Stories

The stories unravel as I spend days and days at Korsang- looking around, watching them play domino, waiting for sick patients, reading. Everyone gets there before Korsang opens, at 730am, ready for a day of hanging out together. I think more than anything, my role here is to talk to the staff, to get their stories, to be a friend, to understand them as Americans, to pass no judgment and to listen. The staff at Korsang are all former felons granted permanent residency and refuge from the Khmer Rouge in the United States but deported back into Cambodia after they got into trouble- mostly gang and drug related. The drop-in center is just as much a space for the staff as it is for the injection-drug user community of Phnom Penh.

One told me about his two years in prison, how he spent $600-700 on heroin a week, how easy it was to obtain the drug in prison. He said he only hit the drug 3 times a day though. He lived in Greenville, North Carolina for a while and also in Lexington. Apparently there is a beautiful Khmer Temple in the woods outside of Lexington where he spent all of the Cambodian holidays. He was separated from his Cambodian family during the Khmer Rouge (all the kids were sent off to labor camps), and he was sent from Thailand to California when he was ten. When he turned 18 he got a private investigator to track down his family. Most of them were in the states. I asked how often he sees them now and he says its been a while. They move around a lot. His mom might come back to Cambodia one day to visit him, but his dad will never return. He's scared of Cambodia. He was tortured by the Khmer Rouge in a bamboo cage.

Another guy was born and raised in Memphis. He told me about his first love, their daughter and how much he misses her. She's nine years old now. He got deported 4 years ago. The immigration officer came to his door and told him to get his shoes. He was taken away from home and within a week he was shackled and thrown in a van to be carted all around the country picking up other deportees. Yesterday, as I was helping him put together kits with Korsang's address and services, shampoo, toothbrush and condoms and also putting together clean needle packets with sterilized water and alcohol swabs, I told him about Eve. I talked to him about who she was, how I'd known her, and how she'd been killed. He started talking to me about his friend who committed suicide when they were 18. He talked and talked and talked about it, as if it were yesterday. Only later would I learn, in a conversation overheard at my bar, that he had been convicted of murder in the US.

As our conversation finished he spoke about how important it is for him to be able to talk about things and that he can't talk to anybody here. His Khmer isn't that good (he was 3 months when he came to Memphis from the Thai refugee camp) so that also makes it hard. He genuinely thanked me for listening. I asked him about the tatoo on his hand. He wouldnt tell me who it was at first. He hesitated. Then he told me it had been his gang. So I dived in and asked him all about it. This silly white southern girl asking him the size of the gang, if it was an all Asian gang. He perked up when I talked about it. He said they had Lao, Thai, Khmer, and even some black and white guys. I asked him if he missed the. He misses them a lot.

One guy gives me rides all the time and is always getting me to go with him to give blood tests at the hospital. He told me about his gang, Asia Boy. He came to America from a Thai refugee camp when he was ten.

My first day back from Thailand, just after hearing about Eve, I was talking to one guy about her murder. He said, "its always the good ones." I asked if he'd had friends killed. He said "Oh yea" and told me about drug deals gone bad, and murders unsolved. We talked about racism and the inequality in our justice system. He gave great detail about the time he was shot at- the speeding blue car, the squeal of breaks, the cock of the shotgun. He had just enough time to dive behind a trashcan as the guy fired three shots.

He told me that when he was one year old his mother carried him out of the killing fields. His brother had been forced to work with the Khmer Rouge and his sister was so malnourished she went blind every night.

He was the first to be sent back to Cambodia. And his case was the test case: Ma vs. Reno, Ma vs. Ashcroft. He said ten deportees came over with him, the third shipment. They took a leer jet that cost the United States $250,000.

One guy told me he doesn't like it in Cambodia. Hes been here a year and he has money problems and he can't have fun like he used to. He has no relationship and he's sad. I told him it takes time to adjust and asked him how long it took the other guys to adjust? He said he hasn't asked anyone. I told him most of them have grown to love it, but it takes time. I asked another of the guys how long it had taken him to adjust, and he said it took 6 months, maybe longer. They need to talk to each other about these things.

Another guy was pretty bitter. He talked about missing his mom and his son and said that he got dumped in Cambodia, in the second shipment, even though he was a citizen because his dad got citizenship. A lawyer helped him get all of his charges dropped except one from when he was 16 and had been tried as an adult. If you serve a year with an aggravated felony, you get shipped back.

And what am I to do with this information? I listen and we talk and talk. Then Eve is murdered and it all is right in my face. How complicated our lives are. How closely each interaction relates to something much bigger. All the guys I am with all of these days could just as well have been Eve's murderer. Or were they wrongly convicted? Its easy to accuse, blame, prosecute someone who has little protection in America. Did my friend really kill someone? If he did, what were the circumstances? Do the circumstances even matter? Most of all, who is to blame? Maybe we are all to blame.