NEW YORK—Pete Pin spent the first years of his life in a Cambodian refugee camp. As an infant, Pin and his parents emigrated to Long Beach, Calif., like many survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide.
In the U.S., Pin’s parents did not teach him his native language so as to guarantee, as they saw it, his integration into American society and his chance for a future. They never spoke of their experience at the Cambodian death camps, also known as the Killing Fields, where 1.7 million people lost their lives under the rule of the Khmer Rouge.
It wasn’t until Pin got older, as he watched documentaries and read books, that he learned of his nation’s history. This got him thinking about his background, and the responsibilities that came with.
Pin, 30, is not a first generation Cambodian-American. He is not really a second generation one either since he was born in a refugee camp. “I’m not American, but I’m not Cambodian either. I am a part of the ‘1 ½ generation,’” he said. “I find this generation of Cambodians fascinating because we have the unique responsibility of telling our parents’ stories.”
Since 2010, Pin has been working on a long-term photography project called “The Cambodian Diaspora,” where he documents the stories of Cambodian refugees in places where large numbers of them reside, such as Philadelphia, Long Beach, and the Bronx. Through photography, Pin captures the legacy of the genocide, trauma, assimilation, and the problems they face today.
His project began at home. The first pictures he took for “The Cambodian Diaspora” were of his grandmother and father. He asked his grandmother to recount her memories of the Killing Fields; it was the first time they had this conversation.
It was a conversation that was missing in many Cambodian-American homes, but a conversation that needed to be had. Such conversations are what Pin hopes to spark with his documentary.
His grandmother told him about how she dyed their clothes black, the color of the revolution, and pledged loyalty to the Khmer Rouge commander.
Cambodia’s market economy had vanished overnight and money meant nothing. People traded jewelry for food. In one instance, his grandmother traded pieces of family jewelry worth thousands of dollars for chicken.
Such actions kept his mother’s side alive, for the most part—an aunt followed her husband and baby into the killing fields and was never seen again.
Pin’s grandparents on his father’s side starved to death.
The tragedy of their experiences, the lack of communication about the past, and the silent memories shared throughout Cambodian-American communities, inspired Pin to use photography to “piece together our collective story—of trauma, displacement, and resilience.”
Pin’s collection consists of photos such as a single mother who is hindered by barriers of language and culture between her four children; and a man clenching his two fists together, revealing with the word “Killing” on one hand with a Cambodian temple in the background, and “Fields” on the other, with a backdrop of skyscrapers.
“That image speaks to me very strongly ... this ironic idea of Cambodian gangs killing other Cambodian gangs, although they are the descendants of survivors of a genocide where Cambodians were killing other Cambodians,” Pin said.
He also has a photo of bullet scars of a Cambodian-American who was shot five times in front of a Denny’s after his prom, in Long Beach, Calif.
“That was Long Beach in the ‘90’s,” he said. “The Cambodian community was ground zero for a lot of inner city violence.”
The Process
It wasn’t easy getting the photos. Of the five months Pin spent working on his project in the Bronx, three were consumed by finding people who would agree to be photographed.
“It is a naked experience that will be seen by a lot of people. People have to open up their homes, their families. Gaining the trust is a difficult process,” Pin said. “People don’t understand what documentary photography is ... it’s not universal.”
To complicate matters, Pin did not learn Khmer, the Cambodian language, until he was in college.
Pin explains his project by showing the refugees a faded black and white photo of a man looking into the distance as he holds up an identification card at a refugee camp. “Every Cambodian family has these images. [When they see this] They can understand what I am trying to do,” he said.
The refugees never talk about their experience in the death camps, and Pin never asks. “I am not a mental health expert. That’s not my role,” he said.
Instead, Pin hopes his documentary will spark conversation between the generations, in hopes of understanding and coping with the effects of the Killing Fields that still linger with Cambodian-Americans today.
Pin spent the last 4th of July with a Cambodian family in the Bronx by the beachside. The mother collected crabs using an old milk carton that was cut in half. She said it reminded her of what she had to do to survive in Cambodia.
“It’s this intersection of memory and time. That experience resonates today while she’s picking crabs in the Bronx,” Pin said.
The Cambodian-American Community
Pin’s parents were not the only Cambodian defectors who kept quiet about their past. In fact, as Pin discovered through his project, there is often a disconnect between the refugees and the “1 ½ generation.”
Perhaps it is the result of the language barrier, culture barrier, and the shared belief in the urgency to move on. “Cambodians are incredibly resilient people,” Pin said. His documentary is also an attempt to capture that strength.
Pin’s mother was 10 years old when they were forced into labor camps. His father was 17.
During the havoc of the revolution, his father barely received a middle school education. But, later, in the United States, he managed to complete a mathematics degree and buy a home in Stockton, Calif., a few years later.
They arrived in the States with absolutely nothing. The Pins had only saved two objects from their house: a family photograph, and a mortar and pestle.
Pin found that many of the refugees were able to resettle, send their children to college, and live contently within the span of a few decades.
But there is a large number of people, such as the man shot after his prom, who are still struggling in inner cities.
Stockton, nonetheless, is still an urban ghetto. Pin went to school in a county where the high school dropout rate is nearly 50 percent.
“In the Cambodian community, our socio-economic status is very similar to that of other minorities in the inner city,” he said. “That speaks very specifically of the history of their immigration. They all came at the same time as refugees.”
Pin still graduated with an outstanding honors thesis award for his undergraduate degree at University of California, Berkeley, where he studied social sciences.
He had a fellowship that would get him through his entire PhD program at Berkeley. He planned to become a professor in political science economics. He had a secure future.
But a few months before his PhD studies began, on a road trip to Washington D.C., Pin bought his first camera and fell in love with it.
He abandoned his graduate studies and went to the International Center of Photography in Manhattan, graduating from its Documentary and Photojournalism program.
Although Pin has made many breakthroughs as a photographer, such as being named emerging talent by Getty Reportage, there are times when he regrets his decision to abandon his safe path, especially when he is paying rent.
“It’s not like I have a fall back option. My parents are not wealthy, my mom works minimum wage,” he said.
But the life spans of the generation that lived through the genocide in Cambodia are running out, and their stories need to be told.
“I feel very strongly that it needs to be done,” he said. “Photography has a unique ability to elicit an emotive response. I feel very strongly that photography is a medium for storytelling that empowers people.”
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