Recording
Oral history interview with Sara Pol-Lim
The oral history interview with Sara Pol-Lim records the life of a Long Beach community leader who survived the Khmer Rouge years.[1] It belongs to Cambodian Americans – Oral History of 1.5 Generation, held at the Historical Society of Long Beach.[1]
About the recording
Pol-Lim was a child in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge entered the city on April 17, 1975, and her family was driven from its home into labor camps in the countryside. After the Vietnamese army arrived in 1979, she reached the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp, and in 1983 she came to the United States and settled in Gardena, California.[1] She studied at El Camino College, California State University, Long Beach, National University and Chapman University. She joined the United Cambodian Community in Long Beach in 1998, became its first woman executive director in 2007, and earned a doctorate in educational leadership in 2018.[1]
Her community work has been recognized with a Trail Blazer award for outstanding leadership in 2014 and a Woman of Distinction award in 2015. She was grand marshal of the Cambodian New Year Parade in 2011 and received an Outstanding Cambodian Leader award in 2012.[2]
The collection
The project records Cambodian Americans of the 1.5 generation: people born in Cambodia between 1963 and 1969 who were children under the Khmer Rouge and came to the United States between 1980 and 1986.[3] The narrators speak of childhood before and after the regime, of what they lost, of migration and of building lives in America. The project also asks how they survived, how they coped as emigrants and how trauma has shaped their well-being.[3] The accounts are hard to hear, and they are offered as hope for the generations that follow.[3]
Credits
Sara Pol-Lim 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
- No item number or recording date is published.[1]