The Cham draw on their inner strength

By Paloma Esquivel
January 12, 2009
In the secluded courtyard of a weathered condominium complex, at the dead end of a graffiti-marred Santa Ana street, the Cham are busy preparing a summer feast.

Banana trees grow tall here, shadowing crowded stalks of lemon grass and green onion. Severed bits of a cow slaughtered in conformity with Islamic law fill bright blue plastic tubs. Nearby, women sit cross-legged, chatting and laughing; their strong hands grind fresh ginger in stone mortars.

Centuries ago, the Cham ruled over their own kingdom, known as Champa, along the coastline of what's now Vietnam. They were maritime traders whose first religion was a form of Hinduism, but they later adopted Islam. Today they are a people without a homeland, their numbers a few hundred thousand. For centuries, they have been chased from place to place -- from the highlands of Vietnam to the rivers of Cambodia and, in the bloody aftermath of genocide, to the United States, where thousands have settled.

In the margins of each place, they've come together.

So it is here, where a hundred Cham families live in this worn Santa Ana complex alongside Latinos, Laotians and Cambodians. In the middle of one of the city's most crime-infested neighborhoods, they have turned one apartment into a mosque and built a world centered on faith. In celebration, neighbors prepare feasts and share stories. In hardship, they share burdens, the cost of food and the cost of burial.

But even as they've struggled to keep their small community intact, the outside world has crept in. Some young people have turned to gangs and drugs. Others have packed their bags and fled. A few have drifted from the religion and language that shaped their youth. Now, when the call to prayer goes out, the mosque is filled mostly with elders and small children, as if those in the middle simply disappeared.

On the day of the feast to celebrate the beginning of Ramadan and the end of the Islamic school year, one man finds himself wanting to rebuild his ties.

Nasia Ahmanth doesn't properly speak Cham, which is similar to Malay. He rarely attends mosque and can't read the Arabic of the Koran. He rarely prays.

He was a baby when his father, El Ahmanth, led a village of Cham refugees here. But as the group put down roots, Nasia drifted, lured by the streets. By the time he was 17, he says, he was an addict and speed was his drug of choice. As it raced through his body, he felt unstoppable, light and creative at once.

Now he's 30 and, he says, sober. He has a son of his own and two years ago moved out of the neighborhood to distance himself from drug-using friends. Last year, though, when his father died, he found himself looking homeward, wanting to rebuild his ties to a community he feared was fading.

"I want my son to know what Cham is," he said.

Nasia had just been born when his family fled the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign in Cambodia in 1979. They went to Thailand, then to refugee camps in the Philippines before landing in Santa Ana.

With a few hundred dollars in refugee assistance, his father rented an apartment on Minnie Street, in a neighborhood ravaged by shootings and drugs. He sponsored 10 families living in refugee camps in Thailand who had also fled Cambodia, and before long those families were sponsoring more refugees.

Ghazaly Salim and his wife and daughters were among the first to arrive, coming at the senior Ahmanth's request after first landing in Houston.

Today Salim, 56, is a telephone installer who spends his off time organizing the mosque. He is something of a community patriarch. He values faith and piety above all, and, though it's not a Cham tradition, he wears a skullcap as a sign of fealty.

Decades ago, he was a religious student in Cambodia. Just before it was time to leave for the school, he went, house by house, to his neighbors. Each family gave him some rice to sell in the market so he could pay for school.

Sticking together "is what our grandfathers taught us," he said.

In Santa Ana, he found freedom and opportunity -- and more struggle.

Minnie Street runs parallel to Santa Ana's north-south railroad tracks, a place of squalor and danger. Over the years, it became a first stop for immigrant families: Latinos, followed by Cambodians and Laotians and then Cham. In this new home, windows were lined with bars. Paint peeled, cockroaches crawled on walls, and rodents scurried across the floors. Families packed 10 to an apartment.

In villages in Cambodia and Vietnam, the Cham had been renowned blacksmiths and rice farmers. In Santa Ana, they struggled to find work in packing plants, as janitors and on assembly lines for minimum wage.

Nasia's mother, Sani Karim, worked on an electronics assembly line. His father got a better job as a teacher's assistant at the nearby elementary school. Those who couldn't find work spent days sitting on the sidewalk or standing idly in doorways. At night, drug dealers could be heard whistling to warn others when police cars cruised by.

Even so, many of the Cham determined to build a mosque. Almost as soon as they arrived, they pooled their minimum-wage salaries and asked for help from local Arab Muslims. In three years they had enough to buy Building B-2, a dingy single-story unit with bars on the windows and a door that opens onto a concrete courtyard. Most moved into surrounding units; others rented nearby.

Five times a day, the call to prayer from B-2 sounds across the neighborhood. Inside, men line up on prayer rugs laid over a linoleum floor. Women, who don't go outside without covering their hair with scarves, go to a white-walled bedroom in the back for their own prayer.

For elders, the mosque and its courtyard are a refuge. But younger generations have struggled to navigate between their insular community and the world that surrounds them.

"You can only go to the mosque so much before you get tired of the uniformity," said Mogul Ahmanth, 35, Nasia's brother.

Here, it isn't difficult to find a different way of life.

Late last year, more than 200 heavily armed police and federal agents raided the condo complex. Eighteen people, mostly Latinos suspected of dealing heroin and cocaine for the Minnie Street Lopers, a local street gang, were dragged out in handcuffs. Inside apartments, agents found semiautomatic weapons and a bolt-action SKS carbine with a foldaway bayonet, popular with communist troops in Vietnam. Heroin, rock cocaine and 3 pounds of methamphetamine were also seized; some of the drugs had been stashed in tree trunks.

When he was young, Nasia's father would regale him with stories about the Cham. As a child he sometimes imagined his father's position of leadership in the community made him something of a Cham prince.

As they grew, the father advised his three young boys to go to mosque and talk to the elders. Get involved in their discussions, he told them. Help with small things -- moving chairs, cleaning up, organizing events.

"You need to learn to walk before you can run," he said.

Nasia rejected his father's way of life in favor of the one he saw friends adopting. In junior high, he joined a group of Cambodian and Laotian homeboys in a tagging crew. In high school they became a gang. They never did anything too bad, he insists. But there was alcohol, then pot. Eventually, he found himself in the bathroom of a friend's Minnie Street apartment, inhaling his first line of speed. Addiction seemed to come quickly.

He remembers going home before dawn one day, his pupils dilated, his teeth grinding.

His father stared at him. "I know what you're up to."

The man who believed Nasia would grow up to be an architect, who imagined he would help lead the Cham, looked at his son and walked away.

A short time later, the son packed his belongings and left for Delaware, where a friend lived. He worked as a machine operator for four years, until he knew he could go home without turning back to drugs. He returned four years ago.

But the community regards him with suspicion. Although he considers himself a Muslim, he admits he doesn't embrace regular prayer or other tenets of the faith.

"Religion is the way of life," said Salim, the community leader. "You have to know religion to lead. You have to know what to teach."

Even so, when Nasia's father died last year, the urge to embrace his community grew stronger.

The Cham stories his father told him when he was younger have stayed with him; they hold a power over him. He believes that one day the Cham might have their own homeland again.

Recently, his father's advice about volunteering to help, about learning to walk before running, has echoed in his mind.

He began talking to Mathsait Ly, an older cousin, about helping, and he persisted until Ly gave him a chance. This year, Ly asked him to join the Cham board of directors as event coordinator, making him its youngest member. He would serve as master of ceremonies at the feast marking the beginning of Ramadan and the end of the Islamic school year.

The day of the feast, elders woke early to roast sweet marinated meat; women made rice, cauliflower and pickled carrots sliced thin as paper.

A few men tended fresh meat grilling over hot coals. Others lifted a giant aluminum pot full of boiling tripe onto a gas fire. Someone had tagged a giant red face with Xs for eyes on a condominium wall.

Salim and Ly scuttled about, giving directions and watching over the celebration.

Nasia showed up a few hours late -- about 10 a.m. The others had been up before dawn.

"I went to a movie last night," he said, smiling apologetically.

Inside the mosque, he nervously paced on prayer rugs, his shiny black hair combed back neatly. A group of graduating students shuffled in place, tugging at stiff shirts and long robes.

Nasia glanced at a speech he'd written for the crowd gathering outside. He clicked the end of his pen over and over again, reading aloud, tripping over unfamiliar Arabic words.

When he took to the stage, his voice hardly registered, despite the microphone in front of him.

"This day is about coming together to celebrate the end of Ramadan," he said -- though it marked the start of the traditional month of fasting. No one seemed to notice the slip.

"This," Nasia Ahmanth said, "is the day where parents become proud of their child."