In Amherst, Massachusetts, not far from Amherst College and the house where Emily Dickinson wrote her unanswered letter to the world, is a flat, five-acre field that even at a distance looks somehow tropical. On a late summer’s day, it is covered with rectangles of brilliant green plantings, which, on closer inspection, turn out to be utterly unfamiliar, almost Oz-like in appearance. Skinny, yard-long melons dangle from trellises, spidery herbs creep along the ground, and enormous eggplants squat beneath a screen of exuberant foliage. Off to one side, in a tarp-covered shed, turbaned women sit on their haunches to sort through piles of what might be timothy grass, but strangely, surreally magnified. Over a brazier, fragrant rice is boiling in a black iron pot. From time to time the women chat and laugh; out in the field, a smallish, compact figure holding a big bunch of leaves is bounding energetically among the glossy green plots, occasionally stooping to scrutinize something or to pick a swirling frond to add to his growing bouquet. The bounding figure is Mao Sokhen, and he’s collecting vegetables for lunch.
Mao is a stocky, muscular man of 38 with a face so round it was obviously designed to accommodate a crescent-shaped smile. Mao is usually smiling, and when he isn’t, he’s running—he has retained the child’s habit of loping from place to place so as not to waste time. He has about five jobs, paid and unpaid, and could stand as living reproof to anyone in his home state with a tendency to brood. Guys who go for long, heartbroken walks by the river when, say, the Red Sox blow another season should get to know Mao. They should hang out with him—if they can keep up.
A few good reasons for the melancholy that has not infected Mao: losing his father, his brother, and many other relatives to savage slaughter in his native Cambodia; watching as the severed heads of local villagers were collected by Khmer Rouge troops; being forced as a boy to leave his homeland; escaping to Thailand through territory held by half a dozen competing armed factions, each more vicious than the last; and, finally, being interned in two miserable refugee camps, in two different countries, before making his way to the United States. His story is typical of the forty-odd Cambodian-American families living in and around Amherst, all of them the tattered remnants of much larger families, many of whose members were executed by the Khmer Rouge or disappeared.
Mao is a middle- and high-school teacher, a community organizer, and the general mainstay of Amherst’s Cambodian community. In one of his unpaid jobs, he has been helping to champion the Khmer Growers of Western Massachusetts, a group of mostly female and mostly elderly survivors of the Pol Pot regime’s genocide of the 1970s who have started cultivating Asian crops on this plot of land leased from the Amherst Conservation Commission. The organization’s purpose is to provide organically grown vegetables to the expanding Asian communities of Massachusetts and to anyone else who gets hooked on their remarkably delicate and complex taste. More importantly, with the proceeds of this little enterprise, they are helping to fund the reconstruction of schools and Theravada Buddhist temples in the villages they left behind.
California has the largest concentration of Cambodian immigrants to the United States, but smaller communities have also sprung up in Seattle and in the Massachusetts cities of Lynn and Lowell, and in the town of Amherst. Some who were farmers still badly want to farm—they’ll even buy toddlers’ plastic swimming pools and turn them into tiny makeshift rice paddies—and the more resourceful among them succeeded in procuring seed from their countrymen in California or from Cambodia itself, and now save seed from their own produce. Though the New England climate can be brutal to Asian crops, the Khmer Growers have managed to make the warm local summers do at least some of the work of the three Cambodian growing seasons.
Cambodian cookery is intimately connected to rice cultivation. It’s not just that rice, in 3 strains (out of the roughly 30 readily available to culinary enthusiasts), is the staple of the Cambodian diet, but also that many vegetables and herbs thrive along the irrigation banks of the rice fields, a profusion that Cambodian-Americans sometimes sorely miss. “In Cambodia, even fish come with the rice fields,” Mao says, laughing, as we thread our way between rows of spiky purple basil. “You don’t need to go fishing at all. When you harrow the rice fields with a blade that digs in about eight or ten inches, the fish get scared and jump out at you. You just sort of pound them on the head with a long stick. Crabs and edible frogs also live among the rice plants, and those you can catch by hand.” It’s an aqueous world, he tells me, where the vegetables, too, need lots of rain, and water has to be piped into the field at Amherst to achieve the necessary dampness. But otherwise there’s nothing here in the way of industrial technology. The Khmer Growers use only organic pesticides, and they pick off Colorado beetles laboriously, by hand.
If you are unfamiliar with Southeast Asian crops, what will perhaps surprise you most is that many of these vegetables belong to genera well known to us yet masquerade here as something else—eggplants as gourds, for instance, or melons as cucumbers. Some types are used in unexpected ways, the pea for its leaves and shoots or as a garnish, the butternut squash mostly for its stems and flowers. And then there is the great variety of strains under cultivation. At Amherst, I notice six kinds of basil: purple Vietnamese; “pig’s ear” (so called for its furry leaves); sweet Thai; sweet-and-sour “fish cheek”; “farm crab,” arachnoid in form; and the peppery sangahum. There is arum, whose roots are consumed as a sweet, with palm sugar, and whose leaves are used for wrapping food and whose stems are stir-fried; watergrass, a natural companion to fish paste; Indian spinach; Chinese long beans; many kinds of eggplants—striped, rotund, lobed, thorny, and even miniature, like the Cambodian “cherry” eggplant, which could pass for an eccentric chokecherry; almost innumerable types of chile peppers, in innumerable lovely hues, that can warm the body against malarial chills; stretched-out, nubbly-surfaced bitter melons; klok, or yard-long gourds; kdad, a cousin of arum; and sbay-rieng, an herb, delicious in salads.
“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.”