Coming Home: A Cambodian-American's Return After 30 Years

My parents left Cambodia in 1979 during the fall of the Khmer Rouge. They walked to Thailand, spent two years in a refugee camp, and eventually resettled in Long Beach, California — home to the largest Cambodian population outside Cambodia. I was born in Long Beach in 1991, grew up eating my grandmother's samlor korko and amok, spoke Khmer at home and English everywhere else, and always wondered about the country that shaped my family but that I'd never seen.

At 35, I finally booked a ticket. My mother cried at the airport — happy tears and scared tears mixed together. She hadn't been back since she fled. She wasn't ready to come with me, but she gave me an address in Battambang: the house she grew up in, the house her family was forced to leave.

Landing in Phnom Penh was overwhelming. The heat, the noise, the smell of street food — it was somehow familiar from my childhood kitchen and completely alien from my California life. I checked into a guesthouse in BKK1 and walked to the nearest market. The vendors spoke to me in Khmer (I look Cambodian, obviously), and for the first time in my life, I was the majority. I could understand about 60% of conversations — enough to get by, enough to feel the gaps where language and culture had eroded across an ocean.

I visited the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng on my second day. My parents never talked about the Khmer Rouge in detail — just the walking, the hunger, the people who disappeared. Seeing the physical evidence of what they survived was the hardest thing I've ever done. I sat on a bench at the Killing Fields and cried for two hours. An older Cambodian man sat next to me and held my hand without saying a word. He understood.

Battambang was where the trip became deeply personal. I found my mother's childhood house — it's still standing, converted into a small shop. The current owner, when I explained who I was (in my broken Khmer, supplemented with Google Translate), invited me in for tea and showed me parts of the original structure. I sat in the room where my mother grew up and FaceTimed her. She recognized the mango tree in the yard. We both cried.

The food was the thread that connected everything. Every dish my grandmother had made in Long Beach, I found here in its original form — but somehow brighter, fresher, more alive. Samlor korko from a Battambang market stall tasted like my grandmother's kitchen. Fish amok in banana leaves on the side of the road was the version my mother had been trying to recreate for 40 years. I ate my way through grief and joy in equal measure.

Angkor Wat was a spiritual experience I wasn't expecting. Growing up, there was always a print of Angkor on our living room wall. Seeing it in person — this impossible, magnificent thing that my ancestors built — I felt a pride so deep it was physical. I am Khmer. This is mine. No amount of assimilation in America could erase that.

I came home to Long Beach with 600 photos, 10 pounds heavier, and a fundamentally changed understanding of who I am. My parents' sacrifice — everything they endured to give me a life in America — became viscerally real in a way that family stories alone could never achieve. I'm going back next year. This time, my mother is coming with me.