Recording
Oral history interview with Bonavy Som
The oral history interview with Bonavy Som records the life of a Long Beach mental health clinician who was a child under the Khmer Rouge.[1] It belongs to Cambodian Americans – Oral History of 1.5 Generation, archived at CamCHAP and housed at the Historical Society of Long Beach.[1]
About the recording
Bonavy Som was born in Phnom Penh in 1966. She was nine years old when the Khmer Rouge took control of the country, and her family was separated into labor camps in Battambang. After the Vietnamese entered Cambodia in 1979, she crossed the Thai border into Khao-I-Dang camp with her sister and mother.[1] A Catholic organization sponsored them to Valley City, North Dakota, and within the year they moved to Long Beach to join extended family. She became a US citizen in 1988.[1]
In 2018 she earned a master's degree in counseling psychology, with a focus on marriage and family therapy, from National University. The degree allowed her to work closely with community members on mental health. She is a mental health clinician with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.[1] She credits Cambodian resilience to the community itself: "we're very community based, and we took care of each other, regardless of who it is."[1]
The collection
The project records Cambodian Americans who were children when the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia. It defines the Cambodian 1.5 generation as people born in Cambodia from 1963 to 1969 who came to the United States between 1980 and 1986.[2] The narrators speak of life before and after the Khmer Rouge years, of displacement, of migration to the United States and of building lives in America. The project also asks how they survived and how trauma has shaped their well-being.[2] The testimony is offered as a way to remember Cambodian history and as hope for later generations.[2]
A California model curriculum lesson for grades nine and ten, on using oral histories to understand the Cambodian Genocide, assigns Som's interview as its second oral history, from minute 12:30 to 40:00. The lesson uses these firsthand accounts to build empathy and critical thinking.[3]
Credits
Bonavy Som is the narrator; no interviewer is named for this recording. Pacific Asian Counseling Services recorded the interviews from a mental health perspective, from a concept first developed by Cambodia Town, with funding from the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health under the Mental Health Services Act.[1]
Access
- Recording: Historical Society of Long Beach video channel
- The Historical Society of Long Beach published the video, titled "Bonavy Som - Oral history," on June 16, 2023. No item number or recording date is published.[1][3]