“My perception was that Australian people, like if you are born in Australia and like your parents are from Australia, you were slightly richer. And I felt like I could recognise that we didn't have certain things like money wise, but I didn't feel like we were necessarily poor, but I felt like we were definitely a bit under that… Cause just little like small things, you see people celebrating Christmas or birthdays, they have these parties and they get presents and all these things that we didn't really have. It's partly cultural cause Cambodians don't really celebrate birthdays. But when we were kids they knew that we wanted to celebrate birthdays and we couldn't afford as much, we didn't really go on too many holidays either. So that played a part in terms of, you kind of not rank yourself, but you see, you compare the others and you go to the houses, you feel like, okay, they're kind of rich, maybe we feel less rich. Later on, I completely realised that we were rich in our own ways, cuz we've always had great food, anything we really needed…”
Episode #133 of The Hope Initiative with Andrew Duong.
