Inside the once majestic country of cambodia, after a decade of war, history witnessed the collapse of the regime. It would end with one of the worst genocides the world had ever seen. This memorial helps to ensure that the world never forgets those who died during the years of the cambodia killing fields. Yet, there is more to the story. There is the untold episode of the fate of tens of thousands of survivors who sought refuge inside thailand. This is my father in a refugee camp in 1980. I knew that my father was a survivor of the killing fields but i was shocked to learn that he and many thousands of others faced a more terrifying atrocity. The massacre on the mountain here. He always pushed me to tell him the story and i always said to him i dont want to. I dont want to relive it again. He would say just tell me one time. That is how we get here to do a documentary. James taing, that is the opening to your documentary, Ghost Mountain. Tell me about this project. James this is the story of my father and the survival of the killing fields of cambodia. It is considered the second holocaust but if you go down to the youth, it really is not in memory. It is sort of the history they are taught. That is one thing we were trying to make up for. What we really focused on is the story that nobody has really heard about. It has been lost and undocumented. It happened after the fall of the khmer rouge in 1975. Things spiraled to really epic proportions. My father and many other refugees found himself in a story that i think it is important that i think is important and everyone should hear. You said in that opening clip that for much of your childhood he really would not talk about his past even though you pressed for it many times. Why did he finally agree . James it took a lot of persistence on my side. One of the reasons why i personally wanted to do the story was i was coming of age from high school to college. I dealt with a large challenge in my life. I always knew that my father was a survivor and we would watch the killing fields movie and he would make comments like i have been through worse than that. Or there were times when i wouldnt finish my food, and he would say i would do anything to , eat that last bit of food. So he disciplined me in that way, and as i was coming of age, i really wanted to know because i really saw a resilience in him. I began to ask him what exactly happened to you . Like he said he did not want to , tell the story. I had to really try. What i did was i took some of my favorite authors like elie wiesel. He told of his time in the holocaust. I told him he made a big impact. I just came back day after day and went after him more, and one ok, he told me that he would tell me a little bit. His idea was that he thought i would give up. He would share enough for me and it would whet my appetite and i would be good. But i found his story incredible. I became sort of obsessed with it. I thought it was a one in one billion story of survival that i had never heard ever. Susan walk me through that sequence from the conversation to the idea to do a documentary. When did that conversation happened and when did you decide to document this . James being of my nature, im the type who likes to write things out and chronicle lies things. Chroniclize things. I went back to when he grow up when he grew up. Iwould look at family photos , would play with toys, balls, they had movie theaters. There are things like that that i really wanted to record. It just went on and snowballed from there. I dont want to spoil it but at some point, there was later on in the film, there was somebody who he connects with. Someone who sort of is part of his story in cambodia where with that moment, we all collected we all said we need to document this in a film. It is important that we do this now before time is lost and this sort of history is buried forever. Susan why do you think it is important for an audience in the United States to hear the story . James for me, i wanted to tell the story because it is survival. It gave me so much inspiration to persevere and have resilience. For people today, i think this is something that you can put a high mark on where everyone is going through it at once. I would like to show the indomitable will of the human spirit. I also wanted to give tribute to a lot of the Unsung Heroes back then. The volunteers who did so much, these are people both from the private ngos and even the public. Many state Department Workers this is a part of history that i think we should embrace in our american heritage. Its something we can celebrate because it tells us a lot about our compassion, our empathy. This falls on the backdrop of the vietnam war where nobody wants to deal with that anymore. We still have individuals who are really daring to do that. Susan had you ever made a film before . James this was my first time. Susan how did you go about it . This is an enormous undertaking without any experience. Tell me how you put it all together. James i am from the Financial Services industry. Had beenid, i documenting my story for a long time when i was working for many, many years. I suppose that as this more important piece of the story where an individual who is connected to my fathers story comes into the picture, we had an opportunity to work with a coproducer who was brought in and also very interested in this. The expectation at the beginning was lets sit down and interview them in the sunroom and see what they had to say. We could tease out what that story was. We could see where it went. Later on, that snowballed into interviewing the next person in d. C. , the next person in north carolina. And lo and behold, we were on the borders of thailand and cambodia. It sort of took on a life of its own. Susan was this the first time you had ever been to cambodia . James third time fourth time i would say. I had to learn all the ropes, and my coproducer had done a film prior about lyme disease. So i learned from her about being behind the camera, editing here and there, to directing people on the floor and sending out these sites, it has been a thrill. Susan how did you finance this project . James we had our executive producer who was involved since the beginning. Financed a large portion of it. And then we also had donors, many of them who were my fathers clients. My father was somebody who connected he has his cleaning business. Painting business. He paints a lot of houses in southern connecticut. So he meets a lot of people. And they always ask where he is from. He says he is from cambodia and he is able to make these really delicate and unique and special relationships with people. We were fundraising and we sent it out. They were also very generous and kind to help us. Susan along the way, you created a nonprofit foundation, how does that mix into the production of the film . James this one is done with as a nonprofit. We really wanted this film to be educational. We did not want to do anything in terms of making big bucks. I also had this longerterm goal of creating a museum out of this. It was not just primarily this film, it was whatever would tell the story. I thought the ultimate of that would be somewhere along where along the border where this incident happened. There would be someday where i could go to a museum and show that i help tell the story physically in that location. It would honor and uphold that memory and ensure that it would not be lost. Susan you have graciously agreed to show the cspan audience the majority of your documentary. We will show it in large clips and then have you give the back story along the way. When exactly did you make the trip to cambodia . James that was approximately 2016. Susan you have been working on this project for quite a few years now. James it has been since 2014, july. I have been working on this story since 2010, over 10 years. Susan when you travel to traveled to cambodia, how large was your entourage . James we had a crew of seven or eight people at a time. Susan when you went there, did you have very specific goals in filming . Were you going to let it build as you went along . James that is a great one. We knew where we were going, we had planned it out precisely. We had only three weeks, and only had a limited time and budget. We went straight for the areas where my father was. He had not been back in over 37 years according to the film. It is always uncertain. Although we know the location and where we are going, we dont know what is there in that mountain, we had no idea what we would capture. That was the sort of fun of the filmmaking that was sort of the fun of the film making process. You take what you are given, especially in documentary work. It is your job as artist and creator to rearrange that. It is really provocative to the audience. Susan with that background, lets let the story unroll. We will begin with the first 10 minutes of this documentary, Ghost Mountain. Lets watch. I never thought i would leave the country. In cambodia, you have a great time. You would play pingpong and soccer. Go out with your friends. I was the youngest of eight children. My family was very close. My dream was to have a piece of land, build my own house near a pond and raise my own animals. To have lots of kids. Luckily, cambodia was full of good food. No one was starving before the war. My childhood was living outside of a really modern city. Growing up in pulp pat, it was somewhat growing up in city, it was somewhat of a western life. Her story tells us of many ways. Was turningime, tv from blackandwhite to color, and rock n roll came in. I was exposed to the english language at a very early age. I grew up with mick jagger and the beatles. As well as the cambodian music scene. Then the war came in. The war really stopped life of all means. In cooperation with the armed forces of south vietnam, we will be cleaning out major enemys actuaries on the cambodianvietnam border. This is not an invasion of cambodia. This began years of intensified bombing campaigns from 19701973, the u. S. Dropped more bombs on cambodia then they dropped on japan during the second world war. Equivalent to five hiroshima bombs. Bunseng my family went to the countryside near the thai border. American bombing caused great instability. Enabling the communists mirror move khmer rouge, once a small faction, to gain power. The leader, pol pat envisioned a revolution. He aimed to wipe out everything that was determined to be modern. When the country fell in 1975, the army purged of the city and committed atrocities on an unbelievable scale. Thida when we were forced out of the city, my father told me everything is going to be ok. That was the last time i remember my father. 7 Million People were forced into labor camps. Bunseng they told us this is your place. You have to build your own house and you have to grow your own food to feed yourselves. When my father got sick and i tried to go and visit him, i was captured by the khmer and rouge and tortured for days. 40 it is all mass killing. They take all of our food. So we were starving. No medical care. People were dying from all of that. Between 1975 and 1979, one third of cambodias population was either executed or tortured or starved to death. The genocide would become known as the killing fields. They were killing off all the people from the city and coming close to my village. And they stopped. The reason was, there was a coup penh. In the phnom 1978, comedies the enemies troops invaded phnom penh. We had to make the escape because the chance of surviving in another communist regime was very low for all of us. Bunseng i reunited with my father and my father told me we had to get out of the country because we dont know the situation of the country. We have to get out now. We made our own oxcart, our own wheels from scratch. We prepared this for a threemonth journey. As refugees began to amass on the border of thailand, a group of Frontline International workers scrambled to help. We were disappointed there wasnt more public outcry. This was a major human rights violation. With just us trying to get some attention from the western press on this, the thai press covered it if at all, barely. After this time, the Thai Government believed that many vietnamese agents would penetrate their borders. They were reluctant to allow refugees across into thailand. We did not have a large refugee program. He sought help from mckellen thompson had been working with refugees macallen thompson had been working with refugees in vietnam. We sort of doubled up the problems on the Thai Government with all these very large numbers of people coming in, illegal aliens. It looked like people coming right out of auschwitz. What were they going to do with them . Many died on the way. By the time my father made it to the border, the Thai Government had agreed to allow some survivors to be brought into makeshift border camps. Bunseng thousands of people poured into the border. I remember before they put us in the pen, it would bring the truck to the border and help us get on the truck. This was the first time that we saw electricity. We were so happy. We all threw our hands up in the air, it is freedom. It is freedom. We couldnt believe our luck. Our spirits were high, we were hopeful. We were cut off from the world for four and a half years. Bunseng we make it to the refugee camp. Surrounding it was barbed wire. One of the best times i had with my family. Every day we enjoyed every moment at the refugee camp. We played music, we talked to friends. We talked about the past and about the future. Susan were watching a segment of the documentary, Ghost Mountain. We are with its producer, james taing. He is talking us to us from new york city via zoom. There are so many questions. We dont have lots of time. Let me ask you from a political standpoint, how have you and your father processed u. S. Policy during that time and its impact on cambodia . James one of the portions of the story that we really have to tell is the impact on war policy and Foreign Policy and the collateral damage. What happened in cambodia was an outflow of vietnam, where kissinger and nixon illegally bombed vietnam. The country gets splintered from it and goes into a civil war revolution. For myself and my father, we can only speak of the mixed feelings where he did not know that the u. S. Was bombing. He only knew of pol pot and the regime. He wouldnt know this history until he came to the u. S. For him, he felt the efforts that people made on these refugee camps, he knew they were directly from the International Community and westerners. He has always had some sort of admiration for the u. S. And what they did. I think its a very complicated area. For me i want to continue the , story because it is an important story to tell. Like what are we doing overseas . What are we doing overseas . What places are getting , involved . How often do we do that . We have to not only count the cost, but we have to know the stories of peoples lives that change from this. What did you need in the way information from the cambodian antigovernment to do your filming . James we had to do our normal film licensing there. Every location, you had to ask for rights in the capital city like phnom penh. Four the locations of the refugee camps on the thai border, we had to work with the Border Forces there. We had friends, we were good friends with some of the generals there. We were very fortunate with that. They were able to escort us in and get us they gave us footage that had never been taken in that area. Susan were you surprised that they were welcoming of your telling of the story . James for some part. They themselves know some of the story and they go through there and they do morning patrols and when they find that people from the past are coming there and wanting to film, it sort of got them excited. They were like wow, this region can really become it can get more attention. It can get more people coming here. So that, for them, was personally rewarding on their side. Susan where did you find all of that vintage footage that you used . James a lot of it was donated by the red cross, International Red cross. A lot of news organizations in france had archives as well. The World Hunger Program as well. There are some that ap give us the license for and reused. We used. We were very fortunate. A lot of this time, people went and there were journalists that went there to document. Vietnam was one of the first televised wars. When cambodia had instances there, there were many people who had cameras out. That allowed us to use that and we use that to help tell the story in a dignified manner. Susan the last question before we go back and watch the next segment, how did you find thida . Why did she agree to sit down in front of your camera . James she is a very important character. She had grown up in cambodia to a wellknown diplomat. She was very educated and spoke english. When she came to the u. S. , she had someone write her book. In the early days when i was researching, i had read that book. It was mainly focused on the killing fields of cambodia, the genocide. There was one chapter that goes through everything will detail my father talked about. This was a time when there was nothing i could find about it. I reached out to her on facebook. The world of social media. She said i have to tell the story, i am so thankful for it as well. Anything i needed, she was willing to help with it. Susan lets return to the documentary and see the story unfold. There was resettlement going on. Even then, you are not sure if they would be processed, where they would go, what would become of them. For most of the people, they did not know if they would get resettled. They lived with constant anxiety over this. We also did not know. In fact, we were told that everybody would be pushed back to cambodia any day now. We were up there, constantly, trying to identify those closest to the u. S. And send them off to other camps away from the border. My fathers happy interlude in the border camp was shortlived. Arrived rescue workers in buses and began calling out names. After committing the relief workers to get in just a few thousand refugees, to cut off the rescue and forced a desperate mob back into the camp. Bunseng the next day, those we heard a rumor that those people were forced back to the border. After just one day, they came to us. The thai soldiers came with the bus and said we can go to a third country. Thida they told us youre going to bangkok, a refugee camp in bangkok. There is this mixed feeling of fear and happiness, we dont know. We knew something was going on. All of these buses were carrying refugees away from the camps. Somewhere, we did not know where. We said that we would be killed, we ran to the corner and cried and begged him not to send us. About 2000 of us made a human chain and said we would not get on the bus matter what. They said that they would kill us. We will die here. They grabbed the little babies and the children out of their mothers arms and threw them on the bus. They said get on the bus and they kicked us, they beat us up. We had no choice but to get on the bus. I saw some people, they put their hand up here. They are trying and trying to help us but there is no way to get to them. We were terrified inside the bus. We did not know where they were taking us. We still had hope that they might be telling the truth, that they were taking us to a different camp. The bus drove us 14 hours that night. Until early in the morning. What happened was they had several tens of thousands of refugees scattered in various camps along the cambodianthai border. The Thai Government said they would push these people back to cambodia. They were tired of them, whatever. They gathered together 42,000 of them and took them to this temple on top of a mountain on the border. Then they pushed them down the cliff. Susan did you ever learn whether or not the Thai Military acted alone, or under orders from the government . James from what i heard after the interviews is that the thai kingship was very embarrassed. Many in the Thai Government were somewhat remorseful about what happened. So it did seem like this was an act that was done within the Thai Military. Maybe in the top echelon. That is more likely where it came from but it was not a good thing. It was not a good look for the kingship itself. You sort of see that this remorse where refugees that have survived or gone there were accepted back in afterwards. Particularly if they went through this ordeal. This is a moment for you to talk about the International Aid workers and the role they play in situations like this. What did you come away from this project thinking about the jobs that these people do . James really underappreciated. And thankless, what some of of refugees have done. Each one of these interviews, i was so impressed with the character and the courage that they have to risk it all. They were risking their careers. If you go out to a town in cambodia, these individuals, many times, their lives were at peril. This was a region that was it had lots of different disasters happening. You can really sense that these people committed themselves to a higher cause. I think it is something that really impresses me day to day as well. It is because of them that i can really sit here and speak with them as well. Its a reason i am living here in in the United States. That was one of the big reasons for doing this. They believed the refugee could succeed in the United States if given the chance. Susan before we return to your documentary, you took that same trip with your father and uncle up to the mountain. What was the topography like today as you made that journey . James the region is still very much full of jungles, and there are still landmines there. They are all in that region. You can see it all the time, the skulls and stuff. As we go into the mountain itself you will find that , everything is still there like it was 37 years ago. We went with soldiers and you will see this in the film a little bit in a little bit. They rushed into the path and they scoured to show us what was there. They would pull out of the ground what we thought were leaves but they would be clothes. There would be pots and pans, it shocked me how wellpreserved it was, all of these artifacts were in the jungle. This was only on the top. We were not allowed to go down to the bottom where the landmines were and most of the things had happened. I was really stunned by the whole thing. For me, it was like reliving history. I spent so much time documenting this. Two actually be there in person and have this personal story, it really came alive. Susan the story at this point is 43,000 cambodian refugees at the top of this mountain in thailand where this temple is. At the hands of the Thai Military in 1979 lets watch as we return to the documentary about what happens next. And when we got there, we dont know where we are, and they forced us out at gunpoint and told us where to go. We found out that we are on top of this mountain. James almost four decades later, i accompany my father and uncle to visit what remains of the site of the massacre. Is very difficult to walk through here. We follow the track and at the top of the mountain, the thai soldiers told us that whatever we have, money gold and nice , things and told us that we would not need them down there. Just drop it in the bucket and give it to them. Is they the cliff kicked us down. We had no way to get down, we had to hold the wire to lower ourselves down clip by clip. When we helped the old people, they fell down and crashed into the branches. In agony, they dropped all the things they carried with them, and they abandoned a lot of their belongings there. That night, every five minutes, we heard boom everyone was crying. People appeared with blood all over their bodies, some of their eyeballs falling out. Some with broken skulls. Screaming, looking for their mother and father. Lived through the khmer rouge. I thought that was bad. But that night was the worst night of my life. Boom, boom, boom. I hear the bullets going right by my ears. I saw a little girl in front of me, the bullet hit her head and she collapsed. I hold onto my moms hand and my thought was at least we will die together as a family. They want us to walk on those landmines and then very few survived. It would make a good lesson that we would never come back to thailand. They want to kill as many refugees as they can. Walking 40,000 refugees through the deepest mountain with no water and with guns behind us, that is one way to kill people. They dont have to open fire. The landmines will do the job. The sound of planes flying through. We thought someone would come to help us. 43,000 refugees cry out. For help. But no one comes for us. Everyone was falling. All of us fell to the ground. In a moment, i gained my consciousness. I saw blood on my hand. All of here was broken. My right and my left. This right here is for a blanket, they give it to us. Becauses cover the body they would just drop the bodies and let them sit and rot. When my wife and daughter died, we could not take the bodies with us, i was injured, i could not walk. My arm was hit by a landmine. My nephew carried me, put me on a rice bag hammock carried me , and took a month with no food. At the place where my wife was struck by landmines, 14 people died. The strong men that carried rise and carried supplies ran water to cook rice and other things. Then the landmines exploded. When it exploded, they all died. Foodeople that didnt have ran to grab the rice off of the bloody bodies. Just to have something to eat. We had to wash the blood off of off the rice and cook it just to have something to eat. Bunseng thousands of refugees passed through here. 30,000 lost their lives. This is all they left behind. I lived through pol pot for almost four years. I was detained, put in a concentration camp and tortured. To live through that time was worse than you could even imagine. After 30 something years, i still have nightmares night after night. Somehow, that nightmare never goes away. Susan we are just watching your documentary, Ghost Mountain about your father and his survival, the story of massacre and survival. The death toll was 13,000 but what was shocking was something was that so many people survived that assault. How do you think they did that . James that casualty rate is something the cia came up with but we are not completely sure. I dont know if they were as well. I dont know if that was a fair estimate of what happened out there. As for how people survived, it was incredible. Many people would be there for days and weeks at a time trying to survive on whatever was there. You heard the story of people picking up the rice, there were people who were finding anything, scouring for food. As the refugees made their way down to the bottom, they found enemy soldiers at the end of the minefield. In order to help some of the refugees get out, my father was one of them. There were also a series of other refugees that were still out there that rescuers and state department had to go out and negotiate rescue out for them as well. It is just incredible. To be in that type of forest with little provision and water is something that was just such a limited supply. My uncle told me that he had buckets of water that he had carried from the bottom river to the top. People were giving him gold for just a bucket of water. All of their life savings. It was really desperate times. It was huge despair. People were doing anything to survive just one more day. Susan the thing about watching that and knowing that is your father that youre standing next to, i am sure that everyone on the film crew was affected by the emotional experience. What was it like for you as a son, watching the pain of your father living through that . James to see my father go through that and really dredge up the demons of his past, to i felt a lot of admiration and courage for what he did, to carry the burden of the story for decades and decades and then to go out there and confront it in thailand and cambodia in front of the camera. I have been left in awe of my father and the bravery it took to tell the story. I give him a lot of props for that. Living through it is one thing but to come from a society and a culture that is honor and shame and many of the cambodian survivors have decided to not talk about it, to stuff it away, to move on, my father took a different approach. He has dealt with it and managed it in a different way. I have seen my father in a different light because of all of that. Susan we will return to a final portion of the documentary, Ghost Mountain where bunseng taing makes his way to the United States for a new life as a cambodian refugee. Bunseng my father and i walked through the jungle for three months. When we got to a small city my father said you have to leave and escape again. I said how can i escape again after all we lived through and been through . My father said you are so young, you still have opportunity. It is not fair to be here. I said what about you . He said just leave. So i was really upset when he wanted me to leave him. I left him without saying goodbye to him. We escaped back into thailand three months later, fortunately, this time i was rescued. The person that rescued me put me in a minivan and then the minivan drove away from that campsite. I broke down. I never cried that hard in my life that i was saved. In the months later, i received a letter from my brothers. My father had passed away. This time, they took me to a legal refugee camp. When we reached there, we celebrated. Now we are legal refugees. To me, that was a gift. To me, that was a second life. So i made it. Bunseng today, i am a painter. I have more than i can imagine. I became a painter because i am able to travel to different places and meet different people. I can sit back and look at the work that i have done and take pride in what i did. One thing that i wished for for many years was to be able to say thank you to the people that saved me. I did not know your name. James one day, while painting a house, that which came true. In the seed for this film was sown. It turned out that the homeowner was renovating the home for his stepfather, bob. He came into the room and he introduced me to bunseng. I said that is the man that i have been looking for for all of these years. I met my hero. My father, mother, uncles and aunts have come a long way from the killing fields. While they take pride in passing on their culture, they are most proud to call themselves american. Bunseng when i am in cambodia, i talked to a lot of young people and i will often ask them if they heard about the refugees on mountain. Nine out of 10, they dont know about it, they never heard about it. All of those educated people were killed and the country just started over again now. It will take a long time to catch up with all the world. Susan did your relationship with your father change as a result of this project . James yes, i got to see my father in a different light. I have grown closer with him and i really see him as more than the father that i saw growing up. Now i see someone who not only survived it is so much more, it is about the concentration camps and this massacre and all of that. He is more than a superhero for me. He is all of this combined. I take great strength in all of the things he has done for me growing up, but also what hes done now, which is to tell the story, on behalf of myself and all of the people who survived as well. Susan the cambodian diaspora in the United States is up to about 3000 people. You said that many people dont really know their own history. What do you want to do with this project . How do you want to go forward . James i want to continue sharing this and showing it with the Southeast Asian community, cambodia as well. For many of the youth who have parents who survived through this, they dont know anything. Their parents are really mum about it. I hope to keep showing this to both the west coast and the east coast. We have our facebook and instagram as well. Susan do you plan to show it in thailand and cambodia . James at some point. A lot of things are up in the air with covid. And all the restrictions in travel. We intended the whole time to be able to take it around in due time. Susan you told me when we were talking beforehand, you were talking about making a museum. Tell me your hopes for that. James right now, it is we have seen areas along this mountainside where there could be a museum placed there. It would be something that would take the things that are there in the mountains and really showcase it for people. It is very dangerous. The rock outcroppings are very steep. Maybe the museum would function as a guided tour to show what it would be like to refugee back then. Whether it is going down the staircase, it would be this interactive type of experience and we would also curate things from that site. That will be a longrange project of mine. I will continue to kick it around in my head and see what comes to light of it one of these days. Susan we have one minute left. Did you ever envisioned back in 2010 that this would change her change your life so much . Im not sure what i was thinking back then. I really just wanted to tell the in as manyet it places as possible. I have been really happy with the reception and the people who have been able to see it so far. Whether it continues to change my life i have taken great gratitude, it helped me understand my history. It helped me to rub shoulders with people of high esteem, these refugees, rescue workers. I hope to take part in that and really carry that forward with me and share that with others as well. Susan the documentary is called Ghost Mountain. James taing is the coproducer of it. It is about his father and the cambodian refugees that survived the killing fields in 1979. Thank you so much for spending an hour with cspan. James thank you so much, my team and i appreciate all of this. All q a programs are available on our website or as a podcast at cspan. Org. The Atlantic Council hosts a discussion on monday on u. S. Relations with russia. Cspan liven coverage on cspan. British Prime Minister or johnson answered questions from members of commons virtually because he is selfisolating at home after coming in contact with someone who tested positive for covid19
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