At the moment my mom steps onto a small fishing boat off the coast of Cambodia, headed for a refugee camp in Thailand under cover of night, she becomes the head of our family. It takes her less than a year to make it safely to her new home in New York, give birth to me, and learn how to be a single parent in the U. Created, written, and produced by Lisa Phu.
Fact checking by Harsha Nahata and Tiffany Bui. Original score by Avery Stewart. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions. Cover art and show name created by Christine Carpenter.
Audience engagement by Rekha Radhakrishnan. Huge thanks and gratitude to Lan Phu. And following how covid has intensified the debate over who gets to decide the future of Los Angeles Chinatown. And find out more at abetterlifepodcast. This episode includes a couple brief mentions of rape and murder. Lan: We didn't know where we were going. We just knew we were leaving Cambodia and we didn't know whether we were going to make it or not. My mom, my dad Ky Song, and my sisters were reunited with my cousins, including Lynn.
And now they were planning to all escape together. But people in Cambodia still faced hardship, conflict, and uncertainty. In Cambodia or in Vietnam. So Ky Song worked with another man, for about six months, to organize a boat escape. There were a lot of details to figure out. He had to find a captain, a boat engineer, and other passengers to join them. The whole thing cost them a lot of money, because there were endless people who had to be paid off to make it happen. Days before the escape, my family returned to Cambodia.
They were more familiar with Cambodia, so escaping from there made more sense than escaping from Vietnam. So we did not escape right away, we have to stay, make believe that we stay with relatives for a few days. Make believe that we are really, really visiting.
