“I left Cambodia at the age of eighteen, and I’ve spent twenty years here,” Mao tells me in his quick, lightly accented English. “I’ve never been back to Cambodia—the trip really costs a lot—but I very much want to go. I left the country in flames, and I want to see what it’s like now, after the flames have died down.” Most of Mao’s students are Cambodian-American kids, and one of the subjects he teaches is genocide.
“It’s like a Holocaust course—we use graphic materials, we trace our families’ roots,” he says. “At night the students have nightmares and I have nightmares.”
The
khmer growers got started about eight years ago, when Pete Westover, Amherst’s
conservation director, was struck by the tidy luxuriance of the Cambodians’
vegetable plots at a local housing complex and arranged for them to lease some
town land on highly favorable terms. Mao’s mother and aunts, all in their
sixties, launched the farm with Mao and Ronnie Booxbaum, then a Ph.D. student
of cultural anthropology and now the Growers’ coordinator. Two of the aunts,
Prak Kom and Prak Ky, have remained deeply involved in the endeavor. They’ve
put in a lot of work while deriving great satisfaction from their activity. “I
built this shed and then they tore it down and rebuilt it their own way,” Mao
tells me, gesturing at the structure with a smile. “Now they sort
of ... hide out here.” Gradually the operation, which is nonprofit, acquired an
educational aspect as local students began to come by to help out in the field.
The day of my visit, Prak Kom is sitting in the shed among the women, tying a mountain of khatna, or Asian broccoli, into bundles; the broccoli has a kind of hypnotic, hyperrealist perfection (in a reversal of Western practice, the leaves are eaten and the florets discarded). Prak Kom speaks only Khmer, but Mao translates for us. She has great dignity: Her gaze is direct, her speech unhesitating, precise. She tells me that she was originally from the village of Kbal Dom Raey, which was destroyed, and that her husband, a soldier, and her son, a monk, were both murdered. She doesn’t mind talking about it now, she says. Her village had one temple, which was leveled, but, partly with the proceeds of the sale of Asian vegetables, the Amherst Cambodian-American community sent funds to help rebuild it and five other temples. It will have slender columns and a steeply pitched roof with dragon-scale tiles.
As a market-gardening outfit, the Khmer Growers have been helped out by August “Gus” Schumacher Jr., a former U.S. undersecretary of agriculture who has devoted a lot of effort to linking farmers with chefs. He hitched up the Growers with Jeff Tunks—chef and co-owner of Ten Penh, an ambitious Asian restaurant in Washington, D.C.—who was struck with the freshness and careful handling of the greens he received. Michel Nischan, chef of the Heartbeat restaurant at the W New York, in Manhattan, feels the same way, and he regularly orders their produce during the summer. The Growers’ vegetables are sold at three Massachusetts farmers markets and are also carried by the Bread & Circus supermarkets in nearby Hadley and in Boston.
Mao says, “My dream is to see all the elders in one place, to see them working in the same field.” This, he feels, would make their transplantation complete—or as complete as can be hoped for. Residues of memory, second thoughts, dashed hopes, lingering confusions—these are a part of any immigrant community’s experience; but the vegetables themselves, their taste and texture, are the same. “It is,” he says, “like home again.”
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