Children in Exile: The Story of a Remarkable Family

by TheklaClark (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $6.35

  In 1979 Americans Thekla and John Clark, expatriates living in Italy took on responsibility for a family of Vietnamese refugees. Less than a year later they also offered a home to the survivors of a Cambodian family: Sarry and her three children. Out of this strange multi-cultural household, in a large battered house in the Tuscan countryside, a community emerged. The Du Caus and the Khuls arrived dazed and malnourished, after years of hardship in Vietnamese refugee camps and Pol Pot's chaotic Cambodia. The Clarks gradually began to piece together their adopted families' harrowing stories: of betrayal and torture, of hunger and fear, of the capriciousness and psychological mind games of the Khmer Rouge; of backbreaking work in the rice paddies, of the squalor of refugee camps. This book interweaves the stories of their difficult pasts with an account of their time in Italy, and the rich cultural exchange which resulted: kung fu and Cambodian dancing among the olive trees, the tragi-comic effects of getting used to new conventions and of coming to accept that friendship and love can be familiar and constant. This account give a personal insight into the painful recent history of the Far East, but is also a look at the nature of exile and the way in which people overcome barriers of difference.