Samly’s

People always seem to wonder how I came to look and be who I am today. The questions vary in its extremities, but I find them all amusing nonetheless. How do you get that kind of nose if you’re Asian? You look more mixed is your mom or dad white? Why are you not friends with a lot of Asian people like the other Asians are? Why aren’t you married yet? How did you manage to graduate from a four year college at the age of 22? You’re dating a white guy? 6 years? Your family was in the Khmer Rouge? You’re an immigrant…but you don’t even have an accent.

My initial objective for this blog was to let everything about me unravel and let others know how I became who I am today. Who knows, maybe I’ll discover something new about me myself. I’ve never laid it all out there before so this should be interesting. So lets begin by going back, going way back.

I was born in Koh Kong Province of Cambodia on May 8th, 1984. Cambodia is located in Southeast Asia bordering Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. According to the CIA’s study, it’s size is comparable to Oklahoma, slightly smaller. Where I was born was only accessible by boat, it was an island within Cambodia. It’s strange because when I visited Cambodia this past summer we were not able to actually go there because it still is only accessible by boat. You would think that after 22 years there would be an alternative method of transportation but no, not there. Aside from the Capital City and major tourist areas, not much of Cambodia has changed really. It definitely is still a third world country. Poverty is still rampant and the image of young children begging is devastating.

According to my mom, grandma and aunt, I was born in the water. What that means is I was literally born in the lake water that surrounded our home. My uncles had to run back and forth from the well to get fresh water and heat it up which was used to assist in my birth. I am still confused about it because I don’t understand if my mom was just over water or I was actually pushed out in water. I can’t imagine my first exposure to life being under water. Maybe that explains why I couldn’t swim until I was about 12 years old.

Regardless of how I came out, it was obviously a success because I’m here to write about. I was a pretty big deal to my family because I was the first niece, granddaughter, basically grandchild in the family. Technically I am not the first grandchild but my cousin who would be 3 years older than me was born in the United States so they never got to see him be brought into the world. Sadly, I don’t have any pictures from my infant or toddler years because they were destroyed in Cambodia so I don’t really know what I looked like. I can only attempt to visualize what I’ve been told. Apparently I was extremely fair skinned with a really round face. Kind of makes me think of those creepy china dolls.
Anyways, my grandma was the one that named me and she thought of Samly immediately. The definition for Samly is white as cotton. So you see, my name actually means something, it wasn’t just thought up by throwing silverware down the stairs.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 30th, 2007 at 12:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.