Kilong Ung survived hell before coming to Portland, where he realized his dream of becoming a Royal Rosarian
When Kilong Ung strides past hundreds of thousands of Grand Floral and Starlight parade spectators this June, most onlookers won’t realize he survived one of the most horrific atrocities in human history.
Marching ceremoniously alongside members of Portland’s distinguished Royal Rosarians, Kilong’s glistening $2,000 uniform is the antithesis of the tattered long-sleeved shirt and dirty pair of shorts he wore for four years as a slave laborer during the Cambodian genocide.
For more than a century, the Royal Rosarians have been a hallmark of the Rose Festival and served as Portland’s official goodwill ambassadors. They greet politicians and dignitaries at the airport, represent the city at festivals around the Pacific Northwest and raise money for children’s programs through their foundation.
Members are accomplished; many are business owners and managers or hold high-ranking positions in local government.
Kilong was a young refugee, new to America and living with a foster family, when he first saw the Royal Rosarians marching in the Grand Floral parade.
Glowing brightly in their double-breasted, cream-colored suits, white-banded straw boater hats, white gloves, white shoes and red ties, the Rosarians captivated Kilong, and for years he would dream of one day joining their ranks.
Kilong had been struck with a similar sense of wonderment several years earlier and halfway around the globe when he first saw Khmer Rouge soldiers march past him in a parade of a different sort.
In their dusty black guerilla fighter uniforms, red-checkered scarves and AK-47s, their impressiveness was exciting to Kilong, who was just a boy.
It was April 1975, and these soldiers had just emerged victorious from Cambodia’s long civil war.
At the time, Kilong lived in a wood and straw house perched high above the ground on stilts in the city of Battambang with his parents and five of his seven sisters. An in-law and his nephew also lived under the same roof.
He was especially close to his only younger sister, Sivly Ung, nicknamed “Ali.” Even at a young age, he had taken on a guardian role for Ali, enrolling her in school when he was only in fourth grade himself.
While Kilong doesn’t know exactly when he was born, he estimates he was 15 years old when the war ended, but he had the appearance of a 10-year-old.
He remembers residents of Battambang celebrating the end of the war, with many believing the Khmer Rouge would be good for Cambodia.
Unlike his long-held infatuation with the Royal Rosarians later in life, Kilong’s adoration for the Khmer Rouge soldiers would quickly fade.
Soon after the war’s end celebration, he saw a group of the soldiers humiliate a man in the street near his home. After berating and threatening the half-naked man to the point of urinating on himself, they shot him in the head, killing him instantly right before Kilong’s eyes.
The Khmer Rouge regime and its Marxist leader, Pol Pot, are notorious for what followed.
They transformed the entire country of Cambodia into a network of barbaric prison-like labor camps, forcing families apart and out of the cities to work on communal farms and build infrastructure.
Workers were not allowed possessions or contact with their families. They were expendable cogs in a machine, worked to death and frequently tortured or executed for trivial missteps.
Cambodians starved to death beneath trees full of ripe coconuts and oranges. In the newly communist and heavily militarized Cambodia, trees belonged to everyone, so their fruits were off-limits.
Because of his boyish looks, Khmer Rouge soldiers initially thought Kilong was much younger, and they placed him in school with little children.
As Kilong recounted life under the Khmer Rouge, he said up until about 15 years ago, he couldn’t get through his story without breaking into tears.
In 2009, he revisited many painful memories from his life under the Khmer Rouge in his brutally candid autobiography, “Golden Leaf.”
The book led to a speaking tour where he told his story to audiences at Columbia University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
“I didn’t know anything until I read his book,” his older sister, Sivheng Ung, told Street Roots. “I just cried – and there’s a lot more things too that he didn’t write in the book.”
She said he doesn’t like to talk about the murders he witnessed when he was placed with the children. She said the Khmer Rouge would kill people for trivial transgressions, such as stealing a coconut, by crushing their skulls with a hammer.
They would make the children watch so they would be easier to control.
“Some of the kids cried, because they miss their parents; they run away, they get caught, they get killed,” she said.
Kilong wasn’t kept in the school for very long as it became apparent he was older than the other children during lessons. He had a seventh-grade education, and it was difficult for him to contain his knowledge among children learning the alphabet.
Once his age was discovered, he was sent to what he described as the “Navy Seals” of the labor forces.
Cambodians who resided in cities, such as Kilong and his family, were handed the harshest work assignments, and as a young man, he was in the hardest-worked demographic.
He built roadways and dams, working with about 400 other prisoners. They were divided into groups of 10, each group with one leader and three subgroups. Each subgroup had its own leader with a second in command as well.
“This is how they control you,” he said. “You breathe, these two people know, and then this other person knows, and it gets escalated to the top.”
As tempting as it was, suicide was not an option. Khmer Rouge soldiers made it clear they would torture and kill all the family members of anyone who took their own life to escape the killing fields.
“I was forced to work 13 hours a day, every day, 365 days a year, for almost five years,” Kilong said.
His spirit and his body were broken.
As a child, he had spent more than a year studying under a Buddhist monk in the temple near his home, but under the Khmer Rouge, he lost all faith.
But at the time, he said, the only thing on his mind was figuring out how to survive each day.
The two daily meals under the Khmer Rouge were typically porridge containing water and two spoonsful of rice.
There were other times when workers would squat, 10 men around a single small pot of stew. It would be mostly water, with a few vegetables and maybe one fish tossed in for nutrients.
Starving and eager to eat, the men were forced to wait for a whistle. Then it was a free for all, each man for himself as he attacked the soup.
Kilong’s mother traded some salt to get him a large copper spoon.
“She got it on the black market,” he explained, because under communist rule, there was no trade and no commerce.
“That’s corruption,” Kilong said sardonically. “That’s evil, that’s a crime. You get up, work, contribute, and there is nothing else.”
Aside from the clothes on his back, that spoon was his only belonging. Half the handle was removed so he could plunge his hand to the bottom of the pot and try to retrieve some vegetable pieces after the whistle blew.
Kilong learned to secretly hunt rats, bats, termites, snakes and bees to supplement his diet. Those who didn’t often starved to death.
Before the Khmer Rouge’s four-year reign of terror ended, both of Kilong’s parents and his grandparents would be dead.
He was laboring in a rice paddy when he received news that his beloved little sister, Ali, and his nephew, had both died on the same day – his nephew in the morning and his sister in the afternoon.
He was not allowed to leave the killing fields to attend funerals, nor does he know where his parents’ bodies are buried.
In all, nearly 2 million Cambodians died from starvation, execution, disease and overwork during the Khmer Rouge genocide.
Kilong saw his sister not long before her death, and he described her appearance in his book. She was 11.
“I noticed her legs, bare from the knees down – dry, cracked, stained, and barefoot. Her entire body was covered only by an old ragged sarong rolled at the waist, leaving the top of her body naked. From behind, through the exposed dry, rough skin, I could see her vertebrae and the backside of her rib cage. If I hadn’t been so weak from hard labor and malnutrition, I could have picked her frail body up with one hand,” he wrote.
In January 1979, the Vietnamese Army defeated the Khmer Rouge, liberating Cambodia from one oppressive regime and replacing it with another.
Kilong was reunited with several of his surviving sisters. Upon returning to Battambang, they found their family home had been demolished. In its place were squatters’ shelters.
Eventually Kilong escaped to Thailand with his older sister, Sivheng, and her boyfriend. It was an adventure he recounts in detail in his book. They were shot at and held hostage and had run-ins with bandits and Khmer Rouge soldiers in exile. But eventually they made it safely to a refugee camp.
They registered as a family, lying about Kilong’s age. They claimed he was born in 1964 because they were told this would make immigrating to the U.S. more likely. He was 15 all over again.
They flew to San Diego that same year when a family there agreed to sponsor them. It was the first time Kilong had ever been on a plane. About six months after arriving, they took a Greyhound bus north to Portland, where they moved in with the brother of Sivheng’s boyfriend.
Kilong thinks he was about 20 at the time, but he was enrolled as a sophomore at Washington-Monroe High School. For the previous five years, he’d had no education. He didn’t speak English and couldn’t multiply or divide. When he first arrived in the U.S., he didn’t know how to cross the street, turn on a faucet or use a toilet. He was placed in a special-education class.
But Kilong learned quickly and started to acclimate to his newfound American culture. He soon became good friends with a classmate named Scott Easter.
Easter’s parents invited Kilong to come live in their home, and it was his new American parents who took him to his first Grand Floral parade in the early 1980s.
When the Royal Rosarians marched past, Kilong saw spectators standing up to salute them. People applauded and cheered. The Rosarian leading the group waved a large American flag.
“You’re an American, it’s a flag, you respect the flag and all that stuff,” said Kilong. “But it has a different meaning to somebody who was supposed to be dead in the killing fields.”
Kilong had no idea who these men were, but to him they stood for peace and prosperity. “The ultimate American dream,” he would later recount.
He told his foster family at that very moment that someday he wanted to be that man in white waving an American flag in the parade. It was a wish that seemed preposterous at the time.
Through the help of administrators who saw his potential in high school, he was invited to attend Reed College, graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1987.
He went on to earn his master’s degree in statistics from Bowling Green State University, where, he said, he began to feel like his former self again – the outspoken sociable kid growing up in pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodia.
His first job after college was with Anderson Consulting, a multibillion-dollar Fortune 500 company (now Accenture).
He married his college sweetheart, Elizabeth Roe. She now goes by Lisa Ung.
The couple had two children. His son, Kilin, is named for his father, and his daughter, Kila, was named for a brother who died before he was born.
Kilong continued his successful career in the corporate world and eventually built a large, luxury home in an affluent neighborhood – an affront to his former communist captors.
But he suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress as he struggled with his identity and his past traumas.
After 20 years in the U.S., he traveled back to Cambodia to see the sisters and the country he’d left behind.
While he was there, an old friend from the labor camps told him that for $800 he would kill a notorious Khmer Rouge leader that had put Kilong’s family through hell. His friend knew where the man was, and he needed the money.
Kilong seriously considered taking him up on his offer. He had long dreamed of having murderous revenge on the Khmer Rouge.
But he realized he was at a crossroads, and he declined.
“They killed over 50 of my relatives, they starved both my parents to death, and they put me in a slave camp for almost five years,” Kilong said. “I forgave them. So today, what can another person do to me that I cannot forgive?
“The Khmer Rouge should have killed me, at the very least. They destroyed my faith in humanity, and yet here I am. When you go through something like that, you can turn out to be a really bad person, or you can turn out to be a decent person. You have a choice.”
Kilong was conflicted about his material gains. He had so much, but when he visited Cambodia, he saw that his friends and family had so little.
He decided to change course, refocus and give back to the Cambodian community.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, there were 4,424 Cambodians living in the Portland and Vancouver, Wash., metro area. Kilong said community leaders estimate it’s closer to 10,000.
Portland’s Cambodian community is among Multnomah County’s “most distressed communities,” according to a 2012 report from the Coalition of Communities of Color and Portland State University.
The report found 44 percent of the local Cambodian population had received less than a high school education, and roughly half could barely speak English. It also revealed nearly half were low income, with a quarter falling below the federal poverty line, but only 13 percent were receiving any public assistance.
In 1994, Kilong’s sister, Sivheng, co-founded the Cambodian-American Community of Oregon in Beaverton, where she continues to teach younger Cambodians about their cultural heritage.
Kilong decided to volunteer with the organization and became its president for several years. He worked diligently to give the Cambodian community in Portland more visibility and credibility.
“I wanted people to know we exist,” he said.
Kilong and his wife decided they would sell their fancy house and 80 percent of their belongings. They moved their family into a small, sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment instead.
“I love him and I respect him, not because he’s my brother but he’s the kindest human being,” said Sivheng, who today works for Portland’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization.
“I don’t know if he’d want me to say this, but at his house, he has this one couch and one dinner table and one TV – that’s it. He never buys anything more than that, just the necessity. He said he’d rather give money to help other people. His wife is the same way.”
Shortly after his book was published, Kilong met Tim Leatherman, of Leatherman tools, at a book reading. Leatherman, impressed with Kilong’s story, asked him what he wanted to do next, now that he’d written a book.
Kilong told him he wanted to build an elementary school in Cambodia. Leatherman wrote him the check that enabled him to establish a foundation to do just that.
Kilong believes education can help prevent another genocide in Cambodia.
“When you are educated, you are less likely to be recruited by propaganda and lies – you will have some degree of critical thinking. Many of the Khmer Rouge just did what they were told,” he explained.
“It is mob thinking and propaganda – those are really, really dangerous, and I’ve seen that leading up to the Khmer Rouge, and even now there are some propaganda going on in Cambodia, and new generation may get fooled.”
Since its establishment in 2010, the Golden Leaf Education Foundation has built four schools in remote and economically depressed areas of rural Cambodia. It plans to break ground on its fifth elementary school this month.
“Quite often the school ends up becoming the community center,” said Ray Dilschneider, board president of the volunteer-run foundation.
“Kilong’s all about doing good things for the kids. I really respect his drive,” he said.
When Kilong visited the foundation’s first school two years after it was built, he saw that the government ran a power line into the village to give the school electricity. A political office and medical clinic had also since moved in.
“My intention is not just building schools; we want to actually bring the spotlight to the village,” Kilong said.
Kilong and his foundation have donated school uniforms, rice and hundreds of bicycles to the villages where the schools are located.
He recently traveled back to Cambodia again with a documentary film crew.
His is one of several stories being featured in “Risking Light,” which is in post production and due for release at film festivals this fall. The theme of the film is “forgiving the unforgivable.”
Director Dawn Mikkelson said she hopes to screen in Portland sometime next year.
Today Kilong owns a State Farm agency, with an office on Southeast 82nd Avenue. He sits on the board of his foundation and is a member of the Rotary Club of Portland.
But it was a chance meeting with former Portland Mayor Tom Potter in a parking lot that would pave the way to fulfilling a lifelong dream.
Kilong was walking into the Barnes and Nobel at Clackamas Promenade to do some last-minute Christmas shopping in December 2004, when he spotted then Mayor-elect Potter exiting the building.
“Chief Potter?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Potter said.
“Congratulation on the election,” Kilong said. He thought that would be the end of the exchange, but Potter began to ask him questions. Soon the men were engrossed in conversation, and Kilong was telling Potter all about Portland’s Cambodian community.
Kilong invited Potter to a Cambodian American Community of Oregon event. The two have been friends ever since, and Potter helped Kilong to give the Cambodian community more visibility by attending their events, and even mentioning Kilong’s efforts with the organization during a state of the city address one year.
When Potter learned of Kilong’s dream of becoming a Royal Rosarian, he introduced him to a Rosarian that he knew, a former prime minister of the organization, Ray Hanson.
When asked the prerequisites to becoming a Rosarian, Hanson replied, “good moral character.”
“I interviewed him and thought he was a good guy,” said Hanson, “and I decided to sponsor him. He’s a truly excellent example of a person who gives back to the community.”
Ten years ago, the Rose Festival Queen knighted Kilong an official member of the Royal Rosarians at Washington Park.
He remembers soon after, when he marched in his first Grand Floral Parade, he quietly spoke to his father’s spirit as he fought back tears, saying, “I made it. I told you I’d make it. Here I am!”
On June 2, marching in the Starlight Parade, Kilong would be at the helm of the Royal Rosarians, dressed in white from head to toe, proudly carrying the American flag.
Email staff reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @GreenWrites.
