Dara Duong's museum displays images of Cambodian men and women, each photo taken shortly before they were executed by Khmer Rouge soldiers.
WHITE CENTER -- Dara Duong is a dapper man, standing in his cobalt-blue, collared shirt in the Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial.
Duong, the founder and executive director, gestures toward his office. "My baby is sleeping," he says softly.
Within seconds, he launches into stories about his birthplace and talks about recent photographs of fishermen, vegetable sellers and beaming children in Cambodia. The framed color images line a wall. "It doesn't matter. Young or old," he says. "They can survive."He points to replicas of Hindu and Buddhist figures who have influenced his country.
Duong, a refugee, has brought them back from his trips home.
But what for weeks has been attracting people to this Sixteenth Avenue Southwest museum -- one of the first of its kind in the nation -- is in the back, behind glass shelves and a performance stage and a large video screen.
They are dozens of somber black-and-white mug shots, images of a different sort from the 1970s. Photographs of girls with dark shirts, terrified looks and blunt haircuts. A boy with an upturned, blood-smeared lip.
Gaunt men with short hair, and a few with bug eyes. Arms are tied behind backs. There is the wife of a senior Cambodian government official. Her baby rests in her arms.
The Khmer Rouge, the Communist guerrilla force that battled the Cambodian government, committed some of this planet's worst genocide from 1975 to 1979. About 2 million people, who were perceived as threats, died during this period.
Worldwide, the deaths are known as the Killing Fields. Today, Duong, 33, wants the Pacific Northwest -- as well as younger Cambodian Americans and this country -- to remember what happened.
In May, after getting 1,200 images of the victims from a documentation center in Cambodia, he opened the museum with $10,000 of his own money.
He had displayed dozens of photographs in his SeaTac garage -- and still hasn't posted all of them in the museum.
The Khmer Rouge, he says, had the images taken before the people were tortured and executed with sickles, shovels, hammers, meat cleavers and other instruments. Many of those killed were educated and innocent relatives of Cambodian soldiers.
Duong says the victims were ordered to smile before the camera lens. Only a few did.
Included in the death toll are Duong's grandfather, grandmother, father, aunt and uncle.
This connection fuels his search for why this happened. "I don't want to take revenge," he says. "I just want to have a peaceful mind."
Many in the Seattle area's Cambodian refugee community want the same thing. And perhaps, just for someone to listen and nod in acknowledgment
His collection started after he arrived in the Seattle area in 1999. He is raising $2 million to open a larger museum in Seattle.
He used to work for a counseling service in Seattle's International District but now devotes all of his time to the museum.
He hopes to have a computer database of the victims' biographies. He also wants to write guidebooks for U.S. students.
His wife, he says, once asked him about the images of all the dead people, especially when he kept them in their garage. Many Buddhists believe that the deceased need a proper shrine or monument so their spirits can rest in peace.
He says he told his wife that they were innocent people, and there is nothing to fear.
In the future, he hopes to build a shrine or monument for them.
Tonight, he will travel to Cambodia for three weeks to continue his research. He hopes to ask surviving Khmer Rouge leaders a simple question: Why?
The topic is still sensitive in Cambodia. But, he notes, his question will be in a historical context, not a political one.
As he talks, two men from the area's Cambodian community quietly enter the building. They, too, are refugees.
They have watery eyes and soft voices. A sense of loss lingers, even as they stand here so many miles away, in the Pacific Northwest. Something has been taken from them. And they want it back.
Seattle resident Srey Samreth, 52, gives Duong a photocopied newspaper image of himself in the Cambodian Navy. He is standing next to a U.S. naval attache.
In 1978, at a prison camp in Battambang province, the Khmer Rouge forced him and five prisoners to turn human feces into fertilizer, he recalls. Their quota: 10 tons of fertilizer each month.
The Communist guerrillas eventually slit his compatriots' stomachs, he says, and the men dropped into a pit. He, too, tumbled into the hole, which was actually a mass grave.
But for some reason, the Khmer Rouge spared him. "I thought maybe I did something good. So, I survived," he says, as Duong translates. "Maybe God helped me."
He is wearing a T-shirt with a donkey image and the words: "I lost my ass in Las Vegas."
Without saying a word, Thoeurn Touch of Burien walks straight to the mug shots.
He examines them, looking for his three brothers, who disappeared back home. No luck.
"Some people say they didn't die. I don't know where they are," the 44-year-old says in English.
On this day, he was looking for Western medicine in this neighborhood and saw the museum's sign by accident.
"I want to save my kid here," he says, explaining why he likes life in the United States. "I don't want to see the place where they killed my family."
By the early afternoon, Duong's baby son is awake. Duong cradles him in his arms back near the museum office. His countrymen have left.
The baby looks at his surroundings. Duong, a proud father, just sways back and forth to comfort the newborn. His son is 3 months old. Duong wants his museum to help his own 6½-week-old son, Darell Vatha Duong, and other children "know where they come from."
Linh Thach could look no longer. He had to get out. "It is a true story," he said, stepping into sunlight from the darkness of a low-slung former nightclub. "I am very upset," he said.
Thach, the Seattle Police Department's liaison to the Asian community, was among a few dozen guests Friday at the newly opened Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial. He was reminded that history's lessons can be as painful as they are valuable.
Thach said several of his relatives were murdered during the Khmer Rouge genocide that claimed 2 million Cambodian lives from 1975 to 1979 during the regime of Pol Pot. Looking back is difficult. But he and a companion, Peter Truong, a community-service officer for the King County Sheriff's Office, both said the museum is needed for local Cambodian youth who know little of what their elders endured.
"Young people, especially, can see what the country went through and appreciate what they have in this country," Truong said. "People born here don't know anything about it."
The museum in White Center officially opens to the public today and is the pet project of Dara Duong, a Cambodian refugee. Last fall, Duong quit his job as a counselor at a social-service agency to devote himself full-time to his dream.
Duong's efforts have taken his collection of items documenting the horrors from his cramped garage in SeaTac to a modest, but accessible, location. Before, some doubted the legitimacy of Duong's project. Now, he says, local shop owners are happy to accommodate his donation boxes.
"Before, it was a project based in a garage," he says proudly. "Now it is a real project, and everybody can come see the real history of the killing fields, the real history of Cambodian culture."
The museum features a library focusing on that culture, with some of his 300 books on history, tradition and religion. Another rack is aimed at kids, with youth-oriented, Cambodian pop-culture magazines.
Art and sculptures line boxy, glass shelves along several walls around a stage — a remnant of the location's former life as a nightclub. Duong plans to use the stage for Cambodian youth to perform traditional dance.
But the wounded heart of the place is the Killing Fields Memorial, where images of war and atrocity surround visitors — the mass graves, austere bearings of Khmer Rouge henchmen, rows and rows of terror-stricken faces. They are the morbid mug shots of people about to be executed.
Duong, 33, first saw the faces in 1999 at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, when he returned to the country he had fled as a boy. His father and grandfather both were killed during the genocide. And he vaguely recalls days of forced labor.
Still, the magnitude of the atrocity was so terrible that Duong felt compelled to share the story with the world, so in subsequent trips to Cambodia he brought items home with that intention in mind: photographs, drawings and other evidence of the crimes that defiled his native land.
The work of assembling the collection he mostly has done himself, with glue, display boards and hours spent at copy shops. He has also had help from Ryker Labbee, a well-traveled 30-year-old who met Duong a year ago and has contributed photographs of modern Cambodia to the exhibition.
"Dara's great," Labbee says. "He has a great vision. But he's going to need help."
Duong has spent $10,000, most from his own savings, to prepare what he says is just a seed of what he envisions: a $1.5 million cultural center and museum in a better location. He hopes that might happen within five years.
Duong also says people in the community told him they don't have time to teach their kids about Cambodian culture, about how they came to America. They told him the children don't believe their recountings of the genocide. They told him to open his museum so the young people could see what really happened.
At Friday's invitation-only grand opening, a documentary on the Khmer Rouge played on a large screen while a hammer, shovel and electric wires were mounted on an easel nearby. Items like those were used to torture people.
When Duong first started talking about his project, some worried for his safety: With history's participants still around — including former members of the Khmer Rouge — the genocide is a delicate issue. He told people he makes no judgments; he wants to simply show things as they were and let visitors decide for themselves.
He says he hopes it can be a lesson for everyone, Cambodians and Americans alike. For Cambodian youth, he says, the museum can be a push to get on the right track.
"It's kind of like a message that can help them change," he says.
Thuong Thach, left, and Lem Thach examine photos at Friday's opening of Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial in White Center. Thuong Thach said 30 of his relatives were among those killed, including his wife, brother, sister-in-law, nieces and nephews
MUSEUM AND MEMORIAL
The Cambodian Cultural Museum and Killing Fields Memorial is at 9809 16th Ave. S.W. in White Center. The museum is open from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. The entrance is in the back.
For information, call 206-763-8088 or 206-730-7740. You also can visit www.killingfieldsmuseum.com Additional information about the genocide can be found at www.dithpran.org More headlines and info from White Center. |
