4/17/2024 0 Comments Intergenerational trauma cambodia![]() But, she says, they speak to her only to curse her. They both finished college and one is a pharmacist and the other a clerk in an electronics store. They fight their grandmother and each other, so bitterly that the police have been called. ![]() They are hostile and difficult, she says. But they have not turned out well, in Sandy’s opinion. After she tried to kill herself while pregnant, her mother took Sandy’s two daughters and raised them herself. She “thinks too much,” a phrase that is common when Cambodians talk about PTSD. She couldn’t concentrate, sleep at night, or stop ruminating on the past. She interspersed her high-pitched, almost rehearsed-sounding recitation of horrors past with complaints about the present. She was seven when she was forced into the jungle and 14 when she came to the United States, during which time she lived in a children’s camp, nearly starved to death, watched as her father was executed, and was struck in the ear by a soldier’s gun. When I visited Arbour, I met a distraught woman in her forties whom I’ll call Sandy. (In Cambodia itself, an estimated 14.2 percent of people who were at least three years old during the Pol Pot period have the disorder.) Their suffering is palpable. Lowell’s Cambodian neighborhood is lined with dilapidated rowhouses and stores that sell liquor behind bullet-proof glass, although the town’s leaders are trying to rebrand it as a tourist destination: “Little Cambodia.”Īt Arbour Counseling Services, a clinic on a run-down corner of central Lowell, 95 percent of the Cambodians who come in for help are diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. These are largely refugees and the families of refugees from the Khmer Rouge, the Maoist extremists who, from 1975 to 1979, destroyed Cambodia’s economy shot, tortured, or starved to death nearly two million of its people and forced millions more into a slave network of unimaginably harsh labor camps. Lowell, Massachusetts, a former mill town of the red-brick-and-waterfall variety 25 miles north of Boston, has proportionally more Cambodians and Cambodian-Americans than nearly any other city in the country: as many as 30,000, out of a population of slightly more than 100,000. ![]()
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