From her familiar station swiping students into O’Donovan Hall, Houy Team Tang, known to colleagues and students as Leslie Yang, keeps watch over the peaceful scene of the university’s main dining hall.
But when the soldiers barged in on her family in Cambodia when Yang was only 12, it sent her life into a turmoil the affects of which — including the loss of her father and one of her brothers — would stay with her through adulthood.
Armed with guns, soldiers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea in Cambodia — having just captured the capital city of Phnom Penh in April of 1975 — immediately began ordering Yang and her family to leave.
“Go, go, go, go, go. Get out,” she remembers them saying, threatening her family with their lives if they didn’t follow orders.
The family was not ready to leave their home in the city, but since the country’s eight-year civil war had just ended and a new regime was in power, they had no choice. The Yangs joined the ranks of nearly 2 million other refugees who were told to leave the city.
The Yangs, like most other families, were told they only had to leave for two or three days. Pol Pot, the new Communist leader, was behind the orders — He believed that cities were of no use to the new Cambodia and that Cambodia would thrive off a purely agricultural society. Yang said that her family — an upper-class family that owned gas stations — was forced from the city and expected to work in the fields.
The Yangs had no idea where to go. Along with Yang’s nine siblings and her parents, her grandmother, cousins and uncle were also told to leave. Their world had just been turned upside down.
“They don’t tell you where to go,” Yang said. “Money was no use. Lots of people killed themselves.”
The Cambodian government at the time estimated that between 2,000 and 3,000 people died during the forced evacuation of the city. Luckily, Yang’s father had brought enough rations for three days. Yang’s family was in a better position than most — for the time being.
After three days of hiding out in the fields near the city, it became obvious that returning to their home was not an option. “By that time the communists took everything from you. You only had two sets of clothes for six years,” said Yang.
After a month, with virtually nothing left, the Yangs were told to leave the field or risk being killed.
“We kept moving. One city to another city, one city to another city,” Yang said. “Communist soldiers were telling us to do this. They came with guns and said ‘go.’”
After crossing the Mekong River, the Yangs found a temple where they stayed for a short while. The scene was devastating. The temple was packed, with many people starving and on the verge of death. “We were city people; we didn’t know what to do,” Yang said.
Shortly after arriving at the temple, Yang’s brother fell from a tree and was severely injured. Since no medicine was available, Yang had to scavenge for herbs and treat the wounds using natural remedies.
While members of the CPK and the social elite had access to medicine and decent healthcare, the commoners and refugees were in a totally different situation. Natural remedies were the norm and Western medicine was almost unheard of, Yang said. Before he was fully healed, however, the family was yet again on the move.
“They keep telling you to move. If you don’t move they kill you,” she said. “We asked them, ‘Where are we going?’ They tell you, ‘Just keep going.’ But you don’t know where.”
The cycle next seemed endless. “You go to another city again, but some other people control you,” Yang added. “Once you’re finished, they tell you to go again.”
Upon arriving at a new location, the family was forced to do manual labor for the Communist soldiers, such as clearing mines from roads or harvesting rice from the fields. But upon completing the task, the rebels told them to move again.
After a year of moving around, the lack of proper nutrition combined with forced labor caught up to the Yang family.
Her father became sick, and thus was not of any use in the rebels’ minds. “We had no food to eat, and then you get sick,” Yang said. “They say you can’t make any gains.”
One day, Yang returned from a day of working and asked where her father had gone. Her mother told her that the rebels had said they were taking him to the hospital. After a month, they had still not heard anything from her father.
Her mother and brother decided to venture out and see if he was really in the hospital. Upon returning, Yang learned that her father had been brutally killed. Soldiers reported that they had syringed out some of his blood and replaced it with muddy water. Before he was even dead, they pushed him in the grave he dug for himself and began to fill the hole. He tried to crawl out, but in the end his efforts were futile.
“They didn’t let me know. I was digging [mines] on the highway,” said Yang. “You die, they never tell your daddy. Your daddy dies, they never tell you.”
Her father was just one of many victims who died at the hands of the ruthless rebels. The U.S. State Department estimates that the lack of supplies, executions and forced labor amounted to anywhere between 1.2 million and 1.7 million deaths. There was a lot of uncertainty and deception within the Communist party in Cambodia, and suspicion of treacherous activity was common. Yang said speaking at night was forbidden, and political executions and mass graves were common.
After learning about her father’s death, Yang was on the move again. By 1977, her family was scattered all over Cambodia. Yang trekked across the countryside for six months, moving mainly at night to avoid detection, to find her family and escape to Thailand.
When they finally made it to Thailand, mainly by luck, life didn’t get much easier. “The first night was O.K. After only nine days in Thailand, the [Thai] soldiers tried to tell us to go back to our country,” Yang said. “Then we had to go to the mountains.”
They stayed there in the jungle for a month; at one point, Yang had to cross three mountains each way to find a banana tree so that her siblings could eat. She said that she witnessed many die while scavenging for water.
“The people on the right and left of me died [due to mines]. That’s God helping me. We were so scared and couldn’t talk,” Yang said. “I turned around and saw all the people dying. Blood like water. Blood like water.”
Eventually, Yang said that the Thai Red Cross arrived and helped her family to a refugee camp. After three days of questioning, the family was sent to New York, with a stop-over in San Francisco.
By then, Yang said she did not trust anyone, and she was still not sure that her family was being evacuated to America. Upon asking the bus driver to confirm, however, she finally realized that her dream of escape was becoming a reality.
Of Yang’s eight siblings, seven made it to America. Yang said that her youngest brother was killed because he was too young to be able to speak Cambodian, and thus deemed useless by Communist party. When she finally arrived in New York City on Aug. 4, 1979, her family was sent to Washington, D.C. She said that they initially stayed in Harbin Hall on the Georgetown University campus.
“I don’t know what to say. We couldn’t believe that we were here. Every night I was dreaming, I couldn’t believe that I was here,” Yang said. “I was thankful for Georgetown University.”
After a month of staying on campus, Cambodian sponsors came to pick her family up and helped them to adjust to life in America. Her younger siblings graduated high school and several of them attended the University of Virginia.
In 1980, Yang met a Cambodian man who had escaped to Washington, D.C., without the help of any aid organization. They have been married for 27 years and have one son and one daughter. Yang said she came to work at Georgetown because she was so thankful of what the university had done for her family. Most of her siblings live in the D.C. metropolitan area.
This summer, Yang returned to her homeland for the first time to visit her sick mother-in-law, who she met for the first time. She said the country was completely different, and she couldn’t even recognize her childhood home.
“When I saw my house, I almost died,” she said. “It wasn’t my house anymore.”
By the time Yang made it to America she was 19 years old. She said that the horrors that she saw and lived through for seven years changed her forever. She kept her clothes from that time as a memento, and she still cries every time she sees them.
Yang has made herself a home here, and has acclimated to live in the United States. “When I’m here, I dream of my escape,” she said. “God saved my life and brought me into the United States.”