Coming to America

In a rundown refugee apartment complex a new world city is taking shape, and one teenage girl is at the center of it.

By Eric Scigliano

Helber (in the pink shirt) and her mother (far left) with her grandmother, aunts, uncles, and cousins at the camp in Thailand, just before departing for Seattle.

But the idyll did not last. Thirty years ago, when Helber’s parents were her age, the long-running war between Burma’s military regime and breakaway Karens—who’d fought since 1948 for the freedom they believe they were promised when Burma gained independence—reached Kwae Bu. “The Burmese army came to all the villages in the forest and burned them,” says Helber, translating for her parents. “When they find Karen people, they think they are all in the army and shoot them.” The soldiers press-ganged villagers to serve as porters and human minesweepers on the front lines. They killed Peh Buh’s sister and burned their home.

Helber’s parents joined some 150,000 other refugees in makeshift camps along the Thai border, where Helber and her brothers were born. Life there, the only life Helber knew, did not seem so bad. She had her friends, some from the same village. She played on a volleyball team, though the other girls were taller than she. And she helped support her family, taking the food her mom made—banana flowers and seasoned vegetables folded in rice and wrapped in banana leaves—to sell at school: “My mom was really good cook. All the kids wanted it.” On Saturdays she would peddle Mom’s cooking around the camp. Sundays were for church.

Still, camp life was limbo punctuated by occasional terror. Sometimes the Burmese army just across the border would shell the camp, and Helber and the others would flee into the jungle. Young as she was, she recalls the excitement more than the fear; it was fun to huddle with your parents while the bombs fell.

Helber studied hard, taking nine classes when she was in fifth grade and learning rudimentary English though she had no assurance she would ever get to use it. Many other kids, seeing no other horizon beyond camp life, did not bother. They could attend school but not college; the camp was a dead end. The Thai government, wary of attracting more refugees and unwilling to accept them as immigrants, did not let them work or travel outside the camp.

Helber’s father, Peh Bu, a trim, wiry man with a shy smile, found work cutting trees for a Thai logging operator, but it was risky business. One day he was out gathering palm fronds to cover their roof. The Thai soldiers thought he was poaching timber. They smashed his face with a rifle butt—he shows the scar above his left eye—and slashed his back with a knife.

Next: Helber’s family arrives in America, and Helber helps other refugees assimilate.

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Published: July 2009