The house across the street from us. It’s got all kinds of bad karma.
Bad Karma, Part I: Sok it to me, baby.
Back in the 90's the Sok family moved into this brand new house the same time we moved into ours…. Husband and wife with 3 kids. The couple was originally from Cambodia with the kids born here in California. The husband was a physician who worked at the county hospital, while the wife was a stay-at-home mom. It was the golden years of the Clinton Presidency.
I never really became well acquainted with Dr. Sok – just small chat at the mailbox or at the curb doing lawn work. He seemed to live a mundane life of working lots of hours and spending his free time in the garage either on his treadmill or playing table tennis with his kids, when he wasn’t doing yard work. He was a really nice, very quiet, unassuming dutiful kind of guy.
And then ….. wham! Dr. Sok disappears, seemingly, off the face of the earth.
But Mrs. Sok eventually finds out that he has returned to Cambodia to be with another woman – the love of his life, he says. He claims that he was forced into his marriage by gunpoint - - they were paired by Pol Pot's ruthless Khmer Rouge regime and married alongside 100 other couples. He was never coming back to see his wife and kids again.
But the real punch-in-the-gut was he took all the family savings and had recently taken out the largest possible home equity loan (this was before the bubble burst on home values in California) and took all that money with him, as well.
So, Mrs. Sok, with two kids in high school and a third who had just been admitted to UC Davis was left high and dry with no income, no savings, no job skills, a mortgage and a home equity loan payment.
Mrs. Sok and her kids could not afford the mortgage and home equity loan payment so they had to sell the house quickly at a bargain sale price, and move into a little apartment. The daughter’s plans to attend UC Davis bit the dust. Mrs. Sok became a housekeeper earning $8.50/hour.
His kids were all pretty good kids from what I could tell and his wife was a very attractive woman … she had not let herself go after 3 kids and twenty-something years of marriage.
That he did this just blew me away….
Postscript: A couple of years later the issue is dealt with in superior court. Mrs. Sok is trying to get alimony and child support. Mr. Sok’s attorney argues that the marriage never existed. The Khmer Rouge regime of brutal dictator Pol Pot was later overthrown, and couples had three years beginning in 2002 to register their marriages with the new government, which Soks never did. They had moved to the United States in 1980.
The good news is that the court ruled in favor of Mrs. Sok. In California, marriages can be dissolved if one person was forced into it. The catch is that, by law, you have four years from the date of the marriage to challenge it. She was awarded $250,000. While it would be difficult to collect from Dr. Sok as a Cambodian resident, the court latched onto all of his U.S. retirement funds which were enough to make good on the award.
Originally Posted by SanJoaquinSooner
