Georgia Superior Judge Out On a Lim After Family Violence Charge

Last spring, Lim knocked on his neighbors’ doors throughout Haralson County and adjacent Polk County to stump as a candidate for superior court judge in the Tallapoosa judicial circuit. After a close primary election in May between Lim and Polk County attorneys Chuck Morris, Andrew Roper, and Vickey Atkins, Lim won a July runoff versus Morris to earn the bench.

“Lim stood out most of all in his home county, where Haralson voters turned out more than 2 to 1 in Lim’s favor. Haralson County turned out 2,174 to 927 in favor of their hometown candidate,” according to local newspaper the Polk Fish Wrap. In Polk County, the tally was 1,812 votes for Lim to 1,544 for Morris.

His campaign stood out partly because of the heavy use of social media, especially Facebook, by Lim and his supporters.Lim’s Facebook page lists his hometown as Bremen, when in fact he was born more than eight thousand miles away in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in 1972. The youngest child of Se Lim, a school principal, and Anh Hue Tran Lim, a nurse, his family’s journey to the United States began in 1975 after the Khmer Rouge seized control of the country. Led by notorious Communist revolutionary Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea in Cambodia.

Following a ruthless agenda meant to prevent their overthrow, the Khmer Rouge exterminated anyone suspected of being capitalists or traitors, including almost anyone who was educated, ethnic minorities, professionals, and people connected to foreign governments.

Many of the new regime’s policies intended to force the country into its agrarian ideal disproportionately affected Lim’s family. His parents were both educated city dwellers and ethnically Chinese. Although his mother had been born in Cambodia, her mother was from China. Lim’s father had escaped his native land to Cambodia in 1949, after the Maoist government executed his own father, a landlord in China.

Before Lim’s birth, his father had fled the city out of fear with the couple’s oldest son. The rest of the family, including Lim’s mother; his middle brother, Lymeng; and his older sister, Siv Lang, were driven from their home in 1975 and forced into farm labor camps outside the city. Little more than a toddler, Lim was separated from his mother and siblings and settled in a one-room barracks with about a dozen other children, watched over by an adult loyal to the movement.

Each morning, the children were awakened at sunrise and marched to work in rice fields. Lim’s memories are spotty, but he recalls some incidents vividly.

“At noon, they would march us from the rice fields to the cafeteria to eat. One day, I remember I had to sit down underneath a tree because I was too weak to walk. When I gathered enough strength and got to the cafeteria, they had eaten all the food. That was one of the few things I remember that was bad,” Lim says, without bitterness. “Most of the experiences were surprisingly positive. We didn’t have toys, but we would play with all kinds of stuff. I remember catching crickets and fighting fish. We would make balls of clay, and that would be our medium of exchange.”

Other than periodic visits to the women’s camp to see his mother, Lim says life went on this way until 1979, when the Vietnamese armed forces invaded Cambodia in response to Cambodian aggression across its borders.

As the Vietnamese made headway into the country, the Khmer Rouge soldiers and their supporters fled into the jungles and mountainsides, abandoning the work camps.

As soon as she was free of her guards, Lim’s mother raced to collect her children. She arranged for the older two to stay with a friend, then set out with her youngest son in tow to search for her missing husband with only a photograph and scraps of information to go on.

“She would hitch rides with army trucks sometimes, but mostly we walked,” Lim recalls. “She would ask any people we met if they had seen this man in the photo. Every time we got news about him, she would chase down that path, only to realize he was no longer there. “

Lim remembers the day, after scouring the Cambodian countryside for more than a month, when they finally found his father. But the joy was tempered with grief, as Lim’s oldest brother had contracted malaria while traveling with his father and died due to lack of medicine.

“It was really strange. I saw this man who my mom said was my father, but I’d never met him before. I remember them crying, and they talked for a long time, late into the night,” Lim says.

Once reunited, Lim and his parents traveled back to pick up his older brother and sister. Back together, the family resettled in a smaller city and tried to rebuild their lives.

While his father worked at any job he could find, Lim’s mother tried to do some basic nursing, but without medication there was little she could accomplish. She resorted to cooking whatever she could find to sell on the streets.

For about a year the family lived in a makeshift hut fashioned from bamboo and palm leaves. One night, a man with a knife came into the shelter and demanded the family’s money. Shaken, the Lims decided they would seek shelter in refugee camps that had been set up in neighboring Thailand to take in Cambodians fleeing the war.

The family gathered a few treasured belongings and set out, traveling mostly at night to remain undetected, on a long, harrowing journey to the border. At the border, Lim’s parents paid a guide to take them into Thailand and to a Red Cross camp.

To a seven-year-old Lim, the camp was a chance to catch up on a lost childhood. “The Red Cross gave us toys and clothes, and there was a school there. Most of the time we would just play, and I remember learning to play Chinese chess,” he says. In the meantime, his father was desperately writing letters to friends and acquaintances around the world, seeking asylum for the family in another country.

It was eighteen months before the family was “called” by an Atlanta organization, Jewish Family and Career Services, who agreed to sponsor them in the United States. In preparation for the trip to the US, the family was transferred to another camp in Indonesia where they learned rudimentary English.

Another six months passed before the day came for the family to fly to Atlanta. Lim remembers the anticipation of his first airplane flight and his mother giving him a handkerchief to put in his pocket and admonishing him that when they got to America he was to be careful not to throw trash on the streets.

When they landed in Atlanta, a host family took the Lims to an apartment that had been set up for them in College Park. The things that stand out in Lim’s mind from that first real home were a thirteen-inch, black-and-white television set and the freezer.

He and his siblings immediately started school, and his parents sought work. His mother soon found employment as a live-in nanny for a doctor’s family, forcing her to be away from her family during the week.

His father, however, struggled with English and was frustrated with his inability to find a job. After about eight months in College Park, Lim’s parents were hired as custodians for the First Baptist Church in Bremen.

The church provided them with a house just across the large asphalt parking lot from the sanctuary.

As the youngest of the family, Lim says he found learning English daunting at first, but quickly began to pick up the language.

“I remember when I finally could say my first sentence. After that I became the interpreter for my mom and dad when they went places where they needed me to help translate,” he says. “Probably because of that, my parents gave me a lot of freedom.

That is mostly good, but sometimes it had its negative effect too. They gave me so much freedom that I did pretty much whatever I wanted to do.”

During this time, Lim’s older brother, Lymeng, was a positive role model for him, starting high school as soon as they arrived in Bremen and managing to complete his studies in four years while learning English. He went on to Dubuque University in Iowa for a year before finishing his business degree at West Georgia College in Carrollton.

“My brother really had to work hard to get this kind of education because he started so late. He would read his textbooks and translate them the night before class into Chinese, writing it in between the lines, so in class he would know what they were talking about,” Lim says.

Following his brother’s example, Lim excelled in school and did his part to contribute to the family.

David Tarpley, who volunteered with Lim’s campaign as public relations manager, recounts the story of when a thirteen-year-old Lim walked into his father’s convenience store, the People Pleaser, and asked for a job.

“Meng was in the eighth grade, and he told my father that he needed the job because he needed braces,” Tarpley says. “Some of the other kids had braces, so he wanted them too, but his family could not afford them.”

When Tarpley took over the store in 1989, he experienced firsthand the tireless work ethic and engaging personality that have been constants in his friend ever since.

“He was always so accommodating with customers, he always wanted to help people,” Tarpley says.

By the time he started high school, however, Lim’s home life had deteriorated. His father had become increasingly bitter and angry about struggling to make ends meet as a janitor when he had been an educator in Cambodia. He felt isolated in a community where he could not speak the language or drive.

“He was angry a lot and yelling,” Lim says. “My mother just tried to enjoy things; she adapted in everything she did. But my mom is very strong-minded too. When Dad got to a certain point, she began to push back. There was just constant arguing and fighting.”

It became difficult for Lim to concentrate in school, and he began skipping classes—sometimes going to the mall or out into the woods, but other times leaving town with a friend and not returning for days.

“You could only miss a certain number of days, and I was always at that limit,” Lim says.

In his junior year of high school, a Department of Family and Children Services (DFCS) caseworker went to the high school to ask some of the teachers if they knew of an emergency place for Lim to stay.

Art teacher Jim Watts overheard the plea.

“I’ve known Meng since he was in grade school, and I taught him art in the ninth grade. He was just an outstanding student. Any goal he set, he always made it,” Watts says. “I knew the caseworker, so I approached her and said if Meng needed a place to stay, we’d be able to take him.”

The next day the DFCS worker called Watts back to ask if he was serious about his offer. Watts called his wife, Becky, a third-grade teacher, who listened to the story and told her husband, “Bring him on home.”

The couple became official foster parents and did their best to make Lim feel safe and comfortable in their home.

“We have two younger children, a boy and a girl, and they were very jealous of Meng at first because we were pampering him to get him comfortable staying there,” Watts says. “Now they are as tight as can be.”

Lim describes his foster father as easygoing with “a really good heart.”

“He always impressed upon me to do something I would be happy about. I was intense all the time,” Lim says. “Asian parents want their children always to excel. He said that was good, but that I had to find something I wanted to do.”

Lim was particularly close to his foster mother, Becky, who died in 2013. “She was just very encouraging and understanding,” he says.

In a stable environment, Lim was able to concentrate on his work and extracurricular activities, starring on the wrestling team and becoming president of several clubs.

Although the Wattses became his guardians, Lim visited his parents often. His mother was happy he was getting the support he needed, but his father refused to speak to him for more than a year. In time Lim’s father realized his son was in an environment where he could succeed, and his attitude softened. By Lim’s senior year, the two families shared their pride and support of their son.

When it came time to apply to colleges, Watts asked Lim which schools he was considering.

“He told me he had only applied to Emory because that’s the only one he wanted to go to,” Watts says. “As you know, he ended up there.”

Valedictorian of his high school class, Lim chose Emory for its academic reputation. He applied only to Emory for practicality—he didn’t have the money to pay application fees to many different schools.

He was accepted and received the Georgia Governor’s Scholarship, which is awarded to the state’s valedictorians, and other scholarship assistance.

At first, Lim felt lost at Emory.

“I’d graduated first in my class in high school, but it was really difficult for me. I had the pressure of going premed because that’s what my parents wanted—even though I don’t like hospitals and I don’t like to see blood,” he says.

Through the guidance of several key professors—including David Edwards, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology; history professor Irwin Hyatt; and administrator Jody Usher—Lim switched his focus to prelaw, majoring in American history.

“Once I decided what I wanted to do, I could channel my energy again,” he says.

After Emory, Lim attended Mercer School of Law in Macon, with an interest in family and juvenile law, in part because of the struggles his own family has been through.

“I always enjoyed helping people because of my background, and I always liked the underdog,” Meng says, a characteristic smile lighting up his face.

When he finished law school, Lim returned to Haralson County as a clerk for the superior court he will now serve as a judge. Retired Superior Court Judge Marion Cummings was one of three superior court judges for the Tallapoosa circuit when Lim took a clerkship with the office.

“It was fairly intensive work because he was working with three judges in three counties. We had many difficult cases, but he is a very bright and capable young man and did the job quite well,” Cummings says.

It was years later that Cummings learned of Lim’s childhood in Cambodia and his journey to US citizenship. As a personal favor to his former clerk and longtime friend, Cummings presided over Lim’s swearing in as superior court judge at the Polk County Courthouse on December 4 in front of a courtroom packed with family, friends, supporters, and colleagues.

With his parents, Watts, his sister, and his children gathered around him, Lim swore to “”administer justice without respect to person and do equal rights to the poor and the rich.”