LIFT THE LAMP

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF CLARA JEFFERY

AFTER THE CAMBODIAN genocide began in 1975, my mom started taping pictures and headlines to our dining room wall. Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and photos of the killing fields are what I remember about those meals. “We have to do something,” she said.

She started sponsoring refugees when I was maybe nine. We were clueless white people. There was no real preexisting Cambodian community in the Washington, DC, area. Our first refugee’s husband and baby had been killed. Something about a helicopter. She lived with us for two years, with no one to talk to in her native