THE NEW IMMIGRANTS

AT 7:05 ON a recent Monday evening, Delta Flight 832 from Seattle to Dallas rolled to a stop at gate twenty. The usual slightly dazed travelers-businessmen, students, couples, a bustling Hispanic family-filed through and scattered toward the baggage carousel. After a pause, a Cambodian family appeared. Ly Hy, his wife, three children, and a crippled sister-in-law in a wheelchair were bound for their new home, a small apartment on Annex in East Dallas.

“Welcome to America,” offered “B.P.” Bounpheng Southivons, a Laotian caseworker at the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the family’s sponsoring agency. Bounpheng spoke some Khmer, the language of Cambodia, and he reassured the family with familiar phrases and smiles. Shy as forest creatures, their dark eyes grave with fear and little understanding, they huddled together in a clump.

The children, ages eight, four, and almost two, wore the blue sweat pants and down jackets (with “Made in U.S.A.” tags dangling from the zippers) that are issued to all refugees, rubber thongs, and no shirts. The women wore colorful Malay sarongs under their jackets. A carved wooden cane rested across the lap of the sister-in-law. “Fell off Taked Dam. Broke many bones. Very difficult for her to walk,” notes her IRC record.

As the family sat-squatted Southeast Asian style, two small boxes holding all they owned came down the baggage belt. B.P. gathered Ly Hy and his family together and herded them toward the IRC van. Thirty minutes later the six new arrivals followed B.P. down the dark hallway of a dilapidated apartment house and into a ground-floor one-bedroom on the building’s east side.

As they sat, bewildered and exhausted, on the living room mattress, B.R explained some basics. “See this?” he said, picking up a light bulb, “It goes up here and here you make dark and light. Click, click. This, a broom. Use it! Hot water, cold water. See here, rice, fish sauce, noodles, all free. Stove is here. Gas very dangerous. You knew how to use clock?| What is it? 8:30? Good. Use it.” They understood little. They had never seen a refrigerator. It was all half-feet, half-enigma, like the radios given Ecuadoran Indians by Alliance for Progress in the early Sixties- which at first they beat like drums.

The apartment quickly filled with curious neighbors, all Cambodians: three kids from next door and their mother, carrying a VCR tape; the San Hengs who arrived ten months ago; Mr. Heng, just back from his job at Oriental Gasket and Packing Company on Denton Drive. Two of his children raced plastic wind-up trucks across the carpet. As new camaraderies began, B.P. explained that tomorrow another caseworker would pick them up at ten o’clock for an orientation talk and neighborhood tour. “And we get you another one of these,” he said, picking up the old scarred cane that had come so far. He leaned on it, snapping it in two. “Oh, no. Very sorry, but we get you one. Free!”



THE LY HY family’s escape from blood-washed Cambo- dia, a country sinking into darkness, had taken years. Ly Hy and his wife had lost three children and nine relatives in the horrific years of the late Seventies, when nearly two million of seven million Cambodians had perished and Cambodian society was destroyed. After their escape they spent five years in refugee camps; after endless processing, screening, and paperwork in three countries, they had finally arrived at their new home and, though confused, were very grateful. An old Asian proverb sums up what all refugees like the Hy family feel, fleeing a beloved-but-deadly homeland for broad-shouldered America: “After the scorpion, the frog seems divine.”

The arrival of an immigrant family like the Hys is one of the most common and clichéd scenes in our history. Yet it remains one of the most thrilling. Such arrivals are the central metaphor that sums up our culture. Since the first great flood of Irish (two million from 1815-1860), the pattern has been the same. The immigrants arrive representing the poorest and least educated and most oppressed. They arrive ignorant of language and customs, exploited and abused. They huddle together in the ghettos of the cities and slowly begin to understand their most immediate needs-the language, self-aid in crisis, organizing for companionship, education for the young. Gradually a community forms. Then they move into the spheres of American life where many or all groups meet-the larger economy, politics, social life. Two-thirds of all immigrants in the world are people like the Hys entering the U.S. Today, 26 percent of us are descended from someone who immigrated within the last hundred years.

The latest wave of immigrants to America began in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson dropped the quota system. These new arrivals have not come from Europe, as was usually the case earlier in the century. Of the 544,000 legal immigrants in 1984, the largest number came from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, and elsewhere in the Third World. That same year, more Asians came to the U.S.-282,000-than in the three decades from 1931-1960. We have not always welcomed them: Congress passed a Chinese Exclusionary Law in 1882, made a “Gentleman’s Agreement” with Japan in 1907 to halt immigration, and created an Asiatic Barred Zone in 1917.

Two substantial refugee communities in the U.S. (the Cubans and Indochinese) were created not as a result of our will but because of decisions of foreign powers over which we have no control. In 1980, Congress rewrote the refugee laws, following the Indochina boat lifts. The annual limit was raised to 50,000, but the president (after consulting Congress) can exceed that ceiling and has. By September 1985, 807,000 Indochinese had settled in the U.S., including 120,000 Cambodians.

The majority of the Asians who first arrived in Dallas in 1975 were educated Vietnamese who had worked for our government. They did not fit Emma Lazarus’ categories: they were not your tired, your hungry, your poor but your energetic, your middle-class, your well-nourished-but still yearning to be free. Unlike in Houston where they settled together and created a “Little Saigon,” the Metroplex Vietnamese were scattered in the suburbs and along Fitzhugh near Bryan in East Dallas. Today they number about 17,000. Laotians followed, also settling on Fitzhugh but also in Grand Prairie and South Oak Cliff. Dallas’ 8,000 Laotians make up the largest group in the state.

With the Cambodians, everything changes drastically. An eighty-year-old Cambodian would have been born under Siamese rule, then lived through French colonial rule, Japanese occupation, once more with the French, then endured Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s rule, Lon Nol’s regime, the evil and horror of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, and finally, in 1979, invasion and occupation by the Vietnamese. In all but Sihanouk’s time (1954-1970), there was fighting and death.

Nothing remained constant, Before the French, Cambodians had one given name- Ek, Bo, Phal, Chamreun. The French introduced the surname, last name always preceding the given name. They could not even depend on their country’s name. Under the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia became known by its Khmer name, Democratic Kampuchea. A Vietnamese-backed government changed that to the People’s Republic of Kampuchea in 1979, but the name recognized by the United Nations is the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, which represents three guerrilla groups that joined forces in 1982 to fight the Vietnamese.

The ultimate horror came during the four years of Pol Pot’s madness, what Cambodians call peal chur chat, the “sour and bitter time” graphically portrayed in the movie The Killing Fields. The Khmer Rouge methodically executed the leaders and the educated, separated families and outlawed the ownership of anything. Appropriately, everyone was ordered to wear only black. If a holocaust of similar proportions occurred in the U.S., 30 to 90 million people would die.

When the scope of the Cambodian genocide became known, the U.S. government began the Khmer Guided Placement Project, a program to settle thousands of Cambodians in twelve cluster cities around the country, including Dallas. Because most were uneducated, rural, very poor, they would require much more help in making a new life than the Vietnamese or Laotians. Because of the large number of low-income apartments there, most of the Cambodians were settled together, largely in a one-square-mile area bordered by Ross, Bennett, Haskell, and Live Oak, with the greatest concentration along San Jacinto between Carroll and Haskell. An Asian community of sorts already existed in the area, and the newcomers would be close to two of the major resettlement agencies (IRC and Church World Services1 Dallas-Fort Worth Refugee Inter-agency) and the two of the four schools offering English as a Second Language (ESL) classes (Fannin Elementary and Spence Middle School). Today, 4,000 of the Metro-plex’s 10,000 Cambodians live in this slice of East Dallas.

To ex-construction worker Ly Hy-to anyone-this part of the city might resemble a defiled Eden rather than a place of Edenic promise. It has small, sporadic spots of beauty, but overall it is a scooped-out neighborhood of sagging apartment houses and cottages; of comer prostitutes and piles of garbage; of high crime and low expectations. In a city dominated by ,the well-mannered and well-fed it is rude and lean, but infinitely preferable to facing random murder in a rice paddy because a pair of glasses identified you as educated.



SIX HOURS BEFORE the Hy family arrived at D/FW, Karen Jordan, an IRC refugee resettlement worker, checked her list of apartment items required to begin life anew on Annex Street. For $230, Terry Henry of Henry’s Used Furniture in Oak Cliff would deliver four beds, six chairs, and a table; as always, no charge for delivery. Food for six: a twenty-five-pound bag of rice, two chickens, a package of wonton noodles, tea, soy sauce, garlic; then, cups, towels, knives, forks, glasses, spoons, sheets, bowls for each person; a frying pan, one rice pot, clock, four blankets, soap, broom, four lightbulbs, toothpaste, dish cleaning soap, toilet paper. Total: $144. She also had an emergency clothes cache, “except for children’s socks and underwear and things for teenagers that we never seem to get,” Jordan says.

Karen Jordan’s job is to find and prepare apartments for newly arriving families. She spends countless hours knocking on managers’ doors, searching for rooms, and she has heard all the excuses. Too many kids. They slaughter pigs in the bathtubs. Why-should I help our enemy? She almost always has to rely on the hundred or so units owned by L&B Investments.

“I know they are in bad shape, but the management does let them live here and is not picky about how many people are in one place,” Jordan sighs. “Sometimes the refugees are to blame, putting rice down the toilet or sink, the kids running around with no colthes, going to the bathroom outside. That doesn’t happen too much anymore.” Entering the Hys’ apartment, Jordan made her survey. L&B had cleaned the refrigerator and stove, provided a clothes rod, tightened the back window glass, and put a better lock on the front door. The kitchen shelves had been cleaned but were already dotted with rat droppings. Satisfied, she checked on other IRC clients in the building. Leaking ceiling, no hot water, faulty lock, always the rats.

The morning after their first night in Dallas, IRC caseworker Marie Tang picked up Ly Hy, his wife, sister-in-law, and youngest child for their orientation. First, Karen Jordan handed them a piece of paper. Did they have any knowledge of captured or live Americans or the locations of any American graves, remains, or aircraft? They did not.

“Welcome to America,” Karen Jordan said with her sunny smite. Using a translator, she explained about her agency and the catch-as-catch-can rules of immediate survival: rent payments, apartment maintenance, job search, food stamps, school, importance of learning English, and customs (“Children always wear clothes outside… Don’t let your kids pull weeds and eat them… Most U.S. women don’t breast-feed in public. . .Learn today how to say your address in English”).

After giving them maps of the area, Marie Tang drove the Hys through their new neighborhood, past the tall AT&T building at Haskell and Bryan that all refugees use as a landmark; past the East Dallas Health Coalition Clinic on Bryan, the Minyard on Live Oak, the Asian stores on Fitzhugh where they could get familiar Asian herbal remedies such as Tiger Balm and Monkey Holding a Peach or miniature Buddhist altars; and finally to the Vien Piane Grocery next to the Thai Lanna restaurant on Bryan where Ly Hy picked up some dried shrimp, some parhok (the pickled fish that is Cambodia’s national condiment), and other items.

It was impossible to tell what the family was thinking. No doubt confused and overwhelmed by impotence and culture shock, these heart-rending, homely people were unfailingly polite, gracious, and congenial, but quiet and introspective, Their culture had taught them not to show excessive gratitude out of fear of appearing boastful or insincere. To Cambodians, our vigorous gesturing, touching, and back-slapping do not communicate friendship or thanks but rudeness, the body literally out of control.

They would have to learn everything, from body language to elevators, freeways, pay phones, designer jeans, calculators, and checking accounts. From a country of almost nothing they had come to the land of too much, which held very few of the loved, familiar things of their past life. Like all who had come before, the Hy family faced two stages of adjustment: mastering the basic skills of day-to-day life and the more profound problem of accepting the American way of life.

Marie Tang pointed out the place that, except perhaps for the clinic, would be most valuable to the newcomers. The Dallas Police Department’s East Dallas precinct storefront had opened only a month before Ly Hy’s arrival but already it had made a difference. It is directed by a remarkable man. Corporal Ron Cowart, who had been an eleven-year member of the department’s ultra elite, muy macho SWAT team, now spent his days not only catching criminals but delivering blankets, boxes of toys, and bags of food, or taking sick Cambodians to Parkland Hospital, or speaking before corporate boards and service groups soliciting help for these new citizens.

Cowart became attached to Asia and Asians in 1968 while serving his thirteen months in Vietnam with a mobile riverine force patroling the Mekong Delta. Back home, in 1974 he joined the DPD’s Special Operations Tactical Section, which only worked high crime areas. Thus he knew Asians and the emerging “Little Asia” of East Dallas.

As the growing number of Indochinese moved in during the early Eighties, Cowart noticed the social topography changing, the new cultural blend: the strange, atonal music mixing with the slow-slap, monotonous-slap of tortillas being made; of women carrying grocery bags dangling from a pole across the back; of a young Hispanic girl mimicking momma with a Coca-Cola can ring for a wedding band playing with a young Cambodian wearing an amulet around her neck to ward off evil spirits; of a Laotian ordering a “Buddy Watson” (a Budweiser) while his neighbor ordered the Colonel Sanders chicken, “orihinal and echtra creepy.” And all the residents of Little Asia searched out the bargains-day-old bread, dented soup cans, sun-burned shirts from store windows.

Cowart got involved because of his wife, Melinda, who teaches English as a Second Language at Spence. She came home full of stories about what the new people had endured and how polite and smart her Asian students were. Cowart began walking the neighborhood on his off hours, seeing the calamities first hand-knives stuck through doors for locks, rags plugging broken windows, malnourished children, seventeen people living in a one-bedroom apartment to save money, kids with black eyes because of a B on a report card instead of an A, rifled mail boxes, too many paralyzed victims.

Cowaxt slowly began building a bridge between the police and the Cambodian community, not an easy task with people who are used to equating police and complaining with death. With the Highland Baptist Church he founded Explorer Past 68, whose thirty Asian members began earning merit badges by installing peepholes in apartment doors. He organized toy, clothing, and food drives and got companies and organizations like Southland Corp., Southwestern Bell Telephone, and (he Vietnam Veterans to contribute money and necessities. When a Meadows Foundation grant was approved ($44,611), Ron Cowart was the obvious choice to direct the police department’s Southeast Asian Refugee Liaison Office.

Most important, perhaps, Ron Cowart recruited three men-Pov Thai, a Cambodian, Leck Keovilay, a Laotian, and Thao Dam, a Vietnamese, to take the police academy course and become public service officers, assigned to his office-the first time in Texas a law enforcement agency has had uniformed personnel representing the three major Southeast Asian nationalities.



GAMBODIAN POV THAI, twenty-three, arrived in Dallas in July 1981 after three years in Thailand’s refugee camps. “We were born again. Finally in America. All we had were our clothes,” says Thai. Thai first lived on Live Oak, then Monarch, and now he and his family live in an apartment at Gaston and Peak. His mother works at Fishbum Cleaning & Laundry Co. and his brother at Walton Manufacturing Inc. Thai worked as a janitor at Richardson High School. He then moved to Williamson Printing and worked part time as a translator at the New Life (Cambodian) Baptist Church. There the pastor, Chuck Morris, told Ron Cowart about him.

“I still have a brother, Muy Thai, in Cambodia,” Thai says. “We hadn’t heard from him in three years. We have been sending posters and names to the refugee camps, and last month we heard from him. He and his three children are alive living in the capital, Phnom Penh. I cannot believe it.”

After lunch Ron Cowart and Pov Thai walk San Jacinto street, past laundry drying on bushes, a metal coat hanger with strips of meat draped over it drying in the sun, a family cooking dinner on a charcoal brazier, perhaps not yet comfortable with American stoves. At the end of the block a group of Hispanics drink beer and toss the cans in the street. Squatting curbside, two Asian kids run out, pick up the cans, smash them flat with a piece of pavement, and drop them in a grocery bag.

The officers enter the courtyard of 4211 San Jacinto, one of the most crime-ridden and dilapidated apartment houses in the area. Several years ago two men broke into a back apartment, stabbed a sleeping man, then raped his wife while she lay beside his dead body. Assaults and robberies are still common. Two Cambodian families-nine people-now live in that apartment. In Cambodia, extra rooms were created by partitions made of dried, plaited palm leaves. Here, the living room and bedroom are divided with sheets hung on ropes around rows of mattresses. There are throw pillows, a chair, a TV and VCR, and a hammock with a long ribbon-rope that the mother gently pulls, rocking a tiny baby to sleep while she watches a pot of simmering chicken broth. A large, framed fake U.S. hundred-dollar bill hangs over the bedroom door.

Thai told Cowart that the woman’s stove ventilation didn’t work; the smoke was giving her child a sore throat. Her rent was being raised to $340 a month and she was confused about clinic hours and wanted to know if her baby needed “asocial.” Thai told her a social security card was necessary for everyone. She was happy that L&B had painted the apartment and cleaned the rug.Cowan and Thai then check on an old couple next door whose teeth are stained with betel nut juice. The old man is painfully thin, his eyes cloud-white. He wears a krama, a checkered cloth worn on the head in Cambodia to keep the sun off, to carry food home in, to cover the body when washing in a stream. In Cambodia he was a highly respected man, Cowart said later. Now he has nothing, feels of no importance. He has not learned English and understands nothing about American life.

Walking out they meet Paul, a new Cambodian arrival from Houston. Thai tells him they are special police officers who work only with the Indochinese community. “We want to know you and protect you, but you have to help us. If you hear anything about drugs, guns, prostitution, gambling, extortion, bribery, let us know. If you need food stamps or clothes, we’ll find an agency.”

The man answers, and Thai smiles. “He says he don’t even let drinkers in his place.”

“See that girl,” Cowart says, pointing to a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese wearing heavy makeup and tight pants. “That would never happen in the old country.” In many Asian countries teenagers are kept apart until their marriages are arranged. Cowart and Thai now see family structures crumbling. Unwed mothers. Kids mocking their parents because they don’t speak English. “Those long-haired, thuggy-looking guys over there are good kids, but they want to blend in so the Hispanics won’t victimize them going to school,” Cowart says. “When I ask why they are carrying sticks to school they say ’to hit a Spanish.’”

More ominous, however, are the unmistakable signs of Asian organized crime beginning To penetrate Dallas, as it did years ago in Houston. Late in the afternoon, Cowart stops at the Ba Le Sandwich Shop owned by a Vietnamese family in the L-shaped building fronted by Mai’s Restaurant. Lately a gang of tough young men had monopolized the four tables in the early afternoon, leaving a mess, not paying, frightening customers away. They told the owner they couldn’t speak English, had no job or money-but he did. He could pay them protection money or spend it on new tires or doctor bills.

“They call themselves ’Cuong,’” says the owner of Ba Le, an ex-military policeman from Saigon. “They have guns and say they are from Oklahoma City and Houston.” A few nights before, Cowart had noted their license plate numbers and seen the same cars parked in front of what vice officers had told him was an Asian whorehouse on Reiger Street near Prairie. “That’s how they start-extortion of small businessmen, then drugs, prostitution, gambling, and contract murder. I just hope we can get people to tell us, because it’s coming,” says Cowart.

Another potentially serious problem facing the community is housing. Cowart still vividly remembers the terrified faces of the 300 Cambodian and Thai tenants evicted from the Golden Hills Apartments on Kir-by Street thirteen months ago. “They thought the government was taking them to camps. They slept in doorways, in cars, under trees with their suitcases, It was terrible.” Cowart is cautiously hopeful about a housing cooperative plan being put together by agencies like the Dallas-Fort Worth Refugee Interagency and Dallas Alliance of Southeast Asian-Americans Inc., working with the city. Residents would make a small down payment and then pay no more than $300 a month rent. If it succeeds, it will be the first such public-private housing project in Dallas for low-income people.

As Ron Cowart has to reeducate the new refugees regarding the law, so does his wife, Melinda, teach them about education. In Asia, a child is taught to rely more on listening, watching, and imitating than on experimenting or making his own discoveries. They imitate rather than innovate. “They are fantastic memorizers,” says Dr. Dam Phap, DISD’s coordinator of English as a Second Language and director of Asian education. “Now they have to learn the discovery process, to synthesize, analyze, infer.”

There are other problems. In the Far East, a child shows politeness by being quiet; to look someone directly in the eye is an insult. “We must change these things, teach participation, not to be shy in the classroom,” Phap says. “Of course, in Cambodia there hasn’t been any education except indoctrination for almost eleven years. Only singing Communist songs, repeating slogans. They need much more help, the Cambodians.”

Melinda Cowart, who has a Ph.D. in education, sees other distresses. Parents discourage their children from participating in extracurricular activities, which they see as time wasted away from primary subjects.

Cambodian boys and girls dislike, even fear, physical education class-boys because they are small, girls because they must wear gym clothing. “Last fall was our first time to suit out in shorts and I had some of my Asian girls say ’Please Dr. Mrs. Cowart’-they always use all titles to show respect-’I would rather take a 50 than put on shorts.’”

Of all the people involved in Asian acculturation, Dr. Cowart and her fellow ESL teachers have the most important job. Learning English is the key to everything, the naked absolute. Asian children know this and want to learn English, while maintaining their native language, religion, and culture. But, many experts say, English is not being taught correctly in Dallas.

“They come to me for two hours of intensive ESL instruction, then go the next hour into seventh- and eighth-grade math, science, and Texas history classes being taught with words far above their capability to understand. It’s very defeatist for them,” says Melinda Cowart. “I think Fort Worth does it better. For two years the kids go to learning centers that serve as their schools. Regular classes-math, science, etc.-are taught using an ESL approach. They then return to regular English classes back at their school able to cope with more sophisticated words.”

Despite the problems, Melinda Cowart’s Asian students rank as her best. They combine easy charm and respect with a fanatical desire to succeed. They sometimes over-learn; an Asian student might put periods after every word instead of at the end of the sentence, to show he has it right. While some students come to class bragging about their first margarita, the Asians ask to be transferred to another class because they aren’t working hard enough in the one they are in. They chide misbehaving peers with teasing nicknames like “Mr. Talks Too Much” or “Mr. Copy and No Study.”

Because of this zeal to learn and succeed, it took only one generation for Asian-Americans to top the national median family income ($22,713 vs. $20,835 for white Americans, according to the 1980 census) and to excel in academics. Asians make up more than 10 percent of Harvard’s freshman class and more than 20 percent of Stanford’s. In 1983, the vice-president of the honor society and the valedictorian of 900 students at Skyline High School was Dr. Dam Phap’s daughter, Janie, now a President’s Scholar at SMU.

In Southeast Asia, the historic gesture of salutation is made by holding the hands, palms together, in humble supplication in front of the face. The height of the clasped hands indicates respect for the other person. In the Indochinese East Dallas community, no one receives a higher clasped greeting than a professor of nursing named Charles Kemp. More than anyone, Kemp, an ex-Marine, is responsible for improving the quality of life for the new refugees. More than anyone, he has made the American dream a reality for them.

“I created some of those refugees,” Kemp says. “I have a very personal relationship with Southeast Asia. My blood’s there, my friends died there. We didn’t help them a whole lot overseas, so maybe we can do a better job here.” The moment Charles Kemp knew these impoverished newcomers had changed his life came in 1982. He had a chance to go to the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see old friends. Or he could go work in the Thai-Cambodian refugee camps with his wife, Leslie, and get a first-hand look at the lives of those other war veterans. They went to Thailand.

It was Charles Kemp who met time and again with police administrators to convince them a storefront was needed. It was Kemp who worked tirelessly with the social action committee of Temple Emanu-El to persuade them to take on the major funding for the East Dallas Health Coalition Clinic; it was Kemp who worked with the Hunger Clearing House to begin an emergency Asian food bank at the Munger Place United Methodist Church. And it was Kemp who convinced his TWU School of Nursing bosses to let him canvass the neighborhood with ten students to make clinical assessments and see that the residents got proper health care.

Kemp quickly realized that health care was the most crying need for the refugees. The complex urban public health system overwhelmed Cambodians, most of whom had always relied on traditional healers called Kru Khmer to dispel evil spirits and witches thought to cause illness. Imagine their confusion in a large hospital with its multiple interviews, crowded waiting rooms, and endless paperwork.

Like social workers, educators, policemen, and the clergy, health officials have to learn an old culture’s ways and reeducate those whose customs have been embalmed – in law for centuries. It is in matters of health more than any other area of American life that Cambodians make both small and large trade-offs between old-world beliefs and new-world reasonableness. Here is the main arena where they are caught in a tug-of-war between cultures, the old way and the new way, la via vecchia and la via nuova, as an earlier group of immigrants put it.

Walking toward Carroll Street to check on friends and those he knew might need help, Kemp explains that Cambodians treat symptoms, not causes; they view health care primarily as the dispensing of medicine and expect to get some every visit. They have no tradition of prevention or education. Pills are nice, injections better, IVs, heaven.

Over and over Kemp has to explain the importance of taking medicine over a long period if it’s needed, as with insulin. Cambodians expect drugs to work quickly and absolutely. He repeats at many apartments the difference between adult and children’s aspirin, explaining that the former is bad for a child’s liver; at the next stop he draws a map to the family planning clinic on North Henderson where “medicine for no baby” can be obtained, and in a familiar losing battle, he tries to explain why a baby should lie on her stomach to prevent choking rather than her back, the position preferred by all Cambodian mothers.

An apartment door opens, spilling children outside like shelled peas. Three more are prone on two mattresses. Stuffed animals line the mantel and sit on top of the TV and VCR, which only the very poor are without. Made-in-Bombay or Hong Kong or Taiwan movies can be rented from almost all area Asian restaurants and grocery stores and provide a link to their almost destroyed culture. Also, the electronic furniture symbolizes success in their new land. Many apartments boast pictures of family members on the wall; often, they are posing by the TV-VCR-tape deck entertainment center, According to Kemp, Cambodians especially love wrestling, the Three Stooges, and Wonder Woman-programs with easily identifiable good and bad guys.

The room has a distinct, fusty odor, a stale, recycled quality because of poor ventilation and too many residents. Traditionally, Cambodians have preferred the nuclear family living arrangement rather than the large, extended family under one roof found in other Asian nations. According to John Maicucci, an SMU doctoral candidate in anthropology who has studied the Dallas Cambodian community for more than three years, many Cambodians don’t like the “cluster” approach of American housing. They see it as not private, too noisy, too smelly. Cambodians view the body in humoral terms, with wind as the dominant humor. A proper passage of wind allows the body to maintain its equilibrium, and when it’s interrupted, illness and anxiety result. This view of the body’s proper workings influences the Cambodian idea of housing.

Perhaps it was an unhealthy or blocked wind that indirectly caused the red circle on the forehead of one of the women in the apartment. “The circle comes from a folk remedy I see all the time ” Kemp says. “It’s called ’choup’ and involves placing a tiny candle on a small wooden platform on the forehead. The candle’s lit and covered with a small bottle. The flame consumes the oxygen and creates a vacuum that causes a circular contusion.”

Kemp has spoken many times to groups and local people working with Cambodians about their folk remedies like choup and “coining,” the nibbing with a coin dipped in Oriental compounds similar to Vicks Vapo-Rub on the neck, back, chest, or arms that causes abrasions resembling burns. They believe it restores proper balance to the body. “We shouldn’t discourage these remedies. They do no harm, and since 40 percent of their complaints involve psychological disorders, it gives them solace,” says Kemp.

Kemp is most worried about mental illness among the Cambodians. The American Psychiatric Association has a psychosocial stress scale ranging from one to seven that indicates a person’s vulnerability to stress-related disorders. Cambodians are sevens down the line-the results of torture, starvation, concentration camps, loss of loved ones, guilt from leaving family behind, eradication of culture.

Still, they survive. One family that has not only endured but prospered began their new life five years ago at Welcome House, an old frame cottage operated by the National Council of Jewish Women and other agencies as a temporary residence for refugees. There on a cold February day in 1981, Reverend Pat Brooks of the Highland Park Church of Christ met Sokhom Hun, his wife, Phaline, and their baby, Sophadavy, one of the first Cambodian families to be sent to Dallas. All were barefooted.

After garbled introductions, Brooks and his wife, Kathleen, scooped the shivering family up, took them to buy shoes, and later agreed to act as their sponsor. Brooks had never been involved in refugee work; the meeting with the Cambodians changed both families forever.

With the help of Brooks and Sokhom’s resettling agency, the United States Catholic Conference, Sokhom began work at a plastic bottle company on the night shift, making $4.25 an hour. A week after his arrival the family moved into a $250-a-month apartment on Live Oak. Sokhom enrolled in English, math, and computer science at El Centra A few months later Pat Brooks asked Sokhom if he would like to come to work for a friend of his. Henry Brunner had worked on Brook’s car and, yes, he had an opening for a hard worker, no matter where he was from. So Sokhom found himself sorting seat cover cloth and convertible tops at Brunner Auto Glass & Trim shop on Garland Road.

Meanwhile Pat Brooks-like Ron Cowart, Charles Kemp, Sue Reed and Sally Todd at the clinic, Karen Jordan at the IRC, caseworker Pat Gatling (“it would take a whole church to replace her,” says Kemp), and many others-became devoted to the Cambodians, spending more and more of his life making their lives better. His church has sponsored twelve families since 1981. He organized nightly English classes at the church using church members as instructors. And, last year, realizing this work was his true ministry, he transferred to the Peak East Side Church of Christ in deep East Dallas to be closer to the refugee families he works with.

A sponsor is a cultural broker, mediating between two systems, confronting the refugee with the reality of living in a different culture. Brooks and his wife take their commitment seriously: they found Sokhom and Phaline another job closer to where he and his wife lived. They taught him the bus system and helped him get a driver’s license and his first car, the ’78 Ford Fairmont he still drives. Kathleen Brooks rushed Phaline to Parkland Hospital and stayed with her when she gave birth to Melinda Joy four years ago. He did not try to persuade the family to worship at the Peak East Side Church of Christ, but they remain one of the most active of East Side’s ten Cambodian families.

Certainly the Brookses’ support helped Sokhom to adjust to America, but Sokhom’s own hard work and intelligence ensured his success. Now a trim specialist at Brunner’s auto trim shop, he owns a three-bedroom home in Mesquite ($2,900 down, $512 a month). He has a new Dodge Merry Miler van in which he toured the western United States last summer (“the Grand Canyon, snow on mountains in summer,” Sokhom says wonderingly) and a Pac Man video game on top of the large console color TV. And Pat Brooks, Sokhom’s sponsor, has beautiful thick red carpet on the floor of his car.

Sokhom now worries over what his children, rapidly becoming Americanized, will remember. How can you fight rock music and blue jeans? What should he teach them about their homeland? When asked about Buddhism or Cambodia will they only give a blank stare and say to their American friends, “It’s neat”? Will Melinda Joy ask about her parents1 wedding picture, the only thing they escaped with besides clothes-or will the children care about Life Before America? Perhaps dating, hair dryers, and Friday night football games will be the only things worthy of reverence.

On every Cambodian’s wall is a picture of Vngkor Wat, with its ornamental galleries and five lotus-bud towers reaching up toward the sky. It is the soul of the country, a symbol of past greatness. At the end of the 13th century, Angkor Wat was one of the great cities of the world, the capital of a powerful empire. Two hundred years later it was overrun by the jungle and the resort of wild beasts, a fete possibly in store for tormented Cambodia itself. Perhaps the story of their ancestral home will be too ghastly, and instead, Sokhom will teach his children about George Washington, Davy Crockett, and the Alamo.