FIREWIRE Magazine Winter 2019: Celebrating 5 Years | Page 14

MEMBERS
MEMBERS: SITHA TAN CONT.
Only it wasn’t the entire family. At the time of the purge, Taylor’s
There have to be a dozen dramas you could call
four eldest children had been living elsewhere; they ended up in
upon to start the story of Sitha Tan—myriad low
other camps, unable to communicate with the remainder of the
points from which to build towards salvation;
family. Their reunification would remain in doubt for years.
countless horrors, all seemingly ripped from
During this time, with the adults in the fields, Sitha and the
a Hollywood script; a thousand injustices,
younger kids tended to any little bit of work they could around the
endured at the fringes of human existence. For
huts that were built to house them. But it was an extermination
starters, there’s the period where he lost three
campaign. Modern medicine was shunned, replaced by
siblings to starvation. Yes, starvation. Yes, three.
supposedly traditional aids, and food was scarce. The only thing
in great supply was work. And suffering. And one more thing, come
There’s the moment where he and his family
to think of it. I mean, didn’t they need to keep people healthy
hid while clinging to a hillside as gunned-down
In front of ME311 in Victorville
enough to tend the crops?
bodies tumbled past them. Or when he found
himself a target in a new land, one of the only Cambodians in a Latino “No, they knew they had plenty of people to use up,” Sitha says. “They didn’t care if people died,
neighborhood in downtown Long Beach. Or maybe the point where as they could just use the next people in line. Our food was this thin soup, with one ball of rice
a little boy he finally sat down, exhausted and hungry, and decided to thrown in—for a whole family. Sometimes they would throw in a part of a chicken.”
stop walking, which is when…
Hang on. Don’t need to go there quite yet. Let’s start in another spot, one that has a direct
link to the man we know today, and see where that takes us.
If you’ve spent any time around Sitha, you’ll find he has a curiously strong affection for
flashlights. On duty, in a small pack on the cowling of the rig he pilots for Victorville’s
Station 311, he carries one, if not more, personal lights. Now of course this is not
odd in and of itself; many firefighters carry little extra tools, trinkets
or talismans to help them perform their duties, to remind them of
home, to provide peace of mind.
But in Tan’s case, there is a unique origin to this particular fetish.
After surviving the Khmer Rouge’s extermination campaign, in
1979 the Tans had landed in a massive refugee camp across the
border in Thailand. It was their second time in such a camp—the
first time had ultimately sent them on the most harrowing part of
their journey, but we’ll get to that—and it was perhaps an upgrade
from Pol Pot’s forced labor farm where they had existed much of
the prior three years, but it was no luxury accommodation. And
still they were not free from danger.
And so, starvation. If you think you can imagine it by going back to a particularly long fast you’ve
attempted, don’t. This was the time, around 1976-79, when the Tans lost three children—a girl
and two boys—to hunger. The girl, in fact, had been sick and so was taken to the infirmary. With
a calmness only 40 years of water under the bridge could offer, this is how Sitha, through the
memories of his mom and dad, recalls learning of her fate.
“We knew she was sick, but we didn’t really know what happened to her
” says Sitha, “but one day we saw another little girl walking around
s in for the sure,
e
camp, wearing my sister’s shirt. That’s how we knew she was gone.”
m
i
t
,
ree
“...Th ,” he says Now, this is not meant to be a mere recitation of terrorist acts. The story is
to illuminate someone we know and work with. And really, there’s
d meant somewhere
elds
in here, so to see some of that, let’s go back a second
the fi times I ha light
to Sitha’s father.
e
“Thre for my life Taylor Tan? Isn’t that name a bit Anglicized? Indeed it is, and no, it is not
to beg guards...” the man’s original given name. In fact, he was born Tan Pot (remember
in many east Asian cultures, the family name is listed first). But after
he -Taylor Tan what that he was
put through, when given the chance at a new life in the U.S., he
from t
had decided not to keep the same given name as the leader of the KR, the overlord of
“When we were in the refugee camp, they kept telling us not to build any big warming fires
or shine any lights around or up in the air,” Sitha says. “I didn’t understand what might
happen, or who exactly would attack, but the few parents who had lights were forbidden to
let their kids use them. We had to find everything in the dark.”
those who killed his children. So he chose Taylor, because to him it referred to his handiwork,
his skill at fixing things—anything—a skill that kept him alive.
“Three times in the fields,” he says, “Three times I had to beg for my life from the guards.” He
believes that only because he could offer them something, his talent, was he was spared.
Whether the threat was from remaining Khmer Rouge militants, rogue Vietnamese or Thai
military, or other unseen agents, was unknown. But to Sitha, by then eight or nine years of
age, the fear of holy hell raining down upon him for the mere act of holding a light aloft
was something that stayed with him. It felt like a basic right denied, and think about it:
what child doesn’t fear the dark? Once freed, once in a new country and able to scratch away at a new life, he parlayed that skill
into a woodworking and odd-jobs business that ultimately, by this story’s end, sustained his
family from Cambodia, to Long Beach, to Victorville, to retirement now in Texas.
So decades later, with no one telling him otherwise, he was damn sure going to own
flashlights. Once cautious allies, Cambodia and the (now-united) Vietnam had skirmished on the borders
for years. Finally, on Dec. 25, 1978, Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion that ultimately
drove the Khmer Rouge from power—though not from existence. In fact, the KR would remain
a political and military entity in Cambodia until official abolishment finally occurred in the
early 1990s.
When the KR took over, it wasn’t like Taylor Tan, Sitha’s father, wasn’t aware of the coming
swarm. A customs officer in the Cambodian-Thai border town of Krong Poi Pet, he knew
that there had been change in the air for several years. And it was here that Sitha,
ultimately third-to-last in a family of 10 siblings, was born, meaning it was here that Taylor
and his wife Seng would have to face a terrifying future with
a growing family.
“We knew something was going to happen, I kind of knew
about it for several years,” Taylor, still stout, if grayed at age
83, now says. “But what can you do about it? How could
you stop it?”
In the end, with a target on his back as a government
employee, he couldn’t. In 1975, after the takeover, the
Tans ended up in the farm labor camps along with millions
of others, shepherded into the center of the country, away
from eyes, away from any access to help—or escape. And so
it began, three years in the Killing Fields, an entire family
uprooted and sent to survive or die.
14
FIREWIRE • Five Year Anniversary
The man named Pot who became Taylor who was a carpenter.
Thus the killing fields were abandoned, and a massive refugee crisis was revealed. Though
the Vietnamese essentially “saved” his country, in Sitha’s opinion,
this march from certain enslavement to treacherous uncertainty
proved to be the most harrowing part of the family’s journey... so
we’ll go quickly and slow down only where needed.
As stated before, the Tans had two stints in Thai refugee camps.
The first time, in late 1978, lasted around 20 days, as the situation
was too tenuous for the Red Cross and other aid agencies to
remain in place. The overwhelmed Thai government sent the Tans
with countless others to a mountainous jungle region in northern
Cambodia, literally dropping them off and directing them, at
gunpoint, toward the woods, saying their destination awaited them
“over there,” in “that” direction.
Sitha has arranged to have numerous community
water wells financed and built. Here, son Erik and
daughter Emily stand near a well built by their family.
At some point, gunfire erupted. Those who clung to the transport
were being shot; those who fled were on their own, and here is
where the Tans found themselves hanging to tree roots in the
hillside, shielding themselves best they could from a rain of
bullets and a hail of bodies. Later, they traversed a minefield
that, according to the family, had been “tested” by others first.
The Tans were saved from annihilation by that fact, stepping
over bodies along the way.
And so he pays it forward, assisting with County Fire’s recent
recruitment process, and also working on his own, approaching
young Asian kids whom he sees boxed-in by tradition and a
presumptive career path.
“I’ll talk to them and they’ll still say, ‘you guys would never hire me,’
So now we come to the darkest moment in Sitha’s memory,
Sitha says. “But I’m trying to show them there’s more opportunities
and yes, it could be seen as coming not long before the dawn.
than just working the business their parents own—yeah, like the
Here, on this long march—perhaps more than 100 miles over
donut shops. I’m trying to get the word out that hey, I made it doing
weeks—is where the little boy had finally had enough, and
this. Maybe you can too.”
decided to stop walking. Now, for those who have witnessed
their young boy stopping and sitting and crying in the
In Cambodia this summer, traveling with wife Sokha, son Erik (age
At home with his family. From left to right: Sitha, wife
warehouse store because he’s tired, and because you didn’t
14)
and daughter Emily (10) as well as his younger sister Sarah
buy him the toy he wanted, you might be able to physically Sokha, mom Seng, daughter Emily, dad Taylor, son Erik and her husband and their kids, and seeing the increasing bustle
imagine what it looked like with Sitha in the road. And you
and commerce of the capital, Sitha says there’s something glaringly
might have employed the same technique his mom, Seng, used to keep him moving: you
obvious about the revolution’s 40th anniversary commemoration: its utter non-existence.
walked away, giving him a choice. And that is what she did.
Only this wasn’t an air-conditioned department store, and Seng wasn’t coming back if
the child chose to prolong the battle of wills. She too, dealing with a toddler and her
husband and other children, and having lost three already,
was exhausted—and not the kind which most of us can
fathom, let alone retell.
“This country is trying to just to get to a new place,” Sitha says. “A lot of people don’t talk
about it, they just want to move on with their lives.”
Of course, there is a seemingly never-ending tribunal working
to bring KR leaders to justice, a court which was established in
1997 and has in fact sent some of those men to prison. But
of course the wheels of justice turn in starts and stops, and
sometimes move in reverse.
“It was not possible,” Seng says. “I simply
couldn’t carry him.”
More poignant to Sitha now is seeing the current refugee crisis
in Syria; he does, in fact, feel as if he shares at least something
of their experience, and hopes others, when hearing about
things far away, might remember how closely they can hit home.
And thus the fire engineer we know; the one who made
it here after all; the one at whom we smile with affection
when he sometimes adds an “s” to a word where one
needn’t be and removes one where there ought; the one
who runs the fairgrounds parking lot at work to stay in
shape; he must possess a stamina, and an ability to make
the right choice, beyond what might be reasonable to
expect.
Long after the family made it to a more stable refugee
camp in Thailand and reunited with most of the other
siblings, long after a relative accepted their petition for
the sponsorship which allowed them to come to America,
long after braving central Long Beach and migrating to the
high desert, Sitha found himself facing another choice.
It’s time to draw this to a close, but there’s so much more to
tell, such as Sitha not meeting Sokha until a 1996 trip back to
Cambodia, which the family undertook to reunite with the one
older son the family still had not confirmed made it through
the purge. Indeed, he was alive and well, and the sublime
astonishment of the reunion reverberates in the smiles of Taylor,
and Seng, and Sokha and Sitha as they recall the story.
Part of the Killing Fields. The sign says it all
“I had been working for my dad for some time,” Sitha says.
“And I was planning on heading to the military. But he—and my mom especially—wanted
me to go to try school first, so I started at Victor Valley College in 1990. In one session with
a counselor there I felt like I had all of five minutes to pick a course, and one of the things
available was fire technology. I just decided to do it.”
And on and on. This just breaks the surface, but maybe that’s
good. In the end, we should leave some stories unwritten, left
to share face-to-face, to grow in the retelling. We all have them,
after all, and they all matter.
From that decision has grown a solid career, one in which he has proven himself to be one
of the most trusted firefighters in the department. Along the way he has knowingly, and
somewhat proudly, blazed a trail for others who happen to look a little like him. And he’s
dealt with, while not exactly harsh treatment, the assumption that, sometimes, he’s in the
wrong place. Literally.
“I was trying to find a class one day, and the fire tech course was right next door to a
computer science class, Sitha says. “The instructor saw me and pointed directly to the
computers. I was the only Asian that I saw at that time in fire tech, so I can imagine what
he was thinking!” Sitha recalls stuff like this with his nearly-constant laugh, but it’s one
that perhaps, just maybe, masks a little weariness in the telling.
So we get stories like the time when, as a PCF, he was paged from home to respond to a
traffic collision on the freeway involving a large number of Asian victims. He arrived ready
to render first aid, perform extrication, but was instead appointed interpreter—only to find
the contingent was Thai, not Cambodian. And he had to explain those were, you know,
kinda two different languages.
There were those who helped him get over the hurdles. He recalls ex-Barstow fire chief Dave
Mathews, a VVC instructor, encouraging him, providing mentorship and guidance. And there
were the many colleagues, company officers and chiefs who welcomed him at Adelanto and
Victorville Fire Departments, where he served in the paid-call or contract firefighter ranks
before eventually being picked up full-time by the VFD in 1998.
Sitha’s laugh and smile spread throughout an entire crew
Ryan Beckers is FIREWIRE’s lead assistant editor. Currently an engineer assigned to Station 75 in
Muscoy, he first met and heard of Sitha Tan’s family story while stationed with Tan in Victorville from
2009-11, and has wanted to find a way to share the tale ever since. He lives in Lake Arrowhead.
Winter 2019 • FIREWIRE
15