Word: cambodians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Seng (see above photograph) has survived quite well for someone who, when he escaped into Thailand two years ago, was nearly dead from malnutrition. His father, a doctor, was killed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge soldiers. The policies of the Khmer Rouge included the execution of Cambodian intellectuals. Kim Seng watched his father being taken away in a helicopter, and for a long time in the refugee camp at Khao I Dang, all he drew were pictures of helicopters...
...greater chance of being claimed by another country. One boy was desolate because his friend suddenly left camp with a family with which he had been secretly ingratiating himself for months. A ten-year-old was so eager to emigrate that he found himself wandering around back at the Cambodian border. He had stowed away on a truck that-he had persuaded himself-was bound for America...
These simple abstractions have a meaning for Cambodian children that is clearly disturbing to them. It is not as if the Khmer Rouge are an invading horde from a distant nation; the Khmer Rouge are their neighbors, their friends, themselves-which may account for the fact that so many of the children have nightmares in which they assume the roles of Pol Pot's soldiers. They have, in fact, known children who were Pol Pot's soldiers. The atrocities of the Khmer Rouge are thus acutely shocking. No, they say; the good spirit and the bad spirit cannot...
...this respect, their situation is not terribly different from the Cambodian children at Khao I Dang?except that their hopes of resettlement are justifiably higher. But in temperament the Vietnamese children seem quite different from the Khmer. Generally they are wilder and more independent, either because of their greater freedom in the camps or because of something characteristic. Argyle 4 used to be a storage depot for Hong Kong's armed forces. Now it looks like a teen-age canteen, the kids loitering under the fluorescent lights like teen-agers in any poor city neighborhood, their self-possession equally dopey...
...part, he feels no hatred for the boatmaster whatever, only disapproval. He understood the necessity of eating the dead boy, and he observes that the fear of starvation may have driven the boatmaster to behave with unnatural cruelty. Unlike the Cambodian children, Pham acknowledges that there is the capacity for good and evil in everyone...