My grandmother, Dara Vichea, learned about loss long before the Khmer Rouge came.
She was twelve when her parents died. Before then, her family had arranged her marriage to Kiri Sokha, a young man who was half Chinese and half Cambodian. Kiri had been raised by his mother after his wealthy merchant father was robbed and killed when Kiri was twelve. With nowhere else to go, Dara moved in with Kiri and his family. What began as an arranged marriage became a lifelong bond.
Dara and Kiri raised five children: their son, Sok Vireak, followed by four daughters—Sreyneang, Vanna, Nary, and Sophea. Vireak was strong and protective, while Sreyneang stayed close to Dara and helped care for the younger children. For a time, Dara had the family she had always dreamed of.
Then Vireak died after being struck by a train.
His death shattered the family. Kiri withdrew and eventually left Dara. She had lost her parents, her son, and the man with whom she had spent her life. But her daughters still needed her, so she kept going.
Nine years later, Dara and Kiri found their way back to one another. Their reunion could not erase the years apart, but they chose to rebuild their marriage. Their youngest daughter, Sophea, had been born during the years after their separation, representing another chance at happiness.
For several years, life continued despite everything the family had already endured. Before Cambodia fell, Vanna married and had two children: a thirteen-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter. They were still children when war and the Khmer Rouge tore their family apart. Vanna became responsible for protecting them while surviving herself. Her son understood that something terrible was happening; her daughter still asked when they were going home. Vanna had no answer. There was no home to return to.
The family’s private losses unfolded as Cambodia itself moved toward catastrophe. By the early 1970s, the country had been drawn into the wider war in Indochina, and violence and political instability were spreading across the countryside and cities. Then, in April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh. The fall of the capital turned the family’s private fears into part of a national disaster.
Almost immediately, the new regime emptied Phnom Penh, forcing residents into the countryside under the claim that the evacuation would be temporary. Instead, families were separated, cities were dismantled, and millions were forced into labor. Starvation, disease, executions, and exhaustion killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people between 1975 and 1979. For Dara’s family, Cambodia’s collapse was no longer something happening around them. The country’s history entered their daily lives as a struggle over food, movement, and survival.
Dara watched her family struggle to stay alive. Her eldest daughter, Sreyneang, began giving her food to her younger sisters, insisting she was not hungry. At mealtimes, she pushed her portion across the dirt floor.
“Eat, Mama,” Sreyneang would say. “I already ate.”
But Dara could see the lie. Sreyneang’s cheeks hollowed, her wrists became thin as reeds, and her shoulders pressed sharply against her skin. At night, Dara heard the soft, empty growl of her stomach. Sometimes Sreyneang trembled too badly to lift a spoon. Dara held her hand and whispered, “Just one more bite,” though there was almost nothing left to give.
Dara searched for roots, scraps of rice, anything that might keep her daughter alive. She remembers the bitter taste of weeds and the grit between her teeth as she chewed them. Still, Sreyneang kept giving what little she had to the younger children.
One morning, Sreyneang could not stand. Dara pulled her into her lap, feeling how light her body had become.
“Stay with me,” Dara begged. “Please, child. Stay with me.”
Sreyneang’s eyes opened only halfway. “Take care of them,” she whispered. “Take care of the little ones.”
Dara held her until the warmth left her body. For years afterward, she remembered that terrible lightness—not the weight of a living daughter, but the weight of someone already gone.
By then, Dara had lost both of her eldest children. Vireak had been taken suddenly; Sreyneang had disappeared slowly, day by day, until there was nothing left to save.
Those losses made her determination absolute. She would protect Vanna, Nary, and Sophea, no matter what it cost.
For nearly four years, the Khmer Rouge kept Cambodia under its brutal rule. When Vietnamese forces overthrew the regime in January 1979, the government fell, but peace did not immediately follow. Fighting, hunger, and fear continued, especially near the western border. The end of Khmer Rouge rule therefore did not offer Dara’s family a simple return home. Their villages had been destroyed or emptied, relatives were scattered, and the safest path led away from Cambodia.
That was why the family fled west toward Thailand. Vanna managed to bring both of her children, but other relatives, including Nary and their husbands, were separated from the group. The flight itself became another test of whether the family could remain together. They faced an impossible choice: continue toward the border and possible safety or turn back for those left behind.
A missionary working with a church urged Dara to continue.
“My children are still there,” she said.
“We have to go,” he told her.
Dara refused. She had already lost Vireak and Sreyneang. She would not lose another child because she was afraid to turn around.
“My family is there.”
She seized his sleeve and pulled him toward the road they had just traveled.
“Turn back,” she demanded. “You cannot leave them.”
He warned her that the border was close, that soldiers could find them, and that returning might cost them their lives. Dara heard him, but reaching safety while her family remained behind felt worse than death.
“Go back,” she said. “Please. I am begging you. Bring them to me.”
For a moment, the missionary did not move. Behind him, the road narrowed into dust and trees. Ahead lay the Thai border. Somewhere behind them were the people Dara refused to abandon.
Then he turned.
He brought the missing family members toward safety: Nary, her husband, their relatives, and the children. Dara waited with her hands clasped so tightly that her nails cut into her palms. Every sound made her look up. Every shadow between the trees became a possible answer.
Then someone shouted.
Figures emerged through the trees, dust-covered and stumbling.
Dara ran toward them.
She held them tightly, counting them with her hands as if touch could prove they were real. One child sobbed into her shoulder; another clung to her waist. Dara pressed her face against their hair and wept.
Not everyone from their original family had survived, but the living were together.
That was enough.
Only after that reunion could the family continue toward the border. Their journey was part of a much larger movement. After the Khmer Rouge fell, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled toward Thailand, driven by hunger, renewed fighting, and the fear that violence would follow them. Refugee camps formed along the border, where international aid organizations provided food, medical care, and temporary shelter.
At last, Dara’s family reached Thailand. Yet crossing the border did not mean the danger was over. The camps were crowded, imperfect, and vulnerable to violence, but they offered the family its first chance to pause, grieve, and imagine a future beyond immediate survival. Thailand became a place of waiting between the country they had lost and the life they hoped to build.
For Dara, reaching Thailand did not erase Cambodia. She still carried the memory of Vireak and Sreyneang, her nine-year separation from Kiri, and the fear of nearly losing everyone else. But the border marked a change: they were no longer running. They had survived the journey, and for the first time in years, survival could begin to mean something more than making it through the next day.
In Thailand, Vanna remarried another refugee. They had two sons, Vichea and Vannak, who grew up alongside Vanna’s older children.
Meanwhile, Nary met Narin, who became my father. Like her father, Narin was half Chinese and half Cambodian. Their first child, Neak Mean, was born in Thailand in 1980. Wanting their children to grow up somewhere safe, they eventually made their way to America.
Their departure from Thailand was part of a broader resettlement effort that helped Cambodian survivors reach the United States through refugee programs, churches, voluntary agencies, and relatives. For many families, the journey from a border camp to America was not a simple escape from the past. Safety came with its own demands: a new language, unfamiliar work, and the task of rebuilding family life after years of hiding, flight, and camps. Still, resettlement offered something the family had not been able to imagine during the Khmer Rouge years—a future in which their children could grow up without being forced to flee.
For Nary, Narin, and their relatives, the next journey crossed another border—an ocean. They reached New York City, then Brooklyn.
Brooklyn was loud, crowded, and unfamiliar. Cars filled the streets, people spoke languages they did not understand, and apartment buildings rose above them. But there was freedom. No one forced them from their homes, separated their children, or told them where they could go. Slowly, Brooklyn became home.
Nary and Narin continued building their family. Neak Mean was the oldest. Three years later came their daughter, Nimol, and a year and a half after her came me, the youngest.
Vanna’s sons, Vichea and Vannak, grew up alongside us. Vichea was about Nimol’s age, and Vannak was only one month younger than me. Neak Mean was the oldest; Nimol and Vichea came next; Vannak and I were practically inseparable.
Above us was another generation. Vanna’s older son and daughter remembered Cambodia and Thailand—being thirteen and nine when they crossed into Thailand and what it meant to leave a country behind. The younger children grew up in Brooklyn, knowing Cambodia through food, language, photographs, and stories that sometimes stopped when we entered the room.
The adults had crossed an ocean to give us a childhood untouched by the fear they had known. They wanted Brooklyn to be a beginning, not another place where the past followed them. But the past remained in their silences, habits, and untold stories.
One evening, those distant places returned through something my grandmother had carried from Cambodia, through Thailand, and across the ocean.
My grandmother opened an old wooden box.
Inside was the tiny golden lotus pendant she had carried through Cambodia and Thailand. Its surface was dulled with age. She lifted it into the lamplight.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the pendant began to shine.
The light spread across Dara’s hands and trembled over the walls. The room fell silent. Even the children stopped moving. The lotus’s glow reflected in my grandmother’s wet eyes.
Dara looked around the room—to her surviving daughters, her grandchildren, and the family she had fought to save. Her fingers closed around the lotus.
“The family survived,” she whispered.
Her voice broke. I saw her thumb move over the pendant as if she were touching the faces of the dead.
No one spoke. The light continued to pulse between us.
I did not understand then. But my grandmother had spent her life learning that people could disappear. She had lost her parents at twelve, Vireak, and Sreyneang. She had spent nine years separated from Kiri before they found their way back to each other. She had watched Vanna carry two young children through a collapsing country, then build a second family in Thailand. And when escape came, Dara had made the missionary turn around rather than leave her family behind.
To Dara, survival never meant saving herself. It meant bringing her family with her.
The golden lotus glowed again, brighter this time. Its light trembled across the room, touching each face. In its small, steady flame, every border Dara had crossed seemed to meet: Cambodia, where so much had been taken; Thailand, where the family learned to breathe again; Brooklyn, where the children gathered safely around her.
The lotus did not explain what had been lost.
It showed what loss had failed to destroy.
She had promised herself that no child would disappear if she could bring them home.
Now that promise had become us.
Dara looked at the five younger grandchildren—the children born into freedom, who would never know what it meant to run from soldiers or beg for food. Her eyes filled with tears. I felt my throat tighten, though I still did not know why her grief seemed to fill the room.
She whispered, “Never again.”
At the time, I thought she was talking about the past. I did not know she was making a promise to the future, or that one day I would understand the lotus as more than something she had carried across borders. It was the shape of her vow: that the family would remember, remain connected to those who had been lost, and turn the life we inherited into an answer to everything she had survived.
The lotus had crossed the borders.
We were the proof it had brought home.