By Marc Ramirez

Seattle Times staff reporter

JOHN LOK / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Dara Duong hopes to someday display in a museum his collection of photographs

genocide in Cambodia,” said Duong. His father and grandfather were killed by

the Khmer Rouge.

The two-story house where Dara Duong lives is low and rectangular, one of

many broad-shouldered family homes overlooking the forlorn streets beyond

SeaTac's Pacific Highway South. An American flag leans over the front yard in

silent salute. It's a scene so typically suburban, so brimming with new-life

promise, that it's hard to imagine the bad memories buried beneath its

surface.

Through the door, down a few stairs, and suddenly you're in a bright,

carpeted room that looks nothing like a garage and everything like a

carefully arranged exhibition. The room is solemnly quiet, nothing but the

sound of a whirring VCR. A small table offering bite-sized cookies and candy

bars is a nod to visitors' comfort, but there is nothing comfortable, really,

about the surroundings.

Images of atrocity and war blanket the walls. Most arresting are the rows of

shocked faces, staring as if pictures from some grotesque yearbook — mug

shots of the doomed, all with one thing in common: They were about to be

killed.

Duong, a 32-year-old vocational counselor, first saw these faces in 1999,

when he returned to the country he'd left as a boy. His father had been

killed there. His grandfather had been killed there. He vaguely remembered

long days of forced labor. Still, what he saw at Cambodia's Tuol Sleng

Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh shocked him.

For the first time, he absorbed what had really happened. As a child assigned

to the countryside to collect rice paddies, he hadn't grasped the magnitude

of the suffering perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.

"When I saw the museum, I felt all this suffering in my mind," he says. "I

saw the reality. I asked myself, 'How could they do this?' "

So many people. So many people. He wasn't the only one with scars. And yet,

he knew so few would ever see what he was seeing, would remember or realize

the horror of those years.

JOHN LOK / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Photographs from the collection.Duong thought: I need to do something.

Now, his garage is filled with dozens of stark images and reminders of the

genocide that claimed 2 million lives from 1975 to 1979. The beaten, mangled

victims of torture and execution. The mass graves, the austere bearings of

Khmer Rouge henchmen. On a tiny television in the corner, labor-camp video

footage of dusty, black-cloaked slaves shuffling in the heat.

"For the time being, we do not have a big building," Duong says, though

Seattle's Wing Luke Museum is one future possibility. "This is a start. I'm

very happy we can do something."

He is understated in nearly every way, short and neatly dressed, reminiscent

of Sal Mineo in "Rebel Without A Cause." He calls his cramped display, not

yet open to the public, the Killing Fields Museum. Most of it he did himself.

There were many trips to Kinko's and hours spent working with glue and

display boards. "It's just a story that happened in that time," he says

simply.

But there's no mistaking the passion that drives his effort. "We had to tell

people what happened. Students say, 'Where is Cambodia? What is that?' They

don't know about the genocide. We want to help this not happen again in

another country."

It's a noble effort, one not without complications. The

Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton area is home to the nation's third-largest

concentration of Cambodian immigrants, among them survivors of the genocide

and, in one of those inevitabilities of wartime upheaval, some of its likely

perpetrators as well. For that reason, he acknowledges some worry over his

safety. "About 3 percent," is how he puts it.

Not everyone will like his idea. But in it, Duong says, are lessons everyone

should learn, questions everyone should ask.

On one table, in front of pictures of the real thing, he has assembled the

kinds of implements once used for torture: a hammer, shovel, sickle and

daggers.

A splash of color beckons from the dreary sea of black and white images —

renderings of an artist destined for execution, spared because he knew how to

draw. His illustrations show babies pried from crying mothers' hands,

sleeping prisoners crowded like cigars across hard floors.

But looking at these walls, the image that troubles him most is the photo of

a mother and her few-weeks-old baby. Like thousands of others about to die,

she sat looking at a camera for the last time, another notch in the Khmer

Rouge record books. "Before they killed them, they took pictures of them,"

Duong says.

JOHN LOK / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Dara Duong's collection is on display in his garage in SeaTac. But her child

had no understanding of what was about to happen. Why? Duong wonders. Why

would people commit such atrocities?

"This museum," he says, "will be a witness to the world."

An idea grows

The idea had simmered in Duong's head even as he carved out a life here,

first as director of White Center's United Khmer Community and then in his

current role with Asian Counseling & Referral Services.

Finally, he sent an e-mail to Cambodia's Documentation Center. It's a good

idea, director Youk Chhang replied. Whatever you need, we'll provide.

Duong created Seattle's Cambodian-American Foundation for future lobbying and

fund raising. He has made several material-gathering trips to Cambodia and

roped in friends traveling there as couriers, too. In many cases, he took

photographs of photographs and reproduced them for display. "I always come

back with something," he says.

His mission, he says, is many-layered — to educate Cambodian Americans and

the general population about the Cambodian holocaust, to memorialize the

millions who died, to help prevent future genocide, to preserve and encourage

Cambodian culture and society.

Eventually, he imagines the collection in a Cambodian-style building,

complete with dioramas, a project he believes will take several years and

about $1.5 million. He's recruiting help and setting up a Web site to raise

funds and collect personal histories.

While many locals lost relatives to the Khmer Rouge regime, community leaders

agree the museum can educate a whole generation of Cambodian Americans who

have grown up here and know little about what their elders experienced.

"Some don't even want to go back to the homeland," says Seattle's Cambodian

consul, Daravuth Huoth. "It's just a nightmare."

But so far, says Lyban Sawn of the Khmer Community of Seattle/King County,

Duong has not done enough as a relative newcomer to woo community leaders and

ensure the effort's long-term survival. "This is a big project — it's not

that easy."

He points to Chicago, where proponents of the planned Cambodian-American

Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial worked to build conceptual su

pport given the emotional stakes. Aware the community was limited

financially, they instead solicited brainpower and volunteers, and the $1.8

million effort is more than halfway toward its goal.

Duong admits community support will take time. For now, he's seeking

corporate sponsorship and federal grants. In addition to Huoth's support, he

says his idea has earned endorsement from the Cambodian Embassy in

Washington, D.C., and the Cambodian representative to the United Nations.

The most promising nod, however, has come from the Wing Luke Museum, which

has expressed interest in incorporating Duong's collection into its own

expansion, also several years away.

Wing Luke director Ron Chew says Duong's effort is much like the United

States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., with potential to be

powerful and moving. "It's a traumatic experience to see and witness what

happened," he says, "but history can be an effective teacher."

With history's participants still around, it's a delicate operation. But such

horrific events demand healing and discussion, not ignorance or avoidance, he

says.

Huoth says he lent his endorsement to the exhibit provided it went beyond

genocide to promote Cambodian culture. (One wall of Duong's garage exhibit

includes Cambodian art, religion and traditional clothing.)

"Now that we're moving into the 21st century, we're looking forward, not

back," Huoth says. "We look back as a lesson. But in order to move forward,

you have to educate. What is Cambodia? It's not just a piece of disaster.

"Some people might like to see it. Some people would like to see it

disappear. Some people feel hate, anger. Some people have never been there.

The thing is, it never dies — it just keeps popping up every once in a

while."

Duong says some people already have questioned the need for such an exhibit.

Why not show evidence to the contrary, they ask? To which he answers: Show it

to me.

Despite the potential for controversy, Duong's family supports him. "When

visitors come, my mother says, 'Go downstairs, see what my son is up to,' "

he says. " 'He's doing a museum.' "

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company