When she was 15 years old, Sovann Chan broke down a nailed-shut door and fled her family’s East Nashville house in the middle of the night. Her father had abused her in that attic room since she was 8 years old. She knew she could never go home.
Sovann Chan
For the next few years, she stayed with friends and at youth crisis intervention space Oasis Center, worked in restaurants and bars, had a daughter and opened a Cambodian restaurant, Angkorians. The restaurant closed in 2020. Life went on. But she began to have questions: How could a father do such things to his daughter? Why didn’t she look like her younger sisters?
Chan sent a DNA test to Ancestry.com and found a match in Lowell, Mass. An uncle told Chan, mysteriously: “If this man is your father, he’ll have a missing ear.” She went to Lowell to find out.
Rethy Long had last seen Chan 43 years before, when she was a newborn in the Cambodian jungle near the Thai border. Chan’s mother and Long were victims of collective forced marriage, a common Khmer Rouge practice. In 1979, Vietnamese troops ousted Pol Pot’s regime, and the couple fled into the forest, where Sovann Chan was born. Her mother was so malnourished that she could not breastfeed. They wrapped their baby in rags and leaves.
Amid the chaos of fighting and flight, the family got separated. Each made their way to Thai refugee camps and to America, where they started new families. Life went on. And then Long’s daughter appeared in Lowell. He could not believe she was alive.
Rethy Long
Sovann knew instantly that this man was her real dad. He was humble. He welcomed her into his family with a lobster feast. And his left ear was burned and scarred from mine and rocket blasts during the war.
For them, this reunion is one more miracle in their parallel histories of extraordinary, improbable survival. “He wants me to tell you,” Chan says, translating for her dad, “that there’s not many who have a life story like mine.”
“I hit the jackpot,” she says, smiling at him. “I think I’m at peace.” They visit each other several times a year. Life goes on.
Stories of who these Nashvillians were, who they are now, and who they’re still becoming
