Courtesy of Jan Pieter Van Voorst Van Beest, an individual partner
Description
Makara Meng spent more than three years in the forced-labor campa of Cambodia, living in barracks with hundreds of other children, weeding rice paddies and living on one bowl of watery rice soup each day until eventually starvation reduced her to “a skeleton in rags.”
She sometimes slipped out to visit her mother, whom she was forbidden to see. One of Meng’s most painful memories is passing her mother on her way to work in the fields and hearing her mother call to her, but being forbidden to answer. “To this day, I never told her what happened, and she never told me what happened to her,” Meng says. They had both learned the code of silence that settled over survivors of the killing fields.
Makara Meng immigrated to Maine from Cambodia and is the former owner of Mitpheap grocery store in Portland.
About This Item
- Title: Makara Meng, Portland, 2009
- Creator: Jan Pieter Van Voorst Van Beest
- Creation Date: 2009
- Subject Date: 2017
- Location: Portland, Cumberland County, ME
- Media: Digital photograph
- Object Type: Image
Cross Reference Searches
Standardized Subject Headings
- Business
- Emigration & immigration--United States
- Emigration and immigration--Cambodia
- Forced labor--Cambodia
- Immigrants
- Immigrants--United States--Maine--Portland
People
Other Keywords
This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. No Permission is required to use the low-resolution watermarked image for educational use, or as allowed by the applicable copyright. For all other uses, permission is required.
Please post your comment below to share with others. If you'd like to privately share a comment or correction with MMN staff, please send us a message with this link.
