By Jason George
April 6, 2008
By Jason George When Dith Pran, photojournalist for The New York Times, died last weekend, newspapers around the world recounted his harrowing tale of four years in the forced labor camps of his native Cambodia.
They wrote of his trials—Pran lost much of his family to the Khmer Rouge regime—and his triumph: He escaped in 1979, made his way to the United States and rejoined The Times, where he had worked before his capture.Yet none of the obituaries mentioned a fact well-known among Pran's friends and family: Dith Pran loved to forward the cheesiest of e-mails.
Such messages are the online trading cards of grandparents and Net neophytes, full of colorful fonts, excessive exclamation marks and pictures of cuddly kittens. They were also Pran's pastime, and until he became too ill this winter with pancreatic cancer, not a week went by that he did not send one along to those in his address book.
For the longest time I did not understand how a man who had experienced so much death could revel so often at the sight of dancing puppies.
Dith Pran—Dith is his surname—and I first met in 2003, when I began a regular freelance assignment with The Times. I wrote mostly from New Jersey, where Pran also was based, and he photographed many of the stories I worked on during my two years there.
To say that I was intimidated on our first assignment together would be a gross understatement. I had repeatedly watched "The Killing Fields," the cinematic retelling of Pran's brave decision to remain and report in Cambodia as chaos overtook his beloved country.
Here was an icon, not just of journalism, but also of history—a man who had turned holocaust into humanitarianism, retelling his story to U.S. civic groups and schoolchildren in hopes that the horrors of the past would not be forgotten or repeated.
And yet here he was, riding shotgun in my battered Volvo sedan.
The Dith Pran of "The Killing Fields" was one of Buddha-like grace—an accurate portrait of the real man. But the everyday Pran also was a man of whimsical wit. It shone time and time again in those e-mails and elsewhere.
I remember he once forwarded a cartoon of the Geico gecko getting run over by a car. To me, it recalled a shocking scene in "The Killing Fields" when the actor portraying Pran ate a lizard raw, just as Pran actually did, to stave off starvation. To Pran, the e-mail was just funny.
A frequent electronic exchange with him often began: "How are you? Send joke."S
uch lust for the small smiles in life carried over into his work. Pran's favorite assignment was to photograph "day shots"—pictures without stories attached—at beaches along the Jersey Shore. He would spend hours enjoying the sun, the surf and, yes, a glimpse of the occasional bikini.
The sight of humanity at its happiest—people enjoying both nature and leisure—may not have given Pran much of a break from his memories. But I suspect it confirmed for Pran that the world was better than its darkest chapters, better than the madness of killing 2 million of his countrymen.
For a man who once wrote, "The ghosts of the innocent will be on my mind forever," the Jersey Shore gave Pran hope that future innocents could remain just that.
In all my hours at Pran's side, I never once learned a wartime anecdote he had not told publicly before. On those rare occasions when we did discuss his homeland—I had visited his Cambodian village in 2000—he was clear-eyed about the past.
He preferred to remember his village as it was both before and during the nightmare of the late 1970s. I believe it was his way of acknowledging the yin and yang, the good and evil, that exist all around. Yet Pran also believed that the good could win out, and this kept him sharing his story, time after time, in school assembly halls, cafeterias and branch libraries.
Whenever some local newspaper would report on one of those talks, Pran always made sure to send the Web link of the article to his friends. Although I wondered at first why he would care about small-town attention after achieving worldwide celebrity, I soon realized that he wasn't forwarding them because of pride in himself, but pride that the story had again been told. It was a great life lesson, and also one about the need for humility in journalism.
It was a reminder that the subject trumps the teller—that the message means everything, the messenger nothing.
Jason George is a Tribune reporter.
April 6, 2008
By Jason George When Dith Pran, photojournalist for The New York Times, died last weekend, newspapers around the world recounted his harrowing tale of four years in the forced labor camps of his native Cambodia.
They wrote of his trials—Pran lost much of his family to the Khmer Rouge regime—and his triumph: He escaped in 1979, made his way to the United States and rejoined The Times, where he had worked before his capture.Yet none of the obituaries mentioned a fact well-known among Pran's friends and family: Dith Pran loved to forward the cheesiest of e-mails.
Such messages are the online trading cards of grandparents and Net neophytes, full of colorful fonts, excessive exclamation marks and pictures of cuddly kittens. They were also Pran's pastime, and until he became too ill this winter with pancreatic cancer, not a week went by that he did not send one along to those in his address book.
For the longest time I did not understand how a man who had experienced so much death could revel so often at the sight of dancing puppies.
Dith Pran—Dith is his surname—and I first met in 2003, when I began a regular freelance assignment with The Times. I wrote mostly from New Jersey, where Pran also was based, and he photographed many of the stories I worked on during my two years there.
To say that I was intimidated on our first assignment together would be a gross understatement. I had repeatedly watched "The Killing Fields," the cinematic retelling of Pran's brave decision to remain and report in Cambodia as chaos overtook his beloved country.
Here was an icon, not just of journalism, but also of history—a man who had turned holocaust into humanitarianism, retelling his story to U.S. civic groups and schoolchildren in hopes that the horrors of the past would not be forgotten or repeated.
And yet here he was, riding shotgun in my battered Volvo sedan.
The Dith Pran of "The Killing Fields" was one of Buddha-like grace—an accurate portrait of the real man. But the everyday Pran also was a man of whimsical wit. It shone time and time again in those e-mails and elsewhere.
I remember he once forwarded a cartoon of the Geico gecko getting run over by a car. To me, it recalled a shocking scene in "The Killing Fields" when the actor portraying Pran ate a lizard raw, just as Pran actually did, to stave off starvation. To Pran, the e-mail was just funny.
A frequent electronic exchange with him often began: "How are you? Send joke."S
uch lust for the small smiles in life carried over into his work. Pran's favorite assignment was to photograph "day shots"—pictures without stories attached—at beaches along the Jersey Shore. He would spend hours enjoying the sun, the surf and, yes, a glimpse of the occasional bikini.
The sight of humanity at its happiest—people enjoying both nature and leisure—may not have given Pran much of a break from his memories. But I suspect it confirmed for Pran that the world was better than its darkest chapters, better than the madness of killing 2 million of his countrymen.
For a man who once wrote, "The ghosts of the innocent will be on my mind forever," the Jersey Shore gave Pran hope that future innocents could remain just that.
In all my hours at Pran's side, I never once learned a wartime anecdote he had not told publicly before. On those rare occasions when we did discuss his homeland—I had visited his Cambodian village in 2000—he was clear-eyed about the past.
He preferred to remember his village as it was both before and during the nightmare of the late 1970s. I believe it was his way of acknowledging the yin and yang, the good and evil, that exist all around. Yet Pran also believed that the good could win out, and this kept him sharing his story, time after time, in school assembly halls, cafeterias and branch libraries.
Whenever some local newspaper would report on one of those talks, Pran always made sure to send the Web link of the article to his friends. Although I wondered at first why he would care about small-town attention after achieving worldwide celebrity, I soon realized that he wasn't forwarding them because of pride in himself, but pride that the story had again been told. It was a great life lesson, and also one about the need for humility in journalism.
It was a reminder that the subject trumps the teller—that the message means everything, the messenger nothing.
Jason George is a Tribune reporter.
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