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Portraits
Lina Boun / From the killing fields to the berry patch, she's on a new path
Between the long, narrow rows of blueberry bushes, Lina Boun is having lunch and talking with her mother and father. Several more hours of picking are ahead of them, so it's not long before they grab their buckets and again start inching down the rows of the Mercer Slough Blueberry Farm in Bellevue. Lina and her mother, Chantha, chat across the dense foliage as they go, and every so often, burst into giggles. The Boun family moved from Cambodia to Seattle about a year ago. In July, Lina worked six days a week at the blueberry farm and cleaned office buildings on the seventh. Evenings, she'd head for English classes at Seattle Community College. Many Cambodians come to work in the fields for summer harvest. Bill Pace, who supervises the Mercer Slough farm's harvest and sales, says some come only for an afternoon; others work for several days or weeks. Pace says the Bellevue Cambodians are meticulous berry pickers and seldom bruise the tender fruit. But just like the berries, he says, some of the workers are very sensitive. "I think it comes from their experience in their country. It's just my feeling." Washington is home to 15,000 Cambodians. Around 8,000 live in the greater Seattle area, and 3,000 in Tacoma, says Chip Tan of the Asian Counseling and Referral Service. Eighty-five percent of Washington's Cambodian refugees fled between 1979 and 1992, escaping the genocidal regime of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge and its devastating aftermath. Refugees who've established themselves in America are now sponsoring their family members to relocate from Cambodia, where 40 percent of the population still live below the poverty line. Lina, who's 20, has come here to work. From the berry fields, she was headed back to Nintendo and a job testing parts. Mostly, she looks forward to school.
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