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Weekend People Supplement

By The Associated Press

OR refugee tells of life in slave labor camp

By GOSIA WOZNIACKA

The Oregonian

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- For more than 30 years, Kilong Ung, a Portland software engineer, struggled with haunting memories of nearly starving in a slave labor camp.

Then there were the deaths from exhaustion of his father, mother and little sister, and the extinguishing of 1.7 million other Cambodians by starvation, disease, torture and execution under Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime.

Ung, then a boy, survived and came to the United States as a refugee, reaching the pinnacles of the American Dream: a Reed College education, graduate school, and lucrative jobs in the corporate world. But despite the successes, he could not forget.

He dreamed of creating a way to share the horrific past with his two Oregon-born children. And he wanted to honor the people who didn't survive, as well as those who helped him make it in life.

Ung decided to write a book, to simultaneously get rid of the memories and preserve them. This summer, he self-published his memoir, "Golden Leaf, a Khmer Rouge Genocide Survivor."

But the book is only a means to an end, the 49-year-old Ung said. He wants his memoir to "leverage the past" and help Cambodia. The goal: to use some of the proceeds from the book to build a school in his country of his birth. He plans to name the school "Golden Leaf."

After surviving a slave labor camp under Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime, Kilong Ung became a refugee in a camp in Thailand. He came to Portland in 1980. The book describes the cruel, dirty, hunger-filled life inside a labor camp. Ung buries his grandmother, catches and eats a rat, cradles his emaciated mother, and is arrested and degraded for stealing a coconut.

When the Vietnamese drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, Ung fled Cambodia by foot to Thailand with his older sister and her boyfriend. They eventually settled in California as refugees, and within a year moved to Oregon.

Because of his experiences, Ung writes that he saw himself as "a leaf at the mercy of the wind." But while other "leaves" were crushed, he persevered and became a "golden leaf."

What sets Ung apart from fellow survivors, said Mardine Mao, president of the Cambodian-American Community of Oregon (CACO), is not just perseverance, but also a vision to transform past suffering into something positive.

"I've lost so much," Ung said, "and if I do nothing with the past, all that has happened would have happened for nothing."

Area Rotary clubs are also interested in supporting the project, said Gene Horton, a member of the Hillsboro Rotary Club, who plans to help Ung raise funds.

"I'm quite impressed with Kilong," Horton said. "He's come so far; it's an amazing story. He's forceful and dedicated enough to make this idea happen."

Ung's other hope is to inspire Oregon's Cambodian community. He has served as a Cambodian language teacher, youth mentor, and past president of CACO. Under his leadership, the organization grew and formed support groups for youth, women, and elderly, a heritage banquet, and a public forum to discuss the Khmer Rouge tribunal, among other programs.

"Many Cambodians would rather forget the past, because it's too painful to relieve the memory. Kilong found the courage to speak up," Mao said. "His work is a great example that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. It provides an inspiration to those of us that may want to share similar stories."

But perhaps Ung's biggest contribution is guiding fellow refugees into the midst of the American mainstream. He wants to serve as a bridge between the Cambodian and American communities, Ung said. His higher education, active participation in the Rotary club and the Royal Rosarians, fluent English and other achievements can be a model of success.

In the end, Ung's story is a deposition against the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge.

"A book becomes evidence," Ung said. "It becomes a legacy, a document."

His final message is of forgiveness and recovery. Ung is converting his sorrow into action: his family has put down roots in Oregon. Against all odds, "a leaf at the mercy of the wind... became a tree."

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Information from: The Oregonian, http://www.oregonlive.com

Hawai'i teen Fujikawa goes to school

By DOUG FERGUSON

AP Golf Writer

ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida (AP) -- Nothing has come easily to Tadd Fujikawa.

He started the year by going through a Monday qualifier to get in the Sony Open, where he shot a 62 in the third round to give himself a chance at becoming the U.S. PGA Tour's youngest winner. He ends the year by making his first foray into Q-school, where he must get through 252 holes over three stages to earn his card.

Along the way, Fujikawa achieved two milestones that should help him keep it all in perspective.

He got his driver's license in April. Two months later, he graduated from Moanalua High School in Honolulu.

"It was nice to be done with that," he said.

Some might equate Q-school with his first job interview, although Fujikawa is not the typical qualifier. It has been more than two years and two dozen tournaments since the 18-year-old turned pro.

Part of him is in a rush to get to where he wants to go. Another part of him knows the journey is just beginning.

"It's really hard to say if I am where I expected myself to be," Fujikawa said after arriving at St. Johns Golf & Country Club in St. Augustine, where his 72-hole exam starts on Wednesday against a field of 70 players. "I'm very pleased with what I've done thus far. But I also wish I could have done more."

Fujikawa is among more than 900 players who have signed up for the first stage of Q-school, which will be played out over the next two weeks at 13 sites. That group includes the son of Jack Nicklaus (Gary Nicklaus), the grandson of Arnold Palmer (Sam Saunders) and Rickie Fowler, who tied for seventh last week in Las Vegas in his first U.S. PGA Tour start as a pro.

For a teenager fresh out of high school, the pressure to perform is nothing new to Fujikawa.

At only 5-foot-1 (1.55 meters), he got his first taste of the big-time when he was 15 and competed at Winged Foot in 2006 as the youngest player to qualify for the U.S. Open. Six months later, he became the youngest player in 50 years to make the cut on the U.S. PGA Tour when he shot 66 in the second round of the Sony Open.

The kid knows all about disappointment, too.

He still had two years left in high school when he turned pro in the summer of 2007. Over the next year, he missed the cut 10 straight times on four tours before he finally made it to the weekend of a sanctioned tournament when he tied for 48th in Japan. Fujikawa didn't earn his first U.S. PGA Tour check until this year at the Sony Open.

The biggest test now is tempering expectations.

Fujikawa made three out of four cuts on the tour this year. He tied for 15th on the Nationwide Tour, then flew to Japan and tied for 31st without having time to play a practice round.

Odds are stacked against anyone making it through all three stages of Q-school. Of more than 1,200 players who signed up last year, only eight made it through three stages, the youngest of which was 24.

"Basically what I told him was, 'We're not going to evaluate you until you're 21 or 22,"' said Todd Anderson, the Sea Island swing coach who has been working with Fujikawa for the last few years. "What I've tried to stay away from is, 'You've got to be here by this time.' I've told him to figure out what other players are doing and see how you stack up. Have fun and see how good you can get.

"He's really hard on himself. He has high expectations. And the last thing I want to do is put more on him."

In February, Fujikawa sat in a courtroom as his father pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree drug trafficking. Derrick Fujikawa, who said that he hid his addiction from his family for years, received a 10-year sentence in August. The judge set a one-year minimum sentence because of the father's rehabilitation since the arrest.

"He's doing a lot better with his life, and I'm real happy for him," Fujikawa said. "I'm not worried about that anymore."

His main concern at the moment is being among the 20 or so players who advance from the first stage. Fujikawa has revamped his swing in hopes of more consistent ball flight. He feels as though his game is close.

Being close, though, is all relative.

"Of course, I always want to do well," Fujikawa said. "But right now is not as important as two or three years down the road."

MD mom is small woman, large eater

By STEVE HENDRIX

The Washington Post

GERMANTOWN, Md. (AP) -- Juliet Lee's first bite of the day is a doozy. With elegant little fingers, she jams half a beefsteak tomato into a mouth that looks better sized for an olive on a toothpick. Only by leaning over does she spare her satin blouse from a jet of seedy juice.

And this isn't even for money.

"I get hungry in the evening time," said Lee. At least, that's what it sounds like through the garble of tomato pulp. "I could eat 20 tomatoes."

She's not exaggerating. Standing just over 5 feet tall and weighing slightly over 100 pounds, Lee has a quirk for which she is becoming increasingly famous: being a diminutive beauty with the appetite of a linebacker.

Lee, a 44-year-old Germantown mother of two and a busy hair salon owner, is also the 11th-highest-ranked professional competitive eater in the world. This yoga-practicing suburbanite, who wears size zero jeans and shops the junior racks at Kohl's, has eaten, for example, 34 hot dogs, 48 tamales, 22 pork barbecue sandwiches and nearly five dozen miniature hamburgers. All within minutes.

"I've always been able to eat more than anybody else," Lee said in an accent still heavy with the Mandarin of her native northwest China.

On the other side of Lee's Germantown kitchen, her husband, Joey Callow, is chopping vegetables and shaking his head. Her voracious ways are all too familiar to him.

"This is why it's so hard to cook," he calls out as another tomato evaporates. "You cut it, and it just goes away."

The two fix dinner together nearly every night, often with the help of their two teenage daughters. As Callow rinses and chops for tonight's menu of asparagus omelets, salad and shrimp stir-fry, Lee brings in end-of-the-season produce from the backyard garden, a few more tomatoes, the year's last green onion (which Lee rinses, rolls into a ball and pops, whole, into her mouth).

It's a scene domestic and normal, but it also highlights Lee's offbeat metabolism: At 5:30 p.m., this is her first food of the day. Since she was a student at Nanjing University keen to make more time for the library, she has been condensing all her meals into one big one at the end of the day.

Lee thought of her daily binging three years ago when she heard about a local pizza-eating contest. She had never heard of competitive eating, but the concept spoke to her.

"I thought, 'I can do that,' " she said, cutting shiitake mushrooms. "That's me. I love to eat and love to compete. It's natural, like a cat knows he can jump from the top of the stairs."

Her family was supportive but quietly skeptical as Lee bellied up to the big table at Greenbelt Three Brothers Pizza in August 2006. "We were debating her odds, and my daughter said, 'What's between zero and nothing at all?' " Callow recalls. But by the time Lee stopped working her jaws, theirs had dropped. She won, downing 11 slices in 10 minutes, beating men more than twice her weight and setting an amateur record.

"I just had no idea," Callow said. He is now her manager, making the arrangements for about a dozen stops on the pro circuit a year. She's been averaging $5,000 in prize money a year, he said, a little more than enough to cover their travel expenses. "She's not getting rich," he said.

Lee, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1992 after working as a college chemistry teacher, still eats mostly seafood and vegetables. She shops mostly at the Asian market in Germantown. (Strangely, Lee is not the only tiny Asian woman in this area renowned for eating well above her weight class. Sonya Thomas, who was born in South Korea and lives in Alexandria, is nicknamed "The Black Widow" for her ability to eat more than men five or six times her size.)

On stage, many of the foods Lee faces are new to her. Not that it matters.

Sitting down last Memorial Day at a seafood restaurant in Island Park, N.Y., she had never eaten a cherrystone clam. When she stood up six minutes later, she had eaten 23 dozen of them, a world record.

Soon after her Greenbelt win, Lee was on the Krystal Burger and Nathan's Hot Dogs circuits, eating with the big guys on national television.

Right now, she is getting ready for her next major event, a meatball-eating contest Nov. 8 in Las Vegas. But Lee pointedly said she is not getting ready. She doesn't do test runs or drink stomach-stretching amounts of water or train in any way for an eating outing.

"If I ever start training, they going to be really scared of me," she said.

------

Information from: The Washington Post,

http://www.washingtonpost.com

Texas priest able to forgive after brutal stabbing

By JAIME POWELL

Corpus Christi Caller-Times

SINTON, Texas (AP) -- Kicked, beaten and stabbed nearly 20 times. Last rites twice in a single day. Still, the Rev. Shaji Varghese harbors no anger toward his attacker.

Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church could have been the scene of his death almost five months ago. Instead, it's where he is living one of the most important lessons in the Bible -- forgiveness.

"I don't take this incident as something very bad because this incident taught me so many things," Varghese said. "It made my vocation more stronger, my loyalty toward God more stronger. I was made more sure that my God is such a caring one. We are not perfect. It made me know that God answers to the prayers and God supports."

That May 8 morning, David Rodriguez approached Varghese, 42, following Mass asking him to hear his confession. Rodriguez, who has a mentally troubled past, didn't say anything to hint that anything was amiss, Varghese said. The priest heard the confession.

Minutes later, Varghese was found about 100 yards from the side doorway of the church soaked in his own blood. Rodriguez was arrested about an hour later.

"I was thinking my time was almost over," Varghese said. "I went to sleep, but on the third day I started seeing people. It was a glad thing to come back to that."

Rodriguez has remained in the San Patricio County Jail since the stabbing, charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He is undergoing psychiatric evaluations to determine whether he is competent to stand trial, his attorney David Stith said.

The response from Varghese's parishioners was immediate -- prayer.

"They were stunned," Varghese said. "And they were scared. I started knowing the community when it happened. This is an incident that brought the community together to pray for a special cause -- that is my life. They started working together."

Guadalupe Aguilar, 71, who attends Mass daily at the church, remembers praying for the priest in front of the church.

When Varghese, a native of Kerala, India, started at the church about 11/2 years before the stabbing, some parishioners in the predominantly Hispanic congregation had a little trouble understanding him Aguilar said that after Varghese was stabbed, the membership was all behind the priest, he said.

"The faith is the same no matter what language you speak or what country you are from," Aguilar said. "It's about adoring and praising God."

Varghese believes their prayers saved his life.

"So many thought I was going to die because of the serious wounds," Varghese said. "The kidney, both sides of my artery, my neck, my cheek, my chest ... It was prayer. I believe prayers saved me."

While Varghese has been on the mend, on Saturdays and Sundays parishioners have had regular get-togethers with their priest to give thanks that Varghese survived, Aguilar said.

"We need to let him know how much we would have missed him and how thankful we are," he said.

The stabbing left its imprint on the small town church.

Altar boys Anthony Sanchez, 14, and Andrew Sanchez, 12, recalled that their grandfather was one of the first on the scene following the stabbing. As they huddled in the doorway Friday watching the rain after Mass, they said it was their first glimpse of real violence.

Altar boy Joseph Mejias, 8, standing in the shadow of his father Mike Mejias' legs, nodded solemnly when asked if he remembered that day.

Mejias said his son was inconsolable after the stabbing.

"He took it so hard," Mejias said. "He loves Father Shaji. He cried a lot."

While Varghese was in the hospital, Mejias and his son visited, though the boy did not get to see the priest because he was still in bad shape.

Other priests who gathered at the hospital took the boy, who had been crying nonstop for three days, under their wing, Mejias said. After they spoke to him, Joseph quit crying, Mejias said.

Explaining the stabbing to a third-grader was tough, he said.

"I just explained life to him," Mejias said. "I told him that some people do bad things in the world."

While Joseph avoids talking about what happened to Father Shaji, he lights up over the priest's recovery.

"He makes me feel happy," Joseph said.

Joseph's father hasn't yet found forgiveness for Varghese's attacker or the stabbing's impact on his son.

"It's human nature not to, but of course I'm going to try because it is the right thing to do."

Varghese chalks up his capacity for forgiveness to his upbringing and more importantly his faith.

He went home to India in August for a month and spent time with his mother, seven brothers and sisters and 14 nieces and nephews. During a visit to his brother's house, Varghese noticed a picture of Rodriguez in the family's prayer room.

"I asked, 'Why do you keep it here,' and my sister-in-law told me, 'While we were praying for you, we were praying for him also,"' Varghese said.

His long trip back to Sinton left plenty of time for reflection. He thought about things such as his parish, his vegetable garden and the drought. He doesn't think about the attack all the time.

But day-to-day actions such as shaving, which irritates the scars on his neck, or stretching, which pulls the scars on his torso, are reminders.

"I have pain here and there," he said, pointing at knife scars on his neck.

"But here," he said, pointing to his heart, "I'm not angry at him. In my heart there is nothing other than forgiveness. There is still a scary event in my mind. And it may be months or years before it goes away. But I'm not angry."

Varghese has not visited Rodriguez in jail, though he said he may as he heals more. He regularly asks parishioners who work at the jail how Rodriguez is doing.

"I pray for him," Varghese said. "God bless, God forgive David."

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