A legacy forged by the gift of a piglet
5 August 2020
A legacy of kindness, of empathy and the gift of a piglet has been handed down to Rebecca Ly across the generations by her grandmother.
Ly, currently in her first year in the General Practice Education Programme (GPEP), completed her medical degree at Otago and spent three years as a house officer at Middlemore Hospital.
Her choice of profession was no accident.
Growing up as the eldest daughter of Cambodian refugees in Manurewa, Ly remembered a happy childhood.
“I grew up in a multi-cultural community and never thought that I was that different to anyone else,” she said.
“But then I became a teenager and started to struggle to understand who I was and where I fit in. That all changed when my dad told me a story about my grandmother.”
Battambang is Cambodia's second-largest city/ photo Wikimedia
Before the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge, Ly’s father, Leang, lived with his family in Battambang, where they owned land and kept animals, including pigs.
Each year, after their piglets had been born, Ly’s grandmother would take Leang and travel to some of the poor rural villages.
She would gift families in these villages two piglets and say “you can keep one of these piglets but you must raise the other one so I can come back when it is big enough and buy it off you.”
But when civil war came, life changed drastically.
Leang and his family were driven from their homes and forced to live in the jungle. Alongside other displaced people, they were subjected to atrocities such as starvation and forced labour. After years of suffering and witnessing the death of loved ones, including his parents, Leang decided to escape, clinging to the hope of having a better life.
But he was caught near the border, imprisoned, and told that he would be executed the next day.
“I can’t image what it must have been like for him,” Ly said. “Being in fear for your life, knowing you are going die, it must have been so scary.”
The Khmer Rouge forced tens of thousands into refugee camps/photo John Burgess
Then, in a twist of fate, Leang’s prison guard set him free.
Leang’s mother had given a piglet to the guard’s family and he recognised Leang as the boy who had been with her.
Leang managed to cross the Cambodian border and reach a refugee camp in Thailand where he stayed for months before being sent to New Zealand, where he built a new life.
“It is such an amazing story, that my grandmother’s actions inspired kindness many years later in a man whose job it was to kill people,” Ly said, “It really resonated with the teenage me.”
She did not know what career path her training would lead her to, but ultimately decided that medicine meant she could make more of a tangible difference to people’s lives.
“It was also the reason I decided to enter GPEP,” she said, “Hospitals are such busy places and the patients you see are there one minute, gone the next. I really want to build relationships with my patients, to help them on their journey through life.”
Rebecca Ly at Otago University/ photo supplied
She experienced this poignantly when she completed her trainee intern elective at the Mangere Refugee Resettlement Centre.
“All refugees coming to New Zealand spend six weeks at the centre receiving help to adapt into this new country and culture,” she said, “My father came through here, and my mother Helen did too, when she left Cambodia, although they met later while working in a factory.
“I could really relate to the people I was seeing, because as each patient came through the door and I heard their individual stories, I imagined what it would have been like for my parents, my aunties, my uncles when they walked through those doors many years ago.
“When I told them that my parents were also refugees, they could really see that New Zealand does offer them great opportunities, and life can change from the fear and hardship they had experienced.”
She said she was keen to come back to the community she grew up in, to fulfil the legacy her grandmother gave her by showing the same empathy and generosity of spirit to her people.
“My family history has given me my identity and a purpose in life,” Ly said, “I am so grateful to them for what they went through to give me the opportunities they never had.
“I’m looking forward to being a GP because I really think that if I can make a difference in even just one person’s life, like my grandmother did, then that person might do the same for someone else.
“If a prison guard can set a man free because of one act of kindness, it shows what a powerful thing helping another human being can be.”
This story has been supplied courtesy of The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners.
- Asia Media Centre