Los Angeles (Silver Lake, Atwater Village, Eagle Rock), Filipino-Americans, Catholic Grade Schools: An Overview 1990-1998

The title of this article represents the time that I was in Catholic School grade in Los Angeles.  That's 8 years of grade school.  My 4 years in Catholic high school were another story altogether and radically different than the time in grade school.

I don't know that if I have many "special" stories or a story, worthy of a movie, or a memoir, but I was inspired to write primarily because of a KCRW/Zocalo segment on Catholic School education in the 1930s. Also, I was once told by someone that there aren't enough stories about "us", "us' meaning Asian-Americans, so here are a few more.

The popular media I've seen on Catholic schools have always involved white kids somewhere east dealing with nuns who would break pencils on their students' hands.  I've listened to and read articles about how the Catholic school was really strict about everything.

Some of those stories have resonated with what I experienced, but I don't think what I experienced exactly has been represented quite yet.

I only have realized my experience well after my undergraduate years.  In college at UCLA, I realized that a lot of Filipino-American kids in LA (When I say "LA", I tend to mean areas from Central LA (Historic Filipinotown) to Echo Park to Los Feliz to Atwater Village to Eagle Rock and Glendale) tended to go to Catholic schools;  I say this without wanting to discount the number that went to public schools, but I can't speak to that experience except for one year in kindergarten and my college experience at the UCs and CSUs.

I mention "Filipino-American" so much in this piece because I think Filipino-Americans and our experiences have kinda "flown under the radar" in popular discourse. Back then from the 1990s to 1998, Filipinos made up a visible population in many Catholic schools across LA, at least from what I "felt" at surrounding schools and in my own.  On anecdotal observation of my old school and schools across LA, they still do. 

I don't mean to speak on behalf of all Filipino American experiences in Los Angeles, but I think I have more than enough to "say something", at the very least about my experience.  I would like for my articles to be one dot that represents one experience in Catholic schools and through the Filipino-American experience, but also is one step in making the Filipino-American racial and ethnic category visible, credible, and present in recent history; ready to engage and participate in public discourses about education and other civic affairs.   I mention it at the outset because it is contrary to the dominant narratives which don't usually include people of color in the now.  By using "Filipino-American", I don't mean to "tribalize" or necessarily say that my experience was radically different than other students', but I just want to say that being "Filipino-American" was one lens through which I viewed things, just like being Mexican, being "short", being a girl, or being tall can affect the way you may perceive things.

Only after having married a Catholic school teacher have I come back to re-call what have been probably my most formative learning experiences.

My project and premise is simple:  I find myself trying to reflect on "what it all meant" and how bits, pieces, and chunks of the experience might have impacted me for today.

There's the obvious great memories.  Graduation.  Field day at the base of the Griffith Observatory with In N Out Burger.  Field trips.  The last days of June which involved wrapping school textbooks in brown covered wraps.  Halloween.  Christmas shows.  Valentines Day with "school families." Talent shows.  School festivals.   The American flag popsicles on hot days.  Art class.  Birthdays in school which evolved into these dance parties as we got into "junior high" from 6th - 8th grade.

There was the mundane things outside of the classroom.  The assignment of play areas.  The dodgeball wars on the playground. P.E.  Kickball.  An almost all-asphalt playground that also served as a parking lot for church on Saturdays and Sundays.  Basketball rims put up around November to coincide with "basketball season."  The organic separation of boys and girls, except for occasional boys vs. girls games.   

There's the everyday rituals that I remember and suddenly miss.  School uniforms and wearing them correctly.  The morning assemblies which began with lining up, and doing a Pledge of Allegiance.  The birthday announcements.  Staring at the analog clock in the back of the class to make sure it was almost close to 3:00 PM dismissal time. Taking home parent envelopes. Getting dropped off in a car behind the cones.  Going to my parents' or friend's car after school.  Or going to daycare after-school.  Homework time during daycare, and then play time after homework.

The school was dominated by car-drivers, and I imagine, probably still is given the geographic spread we students covered.  My dad usually dropped us off because my mom always drove and went to work early at the hospital.  Incidentally, only one kid I knew lived close enough to walk to school;  everyone was shuttled in a car, and I was pretty much able to recognize different cars that everyone was shuttled in.  One carpool of an extended family of Fil-Ams was (kinda mean) called the clown car.  Biking was completely non-existent, though I do remember one incident during the Summer my sister entered Kindergarten;  a little white girl was riding a bike with her older adult-sized brother who was probably somewhere between 15 and 25.  She was bleeding from the nose and was crying.  Some other adults rushed and asked what happened.  He said that they had been hit by a car;  yikes.  Didn't have any effect on what I thought of biking.

There's the curious markings of what made those years clearly the 1990s.  The computer lab just before computers became normal in every home.  A TV with a VCR occasionally being dragged into our classroom.  The slow-moving printer that printed tear-able flaps on each side of the paper which we'd have to rip off, which some used to make these little crafts.  The occasional guestspeaker whether a DARE officer or a missionary.  The principal outlawing "baggy pants" and "jeans" for fear of any association with gang culture.

Of course there wouldn't be the Catholic "school" without the classrooms, my classmates, and teachers and their personalities.  Each year, we fluctuated between 32-35 students, which means that there was enough a crowd in the class, but still kind of intimate.  We had one desk and all books contained within it starting in 2nd grade.  We stayed in one classroom.  We occasionally switched seating positions.

I also remember every single teacher and their quirks.

• 1st grade was a super-tall white lady who brought who equally super big son and daughter to school one time.  
• 2nd grade was a Filipino lady almost my parents' age (and definitely taller than my 4'8 mother) who said that she was older than most of our parents;  she was the first time I was acknowledged as doing well in class.  
• 3rd grade was technically a nun with a nun with an Irish accent, but did not really dress the part and was acknowledged as one of the nicest teachers;  for some reason I did the worst under her.  
• 4th grade was a taller, thin white lady with curly hair and what someone described as loose lips;  she was cool, she apparently might've dated a vaguely Asian guy that was also helping at our school, and where I felt I found an "academic groove."  
• 5th grade was the same Filipino lady who incidentally was chosen as my sister's godmother;  I struggled again.  
• 6th grade was an older white lady with short hair and a passion for diagramming sentences.  I probably forgot, but I felt like I learned a lot from her.  
• 7th grade was slightly split between a white guy who left in the middle of the year and was replaced by a fresh college graduate, the son of the long-time school secretary.  
• 8th grade was a younger, hip cool white lady who specialized in teaching Math and saw me off to the selective Catholic high school of my choice.

I don't know if I could name every classmate, but we spent enough time to where I can recognize faces, though if you ask me to name a kid from a different grade, that might be a little challenging.

Nowadays, as people in our 20s and 30s, I could probably recognize probably a fraction of those who went to the school from 1990-1998.  Probably more likely if you were at the school for at least 4-5 years.  Pretty much if you were a girl in 6th grade or older by the time I was 11, I was probably crushing on you.  It is really really weird saying this as a 30-year old man, but as a growing 10-11-12-13-14 year old, I was a fan of pretty much all the girls.  To me at that age, they weren't little school girls, they were growing, taller-than-me fully formed women.  It didn't make a difference if I was able to be with them or Tyra Banks. Who was hot or not became a topic of conversation amongst the boys starting at 10 years old.  I already had my first two crushes by then.  A Filipina and a Korean girl.  They reminded me of the hit song by Ace of Base, "The Sign." 

Around me, some of the boys were even more knowledgeable about females, their anatomy in a way more advanced than I was. One of the boys proudly admitted that "Showgirls" was his favorite movie, which shocked the teacher, but not really me, because I had no idea what that was.  Another talked about how he wanted to do something pretty lude to a computer teacher, which made me wonder what he was talking about.  That was 5th grade.  I don't think I was an angel, I simply didn't know what the heck these kids were talking about, at the time.

I also remember how friends and closeness shifted as the years went by.  Throughout my time at the school, anyone who liked basketball was someone I grew close to --- that also happened to be a lot of the Filipino-American kids.  My dad was unique early on in schooling in that we were relatively close to a few of the black families in my grade.  As the years came, some parents also gravitated towards my parents and vice versa, mostly the Filipino immigrant parents, which happened later.  I already was brought there because my g-sis, 2 years older than me, had been enrolled and also came to crushing on her friends, this group of attractive Filipina girls who each seemed out of my league.  I did outside activities with other kids which centered first around karate, then Filipino folk dancing, then basketball, and then theater drama. 

I do remember that we created outcasts.  There was never any overt reason why we created outcasts, but it probably had to do with a combination, "cooties" or some kind of irrational fear of "contamination", which is something of an embedded statement about class, and weakness.  A few of my friends were instigators against these outcasts:  they would laugh them off, trip them up, I guess it looked a lot like bullying.  With my friends as aggressors, I never looked at it as that, but upon reflection it probably was.  

I was never big enough to bully anyone, but I do remember occasionally partaking in the teasing of certain kids for questionable non-reasons.  Some of it was "just because."  Some of it was because I really thought some people were gross or disgusting;  actually having a running conversation with some people, one tall Mexican girl in particular, seemed really disgusting to me, and I feel awful upon reflection.  But they probably didn't take me that seriously cause I was like 4'8 and known for farting all the time at least throughout 7th grade.  Irony is that I'm married to a pretty tall Mexican girl now, so...(God's way of getting back at me?)

When I think back critically about how my views have changed, there are things that make me wonder about how much has changed within student culture.  The rumors of having a lesbian principal.  Usage of the word "gay" to describe things that were "stupid."  Parents complaining about fundraising for air conditioning which never came in my 8 years.  Wanting and having the few Filipino teachers that were at the school.  Having almost a majority Filipino-American school and then transitioning into a majority white American high school where Filipinos existed but were not the dominant group.

Now as a 30-year old with a wife teaching at a Catholic school, a lot of my memories have been triggered, and myself making a foray into education, and I wonder about the current-day functionings:  is enrollment falling as it is across the board in Catholic schools?  How do they integrate technology into the classroom?  What immaturities are the kids running with now?  Do they finally have air conditioning?  Is the school still something of a pipeline to my ever-popular high school?

Unpacking more later.

Stories of Broadway in LA

"No one knows these streets better than we do.  They don't know the alley ways, the empty buildings, the cuts.  They're just visitors." - My friend, Pixel, on Broadway.

My friend Pixel is someone I work with, part-time.  He wears the standard outift of snapbacks and shorts, a T-shirt usually from his friend's company, and Nike dunks. 

He grew up in Pico-Union, and when we get together, he's pretty much my informant about life on the streets as a Latino youth in 1990s South LA.

"Broadway, Downtown LA was our playground.  Ain't nothing anybody can tell me about living here."

Bringing Back Broadway:  Free Shrugs

Way back in 2007, fresh out of college, interested in urban planning and running, I'd attended a Bringing Back Broadway meeting.

I remember Jose Huizar making comments about how he used to go to the theaters along Broadway and watch Kung Fu movies.

I remember people waxing poetic about the old, classic theaters.

I remember the idea of a Historic Preservation Committee there speaking to landmarkize these theaters that were over 50 years old.

I remember the idea of a Streetcar coming back to LA.

I didn't really know what to make out of it, other than think, 'Oh OK.'

Now, almost 7 years later, it looks like momentum is on a big upswing.

Surveying Broadway

For a few days, a crew and I were tasked with doing interview surveys along Broadway on behalf of LADOT.

A LONG few days mostly because we had to meet a certain quota, which could become tricky to meet when there is no one walking after 7PM at night.

I culled surveys from a great range of people (or what I thought was a great range):  long-time residents, new residents, people who work there, people who recreate there, old, young, English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, men, women, black, white, Asian, Latino, affluent, transient.  To me what was missing and what there didn't appear to be many of: Pacific Islanders, Middle Easterners, Indians from India. 

As a method of data gathering, interview surveys are one way of getting information quickly.

However, not all surveys are taken equally.  Some respondents were really putting thought into their answers and put me at ease, some I had to yank answers out of and write quickly.  However, the interview surveys won't say that at all, it's just a series of circles of and ratings --- nothing really about what it means to live, work, or just be in the area, just questions about people's perception of safety.

Some gave me an oral history of "how it used to be."  I enjoyed those interviews the most, albeit in the midst of being mandated to meet an hourly quota, they were an impediment, an obstacle.

It was a bit of a shame to not be able to record what they shared with me.  I felt there was an overwhelming worth to what they were saying, because they were sharing with me what they thought or at least what they thought could be interesting.

So in attempt to re-capture what they told me, from memory, here's a sampling of what people talked to me about:

• A young white homeless man who agreed to be my first interview after seeing my initial attempts to corral a passersby for an interview.  He knew the routines of the local district peace officers; he couldn't stay around in his corner.  He wouldn't be around for long.  After the interview, the officer came and gently asked him to leave.
• A elderly Christian black man.  When I told him that "we were interested in his opinions", he seemed to be very interested in saying that adding what we were adding on Broadway was "progress."  He seemed to be indifferent to it, mostly.  However, he was able to recount his youth when there was a streetcar on Broadway and when there was a Streetcar that went all the way to Watts.  While he revealed a wealth of information, what I remember most from our conversation was that he predicted racial strife in the future and disliked the gay lifestyle.  He was waiting on a bus bench when I met him for his fellow evangelist friend who never appeared to come;  he told me that following Jesus was the most important thing I could do in life.
• An older Latino business owner/employee at the Grand Central Market between 3rd and 4th Street wanted to tell me that it wasn't very handicapped friendly
• A red-haired 56-year old black man waiting at the bus stop.  He had seen me struggling to cull in participants and told me "you could survey me."  He said that he had been in the neighborhood to pick up a check from his bank, and pay his rent.  He'd been on disability and was proud to pay only $200 of rent in his $1,300 apartment in Crenshaw.  He says that it was about time;  he was 56 years old.
• A skid row resident Mexican and East Indian whom I thought was a business owner.  Why a business owner?  He criticized the presence of the homeless as something that brought down the value of the neighborhood.  It was all fine and I was nodding my head along till he mentioned that he himself stayed at Union Rescue Mission, which made me wonder, why the self-hate?  He said he had come to the US in the 1970s and everything was "bad" back then.
• An old school 2nd generation Mexican American who said he knew everyone in the neighborhood.  He had a tatt on his neck, and it seemed like he worked for a restaurant there as "unofficial" security guard. 
• A philosophizing borracho talked about how life was not limited to our bodies.  He told me that he didn't want his wife knowing that he was out and about.  He told me about how he was a contrast to his tightly wound worrying brother who died a few years ago.  His mission was to enjoy a few drinks.  When I said that I am Filipino, he said that he knew a few of us when he worked in the medical industry;  I wondered what he did now.
• A white West Angeleno talking about how downtown needed to have afterhours stuff like more bars and restaurants.  He'd noted that he'd come to this part of town because of this particular Italian restaurant that we were in front of;  he reasoned that people would come to any neighborhood they thought had a destination such as this Italian restaurant.  He noted that all he saw was bridal shops and businesses that closed down early.  He would like to see lofts and restaurants.
• Speaking of Italians, a transplant from Italy who recently moved to Thousand Oaks.  She was there showing her mother around the big city.  She'd said that neither Thousand Oaks nor LA was a real "city."  It wasn't a real city because she couldn't walk, bike, or take transit anywhere.  She was frustrated because of her complete reliance on the car to get around Southern California.
• Two punk rock queer girls, one from Brooklyn, the other from here.  Both with a sense of sarcasm.  They were going to the Chinatown New Year festival, something I'd wanted to go to.  They'd just been passing.

Broadway:  the Underground Playground

My friend Pixel immigrated here from Mexico when he was 4 years old.  He has an older brother who taught him English, which allowed him to skip ESL classes.  They thought his balding ass was some kind of genius kid.

He's told me about an elementary school of hanging out, walking down certain streets, being jacked, and being labeled a gangster while going to high school in Granada Hills.  How he received lessons about horticulture and chemistry just by virtue of being an avid blazer.

He's asked me, "Do you know what it feels like to be jacked?  Do you know what it feels like to have a grown man searching your body for anything they can take?  Do you know what that does to you?"

Of course I didn't know. 
He'd punched a 22-year old in defense of a friend before he learned what a mall was.  He remembers the old stores along Broadway:  his favorite toy shop, where his mom got clothing, where he and his folk did business.

The streets of downtown LA at night are where he went to "play" as a youth.  Essentially, only the freaks came out at night  As a young Latino male, ready to get down, he liked this.  Reveled in this invisibility that was already forced upon him. 

They knew the vacant buildings, the places where they could smoke, drink, throw parties.

They knew where they could write.  At least the more encoded, more public type of writing.

Pixel remembers those days fondly, this was his youth. Broadway was the canvas, a place that held these memories of him and his friends together.  It's what essentially made him, him.

His reaction to the new developments?

Maybe you can guess.

How would you react to someone stripping away the infrastructures of what made you, you?  How would people react if they stripped away USC or UCLA or some institution?  Of course its not exactly similar, but it's where he got educated about the world.  The only difference is that USC/UCLA/other institutions charge, have rules, and give employers a more stable reference point about an applicant's qualifications.

Once they started "cleaning" out the "bums", it was over.  They began to make it safe for "other people" to come.

He dislikes the Staples Center, the Lakers, and LA Live for what they did to the people living there.  He tells me that what happened at Staples Center is what happened to the people at Chavez Ravine when the Dodgers re-located to LA.

"No one knows these streets better than we do.  They don't know the alley ways, the empty buildings, the cuts.  They're just visitors," says Pixel.

This makes me wonder, where would someone in his shoes at Pico-Union be today?  Where do they go?

Brief History of Puvungna: Cal State Long Beach Is a Holy Land

During my time in Long Beach, I've spent a lot of time with Cambodians.  Cambodians number just under 20,000 or so in the City of Long Beach, and 44,000 in LA County.  Most of them came during the 1980s after stays in refugee camps, the result of social fracture and disorganization after the Khmer Rouge regime.  Today, in 2012, we see a new generation of Cambodian-Americans:  Long Beach and other places in the United States is home and whatever environment they've grown up is their adopted "culture."

The very last semester of my classes, however, I took a slight turn away from hanging with the Cambodians.  For a project in media and ethnography, I spent time and energy researching the CSULB Special Collections for who and what used to be on Cal State Long Beach.

Cal State Long Beach is known not just as a University but as the birthplace of the Gabrielino-Tongvan deity Chingishnish. Cal State Long Beach itself erected a sign in the 1970s supporting this legend.  They used this legend in some promotional materials for the school.

The legend of Chingishnish had been first recorded in history by Franciscan missionary Geronimo Boscana in the 1820s, around the time that the California Missions had been losing financial support from Spain to continue on.  When we interviewed her, Cindi Alvitre, one of the leaders of the Gabrielino-Tongva tribe today, said that her grandfather would tell her stories about how he was not told to speak too loudly around the area near Cal State Long Beach, by then, sometime in the 1900s, known as the Bixby Farm, because it was "sacred land."

The legend of Chingishnish has been questioned for a while now, mostly by academics.  In the 1920s and 1930s, Anthropologists were disputing just exactly what the legend of Chingishnish meant:  was he a deity or a historical figure?  John Harrington thought he was a historical figure.  Alfred Kroeber, a big name in early Anthropology, questioned the overall historicity and tradition of the Chingishnish beliefs, stating that their beliefs arose as a response to the growth of the California Missions.  

Long Beach proved to be something of a hot spot for archaeologists from the 1920s onward.  According to a survey in 1993 by Scientific Research Surveys, there are officially 35 archaeological sites in Eastern Long Beach.  Artifacts had been uncovered and verified in the 1950s near what is now the Los Altos Shopping Center, which is known as LAn-270, and at a site called LAn-702 discovered in 1974.  Puvungna has historically been placed at LAn-306 at the top of Bixby Hill on Rancho Los Alamitos.  This is about a mile away from where the big discovery was to be made.



In 1972, a big discovery was made at the Cal State Long Beach campus.  A skeleton was found   where a sprinkler system was being installed next to an organic garden.  This was a site designated by archaeologists as LAn-235 and had already been a point site of interest since 1960 when Kenneth Dixon had uncovered some artifacts.

The Coroner’s office eventually found the skeleton to be “human and of antiquity beyond concern of the Coroner.” Additionally the office found that it was buried in a way consistent with an “ancient burial.” On this basis, Cal State Long Beach Archaeologist Kenneth Dixon registered the site on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. 

With this new designation of LAn-235 as a Historic Place, the university stopped plans for future development throughout the rest of the 1970s and early 1980s.  They stopped plans to build housing for a president.  On an archaeological site site designated LAn-234, right next to LAn-235 they erected a sign commemorating the historic designation and even featured the legend of Puvungna in their marketing materials.  

In the early 1990s, conflict arose again. Part of the LAn-235 land had been dedicated for use as a community garden since the 1970s.  The Tongva had determined that the community garden was "not in conflict" with its past as a site of religious significance.  However, the university had other plans. The university went public with plans to not only "delete" the community garden but first build a parking lot en route to building a strip mall and housing.  The short documentary Sacred Land, White Man's Laws outlined the conflict.

A lot of the legal conflict seemed to flame out when a new chancellor Robert Maxson scrapped the strip mall plans and promised in 1995 to preserve the land.  He kept his promise till when he left in 2005.  There hasn't been much outward conflict with the incumbent chancellor F. King Alexander who replaced Maxson, but it hasn't been all positive.  In 2007, two professors at CSULB and six tribal members proposed to develop Indigenous Educational Facility on Lot 20 as had been planned in 1978.  The offer has not been declined per se, but there hasn’t been action towards its establishment.

Today, though probably not over, the conflict seems to be contained within the theoretical and the academic world between Archaeologists/Anthropologists.  Matthew Boxt and L.Mark Raab, Archaeologists from Cal State Northridge and hired by Cal State Long Beach to survey the sites, wrote papers criticizing advocates of Puvungna. They opined that ideas of what Puvungna was and is were influenced largely by Anthropological work.  In the vein of Kroeber, they hinted that tradition was sort of fabricated by not those studied, but by those who were doing the studying.  At their worst, they took special aim at CSULB emeritus professor of Anthropology/Archaeology Keith Dixon, saying that he'd invented the idea of there being a village of Puvungna.

Meanwhile, Dixon maintains that very rarely does an archaeological site match up with a purported legendary site and that he was merely following the ethnohistorical evidence. 

The Lives of Cambodian Seniors in the LBC

Every day in LA, I discover something new.  This, as a lifelong LA resident, whose had work and home connections from the SF Valley, the SG Valley, Long Beach, South LA, Central LA, East LA, West LA, hell even mother-effin' Lancaster. 

There are also still towns in here I have had little to no interface with.  Just the other day on a bike round through Paramount Boulevard, it was the cities of Paramount and Downey. Who'd a thunk that there would be a happening place down in Downey?  As I was biking through, I wondered about the histories of people, places, and things there. What strikes me then as had always fascinated me while living in Silver Lake and staring at the rows of houses were the vastly different worlds from unit to unit.

For the past two years, I've been thrown and thrown myself into Long Beach, and in particular people in the more public aspects of the Cambodian community.

Last year at about this time, I was taking an internship class through my Anthropology program. The objective of the class was to learn about the art of grant-writing.  There was an applied twist to it as well:  we would be writing the grant for a group of Cambodian Seniors.

A group of Anthropology students and I, encouraged over and over by professors to fuse work in our classes, had the idea of making a movie about some seniors who worked at a community garden on Martin Luther King Park.  The same Martin Luther King Park featured in pretty much every 90s Long Beach rap hit.  We came up with a short documentary called "Garden without Roots."

Ostensibly our film was about community gardening at Martin Luther King Park and a backyard,  how these gardens form a place of gathering for them, but that they lack space in general. It was quite a challenge for our first film being that we had no experience behind a camera, none of us spoke Khmer, and we needed translators.

What struck me however was not what we eventually produced, but the stories, experience, and wisdom I learned from them absent the camera.

Cliche-sounding, but it was experience and wisdom that I wish would be broadcasted on national network television or hell at the very least, KCET, local television.  That better than reruns and repeats of films in America.

One man in particular I learned a lot from.

Adam, one of the other producers of the film, had originally noticed him on our very first day of shooting as the guy "intensely watering the plants."

One day outside of shooting, I took another friend, a 2nd generation Cambodian-American woman and Anthropologist whom I called "Savagery" one day to come and converse with one of the seniors, a man named Kea Cheng and can be seen in the video.  Savagery was fluent in Khmer and talked a long while with him.

Kea is no stranger to local media, as he's been featured twice in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, once as a social services client who missed his white savior, and the other time as a worker of the very Cambodian Seniors Nutrition program featured in our video. Neither article mentioned much about his personal stories, not that these articles were the appropriate venue for them.

From the conversation Kea had with Savagery, I learned that about the harshness of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from 1975 - 1979 towards him and the tragedies of his life.  He would use human manure to fertilize plants.  If plants weren't watered thoroughly and/or correctly, he would face punishment.  He'd lost many family members, and fairly recently, a son. 

Him talking about this with Savagery, and it being apparently his first time talking to a Cambodian-American, was something that ignited the video documentary project.

As months rolled on, I got to know more about Kea and other seniors.  I'd forged a bound with Kea based on the fact that he would bike everywhere.  We would arrive at the same time on bike and lock up.  We couldn't quite speak to each other as he struggled with English and I struggled with Khmer.   With the help of translators, and his own efforts to speak English, I would later learn about his experience in the military, that he had a few daughters that were doing well in Cambodia.  I learned that he lived in a temple and had struggled with legal and social services in Long Beach, perhaps because of translation issues.

Every morning that we would film, I kept trying to talk in Khmer not to just Kea but everyone in our group.  A Herculean struggle --- I walked with a clipboard of important and circled verbs that I thought I'd use in conversation.

I was the source of much comedy when attempting to use the word for 'rice', I accidentally used the word 'girl.'  What I was trying to ask was whether or not he worked on the rice farm.  In Khmer, t'wer is the verb for "make" and is used interchangeably with the verbs "do" and "work".  Roughly translated I was supposed to ask him, "t'wer s'rai?"  "Did he make rice?"  Instead, I asked him 't'wer s'ray?", "Did he do women?"

The seniors laughed it up.  The way they let me know was when Phannaka, another "senior" in the film, went up to me with a pocketbook Cambodian-English dictionary and showed me the word 'rape' and the word for 'girl.' I was astounded because I thought she was trying to say something important, but she began to laugh in chorus with the other seniors and kept repeating what I said.

I had plenty of moments with them, despite not being able to communicate beyond hellos, and goodbyes with them.  One lady, Um Sath, would always greet me with a smile and an enthusiastic hello.  She probably didn't recognize my name but she knows my face, even as old as she gets.  "How are you today?  She always tells me in her English, "Yah so sa-weet!"  It's a line I love to repeat in my head every time.

You wouldn't know that her story by way of her personality.  Only later while working my grad assistantship at CamCHAP and searching through newspapers, did I learn that she'd lost her husband and children. 

When we weren't filming at the community gardens anymore, I would visit them at McBride Recreation Center otherwise known as California Recreation Center. one of the elders, Kim, would invite me to sit with her during meal time.  She would give me oranges, or donuts or milk and let the meal people know that I was cool to eat with them.  They all knew I was a poor student and served me as if I was one of their sons.  Being a starving student, I'd eat whatever was served along with them.  They'd pass me their milks and any food that was too American.

I actually did most of my talking with the translators Arun and Serey.

Arun was a former nurse during the regime and was sponsored here to learn English.  He'd also been some kind of actor; I joked that he was the Brad Pitt of our lil documentary.  I didn't think about it at the time but it was an interesting connection I unconsciously made since Brad Pitt actually does have an adopted Cambodian son by way of Angelina Jolie, named Maddox.

Serey, I didn't know much about till chancing upon a Press-Telegram article.  He was always a willing translator, and would always invite me to watch him play ping pong.  I loved how he looked like a gym coach, and it turns out that he was/is.  When Pacquiao fought, he was one of the first few to talk about him.  He would let me know what was going on with Kea, when Kea forgot to send in papers for work authorization. 

As for the Cambodian Seniors Nutrition program itself, I have not visited since May or June.  The last I had heard they were running out of funding from Little Tokyo Service Center in LA.  I'd hoped to check in late July, and it appeared that they were still up and running.

I don't view the people as weak, helpless, passive victims.  These are motherfuckin' survivors who co-own the word "survivors" with anyone who's outlasted a genocide.

 While I was still involved, I thought a lot about how these seniors could be used as assets in the community rather than seen as more people to pay for and account for.  It hit me that they are the expert teachers or gardeners or chefs, just without the title, capital, and prestige bestowed upon them.  Seems like its on us to learn from them.