LYNN — As part of the district’s Genocide Education program, Cambodian Genocide survivor and author Seng Ty told juniors at Lynn Tech about how he spent his childhood surviving a genocide.
“I’m hoping my story will help other young people who try to overcome their lives and know that they’re not alone in this world,” Ty said.
Assistant Director of Curriculum & Instruction of LPS Kristen M. Tabacco said in Ty’s introduction that his parents taught him “to value life, aspire to humility, and seek the good in people.”
Tabacco added that Lynn has the second largest Cambodian population after Lowell in Massachusetts. And Lynn has the fifth-largest population of Cambodian Americans in the country.
She said, “This culture is very present here, we want to make sure we uplift that and all the different cultures that we have here.”
Ty spoke to students at Lynn Tech on Monday morning, starting his story in 1968 in the Kampong Speu province of Cambodia, where he was born.
“That was the year that the U.S. bombed Cambodia,” Ty told the students. “It did not kill the Vietnamese soldiers, it killed thousands and thousands of civilians in Cambodia. And, that’s how the Khmer Rouge rose at that time.”
Ty’s father was a doctor, and his mother was a housewife who emphasized the importance of education to all of her children.
Because of this, Ty’s older brother got a scholarship to study in France.
Ty said that up until 1975, his parents would take him and his siblings to hide in bomb shelters to escape the war.
On April 17, 1975, the day of the Cambodian New Year, the Khmer Rouge, a radical Communist movement in the country, drove in tanks through his neighborhood.
“I remember that day. I ran to my mother while she was preparing food for the Cambodian New Year. I said, ‘Mother, the war’s come to an end, the Khmer Rouge is here! They’re very nice, they’re smiling, everyone’s cheering,’” Ty said.
He said his entire family was so happy that morning.
“That afternoon, everything was turned into a monster, and I was so confused,” Ty said.
Ty ran out into the streets, where he heard the Khmer Rouge order everyone to gather what they could and leave their homes
“They ordered people to leave their hometown in just three hours. Everyone had to get out of the city, and they used the propaganda that the United States was coming to bomb (Cambodia).”
Ty said the Khmer Rouge started to kill everybody who refused to leave their home, as well as those who were intellectuals, had a fair skin tone, and/or long hair.
He said during that time, the Khmer Rouge would keep a close eye on his family because Ty looked Chinese, and they were skeptical of his race and the family’s wealth.
Ty said, “When the Khmer Rouge asked about our family’s background, my father told me to tell them that we collected junk for a living, and I remember this, the Khmer Rouge just did not believe my family.”
He continued, “That night… I heard a couple of the Khmer Rouge soldiers come in and take my father from the (home) while he was sleeping next to me. I knew right away that the Khmer Rouge would not bring my father back.”
Ty’s father was killed right behind the village where they lived. “I was not allowed to show my emotions because they took my father, and I was not allowed to cry,” he said
He said many others died from overworking or starvation, as they were given one small bowl of rice per day.
He said shortly after his father was killed, his mother died of starvation when he was approximately 9 years old.
A year later, after living in that house with 30 people, he was the only person left, he said.
The Khmer Rouge then sent Ty to live at a mobile camp for orphans, which was in the middle of a rice field.
Ty said he and the other orphans would steal food and get caught, which led to them being tortured.
“I’d rather get tortured by the Khmer Rouge, as long as my stomach was full of food,” he said.
One time, Ty recalled he had been so horribly beaten that the Khmer Rouge thought he was dead and threw him in a canal.
Ty said he remembers waking up in the canal and just walking back to the orphanage. He added that he felt his deceased mother’s presence with him in that moment and that maybe it’s what gave him the strength to survive the beating.
In December 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Ty said.
“The minute I heard the gunshots, the rockets, and the tanks rolling on the highway, I was so happy. I did not even care who it was coming from… I just wanted to get out of this Khmer Rouge area,” Ty said.
The Khmer Rouge took the orphans and headed back toward the jungle. Ty said he knew no matter what, he was not going to follow them, so he hid in the rice field until they were gone.
He walked to Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city.
“At the time, I felt so empty,” Ty said.
He then decided to escape to Thailand. “It was very dangerous, there were a lot of land mines in the jungle.”
While in the jungle, Ty said he was caught in the crossfire between Vietnamese and Thai soldiers.
“Suddenly the gunshot from every corner, and I remember that I thought that I would not make it into the refugee camp, so that that night, It was so exhausted and every I was so scared and I was so tired, and I didn’t know that I could make it to that to the border, because of the soldier was shooting each other, and I’m right in the middle of The crossfire,” he said.
He said he lay down under a tree and woke up to a soldier pointing a gun in his face.
“I thought that I was very much dead at that time,” he said. The soldiers took him to a refugee camp in Thailand, and he was able to stay in an orphanage.
He then saw a way out — he got onto the roof of a train and made it to a refugee camp on the Thai border. It was there that he was interviewed by a writer from Time Magazine.
A couple from Amherst saw his story and adopted him. When he first arrived in Amherst, he said he thought, “Wow, my parents are rich.”
He added, he was shocked when he first arrived in America,
“Dealing with a new culture, a new language, it was so difficult for me as a 13-year-old boy to come in and have no background in education,” he said.
He said he struggled but worked “double and triple” hard to catch up, to go to high school and attend UMass Amherst in 1981.
Ty has been living in Massachusetts since then, and is married with two children in Lowell.
