Sunday, November 23, 2008 Times News-MagicValley.com (Twin Falls, Idaho, USA)
It was Sokry who first came to Twin Falls from Cambodia in 2000 to be with her new husband from an arranged marriage. Her two younger sisters followed: Davy in 2004 and Dany in 2006.
Earlier this year, her parents left Cambodia for good to be with their daughters.
It took eight years, but the Heng family is finally together again.
On this Wednesday evening, they gather around a hot pot dinner. The family dips rich pieces of raw beef into a boiling broth filled with vegetables and noodles. When the beef is cooked to their liking, they skillfully extract it with chopsticks.
It's a slow-paced, luxurious dinner - one that the family would have been hard to come by in Cambodia.
"Over there, they don't have a lot of variety,"Sokry says. Food is plentiful, but beef is eaten only in stew. Most people depend on fish and pork for their main meat intake.
Thirty years ago, the situation in Cambodia was much worse.
Dictator Pol Pot took over the country in 1975. Tens of thousands of victims of the regime were systematically tortured and executed. Peasants starved by the millions. Sokry's parents, Heng Ly and Houng Sok, survived on scant bowls of rice porridge and boiled banana leaves.
Houng gave birth to Sokry right after Pol Pot's regime ended in 1979, and the family's life stabilized. Houng and Heng opened a kitchenware store in Tbaung Khmum, an industrial city of 10,000. They sold chopsticks, spoons, bowls and cups during the day and lived on the second floor of the store at night.
"We lived well,"Sokry said.
In Twin Falls, the family is maintaining the good life. Sokry's husband, Yip Tse, works at Pak N Ship. The couple also owns Asian Food Market in TwinFalls, where Sokry and Dany work. Sokry and Yip share a duplex with their parents and Dany, while Davy lives with her husband (and Yip's older brother),Ken.
The sisters followed tradition in taking their father's first name as their family name, and the two young wives kept it after marrying.
Tonight, the whole family comes to the duplex to share the meal. They pile the food on two folding tables in the living room. A Buddhist shrine sits on the floor next to the entertainment center.
Yip is the last to arrive, to his wife's playful admonishment.
"Some of us have to work for a living!"Yip teases.
Their son, also named Yip but called "little Ken," runs around, pretending to shoot his family with a plastic Nerf gun. Unlike his grandparents, it's the closest the 5-year-old has come to violence.
Twenty years ago in Cambodia, armed bandits came to their city, robbing, beating and killing the family's neighbors. They came as close as the house next door but spared the Hengs' home. Sokry was 10 years old.
"They were probably too young to remember," she said of her sisters.
Now, the country is safer and provides a higher standard of living. Electricity is available 24 hours a day instead of being shut off at 11 p.m. nightly.
"It's great now,"Sokry said.
But memories of political unrest and civil violence are still fresh. When asked what she likes about Twin Falls, the first thing Dany says is: "It's safe."
Brothers Yip and Ken Tse were born in Cambodia, but moved to Idaho when they were children. Yip's cousin in Cambodia knew Sokry and suggested the two marry. They agreed, and the husband and wife didn't meet until Yip came to Cambodia for their wedding.
"It's just Cambodian tradition,"Sokry said. "It worked out well."
At the wedding, Davy met Ken. Four years later they wed, and Ken whisked her away to TwinFalls, too.
Over dinner, Dany, the youngest at 24, talks about Cambodia between bites of beef and rice.
"Imiss my grandma and all my cousins," she says. "Even though sometimes here looks better than Cambodia, it's my motherland."
Twin Falls is too cold, she adds. Before coming here, she had never seen snow. It rarely dips below 70 degrees in her home country.
"I love the weather in Cambodia a lot," she says, smiling wistfully.
Unlike her older sisters, Dany didn't have a husband waiting for her in Twin Falls. She came to be with Sokry and Davy in 2006, but immediately regretted the move.
Every day, she cried. She missed her parents and grandparents. She didn't speak English and couldn't understand the customers at work.
"She cried for months,"Sokry said.
Slowly, she started feeling more at home. She took English classes at College of Southern Idaho and practiced with customers and co-workers. Soon, she wouldn't shut up, Yip teased.
With Dany gone, Heng and Houng had little reason to stay in Cambodia. Sokry, family friend Bert Cobb and Yip's mother, Lan Tse, helped the couple apply to move to Twin Falls, a process that took two years. When they arrived in March, the two didn't speak a word of English and felt bad about leaving their siblings and elderly parents in Cambodia. But in the end, what mattered most was being with their daughters.
Although Cambodia is a world away, the Heng family is comfortable here.
They can buy most of their favorite foods, like noodles and lychee fruit drinks, through Asian Food Market. Houng accompanies her daughters at work, where she silently helps around the store. At home, the two young married couples flirt in both Cambodian and English. Dany posts handwritten signs around the house in an attempt to teach her parents English vocabulary. They watch the news in English and listen to Cambodian music.
And at the end of the day, they're rewarded with family dinners together in their comfortable, crowded living room.
Melissa Davlin may be reached at 208-735-3234 or melissa.davlin@lee.net.
