Tom FitzGerald
Monday, February 27, 2012
San Francisco Chronicle February 27, 2012 04:00 AM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 
Sacramento --Looking back on their lives in Cambodia in the 1970s, the parents of USF basketball player Mel Khlok described the constant fear. Her father, Saly Min, said, "They'd come every night ..."
Her mother, Sokho Khlok, finished his sentence: "They'd come and get you, no questions asked."
"They" were the Khmer Rouge, the rebels who took power in 1975 under Pol Pot. They sent the entire population on forced marches to work projects and embarked on a disastrous program of agrarian communism.
They killed Sokho's father and Saly's uncle Phen and his nephew Hor. Estimates of the number of victims have ranged from 1 million to 3 million.
"They killed you if you were educated, if you looked Chinese, if you had light skin," Sokho said. "And if you wore glasses, because (that meant) you were educated."
Saly and Sokho didn't know each other at the time, but they endured similar hardships before fleeing to Thailand in 1979. Both stayed in refugee camps there for four years and, after a brief stay in the Philippines, were flown to a new life in a new land. Neither was thrilled; they knew absolutely nothing about America.
They later met while working in a doughnut shop in Sacramento. They told their story in a cozy, four-bedroom home in south Sacramento that houses seven of their eight children and 11 relatives in all. Saly wore a USF baseball cap as he and his wife described their delight in 21-year-old daughter Mel.
Despite the horrors witnessed by her parents, her own personal struggles and a tragedy that has recently revisited her family in Sacramento, junior Mel Khlok has emerged as a leader on a USF team slowly finding its direction.
She was the first in her family to graduate from high school, and she'll be the first to graduate from college.
"We're really proud of her," Sokho said.
Mel's second chance
Like her three sisters and one of her four brothers, Mel goes by her mother's surname; three of her brothers took their dad's. Nobody calls her by her full given name, Melody, unless it's in anger, and hardly anybody is ever angry at her.
"She's got a positive energy that everybody feeds off of," USF coach Jennifer Azzi said. "I can't imagine the team without her."
The team was briefly without her after her freshman season. Unhappy with her lack of playing time under then-coach Tanya Haave, she quit. She felt her game wasn't improving, and the Dons had just finished a miserable 5-27 season (1-13 in the West Coast Conference). She described herself as being "fat and slow."
She was halfway out the door to Sacramento State when her teammates asked new coach Azzi to give her a chance. No way, Azzi said. "If she quit once, she'll quit again."
Azzi finally let her back, offering a deal that spelled out rigid conditions: One was that she had to get in shape. She was so overweight that she could barely get off the ground on her jump shot. Another was that she had to practice shooting 15 minutes on her own before every practice.
Khlok (pronounced "cloak") agreed.
A family fractured
Sokho Khlok, 44, grew up in Cambodia's capital city of Phnom Penh. Her father, a sergeant in the Army, left to live with his wife's relatives in the countryside because he was fearful of the Khmer Rouge.
Sokho was 7 the last time she saw her father. One of her cousins told her what happened when they caught up with him. "They tied him up in a field and chopped him up with machetes," she said. "They knew my mom married one of the soldiers. My mom's still alive because she didn't go with my dad."
She remembers the constant, overpowering hunger. Like everyone else, she ate crickets, grasshoppers, "anything to survive."
Many of the children were awoken at 3 a.m. to remove butterfly eggs from the cotton plants without being detected by the Khmer Rouge. "If you ate them, they would kill you," she said.
If you ate the cotton, as some kids did, you were also dead, she said.
When the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1978, the Khmer Rouge fled many areas, but not before booby-trapping many of the villages' food supplies. "If you went to get rice, you got killed by bombs," Sokho said.
A year later, at age 11, she left the starving country with her aunt and uncle, walking about 250 miles over hilly terrain to the Thai border. Corpses covered the countryside. The ponds they drew water from along the way were littered with rotting bodies.
In one particularly treacherous stretch, they had to step exactly where their leader stepped. One false step and they could have been killed by land mines left over from the Vietnam War.
In Thailand, they had to bribe their way into the camps, which housed about 1 million of their countrymen.
Four years later, a Catholic priest from Oklahoma sponsored more than 100 Cambodian families and flew them from the Philippines to the United States. "We didn't even know how to cross the street," Sokho said. In Sacramento in 1996, she and her husband became U.S. citizens.
Mel's second family
Because she was needed at times to help out at the family's two doughnut shops, Mel often missed classes at John F. Kennedy High School. During her sophomore year, her mother had a stroke after her last child, Matthew, was born. Shortly thereafter, Saly developed gout. They had to sell one of the shops. He works sometimes at a relative's doughnut shop, while Sokho receives disability payments.
During Mel's last two years of high school, with money very tight and as many as 17 relatives at times under one roof, she lived most of the time with the family of teammate Deja Kinsey. To Mel, Erika West, Kinsey's mother, was Mom, and Kinsey's grandmother, Phyllis West, was Nanna.
"She's a fun-loving, crazy kind of girl," Phyllis West said. "She's driven. She goes after what she wants."
Much of what she wanted was on a basketball court. Her uncle Danney had taught her the game when she was in second grade. As she got older, she played with her close friend, Serena Grant, on youth teams coached by Serena's father, Patrick. She often stayed at their home, too.
"The two of them were a match that nobody could handle" on the court, Patrick Grant said. "I took a natural liking to her. She was headstrong. She wasn't going to let anybody get in her way."
Mel still calls Grant Dad. Her speed and skills helped her become a standout for a couple of club teams and at Kennedy High.
The outgoing Cambodian American blended easily into the mostly African American teams. She won a scholarship to USF, and, as Grant said, "she has bucked all the odds" against overcoming an impoverished upbringing.
The killing fields
Saly, 53, grew up in Battambang, now Cambodia's second-largest city. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge came and told a group of about 200 people, including his uncle Phen and nephew Hor, both of whom were in the military, that they were going to "see the king," Saly said.
Before they got very far, he said - as calmly as if he were describing an event in the 15th century - "they shoot them from behind." Were they buried? "No, leave them there," he said.
All over the country, the same scene was repeated in what became known infamously as "the killing fields."
He was with his farmer parents, who died a few years ago in Stockton, in the refugee camp in Thailand. Meager rations were parceled out twice a week, rice once a month. Water was strictly rationed. They slept on bamboo cots.
With his son David serving as interpreter, Saly said, "You had to have the will to live."
A new tragedy
David Khlok, 24, Mel's oldest brother, is a cheerful sort who hopes to study accounting or public speaking at nearby Cosumnes River College. On Nov. 11, he was walking to a friend's house from his shift at Little Caesars Pizza at 10:30 p.m. when someone shot him at point-blank range.
The bullet entered his left side and severed his spinal column. He is paralyzed from the waist down. He sleeps in a bed in the living room.
"I was in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. He said he didn't get a good look at his assailant and had no idea why he was targeted. No one has been arrested.
A visitor told his mother it was ironic that decades after she and her husband left behind unimaginable violence, an apparently random act of violence had shocked them in America. "I lost a lot of hope from that," she said softly.
The game of her life
While getting in shape in 2010, Mel Khlok lost 12 pounds and started to regain her shooting form and accuracy. Under first-year coach Azzi, however, the Dons went 4-25 (1-15 WCC) in 2010-11. A promising recruiting class doesn't arrive till the fall; meanwhile, the Dons (now 5-24, 3-13 WCC) will soon wrap up another tough season.
The speedy Khlok, a 5-foot-9 junior guard who has started most of the games, averages 8.1 points and leads the team with 48 steals. Her big moment arrived when St. Mary's, then a Top 25 team, came to USF's War Memorial Gym on Jan. 23.
Khlok tweeted her friends that they should come and watch. "I was feeling good that day," she said. "It was one of those days when you wake up and just know what's going to happen."
An injury to another player gave Khlok extended playing time that night, and she played the game of her life. She hit 10 of 12 shots - sinking six three-pointers in seven tries - and scored 32 points, adding six steals in a 66-64 upset.
"That's the Mel I'm used to seeing," her pal Grant texted her.
Transcending circumstances
Khlok continues to impress Azzi on and off the court. "It's one of the things that makes this job so rewarding," Azzi said. "It has nothing to do with winning and losing. There's a light about her, something really special about her as a person.
"That's what I saw when she came in and wanted to be back on the team. I was looking at her and felt for some reason she can transcend her circumstances. I think she can be one of those that isn't pulled down by it."
A sociology major, Khlok says she'd like to be an FBI agent.
"She's going to do great things," Azzi said, "whatever she does."
