Karline Bird – Olympia Author Making Stories Known

Local author, Karline Bird, published "Bending with the Wind," a story about Cambodian refugees who settled in Olympia.
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By Doris Faltys

Local author, Karline Bird, published “Bending with the Wind,” a story about Cambodian refugees who settled in Olympia.

Bending with the Wind: Memoir of a Cambodian Couple’s Escape to America, by Bounchoeurn Sao and Diyana D. Sao, as told to Karline F. Bird, was recently released by McFarland & Company, Inc. On November 28, the trio will be speaking at the Olympia Timberland Library.  More information can be found here.

The book follows the separate lives of Bounchoeurn and Diyana D. Sao from a young age growing up in and escaping from Cambodia, meeting in a refugee camp, and their eventual settling in Olympia, WA.   I meet with Karline Bird at her home in a quiet, rural neighborhood. Sitting in her dining room, we begin our chat.  How and why Karline Bird, a retired Olympia School District teacher, created the opportunity to put her talent and energy into making this book happen is an interesting story in itself.  Karline has thought out her role in this story often and tells it start to finish with only a few interruptions for my questions.

“My husband Rick Bird and I met,” she begins, “in the summer of 1967 between our junior and senior years of college at a Peace Corps training program. The training, held at Northern Illinois University,” she adds, “was for Teaching English as a Foreign Language in Thailand. We studied the Thai language, culture, TEFL methods, and fell in love.  A year later we had finished our degrees, completed our Peace Corps training, and married. It was August of 1968, and we headed out to our assignment.  Rick and I spent the next two years teaching English to Thai high school students in the provincial capital of Chiang Rai, in Chiang Rai, Thailand, the northernmost province bordering Laos and Burma.

“After our Peace Corps service was over,” she continues, “we returned to the United State to attend graduate school and start our family, finally settling in Olympia to work in the Olympia School District.  It was 1973.  Several years later after the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh, Washington Governor Dan Evans opened the doors to welcome the Southeast Asian refugees to our state.  At the start of the new school year, in the fall of 1979, the Olympia School District expected to have 18 refugee students enrolled.  On the first day of class, however, the district discovered 135 refugee students.  Because of our Peace Corps experiences in Thailand with TEFL and speaking the Thai language, Rick became the ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher at Garfield Elementary School where the vast majority of the students were enrolling.   I was hired to teach ESL at Jefferson Middle School, where a small number of Cambodian, Lao, and Vietnamese students had enrolled.  Rick was also made director of the district’s ESL program.  The OSD had already hired a Vietnamese teacher to work with the Vietnamese students, but it soon became apparent that we needed people who could work with the Lao and Cambodian students.”

“With this in mind, Rick drove to St. John’s Episcopal Church to visit the adult English language classes.  Arriving just as the men were outside taking a break, he stood on the bumper of his car and shouted, ‘Is there anyone here who can speak Cambodian, Lao, Thai, and English?’  One man hesitantly raised his hand.  ‘You’re hired,’ Rick announced….thus began our friendship with Bounchoeurn Sao.  Since that time, Bounchoeurn worked not only with the refugee students in elementary, middle, and high school, as well as translating for the district, but he also worked with translations for the local hospitals, doctors, and law enforcement whenever needed.”

Karline relates that she did not initially think of the idea to tell the story of Bounchoeurn and his wife Diyana’s escape from Cambodia.  “What really got me going,” she tells me, “was seeing the movie The Killing Fields.

“At the time when the movie came out,” she continues, “I was teaching at Jefferson Middle School and Bounchoeurn was my educational assistant.” Karline says she looked over her classroom and wondered, “How did they all survive and come to be in my classroom?”  The movie had affected her deeply.  In a book edited by Dith Pran, Karline read Mr. Pran’s call that each person tell his story as a way to make sure that this does not happen again.  (It is estimated that as many as two million Cambodians died during the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979.)  Karline agrees, “All the stories need to be told.”

Karline considers herself among those lucky enough to know Bounchoeurn and Bounriem (Diyana) Sao.  She tells me, “It was in the early 80’s when I talked to Bounchoeurn about telling his story.  He agreed, but I told him, ‘I can’t do it until I retire.’  We saw each other a lot.  Bounchoeurn, his wife, and their children were part of our extended family, often spending Fourth of July, Christmas Eve, and other family gatherings at our home.”

After taking leaves of absence from the Olympia School District, Karline and Rick worked at Shanghai American School in China for three years.  “When I came back from China,” she states, “I asked Bounchoeurn if he was ready to tell his story.  He was.  I did not write to make money.  I wrote to tell the story.  Dith Pran’s words spoke to me.  One thing I had to think about was how much do the readers know about Cambodia in the 50’s and 60’s.  For my husband and I, after living in Thailand, visiting Cambodia, being in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and working with refugee kids, we could not assume that everyone here in the U.S. has the same background of knowledge.”

Bending with the Wind is Karline Bird’s first book.  It can be ordered online or found at the public library.  The story of Bounchoeurn and Diyana D. Sao, and Diyana’s brother Phath’s journey, is very interesting, informative, and well told.  It is an inspiring story recounting the dire circumstances and obstacles these individuals were able to overcome.  Karline says that Bounchoeurn is, “The kindest, sweetest man; when you know what he has been through, he doesn’t come across as a soldier.”  He has spent the last 28 years as an educator and interpreter for Cambodian and Lao refugees in Olympia, Washington and has been honored by two governors.   Bounchoeurn also works for his wife Diyana D. Sao (born Bounriem), who is the owner and manager of Sao Janitorial Services, a successful janitorial business here in Olympia, Washington.

“Will you write another book,” I ask?  “My intent was to do a story of a Lao family or a Vietnamese family,” she responds.  “But I now have plans to tell the story of Susan Zhang, a woman we worked with in Shanghai, who was a member of the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China.”  Karline and Susan are communicating through Facebook, Skype, and email.  In January of 2013, they will spend a week together in Singapore, where Ms. Zhang works, and begin the interview process.  I look forward to reading and learning more about the Cultural Revolution through her next book, and other stories I expect Karline Bird will compile in the coming years.

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