I Don’t Feel Any Resentment
Do you feel any resentment toward the US and American policy in Southeast Asia back in the day?
I don’t feel any resentment, because I was born and raised here. You know, America has always been what I’ve known. So I don’t feel any resentment because one thing is that you can’t hold anger in the heart. I know many Cambodian-Americans who are so angry at the situation in Cambodia right now. It’s not as developed as it can be, there’s so much corruption. I think about cycles of violence, about cycles of power; so in Cambodia, since classical days, you’ve always had a king and his elites, and everyone else is just dirt poor. And the king is worshiped almost as a God in Earth. And it’s really easy to be authoritarian in that type of political environment. For centuries, that’s all that Cambodia has known, that authoritarianism. So what you have the communist, the Khmer Rouge. No I don’t think what they did was right, but what they were trying to do was to eliminate that authoritarianism; that quality of being led by a despot, where only one person’s authority matters. They were trying to eliminate that, they were trying to create a egalitarian peasant society. What they ended up doing was actually tripping and choking on their own power; becoming the same despot that they didn’t want to serve. So now in Cambodia, today when you’re out in Phnom Phenh, you really see the violence that’s perpetrated between the rich and the poor. Usually the rich have big cars, and when they’re driving they honk really quickly, really furiously for you to move out of their way or else they’re going to run you over. People in Cambodia do everything to demonstrate their wealth and how that wealth makes them better than someone else. Hun Sen himself was a Khmer Rouge, was involved in a Khmer Rouge. So what you have is a cycle of violence and a cycle of power where one group replaces another but does the same thing. So for me, I don’t say, “Oh, the Americans caused the war,” they didn’t. What’s happening is that the people inside of Cambodia were trying to change that and they got lost along the way, they got horribly lost along the way. Anger doesn’t get anyone anywhere. Secondly, I think as Americans, we have a responsibility to question our role in the world. It’s really interesting to have Cambodian groups and say, “My country was formally colonized”; but at the same time say, “but my other country is the empire of the world right now.”