ABSTRACT
As this poem suggests, in order to understand today’s Cambodian American youth and the many complicated issues with which they must cope, one must first understand the difficult background from which they have emerged. Their history does not simply begin in the poor neighborhoods of America where their families were transplanted during the influx of Southeast Asian refugees in the early 1980s. It dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, a time before many were even born, a time when the conflict in Vietnam began to spread into Cambodia, and violence on a massive scale hit the lives of their parents and grandparents like a catastrophic monsoon. One must understand the poem’s reference to the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian American’s sense of displacement, the sense that he/she continues to “wander as an outcast,” in order to understand the factors leading Cambodian American youth of today to join gangs.
