From Cambodia to Courthouse: New Judge Faced Hurdles to Victory

Daily Report | August 6, 2014                      

Judge Meng Lim

Bremen lawyer Meng Lim made history when he was elected Georgia's first Asian-American superior court judge last month.

A Chinese-Cambodian refugee, Lim arrived in Bremen with his family when he was 9 years old. He won scholarships to Emory University and Mercer University College of Law, then returned to Bremen to practice law. On Jan. 1, the 42-year-old will become a judge on the court where he started his law career as a clerk.

Lim won a runoff election July 22 with 61.7 percent of the vote for an open seat on the Tallapoosa Judicial Circuit's court.

It was the first time in almost 30 years that there has been an open seat on the Tallapoosa Circuit, which covers Haralson and Polk counties, about 50 miles west of Atlanta. It came open when Judge Richard Sutton announced he would retire when his term expires at the end of this year. Previous vacancies have been filled by governor's appointments.

"I knew I should run. That's not going to happen too many times in my life," Lim said. "The local people have been extremely nice to me since I immigrated, so I felt it was time to give something back to the community as well."

There were three other lawyers in the race—Andrew Roper, Vickey Atkins and Chuck Morris—all from Polk County. Lim, who lives in Haralson County, won a plurality in the May 20 election, with 36 percent of the 7,800 votes cast, then won the July 22 runoff against Morris, a Cedartown attorney and juvenile court judge.

Lim said he was surprised to win. "I thought there is no way that I would win, with four people running and living in a community that is less than 1 percent Asian-American," he said.

Lim said that when he decided to run for judge in March, he was quite nervous.

"I knew it was going to be expensive. I also knew that in a smaller community, it is very hard in this economy to expect people to donate to your campaign," he said.

He learned that social media could help after participating in campaign training offered by the Asian American Legal Advocacy Center in Atlanta. Lim hadn't been using Facebook, but it quickly became a central part of his campaign.

"Facebook is free, or very little cost, and it's instant," he said. "For a community of our size, it was great. People started talking about it among friends and word got out quickly. That is very helpful, especially in a place where the newspaper only comes out once a week."

Lim took a personal approach on his Facebook campaign page—which grew from 100 connections at its March launch to more than 1,200. He posted pictures of himself and his two children and told stories about his campaign experiences and growing up in Bremen as an immigrant from Cambodia.

Lim's story is the American Dream—a Cambodian refugee who becomes a judge in his adopted hometown—but his journey was far from easy.

Lim, who is the youngest of four children, did not meet his father, Se Lim, until he was 7, he recounted in a Father's Day tribute on his Facebook campaign page. His father, a school principal, fled into the Cambodian jungle before Lim was born to escape the Khmer Rouge, which persecuted intellectuals during a brutal civil war.

Lim's eldest brother was killed by the Khmer Rouge, and Lim, his mother, his surviving brother and his sister were separated in different concentration camps, Lim wrote. After the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia, his mother, Anh Hue Lim, found them and then set out to find Lim's father, taking Lim with her because he was too young to be separated.

They located his father after a monthlong trek through the jungle and soon after the family fled to Thailand. After a year and a half in a refugee camp, Jewish Family and Career Services of Atlanta brought them to the United States.

Things were not easy in America either.

Neither of Lim's parents spoke English, he said, which made it difficult for them to find work. The family moved to Bremen because his father was offered a job as a custodian for the First Baptist Church of Bremen. His mother, a teacher and nurse in Cambodia, also worked as a custodian.

As the youngest, Lim learned English the fastest, he said, so his parents took him to stores and appointments to translate. He said he decided to become a lawyer because of his family's early experiences here.

Lim said there were a couple of times when his family needed legal help, but could not afford an attorney.

"As immigrants, my parents faced a lot of barriers over language and finances, and sometimes they would get into arguments and fights," he said. His father was taken to jail after one fight with his mother, when he was in sixth or seventh grade, and it was up to Lim to get him out. "It was scary to have your dad in jail and trying to figure out what to do," he said.

Lim said a number of teachers and people in the community "were extremely helpful and friendly to us," at critical junctures. He said he came close to flunking out of high school early on, even though he was doing very well academically, because life at home was chaotic and he was skipping a lot of school.

A case worker for Haralson County DFACS took an interest, Lim said, and in his junior year his art teacher at Bremen High School, Jim Watts, and his wife, Becky, took him in as a foster child.

"I began to channel my energy into academics and sports instead of getting in trouble and not attending," Lim says. He joined the wrestling team and graduated valedictorian of his class, then won a scholarship to Emory and another to law school at Mercer.

After earning a law degree in 1998, he was hired as the law clerk for the three judges on the Tallapoosa Circuit's superior court. "I was thrilled," Lim said.

The Tallapoosa Circuit does not have a state court, Lim said, so the superior court judges hear criminal cases that range from a traffic ticket to a murder case.

He went to work for Tom Murphy's firm in 1999, while Murphy was still the speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, and opened his own firm a year later. He became the city attorney for Buchanan, Haralson's county seat, and handles domestic relations cases and individual and business disputes.

Lim became the county attorney for Haralson in 2005. He's also city attorney for Waco as well as Buchanan.

"I got really lucky. I had a lot of really good breaks," he said.

When Lim decided to run for judge, many of his childhood friends and mentors jumped in to help him out.

He and his secretary, Samantha Johnson, ran the campaign day-to-day, he said, but Mary Tolleson, his middle-school teacher for the gifted program, was instrumental in getting the word out in the community and helping to raise money.

David Tarpley, who volunteered as his media contact person, owns the People Pleaser convenience store where Lim worked as a teenager. When Lim was 13, he needed braces but didn't have the money so he asked Tarpley's father for a job. Lim worked at the store until he graduated from high school.

Besides posting on Facebook, Lim bought ads in the Haralson County Gateway Beacon and the Polk County newspapers, even though they were expensive. "If you just do social media alone, you lack the legitimacy that people want to see," Lim said. Because the newspapers are the county legal organs, he said it was important "to let people know [he was running] who were in the know."

All told, he spent about $62,000 on the campaign, according to his disclosure report. (Morris spent about $39,000.) That included mailers, yard signs, banners, campaign T-shirts, a website and a political consultant.

Lim said he spent a lot of time going door to door to introduce himself to voters. "In our community, people still really like for you to ask for their vote," he said.

He knew Polk County "was going to be a tough situation," he said, because he didn't have much contact there. He rented billboards to display his photo, despite the expense, so that people would recognize him when he went door to door.

It was hard, he said, "especially in rural areas that have a lot of big dogs. I tried to stay calm and not look too nervous."

One of Lim's Facebook entries recounts a run-in while knocking on doors with a man who remembered him from a long-ago case. Lim had represented the man's siblings in an estate dispute, and he wrote that the man was shaking in anger and launched into a tirade against him.

Lim's impulse was to leave, but instead he stayed calm and heard the man out. After about a half hour of conversation, the man finally told him, "Well, I might just change my mind about you."

Lim doesn't know whether he persuaded the man to vote for him. But the episode was instructive, he wrote. "The greatest lesson for me was to face his anger courageously, defuse the situation, give him the opportunity to be heard and respond with politeness and civility,'' he wrote. "That is what a judge must do in court every day."