Eric Tang. Unsettled

Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto tells the story of Cambodian refugees who were settled in the Bronx after the murderous Khmer Rouge Regime collapsed following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978. This participant history (author Eric Tang was a community organizer in New York) focuses primarily on the family of Ra Pronh. She survived the Khmer Rouge years (1975–1978), was taken captive by the retreating Khmer Rouge forces for nearly a year, and then escaped to Thailand where she and her family lived in refugee camps for several years. Eventually, in 1986, she was resettled in New York. According to Tang, Ra Pronh’s experiences consisted of almost unrelieved hardship and tragedy. Life under the Khmer Rouge was, as is well known, extremely harsh, particularly for anyone who dared to challenge authority. Perhaps 30 percent of the population died. It was also hard on family life. For most of the period, Ra Pronh managed to live with her family, but the Khmer Rouge ultimately forced her to marry Heng, whom she had never met, and move away from her village. But by Tang’s account, life in the Thai refugee camps was not much better. In the camps they faced arbitrary and sometimes brutal treatment from the Thai military and were in general subject to arbitrary control. Ra Pronh was held in a kind of captivity, Tang argues, just as she had been under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Criminology · Ethnology · Political science · Population · Refugee · Social science · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Tragedy (event) · Vietnamese · Cambodian History and Society · Demography · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies