The Narcissism of small differences
INTRO: One of the reasons I'm well suited for my Haing Ngor investigation is that I lived and worked in Cambodia in the same window of time that Ngor was there.
As listeners know, it was the very start of my journalism career, a real coming of age moment for me.So I internalized a tremendous amount about that time and place in history.
Ngor and I never met, but he's a footnote to every Cambodia head story simply because The Killing Fields was such a powerful film.
With this project, I'm learning a lot more about some dynamics at play in Cambodia that I was naive about at the time, like organized crime and the true magnitude of the behind the scenes violence.
But there's only so much investigation one can do over zoom and from behind a computer screen. And cold cases only get colder. So when opportunity presents or temptation proves irresistible, you just need to get on a plane and go.
My name is Patricia Nunan and this is “Who killed Haing Ngor?”
TEXT: It was April 2025 and I was in Phnom Penh. It was actually the 50th anniversaries of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge and next door in Vietnam, the fall of Saigon.
My career began in Southeast Asia in the 1990s.Much of the news we were covering was unprocessed fallout from the 1970s. So I was among the journalists who went back for those anniversaries to see friends, to hit some official events, and if you're me, to investigate the murder of Haing Ngor.
The Innocence center and I have a lot of disparate bits of information about Ngor's life in Cambodia. Of course, that's where he lived and worked off and on between about 1992 and his death in Los Angeles in February 1996.
When he wasn't in Phnom Penh, he was likely working on a film or television project.
In a lot of ways, this trip was about shoe leather journalism, or more accurately, in my case, running shoe journalism.
AUDIO STAND-UP: So I'm standing on a street corner in Phnom Penh, I'm with my colleague and we have come to the place that we knew Ngor lived at with his with his colleague at the time, who we call his code name is Larry, to see if we can find any old timers or people who remember Ngor from back in the day. It's still associated with Ngor's brother. It used to be a hair salon belonging to Chan Saron's wife, and now it's a micro finance place belonging to Chan Sarun's wife. And there's photos of Chan Sarun inside.
That was on Monivong Boulevard. It's an address Ngor shared with a journalist in the 1990s.
I was hoping to find people who might have known Ngor and Larry who would have some memories to share.
UPSOT: WOMAN SPEAKING KHMER
There we found a woman who knew Ngor’s brother - Chan Sarun – and his family.
[AUDIO – WOMAN AND MY COLLEAGUE SPEAKING KHMER]
MPN: Chan Sarun’s is the microfinance place. Did she ever meet Ngor?
[AUDIO – WOMAN AND MY COLLEAGUE SPEAKING KHMER]
MPN: She heard about Haing Ngor but never saw him. She said her mom knew him. Her mom knew everybody. But she died 3 months ago.
UPSOT – AUDIO OF KIDS
A little further north, we dropped in on a grade school. Ngor had owned the land, which he rented to the school. After he died, his family donated the land to the city, and the school remains open. They named a building after Ngor.
The headmaster knew Ngor from the killing fields, and she very kindly showed us around. She also knew that this was once his land. But no one working at the school now had ever met him.
[BREAK]
CLIP: ANDY PENDLETON: I saw him a couple times in Phnom Penh. He had a lot of gold and diamonds and stuff on. I don't know. It's up to him.
My friend Andy Pendleton was an aid worker and a friend of Ngor. He told me once he saw Ngor hanging around with people he thought looked like Chinese high rollers.
CLIP: ANDY PENDLETON: But when he came into Phnom Penh, I saw the people he was hanging around with.They all looked like they were loaded. And we were saying they were hearing, hey, he's just way over his head. And he made good money, but he got into investments and he borrowed money.And we heard that the Chinese mafia knocked him off.
One of Ngor’s hangouts that Andy told me about was a hotel called Sunway. So we headed up there. I was hoping I'd get lucky and I'd be able to find a manager who knew the clientele and the regulars at the hotel in Ngor's time frame.
But no one who worked at the hotel in the 1990s is working there now. That's what a very polite receptionist told us.
And that's what running shoe journalism can be like.Ngor's movie star fame once meant he'd be recognized on the streets of LA or Phnom Penh or on visits to the Cambodian countryside. But he was killed 30 years ago. Cambodia's collective memory is fading.
[BREAK]
Then I caught a lucky break.
My first of the trip, I met with Youk Chang. He's the executive director of the Documentation center of Cambodia, known as DC Cam. It's the non-governmental organization that documents evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities.
It turns out that Chhang knew Haing Ngor. At one point, Ngor had been flirting with the idea of joining the board of DC cam, but it never came together. Chhang and Ngor are a generation apart and they didn't really click.
A quick note. Some of my listeners may have trouble understanding Chhang's accent.
This is an important interview, so I will post a transcript to this episode on the “Who Killed Haing Ngor?” webpage.
CLIP: MPN: But how did you find him as a person?
CLIP: CHHANG: He's sort of a typical young Cambodian student from the Khmer Republic that have a big dream[s of a] better society, but never been fully achieved that dream, so he still carried on that dream.
I find that really interesting. In some ways, Ngor was trying to relive the life he had in 1975, before the Khmer Rouge takeover.
We know it from his investments: Ngor’s father owned a saw-mill, so he tried to launch one. Ngor’s father had a small trucking company – another business Ngor tried his hand at.
In LA, Ngor drove a beat-up old Mercedes – like the one he used to borrow from an uncle, to take girlfriends out on dates, back in his med school days.
Chhang told me Ngor even wore fitted shirts and a belt buckle that were straight out of the 1970’s. So foreigners - like my friends and me –we weren’t the only ones caught in a time-warp.
Something else that stood out to Chhang? Ngor wore a lot of gold.
CLIP: CHHANG: So I don't string myself with gold with things like that, right? And Haing Ngor. He like to do things like that. So I'm a little bit like - it's not my taste. And I I think he[‘s a] bit arrogant, bit arrogant, because among Cambodian refugee, when you arrive in a States before others, you seem to be more superior - because I arrived in a States later. He came first. So to me, he [was] a bit arrogant.
CLIP: MPN: Right. So it's interesting you say he he wore gold.
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: He always wears platinum. Like shiny – we call it platinum.
CLIP: MPN: Platinum.
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: Yeah, yeah, right. You know, like ring and I am scary with that. [Note: “scared of things like that,” presumably because jewelry would attract thieves.]
CLIP: MPN: So he's wearing fancy rings and -
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: Necklace with big Buddha [to] show off his neck, you know.
CLIP: MPN: Oh, really? Yeah.
CLIP: CHANG: He always wears things like that.
CLIP: MPN: He famously had a necklace with an image of his late wife.
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: But the the size of the necklace, huge - meaning like a lot of gold.
CLIP: MPN: So he was, he was a show-off.
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: Well, that’s typical use at that time, that this is the sign of prosperity and knowledge and upper class, you know? But it's not my taste.
CLIP: MPN: Right. It's interesting because in the US everyone remembers him as extremely modest. He didn't wear these gold rings and whatnot in the States.
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: Well, maybe he understood the different culture. In the States [it] would be funny.… But here, if you don't do that, then you not, you're not part of the society. Because every official do[es] that. Every male official in Cambodia, they always have like big, big ring[s] with gold with all these thing[s]. Otherwise, you feel like very small, you're not part of the group, you know? And, and in Cambodia, men do that.
CLIP: MPN: So he had to look like a VIP.
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: Because he also associated with those VIP[s] himself, so maybe that’s what he did. But he always wear[s] that, all the time.
It didn’t work out for Ngor join the board of DC Cam. Listening to Chhang, I hear a traces of the old, low-key rivalry he had with Ngor. Cambodia’s human rights field was a very small town - and funding was competitive. Chhang and DC Cam were trying to establish themselves.
Meanwhile, Ngor was independently campaigning for an international human rights tribunal to hold the Khmer Rouge accountable for their crimes against humanity. And he had his “Killing Fields” fame and got a lot of attention.
On top of that, there were also signs of Ngor all over town.
CLIP: MPN: So do you know anything about the other projects Ngor was pursuing?
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: Even though I don't talk to him. But when we travel, we saw that the bridge built, built by Haing Ngor; high school, built by Haing Ngor. Particularly in Takeo where his home village coming from. So Haing Ngor [is] here and there. And most of the government official associate to him because of the Khmer Rouge topic, the very anti Khmer Rouge at that time. So Haing Ngor [was] sort of their voice to the international stage. So he sort of like everywhere.
Here's where things get intriguing.
Chhang had a friend with an apartment near the riverfront in Phnom Penh. They used to hang out on the sidewalk in front to enjoy a beer.This friend was Sino Khmer or an ethnic Chinese Cambodian.Ngor had an apartment in the same building.
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: But what I know about his business, he buying a lot of apartment in real estate. And he always go to Naga World gambling. Because I have a friend living across the boat just like 20 meter the boat is there. So he bought an apartment next to my friend apartment along the riverside. So I thought why you keep buying this old apartment? I didn't know that. So he has a business mind.
This is the first time I heard that Ngor went to Naga World. And that's a very big deal.
It was a casino aboard a boat moored near the Royal palace. It opened in May 1995.
A Naga is a mythological Buddhist snake, if you're curious. It has seven heads and it's associated with prosperity.
Naga World was Cambodia's first casino to open since the 1960s. And it was controversial from day one. So this was surprising to me. Most people I've spoken to who knew Ngor have insisted that he never gambled.
CLIP: MPN: And so your friend used to see him go into the Naga World casino.
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: I saw. We usually meet there on the sidewalk, and then he would walk there because he have apartment on the second floor and my friend on the first floor. And because my friend, as I know, Khmer, half Chinese. So they speak Chinese to each other sometime. And he always friendly. Because my friend have a mother at that time, she's about late 50 or 60. And they always connected because iBecause both sides lost so much. And when you know someone who come from the same background, you seem to connect quickly. So he always say hello to my friend's mom and say hello to me to my friends. Then he said, oh, I have to go now, brother.So he left.
Chhang also used to go to Naga World for the restaurant.
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: I used to be in that boat to eat buffet. It’s Thai. It's organized by the Thai restaurant. Yeah. So I used to go inside the boat and eat buffet
CLIP: And Ngor was it regular at the casino.
CLIP: YOUK CHHANG: I think so. I think so because at that time, you know with all of these tragedies, the Chinese like to gambling. While people survive the Khmer Rouge, but one way People restore the economic [capacity] or business [capacity] is through gambling .
I want to be careful with the details here. Chhang never saw Ngor gambling.
They were never at Naga World at the same time. It's possible that Ngor also just went for the buffet. And again, most of Ngor's friends have insisted to me that he never gambled.
Still, the opening of the Naga World casino was a huge turning point in Cambodia's journey toward what is now its open, armed embrace of organized crime.
If Ngor went there routinely in the last year of his life, that is potentially a massive part of his story.
We'll be coming back to Naga World in upcoming episodes.
[BREAK]
That interview with Youk Chhang was a lucky break and kind of exciting for me. As I said, Cambodia's collective memory of Haing Ngor is fading. And so are the people who knew him. It's hard to find people to talk to.
I’ve actually been really self-conscious of the number of Western voices I’ve had in this podcast.
Cambodia is an autocratic state. It’s classified as just shy of “full state capture” by criminal networks, in various analyses in foreign policy circles.
Over 40 percent of Cambodia’s GDP is based on cyber-scams. Thousands and thousands of people may, at any given moment, may be held as modern-day slaves in illegal detention centers. That is right now. That is ongoing. We went into that in my ep called “Metastasis,” from the Taiwan series.
I’m absolutely certain there’s no shortage of Cambodians who know how badly entrenched organized crime is. I’m talking about elected officials, senior military and police, members of the business community and civil society, the human rights field – the few journalists who remain. Everybody knows.
But most Cambodians will not speak to foreign journalists on-the-record – at least not candidly. They just don’t want to be recorded. It’s dangerous.
We heard about former Prime Minister Hun Sen’s track record in the “Wrong Bedfellows” episode. To criticize him means risking imprisonment or murder. Even though Hun Sen stepped down in favor of his son in 2023, he’s still enormously powerful behind the scenes.
So often, when I’m meeting someone, I’ll turn off my recorder, and I unplug the mics. Then I ask, “Is there anything else you want to add?” That’s when I get the real dirt.
[BREAK]
That's what I did when I had my second lucky break. On that trip.
I met with someone old enough to remember the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese invasion, the civil war, the peace deal and the United nations era. He worked in the peace building space.
My focus is North's time frame, 1992 till 1996, when organized crime groups were first setting up shop.
So I was pressing this gentleman about the 1990s, the triads and the criminal syndicates.
Didn't you know about the banks? Didn't you know that Chinese organized crime was coming in and taking root?
He gave me polite but somewhat generic answers on tape. I could see it in his face.
There were moments when he genuinely wanted to help me. He wanted to answer my questions. But he'd suddenly realize what he was about to say and stop. Then he'd say, “I don't know.”
That's when I switched the recorder off and unplugged the mics. He said to me something that was deceptively simple. Now, this might not seem like a big deal to you.
But it made absolute intuitive sense to me, like tumblers clicking into place inside a lock. I was asking him about 1990s organized crime and he said, “They're not real Chinese.”
Meaning in the 1990s, the organized crime groups that first came to Cambodia were not from mainland China. China had funded the Khmer Rouge, he reminded me.
The Khmer Rouge, of course, had killed millions of people and destroyed the country.
Then Vietnam occupied Cambodia for a decade. And if you don't know, there's history there. Vietnam and China kind of hate each other.
So in Haing Ngor's day, mainland Chinese were just too wary to come to Cambodia, at least not in large numbers.
In one sense, I felt validated. I'd spent real money going to Taiwan to chase up a hunch about the Bamboo Union.
I'd gone because I thought the Henry Liu murder may have been a precedent for the Ngor murder, because both were prominent Asian Americans murdered in California and there were similarities in the crime scenes.
Now my interviewee was echoing my own reporting that revealed that the Bamboo Union, a Taiwanese triad, was in Cambodia from soon after the peace deal was signed. It's because, unlike mainland Chinese, they didn't have the historic baggage.
So a footnote for the Cambodia-heads who may be listening. They'll remember the gangster Theng Bun Ma. He was investigated in depth by Nate Thayer, whom we've heard from a lot in this podcast.
Theng Bun Ma was ethnic Chinese from Thailand, so he didn't have the historic baggage.
My interviewee said he was most aware of groups from Hong Kong, Singapore, and ethnic Chinese from Malaysia. They didn't have the historic baggage.
But we have to go even deeper than that.
[BREAK]
I’m going to switch gears here for a moment. I promise this will make sense.
Imagine if an Asian journalist came to the US. She’s looking into the murder of someone who possibly got mixed up with organized crime. This make-believe murder took place in the 1980’s.
Let’s say the victim’s name is Kirkpatrick. He bounced between New York City and Boston. He’d hang out at a bar called O’Malley’s. And his friends were Nunan, Murphy, Ryan, O’Conor, and Keenan.
To Americans, this is pretty obvious. With names like those, Boston and New York, 1980’s organized crime: Kirkpatrick may have gotten involved with American supporters of the IRA – the Irish Republican Army. Within that community was the Irish mob.
Now, let’s ask some follow-up questions about Kirkpatrick, our imaginary murder victim. Where was he born? Where were his parents born? Was he Catholic or Protestant? To outsiders, those differences may seem trivial. But if we’re talking about the IRA, that’s absolutely essential information.
[BREAK]
Many Cambodians are immensely proud of their Khmer heritage and. And Haing Ngor is one of them.
He was so deeply invested in saving his country. I'd been looking at him as Khmer.
But during that interview, something I already knew suddenly stood out to me.
Ngor was half Khmer on his mother's side and half Chinese on his father's side.
So I needed to dive into the differences hidden within the word “Chinese.”
[BREAK]
First, the basics.
CLIP: PJ THUM: Imagine if Europe is one entity, but at the same time, you'd still have German, you'd still have French, you'd still have Spanish. That's kind of like what it is to have Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hakka. China is one political entity, but it has many different languages because it is such a massive, massive place. It's got many different religions. It's got many different ethnic groups.
This is PJ Thum. He’s the Singaporean historian and democracy activist we heard from in the “Singapore Group” episode.
CLIP: PJ THUM: But when we talk about Hakka, Hokkien, and Teochew, really what we're talking about is language and place of origin. So when you think of Hokkien and Teochew, …. w hile they are mutually intelligible, they're different from each other. Kind of think of like Portuguese and Spanish. There's a lot of similarities, but they're usually. And a lot of differences. So Hokkien typically signals ancestral origins in southern Fujian province. That's the province that faces Taiwan. And a lot of Hokkien speakers today live in Singapore, Malaysia, and, of course, Taiwan.
[BREAK]
Now think about the difference between Northern Ireland Catholics or Protestants. Or Sunni and Shia, or North Koreans and South Koreans. There are massive divides within those communities. Or even Portugal and Spain, if we’re talking about the World Cup.
It turns out there’s a psychological term for this: the “narcissism of small differences.” It’s the tendency of homogenous groups to amplify the tiny distinctions within them.
Youk Chhang told me that Ngor used to chat with his friend’s mom in Chinese. That was a dialect. Ngor spoke Teochew.
The land Ngor rented to a school in Phnom Penh – that his family later donated? That’s was for Hokkien children.
Ngor made a movie in Taiwan in 1985. Taiwan is, in large part, Hokkien, as Thum just said.
Frank even once sent me a photo of Ngor’s headstone, at the Woodlawn cemetery in Los Angeles. It’s in English and Chinese. There is no Khmer.
The Chinese who first rushed into Cambodia in the 1990’s were from all over Southeast Asia, but not from mainland China, as my interviewee said. That’s corroborated by the Far Eastern Economic Review in articles by Bruce Gilley and Bertil Lintner.
There were legit investors, and of course, there were triads and organized crime.
[BREAK]
Where am I going with all of this? I mean, why do we care? It’s because we know that Ngor was on a financial rollercoaster. He had debts of at least $83 thousand at the time of his death. Fifty thousand of it was money he borrowed in his girlfriend’s name; he borrowed another $33 thousand from sources in the US. That’s over $175 thousand today.
That means the “narcissism of small differences” may an essential factor of Ngor’s financial picture. If he was short on cash, where would the guy go, for a loan?
The Phnom Penh bank where he kept his personal accounts, according to probate documents? That’s the Cambodian Public Bank. It’s Chinese-Malaysian.
The Sunway hotel, where Ngor used to hang out? That’s Chinese-Malaysian. It even flies a Malaysian flag.
The Naga World casino? That was owned by a Chinese-Malaysian.
I'd been running around Phnom Penh looking for people who knew Haing Ngor, and I found one in Youk Chhang. He was super helpful.
But what really emerged for me on that trip was not a person, but a pattern.
[BREAK]
Here are the biggest takeaways I got from that trip:
Ngor often wore a lot of gold – a bit of conspicuous wealth – to fit in with the Cambodia’s upper class, when in Phnom Penh. He had a more modest style in the US and even at times in Phnom Penh, when meeting with Westerners.
Ngor was seen going to the Naga World casino.
And when it came to money, it looks like Ngor hung out with his own kind. That may be vitally important.
As I’m writing this, I need to underline: I don’t know everything yet. This is a real-time investigation and it’s going to zig-zag.
But I’ve realized that these Chinese ethnic distinctions - that narcissism of small differences - may be a massive part of Ngor’s story. Again, like knowing whether someone caught up in Northern Irish politics is Protestant or Catholic.
All of that turned me onto another criminal syndicate – one that’s drawing me ever closer to Singapore.
[BREAK]
My name is Patricia Nunan, and this is “Who Killed Haing Ngor?”
If you knew Haing Ngor personally and would like to contribute, or if you have information or ideas that may be helpful to the investigation, please get in touch – I can be found at whokilledhaingngor@gmail.com I’m on both Telegram and Substack as mpnunan.
If you’d like to support the investigation, there’s a donation button on the webpage, whokilledhaingngor.com
Thank you for listening!