We were granted asylum and sponsored into the United States through Save the Children International and a Lutheran church group confirmed the destination Philadelphia, the Birthplace of America. I grew up believing in the city of brotherly love. The arts music, cultures history, and diversity of people influence my upbringing, and how I see act and operate in the world today as a global citizen invested in connecting people through storytelling and shared experiences. 

As much as my mom has told me, there's still a lot that she can't articulate. For instance, I talked about my mom a lot because my biological father ended up going a different pathway once we came to the States. So, my mother kind of continued to be the matriarch of the family, she's the oldest daughter. She helped keep my grandmother around to this day. She's still my grandmother's caretaker. My mother is still back in Philly, she's retired now, she dedicated her whole life to actually being a social worker. So first getting the whole family out of Cambodia, she then pretty much kind of just got an associate's degree and with that worked for the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare for her entire career. And in the US, she helped bring forth more refugees not only from Cambodia but from all other different countries across the world. On the day she retired, she was the last person in her department still because you could also imagine throughout the years, those kind of different support services were starting to get reduced more and more.

When I think about what my family's journey during that time was, we were a multi-generational family. My grandmother came, my aunts and uncles, we all found safety and stability, community and purpose. In Philadelphia for the longest time, we all lived under one roof. I probably shared a bed until I was in my early teens, just based on the rooms that we had or didn't have. But at the same time, we were all together and we were all safe.

The only exception was my biological father went on a separate path of his own, but he ended up kind of creating another family down in Louisiana where I'm not sure how much but there's a huge population of Southeast Asian shrimpers down there. So, for many years later, I would reconnect with him, but that's story for another day. But, for me that Philadelphia story really means a lot. The story of my mother means the perseverance. I think is something that a lot of people can relate to and it's still something that I speak of very highly to this day.

For me there were different elements of being an American. So, living as a latchkey child in Philadelphia, my soul responsibility was just to go to school, make it home each day and do better grades, all that kind of stuff because again, everything that my parents had experienced to get us to Philadelphia they just want to live to thrive to a certain degree as much as they could see. And that really just meant take the education, takes the freedom and do with it, what you will, and I took all of that. And I think for me, when you talk about being American, I definitely experienced that kind of living within different worlds. Part of me at times wasn't American enough clearly just based on, being a dark-skinned Asian person that for the most part people really couldn't identify at the time, what kind of Asian Are you? Chinese or? Things like that. But all those things I guess just helped me build a resiliency and appreciation, not only for my mother's story, but my people's story, but also trying to figure out my own story. 

I latched on to the sports of Philadelphia. Just that idea of sports and competition help level the playing field. I really just kind of had a lot of heroes that were people of color that were kind of like breaking some of the different barriers in sports, people of color and music that were breaking different barriers. Maybe they didn't look exactly like me, but I saw literally, and I learned the history of America and the history of slavery and everything. And I found the interconnectivity in all that. So, for me, as much as I may have been "other," I always found myself as part of this larger kind of collective community. Marginalized communities of color, I felt like there was fellowship in that and so that's where I would find ways to be a bridge. I kind of always talk about how one of my goals has always been to be a bridge, not a wedge, because when I think about, historically, again, kind of like the experiences of different people, particularly of Asian Americans has been almost as a group that's come in and it's disrupted, the economics of, cheap labor, taking away, jobs from Black people, from Latinos, taking away technology, exploiting all of this, the different ways in which we've been positioned, as far as Asians and Asian Americans in the history of the US.

So, in Central High School in the 90s, a group of us from essentially, the Asian American Studies, Club Group, we wanted to help push an Asian American Studies class and in the curriculum. we had an African American Studies class. We saw how meaningful and how positive that was why couldn't we get this school district of Philadelphia to find us an Asian American teacher that could help bring this curriculum to us. So that also became one of my early experiences trying to bring activism into the communities and early lives and we're able to do that. And so that really again as I think back to how many years ago it's still something I think very highly and when I think about today of more and more of today's younger, generation really feeling even more fully empowered to do that. That gives me kind of also comfort and that again different time. I was like a trailblazer there. But now continuing with this feature generation. A lot of what shaped me is my surroundings, seeing inequalities but then figuring out what could we do to potentially correct them or try to address them and that ultimately really kind of helped set my North Star in a sense that I felt that in order to really kind of do that I had to be able to connect with people. I had to be able to tell my own story. But also, be able to help people, either tell their own story or help, bring their story to life for other people. 

It took me down the path of trying to study sociology: the understanding of people, the understanding of the civil rights movement throughout the country, but also the different migration patterns of people all across the world and the different types of entry points across the Asian American diaspora of how different people are coming in. So, through all of that discovery, I really still saw a lot of fragmentation and a lot of lack of information or maybe misinformation about Cambodians and the migration of Cambodians compared to South Asians or Koreans or Chinese, and things like that. it was to better understand all of those other different paths. But also, how do I figure out ways in which, to help uplift a story? So, I feel like ultimately the end of the day, if I don't tell my story, that story will then potentially not be as well known. 

But what I also want to say is that I was a child of, television, right? So, it's like, I learned the language watching TV. I learned what it was like to be an American, like pop culture, and through sports and through media. And again, despite the fact that maybe the representation wasn't there, as a young person you couldn't convince me that I wasn't in touch with the things. So, I was playing sports. And once hip hop really popped off, I was like, you can't tell me anything about not being a hip-hop head! So, I think even just hip hop itself helped really further bring out my own abilities to story tell, but also still feel, represented to be part of a group and things like that.

When I think about grade school, middle school, it was being around diverse students and that's where I first learned to play basketball on the playground. That's where I first was exposed to people of different dialects and again that's also when television started to have a little bit more that influence. This might sound super cheesy but at the time there's a show called The Wonder Years and there's this character Kevin Arnold and he was kind of again like a young pubescent person and he had a voiceover in his head, and he was kind of thinking about these bigger themes and ideas but yet he was still kind of like a young child, right? And so, for some reason I felt like I was also going through a phase where people were not understanding of how to say my name. And I think this was in the fifth grade at this point where the fifth-grade teacher gave us all an opportunity like hey, if you guys want a different name you can use a different name in this class. And I felt at the time, maybe I should start going by Kevin Arnold's main character. It's super cheesy. And I tried it for a second, but I think ultimately again today, it's like, Kevin was this character and I'm so not. I was human. But I think we talk about some of those pop culture influences. I think that's where it was like that kind of coming of age was happening and I was seeing it on TV and I was thinking, okay what am I thinking, what am I experiencing that I'm also kind of going through? So that was the TV influence but at the same time on the playground and on the court, it was exposure to all different types of kids. I was lucky enough to be in a school where there were African Americans, a Greek population as well as a Jewish population. There were other different types of Asians and one of my best friends to this day, we met in the fourth grade, he's Romanian. 

It was about trying to find others that are also kind of different in their own kind of way but finding a lot of those commonalities. So, we all also were different latchkey kids, we all had working parents that you got dropped off in the beginning of the day or you walk to school and then you came home and then you knew you had to get your homework done because your parents weren't going to be home until five or six, right? So that's the whole latchkey kid mentality. Sometimes I would go hang out at other people's houses for a few hours after work or maybe I might go to the mall and come back later, things like that. So, I took full advantage of having a key but also not feeling like I had to come home immediately. And so, I also then further explored the city of Philadelphia and saw all those types of things as a young person. I think that was also a very unique thing for me. But I also think that's something that a lot of immigrant children can relate to. If you weren't working, you then either had to figure out what you were going to be doing in that time period, before your parents came home.

WHAT DOES YOUR CURRENT JOURNEY LOOK LIKE?

There's always been hope. Whether it's hoped to survive, hope to grow and thrive. Hope was always there. Whether or not my mother saw it, or I saw it, that was something that we just had to know there was always going to be something better or at least we had to strive to think beyond what we could see ourselves. And so, then on that topic of family, I got to the point where I was able to find my own partner and start my own family. So that's what actually then kept me here in California. I had kind of grown up in Philly, went to college in Maine, and then packed my bags and moved out to LA and I started my journey of career and path out in LA. And then I met my wife along through mutual friends. She is a Thai American woman that works for LA County. She's an environmental scientist but she's super rad and creative. We dated long distance for a while but then once I came back to settle, we tied the knot in 2016. 

And since then, we have two children, we have a soon-to-be five-year-old named Juniper. She's our lovely little daughter and we have a one-year-old boy named Ocean. And the two of them are the biggest blessing that we have. They love each other. Junie loves being a big sister. Ocean knows that's his big sister. And that's what we're now in, right? I'm still trying to find words to put it all together because it's a new experience for both of us. Despite the fact we are in our 40s this is still kind of new for us to have children and young children and through this current climate of things. But going back to the idea of hope is that everything now is again going to be, what can we do for our kids? To leave that legacy, to help lead that when that day comes, when we're not around, they'll have each other.

I think that's what's really important for us to kind of focus in on the idea that these are two siblings close enough in age. Our role as parents is to not be as hard on ourselves, to not be as hard on each other and ultimately, to not be hard on them. I mentioned a lot of stuff that I went through. And I am also trying to be very self-editing of not letting, those types of things in the past be passed down, generationally to my children, and they live every day with this joyful energy and excitement that again, kind of further helps give us energy, reaffirms us. And we are also lucky to have my wife's parents living with us as well. So, we're continuing this multi-generational living and we're seeing again, the life, be further helping support Grandma and Grandpa. And it's like, what are we trying to do as parents? Give them guidance, give them education, affirm their confidence and abilities to go forth and whatever they want to do. I want my children to be able to again, embrace the world in front of them, ahead of them, and have that confidence to do whatever they want. I feel like to a certain degree, maybe I had circumstances where I had to kind of act accordingly in order to do these types of things. But I also don't want to put the pressure on them, to try to be like that or be like Mom. I honestly just want them to be and just be amazing and who they are. And I see it now where it's like every interaction, they have not only with each other, but with other people, they're bringing joy and love to everyone around them. And so that's what I'm really stoked about maybe they're not there with the storytelling but just their energy is really helping kind of continue that connectivity, that kind of belongingness. So, I love those worlds that we're starting to shape and create and again, through it all it's like we have hope and we're excited. The children mean the most to us and I think we have to remind ourselves to not be so hard on each other and ourselves because, they're the ones that are going to continue to be the ones that we want to uplift.

So, because we live in Long Beach, and we are within a diverse community of Southeast Asians. And I mentioned earlier my mother-in-law and father-in-law they live on site with us. They are preserving the Thai language with Juniper and with Ocean, so Juniper can understand Thai. And she also goes to high school on Sundays. So, the language and the culture from a Thai perspective is something that she's absorbing like a sponge right now and so from a Thai side, that is really awesome to see that. She also understands that she's half Cambodian as well. So, she'll often times want to ask me questions about How can we speak some Cambodian together? Can we do some different types of tradition things like that? And part of me kind of feels like I wish I would have more of that to offer in a certain way, whereas the Thai side that's like all there. But we have other Cambodian friends that also expose her to other types of things that have little children as well. So, from a preserving culture side, we feel like we're doing what we can to try to do both. But we know that at least, done the Thai side, she's going to be really strong, and she seeks the Cambodian side. So, for a little one that's about to still be five she's already got her passport, she's been talking about, going to Thailand and Cambodia and Tokyo and things like that. So again, she has that natural curiosity for cultures and experiences. So, I'm really excited about that.

And Ocean, again you can imagine with the second one. He's just Mr. Happy-To-Be-Here and he'll follow his big sister wherever she goes. So that's him right there. It is something that we are very mindful of trying to really help uplift and I think for me that was also big reason why I moved to California. So, as much as I love Philadelphia, I also experience a bit of that deficit of the Cambodian side, but the Cambodian side was definitely full of some of those painful experiences, some of the lack of the resources and then when I came to California, because there is a larger population, there's more of that like public visibility of Cambodian communities in Cambodian Americans.

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