I Am Oum Ry: A Champion Kickboxer's Story of Surviving the Cambodian Genocide and Discovering Peace - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Zochada Tat is Oum Ry’s daughter, an author, and kickboxing instructor. She took her first steps in the ring at Long Beach Kickboxing and has trained with him throughout her life. She traveled with him to Cambodia in February 2022 and helped translate his oral history.

Addi Somekh is an author and an instructor of critical thinking at University of California Santa Cruz.

Oum Ry, born in Central Cambodia in 1944, was an international kickboxing champion for many years. From 1963 to 1975, Ry fought over 300 times, never getting knocked out and winning 250 matches, and became one of the most famous people in his country. This was all before the Cambodian genocide, of which most of his family were victims. He was persecuted, starved, recruited by rebel factions as a bodyguard, and after the war fled to the border of Thailand, where he lived in the infamous 007 refugee camp. In December 1980, his immigration was sponsored by an American pastor and he came to the Chicago area, where he raised a family and learnt English by working as a janitor in a hotel. In 1987, he founded Long Beach Kickboxing, one of the oldest kickboxing gyms in the United States. His gym has been open 6 days a week for the last 33 years, training several kickboxing champions and keeping countless kids out of gangs. 

Michael G. Vann is a professor of history at California State University, Sacramento, who specializes in Southeast Asia during the era of colonialism and the Cold War. He is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity and his work can be found in Jacobin and The Diplomat.

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CHAPTER 1 – FATHER AND DAUGHTER

As we say goodbye to Long Beach, I can tell by the way my dad is looking out of the window of the car that he is both excited and anxious, mostly anxious. I can't blame him.

Whenever I'd ask my dad about going back to Cambodia, he'd always say he was afraid of flying or he didn't have the money, or he was needed at the gym — I never believed him. I figured it just hurt too much. He had gone back once in 2004 to help a friend with something, but the trip wasn’t a homecoming. He only stayed six days and didn’t try to reconnect with any friends or family. It's fascinating to think that at this point in his life, he has spent more years living in the States than in Cambodia.

As we approach our terminal, it is becoming increasingly more real for my dad. He’s going home for the first time since the end of the war. He plans to meet his son Oum Pee and grandchildren, and a boxer friend who lived through the terrors he also saw. He’s also bringing me, his youngest daughter, and we are going to write about his experiences.

Overwhelmed and exhausted from the hectic environment at Los Angeles International Airport, he looks at me for reassurance and I give him a nod, squeezing his hand in comfort as we walk inside the airplane. Even with fifty-six years between us, he is my best friend, and we are each other's biggest fans.

My father was a champion fighter and one of the most famous people in Cambodia from the late-1960s to the mid-1970s, the years of the cultural renaissance. He’s a master of Pradal Serey, Cambodian kickboxing, and he was everyone's favorite, because despite his small frame, he possessed profound speed, strength, and fearlessness. He was only five-foot-six and one hundred and thirty pounds, but he fought and beat opponents much bigger than him. Over seven years, Oum Ry fought almost three hundred times and was never knocked out. He won over eighty percent of his matches. It is fair to say he was the Muhammad Ali of Cambodia.

But that all ended for him on April 15, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge invaded Phnom Penh and pushed the entire country off the cliff into an abyss of mass executions, diseases, and famine. Of his eight million fellow Cambodians, it is estimated that over the next four years, nearly one quarter of the population died of disease, forced labor, or were killed.

After surviving what is widely considered one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century, Oum Ry moved to the United States in 1980, learned English, started a family, and opened one of the first kickboxing gyms in the West and the first Cambodian gym in America. He's lived in Long Beach, California for the last thirty-four years, home to the world's largest Cambodian community abroad, where he is one of the pillars of the community. Everyone knows Oum Ry, and he is still idolized by those old enough to have seen him in the ring or who love the sport so much that they have heard of his legend.

Few Cambodian survivors tell their stories publicly, though the effects from that nationwide epidemic of violence and chaos are felt rippling through immigrant Cambodian communities.

“It’s up to the individual whether to not they want to tell their story,” says my dad. “I cannot speak for everyone but I can only share what happened to me. I tell people, for I must keep going.”