Escaping the Khmer Rouge

by Chileng Pa

  Epilogue

  by Carol Mortland

  Shortly after his arrival in the United States, Chileng began volunteering in our busy refugee resettlement office. His help was especially valuable because he was quick to learn and kind to the people who came to us for assistance. In a matter of months, he spoke sufficient English to assist refugees in any number of activities, from applying for social security cards to enrolling in school. He and his wife quickly learned to drive and purchased a car. He probably made the trip to the regional airport a hundred times as he himself met new arrivals coming to America.

  After studying at a local community college, Chileng worked for the local Indochinese center providing translation and general assistance to the refugee community. The older members of Chileng’s family attended English language classes and, later, found jobs. Chileng’s eldest sister-in-law cared for the children and cooked for the family. In 2008, she was still cooking for her family—I was surprised one day when one of her brothers-in-law popped in on his way home to his wife and children to pick up a pot of food Chandy had just cooked for them.

  By the 1990s, Chileng was the head of a large, close, contentious, and vigorous family. They purchased a house, then another, and spread themselves out between the two, then three houses. Chileng became more consumed in assisting the growing community of Cambodians in the region, leading the establishment of a Buddhist temple and involving himself in community celebrations, local refugee and homeland politics, and constant interpretation, much to the consternation of many in his family. As the political situation in Cambodia stabilized, Chileng made several trips back to his native land and, to his delight, reconnected with his sister and several old friends. In America, the family often went on day-long trips, traveling to the cities of the region, north to Canada, and to the mountains and the sea. Often, they had no destination at all except to explore.

  Then things turned dicey. A government task force began investigating allegations that Southeast Asian refugees had obtained disability benefits from the federal government by misrepresenting their experiences and disabilities. Chileng was suspected of encouraging refugee applicants to lie about their persecution in Cambodia and their current mental and physical condition in the United States, coaching them on how to present themselves as victims of their past, unable to support themselves in the present. Federal and local law enforcement authorities sent a Cambodian undercover agent to covertly tape-record conversations with Chileng about the possibility of applying for Social Security Insurance and food stamps. They questioned Chileng for some hours, but the charges against Chileng were eventually dismissed.

  Three years later, however, the United States Attorney renewed his interest in the case. If Chileng would plead guilty to one charge of mail fraud, the maximum penalty the court would impose would be five years, a fine of not more than a quarter of a million dollars, and a maximum of three years of supervised release. Chileng also would have to pay restitution in the amount of $284,994, and agree that for several years he had knowingly and willfully defrauded federal and state governments.

  Chileng didn’t sign the plea agreement because, he said, he wasn’t guilty: he didn’t intentionally defraud anyone, he didn’t financially gain from any type of fraud activity, and there’s no way he would stand in front of a judge and say he did anything wrong. I encouraged Chileng to accept the plea bargain, but he refused, insisting he wouldn’t say he was guilty for something he didn’t do.

  In 1998, Chileng was formally charged with defrauding the United States Social Security Administration and the state’s Department of Social and Health Services. The U.S. Attorney accused him of coaching refugees to distort their personal histories in Cambodia by including descriptions of tragic events that hadn’t occurred to them and reporting symptoms of illness and depression they hadn’t experienced. He was also accused of collecting kickbacks from refugees in exchange for his assistance.

  A jury found Chileng guilty of sixteen counts of mail fraud, shocking Chileng, his family, and his friends. His wife didn’t accompany him to court for sentencing in the fall of 1998, not feeling she could bear the stress. His brothers, monks, and sponsor did. We sat gloomily in the courtroom just behind Chileng as the procedures ran on, the Cambodians understanding little of what was occurring. None of the six U.S. Attorney and Social Security Administration representatives present looked in our direction as they chatted together, dressed in bureaucratic black and white, smiling as they congratulated one another.

  The judge explained that he had to follow mandatory sentencing rules, thus Chileng would receive additional prison time because he would not express contrition. Through my mind flashed newspaper stories of murderers who received terms of a few years and white-collar criminals who spent several months in prison while retaining a goodly portion of their fortunes.

  Chileng was not so lucky. In addition to the statutory maximum sentence of five years, the court applied enhancements under federal sentencing guidelines that bumped his sentence to eighty-four months of imprisonment, or seven years, followed by three years of supervised release. In addition, he owed the government $1,600 in a special court assessment, $12,500 in fines, and $370,968.41 in restitution.

  As soon as the sentence was announced, the bailiffs hustled Chileng out of the courtroom. He had time only to throw a distressed glance back at us. We weren’t able to say a word to him, nor touch him good-bye. He was gone, and it was four years before any of us saw him again.

  Chileng was taken directly to a federal detention center. A few days later, he wrote the following from the center.

  Dear Sister, I was so sorry after the judge announced my sentence. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t talk. My tears were falling. I couldn’t think straight. I know you were disappointed at what happened. Sister, when I left the courtroom and waited to be transported to the detention center, I felt hopeless because nobody came to talk to me. I couldn’t send a message, and my wife and children didn’t know what was happening.

  When I think about losing my family in Cambodia and now being separated from my second family in America, I feel desperate. I turn my mind to you again. Sister, I would like to thank you for coming here to support me and encourage my family. In my whole life I never found a sister like you. I’ll remember you until I die.

  I didn’t know he’d die long before old age, nor that I’d be by his side when it happened.

  How do you write an interesting story about an extraordinarily uninteresting period? Prison was utterly boring and humiliating. It was unbearable for Chileng, and it led to his death.

  Although federal prison regulations stipulate that inmates be placed in institutions as close to their homes as possible, Chileng was not. Almost three months after his brothers and I watched him being led away by marshals, I received a second letter from him from Sandstone, Minnesota, thousands of miles from his home. “Dear sister,” he wrote,

  Sister, you probably know about inmate life. They never leave your hands and legs free, and it was difficult to eat. There were about 40 inmates in the bus, and only one Asian—me. These inmates are so different. This trip was two days, and I was so depressed. I’m in a free country, but still suffering like this, just to help crazy people. I had more misery in the past, but never more sadness than now.

  No, I didn’t know how life was for inmates, and I never could imagine what his life was like without familiar people, language, and food. For six years, he heard no Cambodian music. I can’t imagine. I did learn that “prison” is a much stronger word than “jail,” that “jail” is the term for local buildings of imprisonment while “prison” refers to federal government holding pens.

  I returned to my life as a museum director, busy and feeling little could be done about Chileng. He could telephone out, but could not receive calls, so I got a cell phone so he could more easily reach me. But what were we going to talk about?

  His life was miserable, and mine was strange to him. We had few current landmar
ks in common, because I’d lived for ten years in a town thousands of miles away from him. I returned annually to see my family, so saw him on those occasions. What we had in common were the experiences we’d shared in the past. Now, there weren’t many fun things to focus on. Nor did we have in common the usual topics people discuss. I didn’t know the people whose lives he now shared. I hadn’t ever experienced the environment in which he now existed. The people with whom he shared life lived in a restricted geographic space, sharply divided into a two-tiered hierarchy. Those in the top tier held enormous power over him, and weren’t required to treat him with the ordinary courtesies of life. Those trapped in the second tier with him were as different from him as night and day: they shared neither language nor experience nor heritage. He was stuck in two layers of difference.

  Nor did Chileng know my life. I lived in a different state, a drier land, a rural setting, all different from the urban-suburban environment we’d shared years earlier. Since he’d visited there only a few times, he knew none of my friends and little about my work.

  There wasn’t much uplifting to say about his family. I was some hours’ drive from them, but I knew Chileng’s wife and brothers struggled to keep their households afloat and pay his legal debts. His children faced their own struggles in high school, now without their father’s support and advice. Each member of the family wished for the knowledge and advice of the most acculturated member of the family, missed Chileng himself, and struggled with their own anger at his being gone: anger at him for having gotten into this mess, however it happened, and anger toward those who’d brought him to this pass.

  It was difficult for Chileng and I to talk about plans—the years stretched ahead emptily. It was difficult to contemplate the immediate dreadful future, hard to imagine a time when he would be out. As the years ticked away, we were able to talk about the parties we’d have after he was released but, in the early years, there was little to discuss. Were we each doing okay? Fine. Was his family really okay? Yes. How were we spending our days? Just working.

  Almost immediately, I decided that I would be upbeat. There was no point in leaving him more depressed at the end of the call than at the beginning, and talking about his situation, his family’s problems, or any of our grief would only make him more morose. I made stupid jokes about his life, asking him what trips he’d been on, what interesting discussions he was having with his fellow inmates, how the food was, how he was enjoying his fascinating work. Yes, dumb, but if I could get him to chuckle or launch into a funny story, I felt better—and hoped he did, too.

  I also nagged him about writing, convinced that recording his story would help him endure prison. He later claimed the writing had helped give him focus and determination to get through a rough time. Some months after he was incarcerated, he thanked me for sending him a Cambodian-English dictionary.

  I am happy to have it because it will help me a lot. I have a long story, but I don’t know how to describe all the aspects of the story. Some words in Khmer would be difficult to say in English words. But I will be persistent in writing until I have some resolve to do so.

  Later that month, he wrote, “I will send you more autobiography when I have written it, but this will take time because my English is very broken. I am sorry about inappropriate words and misunderstandings in this letter.” He became concerned that writing his story would have an impact on his family, in one letter, saying, “I am now writing about my remembered life. I have some hesitancy to write intimate details about my family.”

  There were long gaps when he didn’t write, sometimes because he was apprehensive about his English, at other times because he was dejected. Being in prison was depressing enough; writing about his past increased his despondency. He thought then, he said on the telephone, not only of his family living without him in America, but also of his family gone forever. All his former immediate and extended family, friends, fellow policemen and soldiers—all were gone. Also gone were the people of his new life: family, colleagues, friends, and neighbors.

  Old and new, living and dead, in America or in Cambodia—all was now lost to him, permanently or temporarily, although being in prison stretched out time so that he frequently said it seemed his term would last forever, that it would indeed be permanent and that all he had lost was permanently lost. He wasn’t far off; in fact, he died years before the end of his probation.

  Eventually, though, he returned to writing. After a long recess, he sent some pages. “Here are more of my story chapters for you to edit and fix for me, and save them into your computer disks. I will continue to write more until I finish this story.”

  A year later, after he was transferred to Florence, Colorado from Minnesota, he wrote “Hello, sister, how are you? I’m doing well here. But it’s difficult to work on my book because there’s no room to sit and write. The people here aren’t friendly. I’ve been here a few months, but still haven’t found a friend.” But in the same letter, he wrote, “Here is some typing from the Childhood chapter. Please write to me and let me know what you think about my story. Thank you!”

  Chileng made an effort to appeal his sentence, but was repeatedly turned down, for reasons never explained. I never encouraged him, although I edited his papers and thought his cause a valid one: he had had ineffective legal representation, the witnesses had been coerced to testify against him, and he was a model prisoner.

  Like other prisoners, Chileng worked at various jobs while in prison and joked about the money he was earning each day. He did janitor work, including waxing and buffing floors, and operating various cleaning machines. He also did landscaping and laundry. In June 2002, he briefly described his new camp.

  Dear Sister, the Florence prison camp is a working camp. Every inmate is required to work five days a week, seven hours a day. But they only pay twelve cents an hour if the inmate doesn’t have a high school diploma. They just think I’m a dumb Cambodian inmate, so I have to work and also participate in the camp literacy program. If I don’t do it, they’ll take away my good time, which is 12 days a year.

  With the few dollars he earned and his family sent to him, he was able to purchase items from the prison commissary including oatmeal, gray or white clothing, stamps, radios, watches, headphones, beverages, snacks, cards, envelopes, food, hair products, hygiene items, sports items, clocks, bulbs, and tobacco. He bought little: stamps, candy, and not much else. He spent most of his money on the telephone, calling his family, calling his monk, calling me.

  Always, he struggled for the time to pass. “I’m so bored,” he wrote in early 1999. “I go to school to study every day, but I can’t think straight.” In one letter he apologized for taking my time, saying, “I don’t want to bother you because you are very busy with your responsibilities at your job—not like me with only eating and sleeping like a hog in a cage.” At one point he wrote, “Each cube is so small, and my roommate is not a good man.” He seldom gave much information about other prisoners, stating baldly that this man was good, that man wasn’t. He didn’t talk much about prison life at all, a typical comment, being, “I don’t want to tell you about this place.”

  He vacillated between despair and determination. Once he wrote, “At night, I go to sleep early. I look at the ceiling and put my arm across my forehead. Then I think about my passing life and I ask myself: Why have I ended up like this?” He often expressed regret that he’d tried to help his community. Several months after he was incarcerated, he wrote, “I’m so disappointed the judge didn’t find justice for the people. I didn’t go to those people, they came to me. If I did something wrong, the punishment shouldn’t be so high, sending me far from my family. I don’t understand the law in America.” In 1999, in a letter that contained several expletives, he wrote, “I’m sorry for any word I write that’s not appropriate. It doesn’t mean anything. I just feel frustrated, because of my stupid idea to help Cambodian people.”

  Chileng was definitely confused about his guilty conviction. He often rep
eated what he wrote just after going to prison. “Sister, I’m okay now, but I’m still very disappointed that I’m in prison because I feel I’m an innocent person.” Later, he explained why he was in this predicament.

  Now, I am incarcerated because I helped Cambodians in the community. Sister, you know Cambodian people. After the war and killing, they lost their senses. They’re insane, but don’t want to admit it. For example, most people said they hated the communists, but they still cooperated with them, betraying one another because they were emotionally weak and jealous.

  His wife was confused, too, once telephoning me to say she didn’t understand why the government had accused Chileng. “Why do they say mail fraud? We never get mail. How can it be mail fraud?”

  At other times, Chileng was more tentative. A month after sentencing, he wrote, “I hope you still think about me, and I think you hate me because I am a bad brother!” Three years later, he expressed similar thoughts: “Sister, I thought you might be disappointed in me because I am a bad, bad brother. Sorry about that, sister. Love you from a distance.”

  Always, he yearned for his family. He talked of them on the telephone, begging for assurance that they were doing okay. He talked to them frequently, and often at length, telling them he loved them, listening to their problems. His loneliness was palatable. “Sister, I am alone now. I don’t have anyone to discuss things with, I don’t know who my new lawyer is, I don’t know how my appeal will go. Sister, so long. Love you sister, from your brother.”

  He was thoughtful, sending me greeting cards every birthday and holiday. The first Thanksgiving card he sent said he was remembering “the happy times we’ve shared and the good talks when we visited your home. From now on, I won’t see you again, and no fun!” A Mother’s Day card was signed, “your poor brother.” My favorite may have been the Valentine’s Day card that read on the front, “A mi amiga, muy querida, en el dia of san valentin.”