Throughout the 1980’s, over 150,000 Cambodian refugees, survivors of Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, resettled in the United States from refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border. They were among the most heavily traumatized people in modern memory, having survived civil war, Nixon’s carpet bombing of Cambodia, genocide, and living and languishing in refugee camps. Like all immigrant groups in America, the Cambodian American community has struggled to maintain it’s cultural identity. However, this is viscerally compounded by the unique circumstances of the Killing Fields; the Khmer Rouge nearly eliminated the entirety of Cambodian culture and history via the systematic execution of intellectuals, professionals, artists and monks. Further exacerbating this is the social ills of the inner-city, where most Cambodians were resettled. While survivors of the Killing Fields (some of whom lost the entirety of their immediate family) struggled with PTSD, poverty, and the difficulty of rebuilding their lives in an adopted homeland after having lost the entirety of their worldly belongings, their children struggled with their own unique form of trauma endogenous to inner-city America. As a result, there exists a profound inter-generational barrier among Cambodian Americans, which serves to further the generational divide and silences dialogue about the legacy of the Killing Fields.
Pete Pin was born in the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp on the border of Cambodia and Thailand and resettled in California in the mid 1980’s. Raised in Stockton and Long Beach, CA, he dropped out of high school in the first semester of his junior year after having grown dissatisfied with inner-city public high schools. He received his BA at the University of California at Berkeley where he graduated magna cum laude in Political Science and was awarded the Outstanding Honors Thesis award for the best honors thesis in his department, and the Documentary and Photojournalism Program at the International Center of Photography. Pete purchased his first camera months before embarking on an eight-year PhD program at Berkeley in Political Science and abandoned his doctorate studies to pursue documentary photography. He interned at TIME Magazine in the photo department, was the 2011 Fellow at the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund and was named an Emerging Talent by Getty Reportage. He is currently an Artist in Residence at the Bronx Museum as part of the historic Season of Cambodia Festival in New York.
