I am a survivor of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot regime. Almost 4 years in that cruel regime, I had experiences in life which was so sad, so painful, and plentiful of sufferings that I carry until now. I lost my three children, my whole family to the regime because of killings, starvation, and sickness. I lived with fear, daily, and waited for the end of my life by the Khmer Rouge soldiers. Almost 40 years ago. Nightmares and bad dreams still occur and I still scream at night and wake up my husband who sleep near me. He wonders why I still have nightmares, and it is because all pictures of my children, my parents, my siblings, and family still stick in my memory.

The terrific events! The killings of people in front of my face! I lived in a dark place that the rest of the world did not understand and did not see me and see the Cambodian people in that time. The past trauma still bothers me today. My life in the United States with my husband makes me find peace and a safe place to live, but the nightmare still haunts me.

I was a schoolteacher before in my country, Cambodia. Why do I have to step down to destroy my life, to ruin my life as an educated person? I have to struggle for life as the proverb said. So, by thinking about that I try to survive to build up my strength and to motivate myself, to maintain my daily life functioning with my poor husband.

I became a Cambodian mental health counselor from 1988 helping my people who have the same problem as me to live with peace and without fear and to reduce symptoms of PTSD that they carried with them for many years, and to reduce depression from different kinds of things they faced.

I am a Buddhist. That is my national religion that my family practiced so long from generation to generation. I am able to use Buddhist philosophy to handle my job as counselor and help my people to be like me. I believe they trust me in healing their wounds that they carry for so many years. Believing in Buddha makes survivors and people find peace, having less depression, less stress, and less worries by practicing meditation, and mindfulness. Along with medication from our psychiatrist, they feel better, and the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and depression decrease. Our psychiatrist believes that too. That’s why Gardner mental health agency opened meditation classes years ago for clients by inviting the monk to come to present in the class and provide knowledge of mindfulness. I’m a facilitator of the class. With the practice of meditation and medication from psychiatrist, Cambodian patients become less depressed, less anxious, less thinking, and less stress. They are getting better and better like the lotus flowers growing in the Cambodian community in the United States.

The lotus is a powerful symbol in Khmer Buddhism. It grows out of murky water to bloom into a pure and beautiful flower, just as the mind grows out of chaos into enlightenment in Khmer Buddhist philosophy. Lotus blossoms abound in the wetlands of Cambodia. This beautiful symbol was witness to one of the most brutal mass crimes in recent history.

On April 17, 1975, Pol Pot declared “day zero.” He executed a nefarious military plan with bizarre and cruel social-political goals. Pol Pot’s reign of terror and genocide dismantled the social structure of a kingdom. More than a million people were murdered in “the Killing Fields” of Cambodia. Their nameless graves are peppered with wild Cambodian lotus.

In the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge, hundreds of thousands of traumatized refugees fled into neighboring countries with stories of incredible violence, torture, starvation, and witnessed murder. Pol Pot’s killing machine targeted for execution the educated, the politically connected, the brokers of culture or art. The poor and illiterate agricultural population was spared murder but was terrorized, tortured, starved, and raped. And upon escape from the Khmer Rouge’s grasp, the survivors’ only hope was to scramble through the lotus fields and into Thailand [1].

Over the decade that followed, more than 150,000 terrorized refugees were resettled to the United States. Many illiterate and monolingual, most traumatized, Khmer survivors were disseminated to host cities from California to Massachusetts. Prevalence of trauma-related mental health disorders was beyond rates seen in almost any other sample population [2].

San Jose, California, received 10,000 Cambodian refugees. There were no culturally competent mental health resources in the city.

In the shadow of the Silicon Valley Tech industry, a Cambodian lotus was planted in the garden of a new Buddhist temple.

No one knew whether it would grow there.

I was born and raised in Cambodia. Growing up, I was repeatedly exposed to life-and-death situations and forced to go on survival mode. By age 10, I had lived through a devastating civil war, and by age 14, I had survived a horrible genocide. I was deprived of an opportunity to attend school and enjoy life without fear, danger, and violence. So when the war was over, I felt ecstatic and heavenly, jumping up and down, running around smiling and laughing, and playing outside like a carefree preadolescent. At last, there was peace, and there was no more fear. There were no more bombs dropping from the sky, destroying lives, villages, and properties. There were no more explosions in crowded places, injuring and killing innocent people.

But peace was short-lived, and my heaven turned into hell in a matter of days.

In 1975, the Cambodian communist guerrillas, commonly known as the Khmer Rouge, took complete control over the country. Dressed in black and armed with guns, the Khmer Rouge soldiers went around the cities telling people to flee to the countryside. They said, “The Americans are coming to drop bombs on us.” Heeding their warning, my family and I headed to the countryside with very few belongings, hoping to return home within 3 days. Once in the countryside, however, we along with thousands of other evacuees were not allowed to return to the cities. Instead, we were forcibly assigned to different rural villages and told to follow Angkar’s directives without questions. For those who resisted, the punishment was death. The Khmer Rouge’s motto was “To keep you is no gain, and to kill you is no loss.” My family and I were eventually relocated several times, and each time our lives became more and more miserable.

During the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, which lasted for almost 4 years, I was separated from my parents and four siblings. My father, two older brothers, and an older sister were assigned to different mobile units, and they were sent to work in the rice fields. My younger brother and I were initially allowed to stay with our mother, but later on, I was placed in a makeshift shelter for teens. We were forced to work in the rice fields from dawn to dusk, weeding and clearing plots of land, building dams and dikes, digging canals, transporting and transplanting rice seedlings, and gleaning the fields after harvest time. Day in and day out, I had to work under very harsh conditions and was given two meals of rice porridge to eat for lunch and dinner. I was starved and wasted away and had to eat anything that I could get my hands on, like roots, aquatic plants, fruits, honeycombs, rats, fish, frogs, birds, and insects. I was caught for stealing and while foraging for food many times, and these “immoral” transgressions were punishable by death for adults. But I was young, and so the Khmer Rouge cadres were more lenient with me. They arrested me, tied my hands behind my back, detained me, and threatened to kill me. I was “re-educated” for putting my self-interest before that of Angkar. I saw many people disappearing and dying and knew what had happened to them. The majority of them were executed while the rest died from overwork, starvation, and diseases. The Khmer Rouge cadres banned almost everything and strictly enforced the directives of Angkar. They were the enforcers, the judges, and the executioners. I was on my own and had to do my best to survive. I got really sick on two separate occasions, and each time I almost died. My parents and siblings were sent to different locations, and we hardly saw each other for almost 4 years. Fortunately, our family was reunited in 1979 when the Vietnamese armies invaded Cambodia and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime. After the civil war and genocide, I lost one older brother, two older sisters, and one younger sister to ailments and execution. My parents had ten children in total, and these four had been either deceased or displaced from the family.

The 1979 invasion and occupation of Cambodia by the Vietnamese armed forces caused a massive exodus of Cambodian refugees. Thousands of these Killing Fields survivors escaped to the Thai-Cambodian border. My parents had second thoughts about staying put, and they were afraid of being persecuted by the Vietnamese. As a result, we decided to flee with others, despite knowing how dangerous the trek was. The danger was everywhere, from landmines, Vietnamese soldiers, Thai soldiers, Khmer Rouge soldiers, resistance soldiers, and armed robbers. My family and I ended up living in refugee camps for years, and we were subjected to indescribable horror and misery. But while staying in these refugee camps and waiting for outside help, I finally had an opportunity to go to school. In 1983, my family and I were allowed to resettle in America. By this time, I had lived through years of civil war, survived the genocidal communist regime, and endured innumerable hardships while migrating. Through these adversities, I had learned to survive under harsh conditions and to appreciate the support from family. Also, I had learned to be strong, persistent, and optimistic, and as it turned out, these qualities served me well in my new world. I was able to deal with difficulties and challenges while getting adjusted to my new life and transitioning to early adulthood.

The survivors had experienced unspeakable conditions and suffered beyond imagination. Their resettlement in the United States became a major challenge for the Office of Resettlement and for the host cities throughout the states that accepted the immigration. The mental health issues were overwhelming. And this wave of refugees had undergone selection forces for poor acculturation through the nature of Pol Pot’s killing machine. Many were poor, illiterate, monolingual, agricultural persons without experience of modern technology. Most were victims of grave human rights abuses.

Survivors were relocated to host cities throughout the United States. Many individuals with horror stories found themselves in a strange new reality without language capacity, without financial resources, and entirely unprepared for acculturation. Given the overwhelming mental health burden, most resettled Cambodian groups had great disadvantage even accessing the social welfare or health care system in their new cities. San Jose, California, was no exception. The Khmer population quickly found itself at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, without access to basic needs. Cambodians in San Jose did not seek mental health treatment because they did not understand their condition to be in the category of “mental health.” Furthermore, if they did want health care, they did not feel that they had access. Most had no medical coverage or Medicaid at best. And most did not know how to use it if they had it [3]. The Khmer community had limited health care resources, each other, and a local Buddhist temple.