refugees – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind

By Scott J. Pearson | September 14, 2025September 14, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Any book that makes me pour tears in the last chapter is worth five stars to me, and this book fit that bill to a tee. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the war in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge opened a limited slots for one family to emigrate to Vermont. The quota only allows room for three: an older brother, his wife, and one sister. The rest of the family had to separate.…

Beautifully Broken

By Scott J. Pearson | December 21, 2021December 21, 2021 by Scott J. Pearson

To preface, my wife and I are involved in the organization that the authors helped to found in Nashville, Tennessee, but what this essay lacks in objectivity, I hope to regain in honest intimacy. This memoir relates the story of how Hartley’s family escaped the “Brentwood Bubble” (Brentwood is a well-to-do suburb of Nashville) while encountering the Mwizerwas. Having fled the genocide in Rwanda during the 1990s, the Mwizerwas became refugees in Nashville and rebuilt…