The two-story house where Dara Duong lives is low and rectangular, one of many broad-shouldered family homes overlooking the forlorn streets beyond SeaTac's Pacific Highway South. An American flag leans over the front yard in silent salute. It's a scene so typically suburban, so brimming with new-life promise, that it's hard to imagine the bad memories buried beneath its surface.
Through the door, down a few stairs, and suddenly you're in a bright, carpeted room that looks nothing like a garage and everything like a carefully arranged exhibition. The room is solemnly quiet, nothing but the sound of a whirring VCR. A small table offering bite-sized cookies and candy bars is a nod to visitors' comfort, but there is nothing comfortable, really, about the surroundings.
Images of atrocity and war blanket the walls. Most arresting are the rows of shocked faces, staring as if pictures from some grotesque yearbook — mug shots of the doomed, all with one thing in common: They were about to be killed.
Duong, a 32-year-old vocational counselor, first saw these faces in 1999, when he returned to the country he'd left as a boy. His father had been killed there. His grandfather had been killed there. He vaguely remembered long days of forced labor. Still, what he saw at Cambodia's Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh shocked him.
For the first time, he absorbed what had really happened. As a child assigned to the countryside to collect rice paddies, he hadn't grasped the magnitude of the suffering perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.
"When I saw the museum, I felt all this suffering in my mind," he says. "I saw the reality. I asked myself, 'How could they do this?' "
So many people. So many people. He wasn't the only one with scars. And yet, he knew so few would ever see what he was seeing, would remember or realize the horror of those years. Duong thought: I need to do something.
Now, his garage is filled with dozens of stark images and reminders of the genocide that claimed 2 million lives from 1975 to 1979. The beaten, mangled victims of torture and execution. The mass graves, the austere bearings of Khmer Rouge henchmen. On a tiny television in the corner, labor-camp video footage of dusty, black-cloaked slaves shuffling in the heat.
"For the time being, we do not have a big building," Duong says, though Seattle's Wing Luke Museum is one future possibility. "This is a start. I'm very happy we can do something."
He is understated in nearly every way, short and neatly dressed, reminiscent of Sal Mineo in "Rebel Without A Cause." He calls his cramped display, not yet open to the public, the Killing Fields Museum. Most of it he did himself. There were many trips to Kinko's and hours spent working with glue and display boards. "It's just a story that happened in that time," he says simply.
But there's no mistaking the passion that drives his effort. "We had to tell people what happened. Students say, 'Where is Cambodia? What is that?' They don't know about the genocide. We want to help this not happen again in another country."
It's a noble effort, one not without complications. The Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton area is home to the nation's third-largest concentration of Cambodian immigrants, among them survivors of the genocide and, in one of those inevitabilities of wartime upheaval, some of its likely perpetrators as well. For that reason, he acknowledges some worry over his safety. "About 3 percent," is how he puts it.
Not everyone will like his idea. But in it, Duong says, are lessons everyone should learn, questions everyone should ask.
On one table, in front of pictures of the real thing, he has assembled the kinds of implements once used for torture: a hammer, shovel, sickle and daggers.
A splash of color beckons from the dreary sea of black and white images — renderings of an artist destined for execution, spared because he knew how to draw. His illustrations show babies pried from crying mothers' hands, sleeping prisoners crowded like cigars across hard floors.
But looking at these walls, the image that troubles him most is the photo of a mother and her few-weeks-old baby. Like thousands of others about to die, she sat looking at a camera for the last time, another notch in the Khmer Rouge record books. "Before they killed them, they took pictures of them," Duong says.
But her child had no understanding of what was about to happen. Why? Duong wonders. Why would people commit such atrocities? "This museum," he says, "will be a witness to the world."
"Some don't even want to go back to the homeland," says Seattle's Cambodian consul, Daravuth Huoth. "It's just a nightmare.
But so far, says Lyban Sawn of the Khmer Community of Seattle/King County, Duong has not done enough as a relative newcomer to woo community leaders and ensure the effort's long-term survival. "This is a big project — it's not that easy."
He points to Chicago, where proponents of the planned Cambodian-American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial worked to build conceptual support given the emotional stakes. Aware the community was limited financially, they instead solicited brainpower and volunteers, and the $1.8 million effort is more than halfway toward its goal.
Duong admits community support will take time. For now, he's seeking corporate sponsorship and federal grants. In addition to Huoth's support, he says his idea has earned endorsement from the Cambodian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Cambodian representative to the United Nations.
The most promising nod, however, has come from the Wing Luke Museum, which has expressed interest in incorporating Duong's collection into its own expansion, also several years away.
Wing Luke director Ron Chew says Duong's effort is much like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., with potential to be powerful and moving. "It's a traumatic experience to see and witness what happened," he says, "but history can be an effective teacher."
With history's participants still around, it's a delicate operation. But such horrific events demand healing and discussion, not ignorance or avoidance, he says.
Huoth says he lent his endorsement to the exhibit provided it went beyond genocide to promote Cambodian culture. (One wall of Duong's garage exhibit includes Cambodian art, religion and traditional clothing.)
"Now that we're moving into the 21st century, we're looking forward, not back," Huoth says. "We look back as a lesson. But in order to move forward, you have to educate. What is Cambodia? It's not just a
piece of disaster. "Some people might like to see it. Some people would like to see it disappear. Some people feel hate, anger. Some people have never been there. The thing is, it never dies — it just keeps popping up every once in a while."
Duong says some people already have questioned the need for such an exhibit. Why not show evidence to the contrary, they ask? To which he answers: Show it to me.
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