Cambodiadaily.com: Without Citizenship, Vietnamese Remain Adrift

Nguyen Thi Nguyen, an ethnic Vietnamese woman living in Kompong Chhnang City’s Kandal village, prepares to dock her boat on the shore of the Tonle Sap river last week. (Chris Mueller/The Cambodia Daily)

“We don’t have citizenship, so we don’t have rights like Cambodians,” he said.

“People think we are illegal immigrants and they look down on us.”

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KANDAL VILLAGE, Kompong Chhnang Province – Though they live in floating houses moored to the banks of the Tonle Sap river, few of the nearly 2,500 ethnic Vietnamese villagers here can truly call Cambodia home.

Like many of his neighbors in Kompong Chhnang City’s Kandal village, Nguyen Van Hung, 59, settled on the Tonle Sap in the early 1980s when he resettled in Cambodia after fleeing the Khmer Rouge a decade earlier.