Why I revisited painful memories to write A Refugee’s American Dream

This week in North Philly Notes, Leth Oun, author of A Refugee’s American Dream, explains the reasons for penning his memoir about surviving the Cambodian Killing Fields to realize his dream of becoming an American citizen working for the U.S. Secret Service.

When I first met my coauthor, Joe Samuel “Sam” Starnes, almost a dozen years ago, I told him I hoped to write a book about my life. I said during my interview with him for Widener University’s alumni magazine that I wanted to do it while I was still young enough to remember the details of what I survived in the Killing Fields. I was forty-five at the time. Although it took me, with Sam’s help, more than eleven years to take the book from a dream to a reality, I am thrilled that my story is finally on the page for others to read.

Writing my book involved returning again and again to many painful memories I had kept inside. It is filled with details of incidents and images I had not talked about and tried not to think about for years as I was striving to build a career in America. Why would I want to go back and relive that pain? There are, I believe, three good reasons.

Education. I hope to educate others about what happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot in the late 1970s. I survived a holocaust. Approximately two million people, about a quarter of Cambodia’s population at the time, were killed or died of starvation and disease under the Khmer Rouge’s reign. My father, a lieutenant in the Cambodian army, was executed. Even though it is one of the world’s worst genocides, many in America and around the world do not know the story of what happened in Cambodia less than 50 years ago. It is important we don’t forget our history. It is important to remember and understand and do all we can to prevent something like this from happening again. And I want to make sure that my father and all of the two million people who did not survive are remembered.

Inspiration: I hope I can inspire others who are facing hardships. After being starved, tortured, and almost worked to death, I recovered and made a life for myself in America that makes those miserable years seem like they were thousands of years ago, almost like they never happened. Despite all the success and happiness I have found here in America, I will never forget that suffering, but I also know that if I can survive that period, I can survive anything. If I can live through the Killing Fields of Cambodia to become a protector of the president of the United States, nothing in this world is impossible. I hope that others going through hardships can read my story and be motivated to overcome their challenges as well.

Relief Efforts. For a number of years now I have sent money to help Cambodians who don’t have enough food to eat or fresh water to drink. Whatever money my coauthor and I earn from this book, we have pledged to support projects to make life better for Cambodians living in poverty. I also want to support schools in my native country. My goal is to return the many favors and generosity that I have received by paying it forward to help those who are very poor. I would not be where I am without the support that helped me when I needed it. I hope that some of the children we help can go on to live their own dreams as I have been able to do.

Considering these three goals, I am happy I took the time to go back into my painful history to tell my story of survival and finding success. Writing my book has been a hard journey, but it is well worth it.

Overcoming Isolation in the Great Depression

This week in North Philly Notes, Abigail Trollinger, author of Becoming Entitled, writes about how workers in the 1930’s shed the stigma of unemployment and gained a sense of entitlement, and what we can learn in the age of COVID.

Unemployment is often hugely isolating, even when it happens en masse. It was for workers in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. And considering recent debates over unemployment insurance, it seems that COVID-related unemployment has left many jobless workers facing economic insecurity alone.

Becoming Entitled: Relief, Unemployment, and Reform During the Great Depression tells the story of jobless workers and the urban reformers who worked to redeem them. It was an uphill climb: in the 1930’s, workers faced an American culture that was slow to defend the jobless and a federal government that was unwilling to fund the relief they needed, situations that only seemed to reinforce a jobless worker’s feeling of personal failure. As one worker described in Chicago of that year, “I was out of work two years last month. I have never gone for charity. I was ashamed to go.”

In 1932 Chicago reformers rightly sensed, then, that an unemployed worker’s first step toward survival might be the small step of seeing others like them and shedding their sense of shame. Which is why, in Chicago, the newly founded Workers’ Committee on Unemployment (WCOU) hosted seven hearings across the city that allowed workers to tell their stories, and to hear the stories of their neighbors, their landlords, their grocers, and their kids’ teachers. Once workers saw themselves as part of a group, rather than part of the problem, they were able to craft solutions to the economic crisis facing them. As members of the WCOU, workers offered collective action to solve both immediate and long-term problems.

Was a jobless worker’s electricity shut off suddenly, leaving their family in the dark? A formerly employed electrical worker could come turn it back on! Was a family unable to pay rent and thrown on the street? A WCOU member with a truck could help them move! Was a caseworker routinely cutting clients relief funds? The WCOU was there—protesting at the relief site! And were the state and federal governments failing to provide relief where it was highly deserved and much needed? The WCOU was ready to protest—like the 1932 silent march through Chicago.

What emerged from the hearings, the mutual assistance, and the protests was a sense of worker entitlement, or the belief that jobless workers had the right to ask for protection from the state—that when the economy fails, the state is responsible for preserving the dignity and livelihood of those most impacted. As a WCOU pamphlet on declining relief budgets said, “You are entitled to live.… We can not beg all the time. We must ask and demand.”

Unemployment and isolation. These are not unfamiliar concepts for many Americans right now, as the nation has faced unemployment rates between 8-14% since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Jobless workers in the U.S. have had support in the form of the CARES Act and some stopgap emergency funds, and yet they, too, face questions about how much relief they really need. Debates in Congress over stimulus plans (the Heroes Act and the Heals Act), in which legislation has stalled over how much weekly income the unemployed should receive (ranging between $200 and $600 a week), suggest that either jobless workers have a miraculous economy of thrift or that they earn more than they say. And on October 5 the Wall Street Journal reported that some states are requesting that workers who were inadvertently paid more than they were allotted should return as much as $8,000 to the state.

Workers in 1932 did not have a pandemic to reckon with, but their story is a reminder of the fact that entitlement is not a given, even in the midst of national crisis. As we approach the 2020 election, let us call for a generous entitlement that offers both relief and dignity to the many thousands of Americans who currently feel isolated in their economic insecurity.