Davik Teng, 9, walks through the Tom Bradley Terminal at Los Angeles International (LAX) Airport. (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)
Davik Teng, 9, left, her mother, Sin Chhon, and Peter Chhun are somber as they prepare to board their China Airlines flight to Phonm Penh via Taipei at the Tom Bradley Terminal at Los Angeles International (LAX) Airport before the flight home late Wednesday. (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)
Davik Teng, 9, poses with Jennifer Sovannara, 4, as Socheath Sovannara, 8, snaps a picture of them before heading to Los Angeles International (LAX) Airport.
Davik Teng indulges in an American treat --- a See's lollipop --- on her last day at the Long Beach home where she recovered from her heart surgery. (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)
Davik Teng, 9, hugs Tina Prum as her mother, Sin Chhon, phones friends to say goodbye on Wednesday. (Jeff Gritchen / Staff Photographer)DailyBreeze.com
By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer
07/12/2008
LOS ANGELES - The Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport hums with urgency at 9 on a weekday night.
It buzzes with comings and goings. Happy families unite; others depart in sadness.
Amid the whir, it would be easy to miss the small group of Cambodians, even with their entourage of friends and several journalists.
They cart their five boxes and six suitcases to the Transportation Safety Administration X-ray machine. They check and double-check passports and their tickets for China Airlines flight 007.
The airline will take them to Taipei, Republic of China, and then on to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Peter Chhun, the de facto patriarch, is an experienced traveler. This is rote to him. But on this day there is an undercurrent, a gnaw at his gut about what he must do to two members of his group.
rows 56 and 58 on Normally for Chhun, the prospects of a return to his homeland are happy. Today, he sets his jaw and continues with his duty. His responsibility. This is the part of saving lives he hadn't counted on.
He must return a mother and child to poverty. Six months after the girl, Davik Teng, was given a new lease on life with life-altering open heart surgery unavailable to her in Cambodia, she and her mom, Sin Chhon, have used up most of their six-month visa and must return home.
Home: a barren patch of land in a place that time and technology have forgotten. Home: Svay Chrom.
"Briefly (they were) away from hell," Chhun says of the two. "Now (they) have to go back. It's a tough one. It's tough for her. It's tough for everyone."
Chhun could be accused of being overly dramatic, except that he grew up in nearly identical surroundings and circumstances before he got lucky and hooked on with NBC News as a cameraman during the Cambodian civil war and was able to escape.
A one-room hut
You won't find Svay Chrom on a map. The family compound for Davik and Sin consists of about 20 residents, plus several dogs and an assortment of chickens. It sits off an unnamed dirt road outside the city of Battambang.
It has no electricity, no running water, no toilet facilities. When the mother and daughter left five months ago, the ground was cracked and dusty. When they return it will be slick and sticky with mud after the onset of rainy season.
Sin and Davik will return to a one-room bamboo hut they share with Davik's older sister and a grand-aunt. Sin will go back to riding her bicycle to her $1 a day job as a construction worker.
When the two left their village, their worldly possessions consisted of their clothes, some photographs, cooking utensils and the bicycle. When they return with the clothes, toys and mementos they have gathered in the United States, their possessions will have more than doubled.
Early on the day she had to leave, Sin was shaken to near incoherence when she learned she might have to leave some of the clothes and toys behind because of luggage space and weight restrictions.
She couldn't bear the thought of leaving any of it behind. Each pair of hand-me-down jeans was a treasure, each "Hello Kitty" bauble a jewel. It was paralyzing. How to pick and choose from a bounty you know you'll never see again.
Eventually, Lucky Chhuon, a Long Beach travel agent who arranged the trip home, brokered a deal with the airline to allow Davik and Sin an extra box.
As Sin sits on the floor of the Tom Bradley terminal waiting for the last bags to clear the X-ray machine, she is silent, resigned. Throughout the day, her mood has been broken only by jags of weeping. The sadness has been building in recent days. You could see it around her eyes.
"I'm not happy, I can tell you that," Sin says through translation. "I don't want to go. I really couldn't believe the time would come so fast."
As she stares around the vast terminal, the tears well up once again.
"I never dreamed I'd come to America. I had heard a lot about it, but I never thought I'd come. Now I know what it's like. I tasted and it was all good."
Nearby, Davik is taking it all in stride. She plays with a couple of friends she made during her time in the United States. She carries the hopefulness and optimism that children share. To her, although there is a sense of endings and occasional tears, there is also excitement at the prospect of her airplane ride. She is eager to reunite with her cousins, to play and tell of her adventures among the "barang," as Cambodians call Western foreigners.
Through translation she says she'll miss the friends she made, the lights, the buildings and Chi, referring to Chi Nguyen, a Vietnamese girl and fifth-grader at Lincoln Elementary who became her friend.
Davik recalls the last time she saw Chi a few days earlier at a going-away party.
"We played and then it was time to go and we didn't want to leave," Davik says in translation.
"I miss you, I love you," she adds in English.
When passengers are called to begin boarding, Davik adds another phrase in English, "Let's go. Woo."
When the wheels lift off shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday morning, it marks the last act of a rather remarkable journey.
In the beginning
The odyssey began with the discovery of a wheezing young girl who seemed destined to disappear into the backdrop of despair that is poverty in rural Cambodia. It bloomed with the determination of a small group of Cambodians to do whatever was necessary to save this child.
After hope, failure, renewal, setback and, finally, success. Davik was allowed to travel to the United States.
Her ailment, a ventricular septal defect, or hole in the heart, would typically have been repaired in the first year or two of life in the United States. In Cambodia, it was a lingering death sentence that promised a lifetime of depressed activity, a succession of days and nights when the lungs and body screamed for oxygen. It meant stunted growth, gradual decline and likely death by the mid-30s.
Until she met several Cambodian-Americans.
Davik was discovered in her tiny village by aid workers who were family members of Chantha Bob, a Cambodian waiter in Long Beach. Her story reached Chhun, who had recently created a nonprofit group with good intentions but little actual direction or purpose.
In Davik, Chhun and Hearts Without Boundaries found their purpose. In saving Davik, Chhun saw the arc of the rest of his life.
"Since Davik came into my life, I know I'll continue to save poor and sick children," Chhun says. "It was something I hadn't thought of before."
After several failed attempts to get Davik the treatment she needed in Cambodia, Chhun, with the help of Dr. Mark Sklansky, was able to broker a deal with Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, to provide the cardiac team with renowned heart surgeon Dr. Vaughn Starnes and facilities to close the quarter-size hole in Davik's heart.
During surgery, Starnes marked the Dacron patch that would seal the hole with a "smiley face" and sewed it in.
That was in late March.
High times
The intervening months were a whirlwind of activity. Davik and her mom rode as guests in Long Beach's annual Cambodian New Year Parade and attended the Cambodian New Year festivities at El Dorado Park. Davik was introduced to civic groups in the Cambodian community and donors at Childrens Hospital. Several fundraising dinners were held for her.
Lincoln Elementary, spurred by Nguyen, a cancer survivor who learned of Davik's ailment and donated $50 in New Year's money and cash she made doing extra chores, raised more than $1,800 for Davik and honored her at a school assembly.
Davik and her mom visited sites in Long Beach, including the aquarium, and even made a trip to the ultimate Southern California attraction, Disneyland.
Davik appeared on stage with Dengue Fever, an American rock band whose Cambodian lead singer, Nimol Chhun, is a star in her native land.
Everywhere she went, Davik would steeple her fingers and bow in the traditional Cambodian greeting. Everywhere she went people seemed to unite.
At Sophy's Restaurant, where Davik was a regular during her stay in Long Beach, a couple of bystanders were chatting in a back room as Davik was about to depart for the last time.
"This brings us all together. We need that in this community," one said.
One of Davik's last appearances was one of her most intimate. Chhun brought Davik to a nursing home in Norwalk to meet Helen Madison and her two friends, Barbara and Susie. The three elderly women had read about Davik in the newspaper and became entranced with the little girl and her story.
Now came the hard part.
Chhun doesn't do a good job of being stern. He tends to tear up easily. So explaining to Sin that she and Davik can't stay in the United States and why she can't stay has been difficult.
"I have been crying in my room," Chhun says. "I just don't show it. I just don't show it."
He knows he will never save another child quite like Davik. She is his first and will always be special.
"I feel like what I give her is a new heart," Chhun says. "What she gives me in return is a lot of strength and courage to help more sick children. She gives me a plan to save the next child."
Similarly Bob has kept his emotions in check.
"It hasn't hit me yet," he says of the prospect of leaving Davik behind in Cambodia.
Bob has said he has always wanted children of his own and Davik is as close as he's come.
"I never thought I'd be this much involved emotionally," he says, his breath catching.
"Everything is so real, yet I find it so hard to explain."
Bob remembers how easily he fell in love with Davik and how heartbroken he will be.
"I just thought this little girl needs help," Bob recalls. "I figured that's just something anyone would do. And yet it's been so beautiful. I wouldn't trade any of it. It's priceless."
Closing the circle
Wanting to stay
Sin heard the whispers from members of the community.
"Just don't go back. You can stay here," they told her.
She could work off the books. Disappear into the American fabric just like the multitudes of illegal aliens who flock to the United States.
Certainly Sin knows that even the meanest existence in the United States, the basest poverty is relative luxury compared with what she is returning to.
But she also knows why she is here and that staying was never part of the deal. She knows she has been given a gift beyond value - a longer, healthier life for her child.
If Sin and Davik were to stay, it would jeopardize Chhun's ability to bring other children to the United States for life-saving surgeries.
She knows all that and acknowledges as much.
"So many people were telling me `Why not just don't go back,"' Sin says. "But in my heart I couldn't do it. I couldn't give Hearts Without Boundaries a bad name, because you've done so much. This isn't the way I pay back."
Sin and Davik experienced affluence they never knew. Even if that luxury was sharing a room in a crowded apartment on Lemon Avenue in the Central Area. It's one thing to experience the excesses of America. It's another to know they will disappear forever.
Thomas Wolfe wrote "You can't go home again," but Sin and Davik have no choice, because they can't stay.
Now, it occurs to Sin that in some ways her American experience was never real, but just a kind of dream interlude.
As she thinks about the future, the emotion wells once again.
"I don't think I'll ever come back (to the United States,)" Sin says. "But depending on the fate of my daughter, maybe my daughter can bring me back."
If Chhun has any say, Davik will succeed. He and several Long Beach Cambodians have vowed to help sponsor Davik's education.
But Chhun says he has little money. Although he raised $12,000 for Davik while she was here, he was also paying $500 monthly in rent for her. He bought the round-trip flights to Cambodia for Davik and her mom and paid for their food. And then there was an emergency room bill, when Sin suffered a panic attack.
Chhun said he had to go into his personal finances to pay the last month of rent for Sin and Davik.
Hopes for the future
A Long Beach nonprofit that sponsors English language schools in Cambodia is considering building a school in Davik's village.
But it's a long, tough road. At 9 years old, Davik has had little formal education. Before her surgery, she had been too ill to regularly attend school, so she has a lot of catching up to do.
If pluck and personality have anything to do with it, Davik will be in good stead.
When asked about her dreams, Davik says she would like to become a doctor and help children like her.
Since the surgery, Davik is a different child. She runs and plays with abandon and sometimes it seems without stopping.
In the past, her bursts of energy were short-lived. She has gained weight and, while still thin, is much sturdier.
Also fortified is her confidence. When she sees friends, she often greets them with flying bear hugs. She splices her Khmer with phrases in English. When she gestures for someone to follow her, it's with an emphatic "Come here. Let's go."
At a going-away party, the girl who once talked in whispers around strangers boldly walks up to the stage area at the Golden Villa Restaurant on Anaheim Street.
All sass and attitude and smiles, she grabs a live microphone and begins singing an a cappella rendition of a Cambodian song, "Boeu Chea Kou."
After several minutes, she belts out the final notes. Translated, the last line of the song says "don't forget me."
By Greg Mellen, Staff Writer
07/12/2008
LOS ANGELES - The Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles International Airport hums with urgency at 9 on a weekday night.
It buzzes with comings and goings. Happy families unite; others depart in sadness.
Amid the whir, it would be easy to miss the small group of Cambodians, even with their entourage of friends and several journalists.
They cart their five boxes and six suitcases to the Transportation Safety Administration X-ray machine. They check and double-check passports and their tickets for China Airlines flight 007.
The airline will take them to Taipei, Republic of China, and then on to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Peter Chhun, the de facto patriarch, is an experienced traveler. This is rote to him. But on this day there is an undercurrent, a gnaw at his gut about what he must do to two members of his group.
rows 56 and 58 on Normally for Chhun, the prospects of a return to his homeland are happy. Today, he sets his jaw and continues with his duty. His responsibility. This is the part of saving lives he hadn't counted on.
He must return a mother and child to poverty. Six months after the girl, Davik Teng, was given a new lease on life with life-altering open heart surgery unavailable to her in Cambodia, she and her mom, Sin Chhon, have used up most of their six-month visa and must return home.
Home: a barren patch of land in a place that time and technology have forgotten. Home: Svay Chrom.
"Briefly (they were) away from hell," Chhun says of the two. "Now (they) have to go back. It's a tough one. It's tough for her. It's tough for everyone."
Chhun could be accused of being overly dramatic, except that he grew up in nearly identical surroundings and circumstances before he got lucky and hooked on with NBC News as a cameraman during the Cambodian civil war and was able to escape.
A one-room hut
You won't find Svay Chrom on a map. The family compound for Davik and Sin consists of about 20 residents, plus several dogs and an assortment of chickens. It sits off an unnamed dirt road outside the city of Battambang.
It has no electricity, no running water, no toilet facilities. When the mother and daughter left five months ago, the ground was cracked and dusty. When they return it will be slick and sticky with mud after the onset of rainy season.
Sin and Davik will return to a one-room bamboo hut they share with Davik's older sister and a grand-aunt. Sin will go back to riding her bicycle to her $1 a day job as a construction worker.
When the two left their village, their worldly possessions consisted of their clothes, some photographs, cooking utensils and the bicycle. When they return with the clothes, toys and mementos they have gathered in the United States, their possessions will have more than doubled.
Early on the day she had to leave, Sin was shaken to near incoherence when she learned she might have to leave some of the clothes and toys behind because of luggage space and weight restrictions.
She couldn't bear the thought of leaving any of it behind. Each pair of hand-me-down jeans was a treasure, each "Hello Kitty" bauble a jewel. It was paralyzing. How to pick and choose from a bounty you know you'll never see again.
Eventually, Lucky Chhuon, a Long Beach travel agent who arranged the trip home, brokered a deal with the airline to allow Davik and Sin an extra box.
As Sin sits on the floor of the Tom Bradley terminal waiting for the last bags to clear the X-ray machine, she is silent, resigned. Throughout the day, her mood has been broken only by jags of weeping. The sadness has been building in recent days. You could see it around her eyes.
"I'm not happy, I can tell you that," Sin says through translation. "I don't want to go. I really couldn't believe the time would come so fast."
As she stares around the vast terminal, the tears well up once again.
"I never dreamed I'd come to America. I had heard a lot about it, but I never thought I'd come. Now I know what it's like. I tasted and it was all good."
Nearby, Davik is taking it all in stride. She plays with a couple of friends she made during her time in the United States. She carries the hopefulness and optimism that children share. To her, although there is a sense of endings and occasional tears, there is also excitement at the prospect of her airplane ride. She is eager to reunite with her cousins, to play and tell of her adventures among the "barang," as Cambodians call Western foreigners.
Through translation she says she'll miss the friends she made, the lights, the buildings and Chi, referring to Chi Nguyen, a Vietnamese girl and fifth-grader at Lincoln Elementary who became her friend.
Davik recalls the last time she saw Chi a few days earlier at a going-away party.
"We played and then it was time to go and we didn't want to leave," Davik says in translation.
"I miss you, I love you," she adds in English.
When passengers are called to begin boarding, Davik adds another phrase in English, "Let's go. Woo."
When the wheels lift off shortly after 1 a.m. Thursday morning, it marks the last act of a rather remarkable journey.
In the beginning
The odyssey began with the discovery of a wheezing young girl who seemed destined to disappear into the backdrop of despair that is poverty in rural Cambodia. It bloomed with the determination of a small group of Cambodians to do whatever was necessary to save this child.
After hope, failure, renewal, setback and, finally, success. Davik was allowed to travel to the United States.
Her ailment, a ventricular septal defect, or hole in the heart, would typically have been repaired in the first year or two of life in the United States. In Cambodia, it was a lingering death sentence that promised a lifetime of depressed activity, a succession of days and nights when the lungs and body screamed for oxygen. It meant stunted growth, gradual decline and likely death by the mid-30s.
Until she met several Cambodian-Americans.
Davik was discovered in her tiny village by aid workers who were family members of Chantha Bob, a Cambodian waiter in Long Beach. Her story reached Chhun, who had recently created a nonprofit group with good intentions but little actual direction or purpose.
In Davik, Chhun and Hearts Without Boundaries found their purpose. In saving Davik, Chhun saw the arc of the rest of his life.
"Since Davik came into my life, I know I'll continue to save poor and sick children," Chhun says. "It was something I hadn't thought of before."
After several failed attempts to get Davik the treatment she needed in Cambodia, Chhun, with the help of Dr. Mark Sklansky, was able to broker a deal with Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, to provide the cardiac team with renowned heart surgeon Dr. Vaughn Starnes and facilities to close the quarter-size hole in Davik's heart.
During surgery, Starnes marked the Dacron patch that would seal the hole with a "smiley face" and sewed it in.
That was in late March.
High times
The intervening months were a whirlwind of activity. Davik and her mom rode as guests in Long Beach's annual Cambodian New Year Parade and attended the Cambodian New Year festivities at El Dorado Park. Davik was introduced to civic groups in the Cambodian community and donors at Childrens Hospital. Several fundraising dinners were held for her.
Lincoln Elementary, spurred by Nguyen, a cancer survivor who learned of Davik's ailment and donated $50 in New Year's money and cash she made doing extra chores, raised more than $1,800 for Davik and honored her at a school assembly.
Davik and her mom visited sites in Long Beach, including the aquarium, and even made a trip to the ultimate Southern California attraction, Disneyland.
Davik appeared on stage with Dengue Fever, an American rock band whose Cambodian lead singer, Nimol Chhun, is a star in her native land.
Everywhere she went, Davik would steeple her fingers and bow in the traditional Cambodian greeting. Everywhere she went people seemed to unite.
At Sophy's Restaurant, where Davik was a regular during her stay in Long Beach, a couple of bystanders were chatting in a back room as Davik was about to depart for the last time.
"This brings us all together. We need that in this community," one said.
One of Davik's last appearances was one of her most intimate. Chhun brought Davik to a nursing home in Norwalk to meet Helen Madison and her two friends, Barbara and Susie. The three elderly women had read about Davik in the newspaper and became entranced with the little girl and her story.
Now came the hard part.
Chhun doesn't do a good job of being stern. He tends to tear up easily. So explaining to Sin that she and Davik can't stay in the United States and why she can't stay has been difficult.
"I have been crying in my room," Chhun says. "I just don't show it. I just don't show it."
He knows he will never save another child quite like Davik. She is his first and will always be special.
"I feel like what I give her is a new heart," Chhun says. "What she gives me in return is a lot of strength and courage to help more sick children. She gives me a plan to save the next child."
Similarly Bob has kept his emotions in check.
"It hasn't hit me yet," he says of the prospect of leaving Davik behind in Cambodia.
Bob has said he has always wanted children of his own and Davik is as close as he's come.
"I never thought I'd be this much involved emotionally," he says, his breath catching.
"Everything is so real, yet I find it so hard to explain."
Bob remembers how easily he fell in love with Davik and how heartbroken he will be.
"I just thought this little girl needs help," Bob recalls. "I figured that's just something anyone would do. And yet it's been so beautiful. I wouldn't trade any of it. It's priceless."
Closing the circle
Wanting to stay
Sin heard the whispers from members of the community.
"Just don't go back. You can stay here," they told her.
She could work off the books. Disappear into the American fabric just like the multitudes of illegal aliens who flock to the United States.
Certainly Sin knows that even the meanest existence in the United States, the basest poverty is relative luxury compared with what she is returning to.
But she also knows why she is here and that staying was never part of the deal. She knows she has been given a gift beyond value - a longer, healthier life for her child.
If Sin and Davik were to stay, it would jeopardize Chhun's ability to bring other children to the United States for life-saving surgeries.
She knows all that and acknowledges as much.
"So many people were telling me `Why not just don't go back,"' Sin says. "But in my heart I couldn't do it. I couldn't give Hearts Without Boundaries a bad name, because you've done so much. This isn't the way I pay back."
Sin and Davik experienced affluence they never knew. Even if that luxury was sharing a room in a crowded apartment on Lemon Avenue in the Central Area. It's one thing to experience the excesses of America. It's another to know they will disappear forever.
Thomas Wolfe wrote "You can't go home again," but Sin and Davik have no choice, because they can't stay.
Now, it occurs to Sin that in some ways her American experience was never real, but just a kind of dream interlude.
As she thinks about the future, the emotion wells once again.
"I don't think I'll ever come back (to the United States,)" Sin says. "But depending on the fate of my daughter, maybe my daughter can bring me back."
If Chhun has any say, Davik will succeed. He and several Long Beach Cambodians have vowed to help sponsor Davik's education.
But Chhun says he has little money. Although he raised $12,000 for Davik while she was here, he was also paying $500 monthly in rent for her. He bought the round-trip flights to Cambodia for Davik and her mom and paid for their food. And then there was an emergency room bill, when Sin suffered a panic attack.
Chhun said he had to go into his personal finances to pay the last month of rent for Sin and Davik.
Hopes for the future
A Long Beach nonprofit that sponsors English language schools in Cambodia is considering building a school in Davik's village.
But it's a long, tough road. At 9 years old, Davik has had little formal education. Before her surgery, she had been too ill to regularly attend school, so she has a lot of catching up to do.
If pluck and personality have anything to do with it, Davik will be in good stead.
When asked about her dreams, Davik says she would like to become a doctor and help children like her.
Since the surgery, Davik is a different child. She runs and plays with abandon and sometimes it seems without stopping.
In the past, her bursts of energy were short-lived. She has gained weight and, while still thin, is much sturdier.
Also fortified is her confidence. When she sees friends, she often greets them with flying bear hugs. She splices her Khmer with phrases in English. When she gestures for someone to follow her, it's with an emphatic "Come here. Let's go."
At a going-away party, the girl who once talked in whispers around strangers boldly walks up to the stage area at the Golden Villa Restaurant on Anaheim Street.
All sass and attitude and smiles, she grabs a live microphone and begins singing an a cappella rendition of a Cambodian song, "Boeu Chea Kou."
After several minutes, she belts out the final notes. Translated, the last line of the song says "don't forget me."
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