Saren Keang: A Life Built Against the Odds I had the chance to speak with Saren Keang in this episode. Her story runs through three countries, two health crises, and one pattern that repeats quietly across a generation. Saren grew up in a small village in Cambodia, in the years after the genocide, when the country was still rebuilding an economy that had almost nothing left in it. Her mother sold food from a bicycle to make two or three dollars a day. Her father had arthritis and could not work. In that environment, a belief took hold. Girls could go to primary school, but nothing more was expected of them. Boys were the ones who continued. That belief was not held by one or two people. It was a system, repeated quietly across a generation. Saren's older sister was pulled out of school at grade four. Her younger sister left at grade nine. Neither of her siblings went on to finish a college degree. Saren watched this happen and understood, early, that the same pattern was waiting for her. Selling clams and grilled chicken wings after school helped pay for her father's medicine, and she kept studying anyway, because education was the only path out that she could see. That decision earned her a scholarship to a university in Bangladesh built specifically to support young women from across Asia, and later a dual master's degree in the United States. She is now the first person from her village to hold two master's degrees from a US university, and the first from her district to hold three master's degrees from two different countries. The cost did not end when she left Cambodia. While completing her third master's degree, Saren was also financially supporting a family of ten back home, and doing so while living with kidney failure and bipolar disorder at the same time. In January 2023, a routine blood test led to an emergency room visit. Her kidney function had dropped sharply, and by March her kidneys were functioning at eight percent. Dialysis followed, three times a week, four hours at a time, and she kept writing her research on the days her energy allowed it. In February of this year, she received a transplant that matched her blood type and antibodies exactly, and she has been recovering well since. A psychotic episode in 2017, not long after losing her father, led to her first bipolar disorder diagnosis. Her family combined traditional healing in a Buddhist pagoda with medication collected from a clinic in the capital. She speaks about the diagnosis directly, without performance, because she wants to reduce the silence that still surrounds mental health in her home country and elsewhere. Two books have come out of this journey, and Saren now mentors high school and college students, particularly newcomers and immigrant youth, on navigating scholarships. That work started informally with young women from Cambodia and is something she wants to extend further. None of this reads to her as exceptional. It reads as a series of decisions made inside a system that told her, repeatedly, to stop. She kept choosing to continue, and now she spends part of her time helping others find the same path. That pattern is worth watching, in Cambodia and anywhere else it shows up. Highlights: 00:00 Arriving in Canada 02:49 Growing up in Cambodia 20:35 Kidney Diagnosis 35:00 Bipolar Diagnosis 41:12 What's Next Guest links: Saren Keang: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saren-keang-796466260/ Jens Links:
