Cambodian journeys

Read a story about recording the experiences of Cambodian refugees

‘We thought tigers were wild, but the Khmer Rouge were worse, wilder than crocodiles, as they killed without mercy.’ The chilling words of Phalla Chok come from recordings of survivors of Cambodia’s civil war, made by Niborom Young and memorialised in the Turnbull Library’s Oral History and Sound Collection.

Young came to New Zealand from Cambodia in 1974 as a Colombo Plan student, but was unable to return home after the Khmer Rouge took over her country in a murderous revolution in 1975. She did not know what had happened to her family. Later, volunteering as an interpreter, she travelled to refugee camps for displaced Cambodians, hoping — fruitlessly — that she would find some trace of her relatives.

She began interviewing 10 other women from Cambodia in 1993 for Women’s Suffrage Centennial Year, recording the stories of their lives in Cambodia before, during and after the civil war. The interviewees recount their harrowing experiences under Pol Pot, the regime’s leader, their experiences of being refugees, and the process of getting to New Zealand and adjusting to life here.

The interviews were recorded in Khmer, the women’s first language. The tears Young shed with the women as they were telling their stories fell again as she painstakingly transcribed the interviews and translated them into English. She later turned them into book form in I Tried Not to Cry: The Journeys of Ten Cambodian Refugee Women, published by Steele Roberts in 2015.

‘I enjoy living in New Zealand,’ says Sokhom You, ‘but I still miss Cambodia very much … my absent family, my village, and many places and people … I can’t help but think of the many traumatic experiences I had under Pol Pot … the killing fields that made me suffer and now still linger in my mind. Every time I think of it, it hurts and I cry. Well at least now I can cry without the fear of death.’

This oral history archive is one of several taonga in the Turnbull Library inscribed on the New Zealand register of UNESCO’s Memory of the World. The register lists documentary heritage endorsed by UNESCO as being of world significance and outstanding universal value.

The archive allows another generation of Khmer New Zealanders to learn how they came to be here, and perhaps to get answers to questions that will never be satisfied by parents or grandparents trying to forget or bury their painful past.

Story written by: Lynette Shum

Copyright: Turnbull Endowment Trust

Cambodian oral history project participants

Find out more

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• Somali Pacific star.

Explore the Alexander Turnbull Library collections further: Cambodian refugees.

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Many Answers has Refugees (New Zealand).

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