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.

Link:
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