By Thomas Huang

When I think of Dith Pran, I think of a wise man who took the time to encourage young journalists. I remember the short conversations we had over the course of several Asian American Journalists Association conventions.

NYT.com screengrab

The first time we met, he came by the make-shift newsroom where I was running a student newspaper project for AAJA. College students were covering that year's convention in a daily newspaper. Professionals like me were their editors.

I was awestruck. I shook Dith's hand and said something like: "It's an honor to meet you."

Dith, a photojournalist with The New York Times, died of pancreatic cancer on Sunday. In the 1970s, he was the journalistic partner of Sydney Schanberg, a Times correspondent in Southeast Asia. When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, Schanberg was forced out of the country. Dith was imprisoned, but eventually escaped against all odds.

Their story inspired the 1984 movie, "The Killing Fields," so named because as many as 2 million Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge regime.

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Dith Pran: Pioneer, Role Model, Legend, Friend (AAJA.org)

In the newsroom, Dith shrugged off my compliments in his humble way, and laughed. He said he wanted to learn more about the student project. Carrying his camera, he wanted to take photos of the project. So I took him through the newsroom, which had been set up in a cramped meeting room in the convention hotel. I introduced him to the student reporters, photographers and copy editors.

I tried to explain who this man was to the students. "The Killing Fields" had come out when I was in college, and Dith's courage had inspired me to think of journalism as a calling. But I don't know what this all meant to the students, some of whom hadn't even been born when the film's events took place.

It was hard, too, to connect Dith, gentle and unassuming (at least on the surface), with someone who had witnessed unspeakable things, who had such a fighting spirit to survive when so many others had not. It was only later that I learned of Dith's crusade to speak out on the Cambodian genocide.

Before he said goodbye, Dith told me, "This is a good thing, what you're doing." Working with the students was hard, and the rewards weren't always clear. I needed those words of encouragement. I imagined he was saying: We must pass on what we know.

On Sunday, when I heard Dith had died, I could once again see him wandering through the crowds at the AAJA convention with his camera. People thinking about the next job or the next rung on the ladder or the next person who could help them ... they rushed past the quiet man.

Sometimes the wisdom we're searching for is right in front of us.


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