But too far," she said, looking down at her hands. Her soft voice trails off as she begins to cry. Beua's father, 68-year-old Beua Pruel, doesn't understand what happened to his son, but he is less sympathetic.
"If he was a good guy, they wouldn't send him back," he said. Ho Beua was one of many refugees caught up in a 1996 immigration-law change that greatly expanded the list of crimes committed in the U.S.
that would lead to deportation. The changes also made it much more difficult to get waivers, which in the past had been granted to offenders who had been rehabilitated or could show deportation would hurt family members. Lacking extradition agreements with Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and other countries, the U.
S. could not send refugees from those countries back immediately. Following the 9/11 attacks, the U.
S. pressured Cambodia to sign an extradition treaty. It was signed in 2002, setting Beua's departure in motion.
Nothing came easy for Beua in America. He didn't know a word of English when he first arrived, struggled in school and dropped out of ninth grade when he was 19. And he had difficulty coming to terms with his past.
When the family gathered at home to watch "The Killing Fields," a movie depicting the Khmer Rouge atrocities, Beua got upset and refused to join them. "He didn't talk about it much," a brother recalled. "The times he did, he cried.
" Beua had a lengthy record of run-ins with the law, including convictions for drunken driving and assault. In 1996, Beua spent four months in jail on an assault charge for hitting his girlfriend. She bailed him out, and eventually they had a child together.
That crime led to his expulsion eight years later. His family, left behind, has paid a high price. Beua had been raising his teenage daughter, Shantel, now 16, by himself in a Mountlake Terrace apartment.
The two had grown close. These days, Shantel and Beua's son, Anthony, 19, avoid talking about their father's absence. They now live with Beua's sister-in-law, Marissa Beua, in Marysville.
"They can't face that their dad is in Cambodia," she said. "It hurts them too much." Anthony, tall and handsome, looks like an Asian rapper in a plaid shirt, loose jeans, gold earrings and a baseball cap.
Asked how he's coping without his dad, he replies "I'm cool." But after a few minutes, he chokes up and leaves the room. Beua's youngest son, Tapi, turned 10 last year and lives with his mother in Ferndale.
Ho Beua hasn't been able to reach Tapi by phone for months. The last wave was in December, and hundreds of others in the pipeline may be sent back at any time. Others, like Beua, left steady jobs, families and lives they had worked to rebuild.
Unprepared for life in Cambodia, some fall into local gangs, drive loud dirt bikes through the streets in a show of bravado, and use readily available drugs. A few have become monks; about a dozen have gone to prison. The readjustment problems were so severe that the U.
S. government began funding a nonprofit organization in Phnom Penh to assist the deportees. Now called the Returnee Integration Support Program, it teaches basic survival skills, including Cambodian culture and language.
Many Cambodians are wary of the returnees. Some are amazed anyone could fail in a place like America: One saying in Cambodia goes, "They couldn't make it in heaven, so they were sent back to hell." Beua spent his first week in Cambodia in a local immigration jail.
He had no friends or relatives in the country, uncertain of what to do next or where to go. "It was like, man, I'm lost. I don't know any of these people," Beua said.
Cambodia seemed the recurrence of a bad dream. He remembered days of hard labor and nights of fear as a boy under the Khmer Rouge, which killed as many as 2 million Cambodians. "I was starving," he said.
"I had to go steal at night just to feed my little brothers and sisters. If I got caught, it was death." In Beua's new home, reminders of that time crop up unexpectedly.
Land mines still litter the terrain around Chamcar Svay. Beua and his wife were picking bamboo shoots in the nearby mountains recently when he almost sat on an unexploded grenade. To his neighbors, Beua is still the American.
He can speak Cambodian but he can't read or write it. No one around speaks English, so he sometimes resorts to talking to himself. "Too bad about the Seahawks," he greets a visitor from Seattle.
He carries a mobile phone, a treasured connection to the world outside the village, and keeps up with Seattle sports teams in weekly phone calls from his mother in Marysville. Dressed in the clothes he packed from Seattle two years ago long gray denim shorts and a microfiber T-shirt, he is 30 pounds lighter with skin baked deep brown by the sun. "A couple months in the rice field," he explains.
Watching the frail and stooped man who is now his father-in-law, Beua learned to plow the fields, transplant rice seedlings and cast a fishing net. It's a far cry from grabbing his fishing poles and driving to Edmonds, where his last photo in the U.S.
was taken. The framed picture shows Beua proudly displaying a giant salmon caught off the pier. His wife says the family depends on him to eat.
But without money sent by his relatives in Marysville, he couldn't survive, let alone buy any extras such as mosquito repellent, clothes for the kids or a TV. Even by Cambodia's modest standards, Beua struggles. He dismisses suggestions he look for work as a welder or a tour guide.
In Cambodia, he has no connections or education. And workers make about $30 a month, what he used to spend on dinner in the States. Beua's home consists of two raised wooden platforms covered in plastic mats and protected by a long thatched roof.
In the back of one platform is a makeshift stove. The other platform holds a television and stereo and functions as sleeping quarters for eight people. "We eat here, we sleep here," he said.
A shelter is better than this. A house got walls, lights, a bathroom." A large clay urn holds rainwater for drinking and cooking.
Another holds river water for bathing. His meal today consists of tiny silver minnows he caught in the river and grilled over an open fire. "What you see today, it's gone tomorrow," he said.
Even in this remote village, one thing brings Beua instantly back home to Seattle. "I want to get depressed, I just pull these out," he said, retrieving four scratched and grimy CD cases: Dr. Dre, Mariah Carey, a hip-hop mix and Journey.
He doesn't play them too often because it's like opening a wound. But today he's already thinking about the past. He takes out a Thunder Lite car battery, clamps cables to each side of the battery like jump-starting a car, and then powers the stereo up.
He puts on a Journey song: "Don't stop believin', hold on to the feelin'...
The music makes him cry. "Whenever we got together for Christmas or birthdays we listened to it," he said. It's hard to imagine Beua, this weary, middle-aged farmer, young and free and cruising past the lights of downtown on the way to a party.
"I thought I had everything set," he said. In the oppressive afternoon heat, he sits on the wooden platform, batting away mosquitoes. at 12:45 AM But too far," she said, looking down at her hands.
News RSS