When I moved to New York City to start college, it was the first time I came to live close enough to my dad’s side of the family to be able to make a day trip of visiting them. Taking Metro North to Danbury, CT, I contemplated on and processed the bewildering behavior of a family whose parents (my grandparents), two sons and a daughter and their spouses and children, lived within a 2-mile radius of each other since the 1970s and regularly stopped by each other’s homes, but yet there was an unspoken distance and underlying sense of anxiety always seeking to penetrate the family closeness. My dad (the third son) built his own family away from Danbury, so perhaps I was fortunate in not being influenced too much by the family traumas. Of course, it was escapable and it affected my dad and therefore me, and I wanted to try to make sense of it During the 1970s, my grandparents had to escape the Khmer Rouge, perpetrators of the Cambodian Genocide. My dad was five years old when my grandma carried him over minefields as she and the rest of his family fled, eventually making it to the US as refugees.
Photographing my Cambodian relatives in Danbury inspired a trip back to Southeast Asia this past summer during which my dad and I spent a few days in the village with my relatives in S’ang, Cambodia. On the way to S’ang I learned that the roads were built by forced labor (any Cambodian could be called to work on public projects). I observed how the capital city of Phnom Penh seemed to lack a sense of purpose, innovation and creative expression. People would say that Cambodian food was better in neighboring countries than in Cambodia. Yet, at the same time, my relatives in S’ang expressed content with what they’ve been able to achieve - gaining education and stable jobs, and establishing and providing for their families. Within each relative’s home, I could sense the resilience and the hope placed in the children, who naturally expressed their joy, innocent of tragedies past or present insecurities.
S’ang, Cambodia
Danbury, Connecticut
