His Story

Mardi Seng was ten when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh. His father, Im Kao, a junior-high-school teacher who had been drafted into the Lon Nol army, had come home wounded only two weeks earlier after eleven months under siege. His mother, Chen Id Seng, was a tailor carrying a five-month-old baby. With his grandparents and aunts, the family joined the sea of people forced out of the capital. Because they were from the city, they were labelled “New People” — educated, urban, and therefore suspect.

Within days the new regime called on teachers, former officials and the educated to come forward and help “rebuild” the nation. Mardi's father answered the call. He never returned. Mardi has written that his father died so that his family might live.

After walking ninety miles, the family reached his paternal grandparents' village in November 1975. For a few months there was quiet. Then came the communal dining halls, the sixteen-hour days, the permits needed to walk to the next village, and the nights when “New People” disappeared. As a boy tending water buffalo, Mardi stumbled into a freshly dug pit while chasing a frog; two days later it was a mass grave.

In January 1978 the family was told they would be taken that night. His great-grandmother died of grief the same evening. Instead of execution they were marched two hours in the dark to a prison compound, chained by the legs, and held for five months among the graves. In late June 1978, guards led the three eldest boys away on a pretext. When they returned the next morning, their mother was gone. Mardi's younger sister Theary and youngest brother Dar had cried through the night looking for her.

In January 1979 the regime collapsed. Their maternal grandmother — to whom the five siblings have dedicated their story — led the family across the border into Thailand. They spent a year and a half in refugee camps.

Sponsored by Millbrook Christian Reformed Church, the family arrived in Grand Rapids. None of the younger children spoke English. Within a few years they were placing in the city spelling bee, graduating near the top of their classes and being mentioned in the U.S. Congress. Mardi went on to Calvin College and Northeastern University, examined banks for the Comptroller of the Currency, and audited a major bank — always, in his own words, so that professional Cambodian-Americans like him could one day go back and help rebuild Cambodia.

In September 1994, sitting in a screening room at Auschwitz, Mardi heard the film end with the words “never again” and wept. If the world had truly meant those words, he has said, his parents would still be alive. They became his lifelong reminder that the defence of liberty is never finished.

After nearly three decades in America he returned to Cambodia and entered politics — treasurer and campaign chief of the Sam Rainsy Party, senator, anti-corruption commission secretary, treasurer of the Candlelight Party, and today President of the Khmer Will Party, Senator, and Chairperson of CALD. His sister Theary, a Georgetown- and Michigan-educated lawyer, was jailed in 2022 for criticising the government online. He describes democracy as the air that we breathe, and says his optimism is the kind that must be backed by competence and hard work. He has not stopped.