'Big Mom' and her orphans

An Australian woman devotes herself to mothering motherless children in a harsh land. Their story, appearing on Cinemax, is guaranteed to tug hearts.

By JEANNE MALMGREN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 3, 2002

Geraldine Cox has fiery red hair, a large, lumpy body she's proud of and a mischievous smile. Her favorite expression is a vulgar rhyming phrase involving a duck. The subject of a tear-jerking documentary? Believe it.

Cox, 56, has devoted the past 10 years to the orphans of Cambodia. My Khmer Heart is the story of Cox's untiring efforts to help 60-some children she mothers in an orphanage outside the capital of Phnom Penh.

The film, which will air Tuesday and Feb. 11 on Cinemax, won best documentary at the Hollywood Film Festival last year. It has been featured at several other film festivals and reportedly was considered with 15 other documentaries for an Academy Award nomination. (The Oscar nominations will be announced Feb. 12.)

My Khmer Heart is a two-hanky production, with scenes that tug at the heart and disturb the conscience.

A young orphan, disabled by polio, crab-walks on all fours, the only way she can get around. A widow who lost her job in a garment factory and can't support her three daughters waves goodbye as the girls ride away in a car, bound for a new life at Cox's orphanage. People lie dead in the streets, covered with blood, after a violent coup in 1997.

Scenes like that are common in Cambodia, a battered country that has endured 30 years of civil war, foreign occupation and the infamous "killing fields" of the late 1970s, when one-third of the population died.

Cox went there in 1970 from her native Australia, an adventurous 25-year-old with a new job in the foreign service and aspirations of "chance meetings with James Bond." Instead, she found herself in a war zone.

She grew to love the jungle-green country, where lotus flowers bloom in mud, where Buddhism and bribery coexist, where the interference of other nations, including the United States, has caused a generation of suffering.

"Everybody has had their fingers in this little country," Cox says in the film. "And I think there should be some sort of global social conscience for this country."

The Australian foreign service sent Cox to other places -- Iran, the Philippines, Thailand, the United States -- but her heart remained in Cambodia.

In 1993 she went back. She took an office job in the Cabinet of First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh, son of King Norodom Sihanouk. In her spare time, she worked at the orphanage started by Ranariddh's wife, Princess Marie.

Very quickly, the orphanage became Cox's passion and her life. The children, most of whose parents were killed fighting for the royal family, learned to call Cox "Maday Thom-Thom" -- Big Mom.

"She is chubby, quite healthy and wears silly clothes," one boy says in Khmer, subtitles scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

"Big arms. Big legs. Everything's big."

He grins delightedly.

When Second Prime Minister Hun Sen overthrew Ranariddh in the 1997 coup, Cox learned the hard way that it was a mistake to align herself politically with either side. Loyalties could change as easily as the currents of the Mekong River. She found her orphanage in jeopardy.

How she saved it, and how her last-ditch effort led to a surprise gift, is the highlight of the film.

My Khmer Heart was made by a pair of Cox's fellow Aussies, Janine Hosking and Leonie Lowe. Originally, it was supposed to be a 45-minute show for Australian television. Now Cox's story, and the story of Cambodia's orphans, is finding a wider audience.

The feature film rights to her autobiography were bought by the production company of actor Danny Glover, who has been involved in fundraising for Cox's orphanage. Last month, Glover, Matt Damon and other Hollywood celebrities hosted a benefit dinner and auction in Los Angeles. Among the stars donating items for the auction was Billy Bob Thornton, who reportedly is trying to adopt a Cambodian child with his wife, Angelina Jolie.

Despite its sad underpinnings, My Khmer Heart is visually beautiful. Scenes of orange-robed monks filing up the ancient stone steps of Angkor Wat are juxtaposed with piles of skulls, a legacy of the killing fields. Candles glow in the open windows of the orphanage. Cox, with scarlet lips and fingernails, fans herself in the tropical heat, wearing the native Cambodian krama, a blue-and-white checkered scarf.

The children steal the show, though. Small and skinny, dressed in mismatched clothes, they cartwheel across the dusty courtyard of the orphanage, dance in traditional costume for the prime minister, sprint ecstatically toward Cox's truck when she returns after a fundraising trip to Australia.

Their midnight black eyes are sad and sweet at the same time.

"I hope people look at them and see how resilient these little characters are," says Cox. "And how strong they've had to be to get this far and survive."

Have the Kleenex ready.

- Jeanne Malmgren has visited Cambodia twice. Last summer she and her husband, Jim Melvin, adopted a 2-year-old Cambodian orphan, Lia Lotus.

PREVIEW: My Khmer Heart airs at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday and 10:30 a.m. Feb. 11 on Cinemax.

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