Chapter 4: Khao-I-Dang (1980)

Excerpt from my upcoming memoir.
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The Hour Between Worlds

I was born in a soldier’s camp.

Khao-I-Dang was not meant for beginnings. It was built for overflow, for those who had nowhere else to go. Established in late 1979, just across the Thai-Cambodian border in Sa Kaeo Province, it spread across the land like a nervous system, pulsing with fear, hope, and motion. By the time my parents arrived, the camp had become the largest and most enduring refugee center for Cambodians fleeing both the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese invasion.

Each house was meant to hold one person. But the rules folded under the weight of survival. The camp swelled far beyond its intended capacity. At its peak, over 160,000 people were crowded into a space meant for far fewer. What had once been forest became a dense city of tarps, bamboo poles, barbed wire, and dust. There were designated sectors for food, sanitation, registration, and hospitals, each a fragile attempt to impose structure on chaos.

It was there, in a crowded medical post run by international aid workers and Thai soldiers, that I entered the world.

My mother’s labor began sometime after two in the morning. The air was thick and unmoving, heavy with heat that lingered through the night. The pain gripped her in waves. She was not alone when the contractions came. My father walked beside her, steadying her as wave after wave of pain coursed through her body. The path to the clinic was uneven, lit only by flickering lanterns and the dim outline of the moon. My mother gripped her belly in one hand, her other hand clutching his arm, each step more fragile than the last. My father tried to encourage her, his voice quiet, his pace slow. But she couldn’t keep walking. Her legs gave out halfway there, and she collapsed at the edge of a dirt path, breathless and afraid.

A security vehicle making its night patrol found her there. The soldier didn’t speak Khmer well, but he understood what he saw. He carried her into the vehicle and drove quickly through the maze of sleeping shelters and dimly lit checkpoints. The vehicle passed the UNICEF trucks, the Red Cross tents, and the narrow rows of shacks built from relief materials. The camp was quiet, but her breath and heartbeat were loud.

I was born at 5:15 in the morning, just as the sun was beginning to rise over the wire-lined horizon. An American doctor delivered me. He did not speak our language fluently, but his hands were steady. There were no machines, no soft light, no sterile warmth. Just sweat, urgency, and the soft whisper of my mother’s prayer that I would cry.

In the bed beside hers, another woman labored in silence. She had no husband. My father, already exhausted from fear and waiting, stepped in to help her. Ten minutes after I was born, her daughter arrived. Two lives, born side by side in a place meant to hold people temporarily, but which had somehow become the place of our first breaths.

When my mother returned to our shelter, nothing around her had changed. The tarps still flapped in the wind. The ration lines still stretched long and slow. But everything inside her had shifted. There was no formula, no vitamins, no warmth beyond what she could offer. She nursed me with what she had. And when her milk ran dry, other women in the camp stepped forward, new mothers who had just enough to share. They did not need to be asked.

It was not charity. It was understanding.

The camp moved as a single organism. One mother’s body answered the cry of another woman’s child. One stranger’s hands helped hold up a neighbor’s bamboo wall. There were no questions, only instincts. Survival was not an individual act. It belonged to everyone. Grief, hunger, childbirth, illness, even joy—all of it was shared.

This was my first experience of what it meant to belong to something larger than a family. I was nourished not only by my mother’s love but by the willingness of women who had lost as much as they had to give. Their bodies kept me alive, just as they kept their own children alive. And in that silent bond, we were connected. Not by blood, but by the quiet and unspoken promise that no one should be left to suffer alone.

The outside world saw us as refugees. To others, we were numbers on manifests, names on waiting lists, problems to be solved. But inside the walls of Khao-I-Dang, we were a breathing, grieving, helping body of people. There was no wealth. There was no certainty. But there was each other. And sometimes, that was enough.

My father found work helping with logistics. He moved supplies, offered translations, learned English from pamphlets and from the mouths of volunteers. My mother carried me in her arms through long lines for food, for medical attention, for news. As we waited beneath the white-gray sky, she sang to me softly, old lullabies no longer heard outside the wire.

Even before I knew language, I knew community. I was passed between arms, fed by kindness, rocked by voices that were not always my mother’s. I learned, without knowing it, that survival was never meant to be solitary.

I was born at a border. Not just between Cambodia and Thailand, but between two worlds. Behind us was a life destroyed by war, ruled by terror, held together by silence. Ahead was something unfamiliar, unnamed. It was not safety, not yet. But it was the beginning of a path that led toward it.

I came into the world in the hour between darkness and light, when the worst had passed but the future was still unclear. The night had not fully ended, but the sun was rising.

Khao-I-Dang was not a home. But it became my first cradle. It held the breath of thousands in transition, all waiting for something better, all carrying something precious from the wreckage behind them.

I was born not in a country, but in the space between countries.

Not in peace, but in the pause where peace begins to take shape.

Not in permanence, but in motion.

I was born into the world as it turned,

in the hour between worlds.