Season 5, Ep. 3: Refugee

Saturday School Podcast

This week's episode, as part of our season on Asian Americans in Asia, we revisit the 2003 documentary "Refugee," by Spencer Nakasako, which follows three Cambodian American young men as they go back to Cambodia for the first time to confront their family histories. Like most of Nakasako's films of the time, the documentary makes use of the subjects' personal video diaries and Nakasako empowers Mike Siv and his friends Paul Maes and David Mark to pick up the camera themselves and film their own stories.

Mike Siv, who's 24 at the time, has been told his whole life that he and his mother escaped the Khmer Rouge when he was a little kid, leaving his father and brother behind. He only recently found out that his brother doesn't actually know his father, so his assumption that if he had stayed in Cambodia, that he'd have a father, is shattered. So we see what happens when see a Cambodian American, from the streets of San Francisco's Tenderloin, brings his very Americanized perspective of what a father should be -- what a son deserves to have from his father -- to war-torn Cambodia.

And we see that this is just the beginning of a journey: 12 years later, Mike Siv would make his own feature length documentary, 2016's "Daze of Justice," where he follows a group of Cambodian American women back to Cambodia so they can testify at the Khmer Rouge trials.