In 1985, at the age of nine, Kha Diep stood before armed guards at a communist prison camp in Cambodia, near the border of Vietnam. His family’s future lay his hands, in the form of a single orange and a bag of meat sandwiches.
As the Vietnamese guards strip-searched Diep’s father, mother, and sister, Diep sucked slowly on the orange, just as his mother had told him. Inside was a gold ring and a necklace, the remains of the family fortune. Combined with jewelry hidden inside the sandwiches, Diep held roughly $1,200 dollars—the family’s only chance to get out of the prison camp.
He was a long way from his homeland in southern Vietnam. His family had been one of the richest among the Khmer Krom, an indigenous group from the Mekong Delta. As a child, Diep remembers looking out at his family’s rice fields, which extended "as far as my eyes could see." But like almost all of the estimated eight million Khmer Krom living in southern Vietnam, the Dieps had been persecuted by a communist government that had twice—in 1949 and 1975—snatched up their land, chopped it into small segments, and redistributed it to other farmers.
The Dieps watched helplessly as thousands of Khmer Krom who had sympathized with the American and South Vietnamese soldiers during the Vietnam War, were slaughtered by the North Vietnamese.
The family had finally had enough, and in 1984 they hired a guide to sneak them into Thailand. The only problem was, the guide was an undercover communist. He led them straight to the prison camp where Diep and his family now stood, stripped naked and awaiting their fate.
"This is our last chance, son," Diep remembers his mother telling him. "Don’t squeeze on the orange, or chew on the sandwich."
" I was scared to death," Diep said. "I peed myself. "
Miraculously, the guards never found the jewels. Two years later, after digging graves for six fellow Khmer Krom prisoners who had been executed with a bullet to the back of their heads, the Dieps bribed their way out of the camp and scuttled over to Thailand. Eventually, in November 1989, they pooled enough resources to get to Kansas. Between 1989 and 2002, more than 4,000 Khmer Krom refugees immigrated to the United States, according to the United States Committee for Refugees.
The family set about creating new lives. Diep, now 27, lives in New Jersey, but spends a lot of time in Philadelphia, where a large community of Khmer Krom have settled among over 10,000 ethnic Cambodians. It is there that he heads a youth outreach program through the Khmer Kampuchea-Krom Federation (KKF), an organization that advocates for Khmer Krom worldwide and works for Khmer cultural preservation in greater Philadelphia.
In a phone interview from the liquor store his sister recently opened in Philadelphia, Diep talked about keeping Khmer Krom culture alive among the youth.
" We are quite worried about the dying of our culture," said Diep, a U.S. Citizen since 1997. "The challenge is to get Khmer Krom culture to come back alive, since the Vietnamese didn’t allow us to practice it [in Vietnam]."
To that end, the KKF holds classes of around 15 kids (between the ages of 10 and 20) to teach them Khmer dances like the "wishing dance," or to study Khmer language or songs. However, because Khmer language textbooks and dance costumes are expensive and must be shipped from Cambodia, Diep said that the KKF, now eight years old, is heavily in debt.
When asked where he saw Khmer culture in the United States in 15 years, he replied, "Let’s talk about five years from now—if we don’t have any luck, we’ll have to stop this program, and our culture will be extinct forever."
Diep is applying for small private grant money to stay afloat, he said.
Almost 20 years after escaping the prison camp in Cambodia, Diep no longer has just his family’s future in his hands—he said he now feels like he holds the future of his culture. It is a task he takes seriously.
"Here in the U.S. we’re trying to preserve [our] culture," said the man who once saw his family’s rice fields stretch to the horizon. "But we need money. "
Janelle Hill contributed to this report.