Alum Arn Chorn-Pond Returns to His "Home"

For alum Arn Chorn-Pond ’86, the community at NMH was, in many ways, lifesaving. After surviving the horrors of the Cambodian genocide, Chorn-Pond was thrust into the isolation of a rural New England culture he had no context for. Through the love and support he found at Northfield Mount Hermon, he was able to come to peace with his traumatic past and turn his pain into a passion for helping other children scarred by violence.

Today, his nonprofit organization, Cambodian Living Art, works to revive his native country’s artistic heritage by empowering a new generation of artists and offering a model of peace and healing, utilizing the power of music and his connections around the globe.

On Sept. 25, Chorn-Pond returned to his alma mater to share his story with students and to encourage them to use the exceptional opportunities they have at NMH to serve those in need at home and abroad.

Homecoming

Listening to Arn Chorn-Pond, one would be hard-pressed to imagine the depth of tragedy he has experienced in his life. Unassuming and affable, he is quick to laugh and expresses a deep humility.

“I’m a little nervous,” Chorn-Pond admitted as he stood before an assembly of students and faculty in Memorial Hall. “It’s so wonderful to be back after so many years, and I have a lot of feelings.”

Holding a flute to his mouth as if it were an extension of his limbs, Chorn-Pond proceeded to play a lively, up-tempo tune – one of the first he learned.

“That’s a Khmer Rouge revolutionary song,” he revealed, adding that the Khmer Rouge murdered his first music teacher shortly after he learned the tune. Chorn-Pond is convinced that he would have been killed as well, had he not shown an affinity for music so quickly. “In a way, music saved my life,” he said.

This ability to turn the horrors he faced as a child into a teachable moment was on display throughout the morning, as Chorn-Pond met with a Humanities II class, the Honors Chamber Ensemble, and Honor Chamber Orchestra to discuss his journey and work. The son of well-known Cambodian opera performers, Chorn-Pond said he had little memory of his life before 1975, when Cambodia’s government fell to the Khmer Rouge regime. Following the revolution, most of his family was killed, along with an estimated 90% of Cambodia’s artists.

For a culture predicated on the oral tradition, the effects of these mass executions were devastating, he told students. “Many art forms died with them during the war and on the killing fields,” he elaborated. “So much of my culture, so much of my identity. It's hard to just pick up the pieces.”

Chorn-Pond’s situation somehow became worse when Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1978. When he was in his early teens, the Khmer Rouge replaced his flute with a rifle, forcing him to fight. While most kids his age were deciding what type of music they liked or what clothes to wear, Chorn-Pond was fighting for his life.

After a harrowing escape to Thailand, Chorn-Pond said, his adoptive father, Pastor Peter Pond, quite literally stumbled over him in a refugee camp, decided to adopt him, and brought him to live in New England.

Stranger in a strange land

Chorn-Pond found the culture shock that accompanied his move difficult to overcome. Isolated by an extreme language and cultural barrier that neither he nor his new classmates fully understood, Chorn-Pond often found himself in trouble in school and at home. His loneliness and inability to understand those around him drove him to suicidal thoughts more than once.

During his classroom discussions, Chorn-Pond highlighted the parallels between his personal struggles during this time of his life and those that many young people experience today, such as gun violence. “I think it's because kids feel lonely, they feel like they lose their identity,” he mused. “I was so angry, but I couldn’t express it. I was never taught to cry.”

Enter Northfield Mount Hermon, which Chorn-Pond referred to as “his home” throughout his visit. On the recommendation of former President Jimmy Carter, whom Arn-Chorn met while serving as an ambassador for Amnesty International, he enrolled at NMH in 1986 through its Transition-Year Program.

NMH offered him a place where he could finally feel safe to enjoy the things a teenager should enjoy, a space to unpack and process his traumatic past, and the seeds of what would become his life’s work. From his love of NMH’s salad bar to his friendship with classmate Uma Thurman, Chorn-Pond’s face lit up as he recounted the support he received from his peers and teachers.

“Feel the love from this community – that's what I want you to do,” he advised students in the ensemble class, where he was nearly brought to tears as they welcomed him with a choral rendition of “Round and Round the Earth Is Turning,” a song signifying peace through difficult times. 

“That's what I got,” he added, “and that really equipped me [to] move forward.”

Bringing it all back home

From the halls of academia at Northfield Mount Hermon, and later, Brown University and Providence College, Chorn-Pond went on to develop outreach models centered around pulling vulnerable young people from the grips of violence and poverty, utilizing the power of music and the model of support he found at NMH.

Starting with just “a few thousand dollars” raised partially through his connections at the school, Chorn-Pond co-founded the nonprofit Children of War and developed gang violence prevention programs around Providence. In 1998, he founded Cambodian Living Arts, which links artists who survived the genocide with young Cambodians eager to carry on and rebuild the country’s artistic legacy.

“Right now we have tens of thousands of young people [in our programs],” he told students, adding that priority is given to young women and minorities in rural areas of Cambodia. “We give kids a laptop, [and] the world is in their hands, so they can learn about their lives and music through teaching on Zoom.”

Chorn-Pond aims to implement CLA’s model worldwide, with the hope that one day “every child in the world will carry musical instruments instead of guns and perform and learn how to love each other, dance together and not shoot each other,” he said.

“Is that a stupid dream?” he asked the assembled crowd in Memorial Hall, which responded with boisterous applause. “I don’t think so.”

A final note

Chorn-Pond issued a call to NMH students to not only appreciate their time at the school but to use their knowledge and connections to help those in need around the world.

“You guys really care.: You must show that,” he advised. “Do whatever you can do, do more than you think you can. The school here, not only [through] academics, they encourage you to do that.”

Chorn-Pond closed each of his talks with another song, this one traditional to Cambodia, which struck a softer, more esoteric tone than the one he began his lectures with. As the notes faded, one could feel the weight of his words transfigured into something lighter than air, buoyed by the potential of what can be, a model of understanding that he learned on this campus.

“I was shaped by this community; I was shaped by the love of the teachers,” he said. “You have many choices. Just know that I'm here today to remind you: You are my family– [although] I look different from you, I feel that I'm your brother. And you are mine.”

— Max Hunt