Essay by M. Chiao
Art by Nicole Ma
Obscured by Western journalists’ documentation and filmmaking of South-East Asia’s various war during the Cold War era, narratives of the Cambodian genocide often center around trauma, violence, and Western heroism. Many of these narratives act in opposition to its advertised intent, displacing Cambodian experience in lieu of emphasising a Western benevolence that distracts from the West’s actual destructive contribution to an otherwise sidelined and ‘secret’ war. The erasure of Cambodian livelihood under the Khmer Rouge and the furtherance of Western benevolence falls into a pattern Schlund-Vials refers to as ‘Cambodian Syndrome’: “a set of amnesic politics manifest[ing] in hegemonic modes of public policy and memory” (814). These amnesiac politics stem from both Western representations of the war for the international community, and from attempts to re-narrativize the genocide within Cambodia’s borders, downplaying the violence and traumatic history. To combat this politicised amnesia, many Cambodian scholars and other storytellers take to an alternative Schlund-Vials calls ‘Cambodian Memory Work,’ a method to humanise and reclaim the refugee story outside of the Khmer Rouge’s violence and the contractual benevolence of Western humanitarian efforts and public memory. Dr. Y-dang Troeung’s Landbridge in particular, using her own experiences of her migration to Canada, revisiting Cambodia, and further travels in Hong Kong and Asia, exemplifies these new waves of remembrance. Landbridge avoids glamorising horror, instead sitting with the reader to engage in dual listening and speaking; Troeung does not position her memory work as simply a responsibility or obligation to pass on, but as a living text working from the past, within the present, and towards a healing of multigenerational trauma.
The effect of Cambodian Memory Work relies on its insistence on emotional affect and labour over historical accuracy and account. Certainly memory work can aid in testimonials and direct trials surrounding war crimes and violence, but its purpose is firstly to resist and critique “the realities of a US marketplace which can potentially privilege particular narratives of the genocide that adhere to dominant notions of US exceptionalism” (Schlund-Vials 807). US exceptionalism, and by extension Canadian exceptionalism, appears through narratives of benevolence and intervention. Many film and documents of the Cambodian genocide such as Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields (1984), whilst commonly understood to be well-intended reproductions and insights into Cambodian history, remain large contributors to public notions of Western benevolence; American journalists bravely step across a border to document such histories before they ultimately abandon it as they gain fame. The benevolence that appears even within stories about Cambodia pushes away the Cambodian in lieu of the heroic Western and American journalist at the forefront of a Cambodian story. Imperatively, Memory Work relies on the emotion of traumatic experience to “destabilize essentialized national narratives of reconciliation because of their incontestable connection to the remembrance of state-sanctioned mass violence” (Schlund-Vials 806). Distinct from refugee narratives boasting gratefulness to a Western figure, Cambodian Memory Work directly refutes the trope of the grateful refugee figure that necessitates the refugee “to fulfill the expectation of gratitude, one that prescribes and produces a certain kind of good subjects—those who are successful and devoted to the nation-state, who are economically mobile, law-abiding, and consciously thankful for the benefit given to them” (Nguyen 30). By situating the Cambodian refugee as the primary force within the memoir or autobiography, Cambodian Memory Work allows for the critique of both Western presence during genocide and its supposed benevolence post-genocide.
To subvert the cultural expectations of refugee narratives, memory work is not only political in effect, but also forms a healing methodology. The form of the memoir—to put memories to paper, to consume, digest, and reproduce traumatic experiences for a multitude of diverse readers—expects authors to write from subjective, lived experiences for capitalistic commodification and consumption. Autobiographical authors engaging in Cambodian Memory Work must tread the line between recounting experiences that align with collective perceptions and experiences of trauma while also undertaking responsibility for their individual story, which may differ from such collective memory. The negotiation of these tensions provides authors with a space to produce and examine closure on a matter where closure is impossible, re-humanising the refugee subject who is constantly refuted as a monolithic object of need. The power of Memory Work through the memoir, as conceptualised in Nelly Mok’s analysis of Loung Ung’s First They killed my Father, becomes a way of negotiating pain with truth through moments of fictionalised imaginings. The deaths of her sister and father, often cited as a major critique of Luong Ung’s autobiography for historical inaccuracy and fiction, become a place of personal exploration and understanding; as Mok argues, re-imagination in autobiography “enables Ung to re-humanize [her sister and father’s death], to restore the materiality and uniqueness of their bodies, voices, and perspectives—thanks to her imagination and to her memories of them—against the anonymizing circumstances of their disappearances” (Mok 71). This is not to say that fiction replaces the experience entirely, but rather through reimagination, memoir as Cambodian Memory Work integrates closure through fiction, becoming a method for healing post-trauma.
Thus rather than becoming a solely historical archive, memoir and autobiography prioritizes emotionally archiving the refugees’ experience of trauma. In effect, the valuing of subjective history pushes narratives of genocide away from outside voices attempting to take advantage of tragedy, and repositioning history back in the hands of victims and survivors. As Bunkoung Tuong writes, the memoir is “emotional truth, a truth that is emotionally and experientially meaningful for the writer, almost irrespective of what actually happened” (Tuon 118). Criticisms of Cambodian Memory Work’s potential to conflict with global narratives and ‘objective historical’ accounts fail to address the ways that survival of oppression and genocide are not uniform, and cannot be easily recalled as though they were a stagnant or single experience. Memory work is thus produced and embodied differently depending on the individual doing the production.
For the “1.5th generation” of Cambodian refugees like Dr. Y-Dang Troeung, who was born in the Y-dang refugee camp before migrating to Canada at a very young age, the experience of Cambodian Memory Work in North America ceases to be a learned skill and becomes an inescapable environment of life. Navigating experiences of the war through parents, siblings, or teachings in the asylum country, the act of experiencing Memory Work is necessary to heal both during and post genocide. Fragmentation in particular as a writing style becomes an incredibly important tool in navigating experiences of forced migration and difference. Destabilising the image of the grateful refugee or welcomed guest, the fragmentary form in memoir asks the reader to question not only what has been said by the page, but also what has not; what information non-Cambodian readers draw from the cultures they are immersed in to construct their understandings of war and refugeehood, without reference to the people directly affected. The fragmentary form adapts experiences of Cambodian refugeehood into individual stories despite Western attempts to isolate and portray the experiences as monolithic trophies.
Troeung’s usage of fragmentation through her anecdotes, theories, and letters emphasises a holistic and embodied experience of refugeehood outside of a singular point of trauma, recollecting her experience beyond that of the poster child for a ‘post-war’ refugee in Canada into something far more mundane and human than what Western refugee stories portray. The fragments are a record including, but not limited to, her childhood, her ventures in academia, her building of a family, and even her cancer diagnosis and treatment. In contrast to Loung Ung’s narrative memoir, which uses speculation and reimaginations to produce closure, Troeung’s understanding of the Cambodian genocide expands beyond trauma, resilience, and multigenerational memory through the avoidance of speculation. Instead, she remains predictably silent, pushing the reader towards an awareness of the gaps but never enabling them to gain a clear picture of events in context. The cumulative effect of this fragmentation and silence produces a silent, paradoxical mode of narration. While further explanation could be provided in many of the chapters, instead Troeung chooses to leave the pieces short, producing not only an implicit authorial reflection on past experience, but also a space for the reader to address and live alongside trauma without forgetting the complications of joy that appear with it.
The chapters ‘Kapok’ and ‘pods’ in particular discuss the ways language becomes personalised and embodied within diasporic pockets of Cambodian refugees. Even if their use of their mother tongues become inaccurate over time in vocabulary, grammar, or thick accents, inaccuracy in language and even in its silence becomes a means of connection between refugees—of understanding what one has the capacity to say and what they choose not to. As the ability to converse and connect with one another became a grave marker for education and inevitably a target on one’s back, Troeung writes that “during Pol Pot time, Cambodian people recited the proverb to plant a kapok tree (dam-doeum-kor) to each other as words of wisdom about how to survive the genocide” (Troeung 257). While silence can be interpreted as a method of oppression, it is paradoxically also a reminder of survival. Language, and the ability to choose conversation or silence, is a power that is in the hands of the refugee and nobody else.
Landbridge does not suggest a solution to the paradoxical nature of the refugee experience, but rather revels in it:
The Floral Hole ink drawing by Visoth Kakvei draws us into a space of paradox that confounds and unsettles so much of what we know or think we know about trauma, loss, and survival. When we enter into that space, we delve into a spiral of infinite darkness, but we also swirl into a field of life: a lifeworld, a meditative, repetitious space of beauty, creativity, and regeneration.
(258)
Troeung’s experience of Cambodian memory work does not force the reader to create solutions to a ‘refugee problem,’ nor does it absolve complicity in the face of social injustices. Rather, the image of the refugee is complicated for the sake of creating a human understanding of the refugee figure. We, as readers, colonial settlers, or individuals born long after genocide are not outside of memory work;we are carriers of such work in our own fragmentary experiences of life.
Landbridge as a whole thus becomes its own being, a text that will continue to grow beyond what Troeung might have expected within her lifetime. Presenting fragments of a life full of tragedy, the memoir necessitates recounting a life full of joy alongside it. Refugeehood, despite Western rhetorics of gratitude and benevolence, ultimately centres the necessity of survival in all aspects of life, often at the cost of narrating joy and love. There is still much work to be done in unpacking the text and refugee narratives in the years to come through other texts from South-East Asian authors and other parts of the world. The power of memory works is not limited to Cambodia, but to everyone that experiences disconnection from their land and livelihood. Rather than forcing adherence to a specific narrative that necessitates violence, trauma, and harm as the only way to understand genocide, memory work serves to suggest a new perspective on refugee lifeworks as potential seeds; kapok trees that “grew everywhere, belonged to no one, and provided for everyone” (Troeung 257).
Works Cited
Nguyen, Vinh. “1. Gratitude.” Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience, University of California Press, Oakland, 2023, pp. 29–51, https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/85259.
Mok, Nelly. “Healing from the Khmer Rouge Genocide by ‘Telling the World’: Active Subjectivity and Collective Memory in Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father.” Memory, Trauma, Asia: Recall, Affect, and Orientalism in Contemporary Narratives , Routledge, London, 2021, pp. 69–87, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315146669.
Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. “Cambodian American Memory Work: Justice and the ‘Cambodian Syndrome.’” positions: asia critique, vol. 20 no. 3, 2012, p. 805-830. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/483979.
Tuon, Bunkong. “Inaccuracy and Testimonial Literature: The Case of Loung Ung’s ‘First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers.’” MELUS, vol. 38, no. 3, 2013, pp. 107–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42001241Troeung, Y-Dang. Landbridge. Alchemy by Knopf Canada, 2023.