Death in L.A.’s Killing Fields : Haing Ngor, who helped save fellow Cambodians, is slain : He survived long enough to describe the madness for us and to do all that one man could to help his fellow Cambodians.
Has there ever been a more articulate and grieving witness to the death of a people than Haing Ngor? A physician trained to save life, he could not save his own wife’s, nor their unborn child’s, in the horror that became known as “The Killing Fields.†But he survived long enough to describe the madness for us and to do all that one man could to help his fellow Cambodians.
Ngor had a life in America after escaping the bloody Khmer Rouge in 1979. He settled in Los Angeles and was counseling other Cambodian refugees when he was chosen to play the part of a Cambodian photographer in “The Killing Fields,†a film of those terrible times. He won the 1984 Oscar for best supporting actor in a role that needed no coaching. Sunday night, Ngor was shot to death outside his apartment just west of Chinatown. Robbery? Politics? The police still do not know. But whoever took his life took that of a hero to many.
Ngor told his story in an autobiography, “Haing Ngor: A Cambodian Odyssey.†War in Cambodia was a splash-over from Vietnam. In his account, author William Shawcross dubbed it “The Sideshow,†and cruel and tragic it was. Khmer Rouge guerrillas seized the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975, and launched a deadly persecution of anyone deemed not of the working classes. Orders came from a mysterious central power, known only as Angka, and were carried out by teenage legions. As a doctor, Ngor would have been on the list, so he discarded all signs of his former life and moved west with his pregnant wife, seeking escape.
His was an intense report of one of history’s great tragedies. In a snapshot of the fear and fate of the rich, he wrote:
“A shiny new Peugeot with a family inside drove directly into the river and was carried slowly downstream. A man in the driver’s seat, a woman beside him and children looking out the back with their hands pressed against the windows. All the doors and windows stayed closed. Nobody got out. We just stared as the car settled lower and the waters closed over the roof--a rich family committing suicide.â€
Nothing in his later life turned Ngor’s thoughts from Cambodia, not his acting career nor his successful book. He stayed with his people, traveling to the dusty camps and aimless lives of refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border, giving money, distributing supplies.
“It’s important to save the children,†he said. “My generation is already gone. If these children disappear, the entire Cambodian civilization will vanish along with them.â€
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