Far From the Killing Fields, a Graduate Looks Back ...

For Thi Mary Le Evans, the memories are vague: she remembers the heat, the sounds and feel of the night jungle, and being told not to talk. She was 2 ½ years old when her family walked from Phnom Penh in Cambodia to the Thai border.

“We were told Thailand was not taking Cambodian refugees so we were disguised as Vietnamese,” says Evans. “My parents took only a jug of water and us … their three children.” The jungle they traversed in the dark of night was full of snakes, cobras and landmines.

On May 15, Evans, now 27, a married mother of three, received her master’s from the School of Management and Labor Relations  (SMLR)—and presented the convocation speech.

For Evans, the route to academic achievement has involved not only challenging courses and hard work, but also refugee camps, hunger, and uncertainty. She was born after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge, a regime notorious for social engineering policies that led to the genocide marked by the chilling phrase “killing fields”. Her parents each spent a decade in labor camps, their own families having been wiped out. Her father survived only because by chance he was studying away from home when the soldiers came through.

These dark facts were a constant background to growing up, says Evans: “The history was ingrained in us. We talked about how intellectuals, the educated and literate, were killed. We understood why we had no grandparents, aunts or uncles. The only way to know where you come from is to talk about it.”

After their jungle trek, the family spent a few years in a Thai refugee camp. “I remember dirt everywhere. We had a bamboo hut and banana leaf roof, with walls of plastic to keep out the rain,” she says. “But not until I was an adult did I understand the deprivation. I was a child and everything was enchanted for me. At school, occasionally there would be lunch given and it was a piece of stale bread. I remember being told by my mom and dad: ‘Bring it home.’ That was food for the family. That’s what we ate, with rock salt.”

The family was later moved to a refugee camp in the Philippines, where they stayed for more than two years, and then followed a sponsorship from a church in Maryland, which brought them to the United States.

Upon arriving in the US, Evans’s mother learned she had a sister in New York City and the family moved to the Bronx, where they remained for 10years. The neighborhood was riddled with drugs and violence, but Evans found a haven in her grammar school, Immaculate Conception School, and its associated convent. An all girls’ Catholic high school brought her to Manhattan and provided job placements, which gave Evans her first glimpse into the work world.

When her parents expressed reluctance to let her travel even on a full scholarship for college, Evans took courses at Middlesex County College—until the disruption of September 11 meant she needed to focus on earning a living. Once she could zero in on academics, she enrolled at Rutgers, where she was originally a pre-med student, but took a variety of subjects that interested her.

By happenstance, she took a class on labor relations with Professor Paula Voos and a class with Professor Jeff Keefe. “[The subjects] clicked with me—they were multidisciplinary and can be directly applied, taking everything I was currently seeing and experiencing while providing me with a toolbox of new ideas and possible solutions,” she says. “It related to how policies and relationships between people developed in the world and how I was affected by it.”

What Evans treasures in Rutgers is that “people are huge resources, full of ideas, and there are so many associations and connections constantly around us,” she says. “In SMLR at Rutgers, students have full access to professors. It’s very student-centered.”

Evans is interested in pursuing international labor relations, planning, and policy and expects to go on to get a Ph.D. J.D. For now, she’s taking a break from school and working to establish a nonprofit to promote access to education and basic necessities in Cambodia.

In her career, Evans hopes to use her knowledge of labor relations to find solutions to international problems. “In Cambodia, there are classrooms filled with students where professors are not teaching their classes because they make more money driving tourists then they would if they taught,” she says.

Evans recognizes the challenge of convincing poor families whose children work in factories that education is worth the loss of family income.

“If you take out the incentive for the need of child labor as a source of contribution to family income and put the incentive toward education, then it changes things, ” she says.

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