LETTERS: Advocating for Cambodians after the Genocide
LETTERS PART 1.mp3Chinary Ung discusses his first reaction to reading the letters he received from refugees in 1979.
During the Cambodian Genocide (1975-1979), between 1.7 and 3 million Cambodians were killed under the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge agenda for a classless agrarian society was enforced through the brutality of labor camps, prisons, and killing fields for those in the middle class, intellectuals, ethnic Vietnamese, and Cham Muslims. The high death toll included a majority of Chinary Ung’s family.
For four long years (from April 17, 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh until the end of 1979), Chinary Ung awaited news from his family while living in the United States and working as a composer and music professor. Then towards the end of 1979, he started to receive hundreds of letters from family members, Cambodian refugees, government officials, and non-governmental aid workers. He and Susan worked tirelessly for the next decade to track down family members and find sponsors to bring them to the U.S.
(Part 1) Examples of the letters received by Chinary Ung. They were primarily in Khmer, but others were written in English and French.
(Part 2) Examples of the letters received by Chinary Ung. They were primarily in Khmer, but others were written in English and French.
Distraught by the suffering his family and country had faced, he burned many of the letters, burying the rest in a corner of his life. They would be discovered decades later by his daughters, Sonika and Kalean, and inspire Kalean’s solo performance, "Letters from Home."
Chinary’s wife, Susan Ung with his sister, Helen and her son Dean in Australia in 1984.
While advocating for his family members, Chinary Ung became involved with the Khmer Studies Institute, serving as its president from 1980-1985. The KSI was based in Connecticut and focused on the preservation and dissemination of Cambodian arts. Ung had teaching appointments at Connecticut College and The University of Pennsylvania.
Chinary Ung playing the Roneat ek, or Cambodian xylophone, while students look on, 1981.
Even though the formal reign of the Khmer Rouge ended with Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1979, the KR remained in control for much of the next decade, supported by the United Nations as a potential political foil to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In 2003, Cambodian officials worked with foreign prosecutors to set up the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), also known as the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. Seeking to prosecute high profile former KR leaders, this tribunal famously convicted Comrade Duch (Kaing Guek Eav), the feared leader of S-21 prison, in 2012.
The legacy of genocide is inscribed in the memory of the Cambodian diaspora. While political efforts such as those by the Khmer Rouge Tribunal are a step in the truth and reconciliation process for the Cambodian people, art may serve an equally important function to prompt personal and collective healing. Embedded in the art of Chinary Ung and Kalean Ung are the shared hopes for reconciling with these past tragedies while forging a way forward.
While the letters received by Chinary conveyed struggles of Cambodians in the camp, these transcribed letters detail extreme cases of violence at the Thailand-Cambodia border camps. They were sent to Mary Scully of the Khmer Health Advocates, a non-governmental agency that assisted refugees at the Thailand-Cambodia border in the 1980s and later in the United States.
Letter from Sheppie Glass Abramowitz, wife to former U.S. Ambassador Morton Abramowitz and sister to composer, Phillip Glass. Mrs, Abramowitz was responsible for locating Chinary’s first relative, sister Helen, at Khao-I-Dang refugee camp.
A number of the letters received by Chinary Ung have been scanned for digital archival preservation. From these scans we were able to discern the origins to many of these letters. Most originate from Khao I Dang refugee camp near the Cambodian border in Thailand, while some originate from addresses located in Bangkok, including the US embassy there. Within these letters, Chinary even received one from the man who buried his brother. Sent from Khao I Dang as well, it contained a photo of his brother taken decades before the war began.
BROTHER.mp3
Map from “Cambodia: the Fight for Tomorrow,” a fundraising publication from 1980 produced by the National Cambodia Crisis Committee based out of Washington DC. This map identifies refugee camps along the Thailand-Cambodia border and provides statistics on the displacement of Cambodian refugees.
Map digitized from the "Lionel Rosenblatt collection on the Interagency Task Force for Indochina Refugees" from 1980 which depicts refugee camps and their respective populations in Thailand.
Photographs circa 1979 and 1980; Cambodian refugees at Khao-I-Dang, the refugee camp where a majority of Chinary Ung’s family found themselves awaiting asylum as they wrote letters appealing for help.
