'Dragon Chica'

by May-lee Chai
By ANNE MORRIS / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
Anne Morris, a member of the National / The Dallas Morning News
s Circle, lives in Austin.

When a church sponsors an Asian refugee family and sets them up with a
trailer in a small town west of Dallas, difficulties arise. The family has
survived the Khmer Rouge, but now the children must endure nasty treatment
from their new classmates, who at first think they are Native Americans.

It is the strong bond between the two Chinese-Cambodian sisters that makes
Dragon Chica a tender story. Sometimes funny, always very much alive, this
novel introduces yet another variation on the modern-day immigrant
experience as the Chhim family continues to move on – to East Dallas, where
Ma gets a job in a Chinese restaurant, then on to Nebraska.

May-lee Chai creates a lively narrator in Nea Chhim, who goes from age 11 to
19 in the course of the novel, and never loses her willingness to defend her
family – especially her much prettier sister, Sourdi, four years older. Nea
is the scrappy Dragon Chica of the title. She remembers how Sourdi once
carried her through a Cambodian minefield, finding safety by stepping on
corpses. She would do anything for Sourdi. In the pattern of little sisters
everywhere, sometimes Nea tries to do too much. In part, the book is about
both girls' coming of age, and the different paths they take to happiness.

Their mother – or Ma – charts the course of the family using miracles, luck
and dreams she backs with hard work and intelligence. When Ma loses her job
in Texas, she almost simultaneously receives a letter from her older
sister's family. Missing until now, they are miraculously alive in Nebraska
and have started a restaurant called The Palace. They want Ma and her family
to join in their undertaking.

"We left quickly," Nea says, "not because we were naïve or simple or
foolhardy, any of these things people might want to accuse us of being, but
rather because we understood about miracles all right, how their shelf life
was as long as a butterfly's summer." That lyrical phrase may surprise the
reader, coming as it does in the middle of practical prose, but it's one of
the stylistic hallmarks of Chai's best writing.

When Nea's family reaches Nebraska, the restaurant has as yet no customers.
Moreover, Auntie and her husband are in debt to a loan shark. At one time
they had been prominent in Cambodian society. Now they have very little –
only bitter memories and the scars of war. But at least Ma and her sister
are reunited.

In the course of the novel, this second sister bond is shown to have deadly
weaknesses.

Asians stand out even more in small town Nebraska than in Texas. Nea's
description of feeling different at school echoes that of anyone who ever
failed to fit in. Eventually, she and her siblings learn to survive.

One thing that separates this immigrant narrative from many others is the
skill with which the author describes how the kids are tortured by their
peers. Naive brother Sam's wrestling teammates invite him to a party but
then try to get him to cook the family dog "gook-style" and serve it to the
others on the team. Such an act, they say, would show team spirit. The drama
of the kids' problems in Dragon Chica suggests that this novel might also
appeal to young-adult readers.

Chai is the author of six books, including The Girl From Purple Mountain.
She lives in San Francisco and is a translator for PEN American Center.

Anne Morris, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Austin.
books@dallasnews.com
Dragon Chica
May-lee Chai
(Gemma, $14.95)
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http://khmernz.blogspot.com/2010/12/center-will-tell-cambodian-story.html
Sunday, 19 December 2010

Center will tell Cambodian story
HISTORY: Fundraiser is first step in creating facility at CSULB, as well as online museum.
By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer
Posted: 12/17/2010

LONG BEACH - Although Long Beach is well known for having the largest Cambodian population in the U.S., there have been precious few resources to research how this has come to pass.

The Khmer Genocide Study and Resource Center, planned for Cal State Long Beach, will attempt to help fill that gap. The first formal step in its creation starts tonight with a fundraising dinner at Sophy's Restaurant. However, the idea has been a long time coming. In the late 1970s, Long Beach became a hub for incoming refugees who escaped from the ravages of the genocide that engulfed Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and left upwards of 2 million dead. Since that time, a large Cambodian community has developed in Long Beach, with businesses, arts and social service agencies. What hasn't evolved is a place where academics and the community can learn about the calamitous history and circumstances that led to Long Beach becoming the home of Cambodia Town. Although the center will have a physical location on the Cal State campus, primarily it will be a virtual museum online with an array of information across multiple platforms.

"The intent is to develop an archive of the genocide experience," said John Fallon, one of those helping create the center.

"It will have three components," Fallon said. "An academic venue for information with oral histories; an electronic library; and third, an most important I suppose, an initiation of the Cambodian community as stakeholders."

Dr. Donald Schwartz, a Fulbright Specialist and retired professor at Cal State Long Beach, will be helping to head up the academic side and is hoping to link up with other universities, including Stanford, Yale and Pannasastra University in Phnom Penh, along with the Document Center in Cambodia, which has provided much of the information for the Khmer Rouge War Tribunals. Schwartz will also be teaching in the spring at Pannasastra and hopes to get funding for videographers to do a project on the infamous Tuol Sleng, or S-21, security prison. Schwartz is an expert on the Holocaust during World War II. He said one theme from survivors of that genocide was that they didn't tell their children what they endured. He sees parallels with the children of Cambodian genocide survivors and hopes this project can help answer their questions. Fallon, who has been at the forefront of the refugee movement since the '70s and has helped place 22,000 families, said his inspiration comes from the words of a survivor he met: "He said, `My children must understand what happened to me, so the world will not forget."'

Schwartz said the primary purpose of the dinner, in addition to raising funds, is to invite the Cambodian community to be part of the process and inform them what's envisioned.

Or as Fallon says, "It's their life and their history."
greg.mellen@presstelegram.com , 562-499-1291



Independently Searching for the Truth since 1997.
MEMORY & JUSTICE

“...a society cannot know itself if it does not have an accurate memory of its own history.”

Youk Chhang, Director
Documentation Center of Cambodia
66 Sihanouk Blvd.,
Phnom Penh, Cambodia