Ly Sieng Ngo

1943-2021

“People don't appreciate what they have until they've lost it.”

— Ly-Sieng Ngo

Born in 1943 in Cambodia to a privileged Chinese-Cambodian family, Ly Sieng Ngo was already an adult when Pol Pot’s brutal regime seized control of the country. She spent four years immersed in the horror of Pol Pot’s killing fields, and she was one of only a few of her family to escape. In Seattle, Ly Sieng became an ardent defender of the Cambodian refugee community, working as a social worker, an advocate and an interpreter at a time when language services in health care were still a distant dream. She worked with Community Healthcare Interpreting Services (CHIS), the first organization providing interpreters to the Seattle’s Community Clinic system, as well as for the Hospital Interpreting Program (HIP) that grew out of it. The Medical Director of one of these community clinics, Country Doctor Health Centers, wrote this of Ly Sieng:

Nobody knows the suffering of the Cambodian people, nor recognizes the complex, long-term needs of the community, better than she. She has achieved a remarkable balance between translator, social worker, and advocate. She has always been exquisitely effective as a cross-cultural broker and is extraordinarily respected by providers and patients alike. She is clearly qualified for many higher paying jobs but has made a commitment and stuck to it. She inspires all of us who are lucky enough to have worked with her.

It is no surprise that Ly Sieng was chosen in 1995 to represent CHIS and HIP at the initial meeting of the National Working Group for Interpreting in Health Care. At that initial meeting, she challenged the view that an interpreter’s job was only to render in one language what was said in another with no regard for understanding, insisting that interpreters in small communities had to maintain their credibility in the community as well as with their institutional employers. Her voice echoes through the decades in our organization, just as her commitment and compassion inspired all who knew her.

~by Cindy Roat (9/2023)