Laotian refugee came to Sonoma County as a child

As a Santa Rosa High School student in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Somphet Pheauboonma volunteered at Sutter Medical Center, translating for patients who were Lua, an ethnic Laotian minority.

The stories she had not yet asked her family about - of war and the act of fleeing it - emerged from the patients’ lingering pains.

“It would start with the injuries,” said the soft-spoken Pheauboonma, who lives in Rohnert Park. “The doctors would ask, ‘Tell me your family history.’ So we would go back in time and these stories would surface.”

The stories were of the years leading up to and including the flight by thousands of Laotians after the United States withdrew from their landlocked Southeast Asian nation in 1973 - after bombing it for nearly a decade to disrupt Vietnamese supply routes.

Though she had never lived the stories, Pheauboonma, 31, was formed of them. Her Lua mother and her family had fled Laos in 1975. Pheauboonma was born in a Thailand refugee camp in 1984, the same year her father disappeared.

Her family was flown out of Loei Province to San Francisco on April 26, 1986. Soon after, they were brought to Santa Rosa by Catholic Charities, which ran refugee resettlement services in Sonoma County until last year.

“I self-identify as a refugee who fled conflicts of war, as a result of war,” said Pheauboonma, now a pharmacy technician at Petaluma Valley Hospital.

It’s not known how many Laotians were resettled in Sonoma County, and Lua refugees would not have been differentiated from other Laotians. But in 1999, a Sonoma County Medical Association survey identified 32 Lua households and noted that the county was believed to have one of the highest concentrations of Lua in the United States.

Still, unearthing her history has taken Pheauboonma years. Although she was raised speaking Lua - a language distinct to Lua people - that was as far as the family heritage was extended.

“I didn’t start asking my family about their experience in the refugee camp until I was in high school,” Pheauboonma said. “I didn’t even know how to start talking about it. There was no dialogue.”

And even as she continues to uncover it, her past remains clouded, she said, by the tumult it was forged in.

“I think it’s overshadowed by the war. A lot of the cultural heritage, the linguistics, the artistic heritage, is lost in that,” she said.

“In my academics, it was hard to speak about the customs, the people, without tying it into the war. Even now, the reason I’m able to exist her e is due to the war,” she said.

Seeking clarity and connection has steered Pheauboonma.

She studied anthropology at San Francisco State University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 2008. Her senior project was ethno-archaeological research into the Lua people of Sayabouri Province in Laos, their indigenous cultures, health and rituals.

Researching the obituary for her grandmother, Sai Pheauboonma, who died in Santa Rosa in 2013, brought more family details to light. And that year, she traveled to Laos for the first time to her ancestral village to reunite with her grandmother’s family.

It was a pivotal moment.

“The trip solidified my ‘Lua-ness,’?” she said. “And I mean, my language. I wanted to know if the Lua I speak here in America with my family is spoken the same way over there, and I was so relieved to be able to communicate.”

American. Lua. Translator. Student. Discoverer. Pheauboonma the refugee is a blend of then and now.

“It’s hard to separate that experience from who really I’ve become. It’s dictated what I’ve studied and what I feel I should do as a community member,” she said.

Pheauboonma has followed the world’s refugee crisis closely - particularly the calls, following the Paris terror attacks, to restrict Syrian refugees’ access to the United States, although none of the terrorists so far tied to the Nov. 13 attacks that killed 130 people was Syrian.

“I think at a time when it’s difficult to trust other people, there’s fear, there’s anger and all that,” Pheauboonma said. “And for me, knowing what happened to my family coming here, it’s allowed me to be open, to open my eyes to things. Don’t jump to conclusions.”