Guest Post by Arthur Dong
Above is a clip of Dr. Haing S. Ngor recorded at the U.S. House of Representatives almost thirty years ago. It's intense, passionate, and angry. Take a look.
This one-minute clip, singled out from volumes and volumes of material we went through for my new documentary,
The Killing Fields of Dr. Haing S. Ngor, continues to captivate me even after years of production work. It's partly because Dr. Ngor foreshadowed his own murder, which would happen eight years later from the time this video was recorded, but mostly it's because I was startled to see such pronounced rage from an Asian refugee in white America.
When Dr. Ngor was forced into slave labor in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge, little did he know he would escape four years of torture and be called upon to recreate his harrowing experiences in the feature film
The Killing Fields. That first acting job earned him an Academy Award® for best supporting actor, and overnight he became the face of Cambodia to the world. He forsook the stereotypical quiet demeanor so often associated with Cambodian culture and took on the role of a human rights advocate with fervor, sometimes antagonizing those in his community who wished to remain silent or cower in fear of reprisals from Pol Pot's henchmen still at large. After all, entrenched Buddhist teachings led many Cambodians to believe that evildoers would eventually meet their fate anyway in the next life, so why cause any more animosity on earth.
