By Jeffrey Heng
Conestoga High School

Sarun S. Chan, executive director of the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia (CAGP), spent his childhood at a refugee camp in Thailand and has felt disconnected from his family line.

For millions of Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge regime was responsible for a genocide between 1975 and 1979 that brought an unbearable flood of trauma, starvation, anxiety, and the loss of nearly 2 million residents — one-fourth of the country’s population.

“‘You should be lucky that you’re here, because all these other people are dead,'” Chan recalled his parents telling him. And that’s about all they’ve told him about their experience. “I don’t know the family. I don’t know my parents. I don’t know their siblings.”

The year the genocide officially ended, the CAGP sprouted in Philadelphia. It is one of the oldest Asian American nonprofits in the city, providing services for the Cambodian, Southeast Asian, refugee, and immigrant communities. The organization aims to foster a safe place for members to embrace their cultural legacy and acquire essential services. Over four decades, CAGP has withstood various barriers, from a lack of resources to disparities in representation.

“If you sit back and look at various AAPI groups or Asian caucuses, you won’t see many Cambodian Americans, because we were not recruited to get access to certain things,” Chan said. “We’re a minority within a minority.”

Chan recalled when Cambodians first came to Philadelphia.

“As Southeast Asians, we came in with nothing: no community, no translators. Within the Philadelphia area, people looked at us as leeches like, ‘Oh, these refugees — Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Laotians popped out of nowhere. Why are they getting housing?’ We were dumped there with no recollection — then facing racism and not understanding the system. We still haven’t fully healed,” he said.

Today, CAGP offers educational programs for children, family support services, and cultural spaces for elders. Service locations are spread throughout North and South Philadelphia, including at the Preah Buddha Rangsey Temple, FDR Park, and CAGP’s North and South centers.

“There are so many barriers, like parents busy at work [or] children unable to translate or interpret for their families when they go to the doctor,” Chan said. “Being here and helping them address things, resolve their problems, so they can refocus on what they need to access.”

Since December 2022, CAGP has faced challenges with its South center, the original location for its Outside-School-Time and pre-K programs. The building is under renovation, so these programs now reside in the John H. Taggart School, and its administration shares the property with CAGP.

For Samantha Oum, director of early childhood programs and a Cambodian immigrant, there were problems with leaving the nonprofit’s South center property.

“Being a school-based program means we can only serve children from that specific school,” she said. “That was a big adjustment for us, having a whole new population of students having to adhere to all these different school district guidelines and policies and administration rules.”

She said the nonprofit almost had to close its preschool last year because of discrepancies with funding requirements.

“But that’s where we had to bring in our advocacy hat,” she said. “We held meetings with funders and were able to show that without the service for our kids, they’re going to be regressing, and their families won’t be able to have services.”

Chan said, “there’s a lot of disparities within the city and the United States being Asian American, even more so as Southeast Asian American, even more so as Cambodian American. Especially coming from a refugee immigrant background, our experiences are very different. If you don’t go out there to advocate and bring visibility and voice to your community, you’re not going to get the support that you need, as well as change and break barriers.”

Through the association’s Legacy Project, a project to engage elders with their culture, Chan explained his struggles of assimilating as a Southeast Asian immigrant, as well as the lack of experiences shared by his family.

“The elders were able to share stories with the youth in our program, because it wasn’t their own children or grandchildren,” he said. “This is their understanding: Why would I burden my story of death and people I’ve lost to burden my own family members? And they shared that it’s easier to tell someone else, because it’s not your family. You’re not actually bringing sadness or stress to that person’s life, so it was easier for a child [who] had no relation to them.”

Oum said resilience is the common factor that continues to unite the area’s Cambodian community.

“It’s been a long journey for Cambodians [and] Cambodian Americans,” she said. “There’s a lot that everyone had to endure just to be where they are now. It’s not perfect, but it’s coming from a place where they came in, didn’t even know their next-door neighbor, to now having a community of Cambodian businesses. They all know each other somehow.”