At a literary festival, in the fall of 2023, I attend a dinner with your friends and family. I sit with your friend T., who tells me a funny story about eating hallucinogenic “magic pizza” with you in Phnom Penh. Across the table is your brother, M., who fiercely defended you from bullies when you were children, and who now quietly savours a tall glass of Chè Ba Màu. To my left is your friend V., who has conscientiously pre-ordered appetizers. I already know him to be a beautiful host. At the far end of the table, your son, in a colourful patterned shirt, is busy drawing. Your partner, C., is attentive, observant. You are here, present in the cozy swirl of words, the clatter of dishes. These friends and family surround your silhouette, hold your shape. It is warm, this space where you have so recently been.
*
When I teach Landbridge: [life in fragments] a few months later, my graduate students want to call you by your first name as a way of “holding you close.” You feel very present in the flow of conversation, in the churning questions: What is the presumed “whole” against which a fragmented life exists and persists? What are the forces of fragmentation that act on a life?
A student named S. wishes to name the forces precisely. In Y-Dang’s story, there is colonization, genocide, capitalism, migration, productivity, fascism, dictatorship, cultural cleansing, language, the experience of being framed by language . . .
*
We spend a long time parsing a single paragraph. It is braided with your mother’s italicized voice. We sit with its delicate plaiting and discuss how we might use polyphony to invite different inner voices and interiorities into our writing, thus extending what gets counted as memoir material, as memory matter, and who gets counted as memoirist.
“So careful. The way Y-Dang moves on the page,” says a student, E. “I mean, so full of care.”
I have learned that my students love most what they find themselves, so I follow them: their acts of taking note, their little moves of attention. E. leads us to another moment. She gently asks us to stop at the base of a kapok tree, or “the mute tree.” We sit at the trunk of this image and its meanings. We are shaded beneath the canopy of an ongoing historical grief, but also of the all-consuming moment we are living within—a war being waged on Palestine, a genocide in Gaza; we wonder at the way the colonizing mind continues to reach towards elimination. My students speak openly of the burden of living in a world drenched in war and the cruel machinations of capitalism. How do we write against this machine, when we are embedded in its operations? How do we speak?
*
We sit with the kapok tree and with silences that might be the impetus for healing, that might contain the seeds of regenerative retellings. We sit with the olive tree, our solidarity reaching towards a land where occupation is unjustly part of the everyday. We sit with trees that teach pride in patience, endurance, futurity.
*
“There is another tree,” says one student, S., paging through her copy of Landbridge. The tree appears in a photograph, amid a beautiful set of textual and visual juxtapositions, a photo of you as an adult. You are looking at the famous “killing tree.” Again, S. observes with precision: This is an image Y-Dang wants to have taken so she asks someone to take it, which is a huge step for her. She wants her son to see it without fear or horror. This really resonated for me because I have seen my own son respond to our place of origin with horror, and that serves as a barrier for him wanting to know about it, which is painful for me. So, I really understand what she’s doing here.
My students don’t need me to explain the deep, painful sorrow of a tree transformed into a site of death, or the power of a mother who unfixes the tree from the singular meaning to which it has been pinned as, in Y-Dang’s words, a “synecdoche of horror.” S. is backed by murmured agreement, a collective thankfulness. We can look at death. We can face the truth and reverberations of our histories, beyond any obvious or ominous conclusions.
*
The day after our Landbridge class, I attend a drawing workshop. The theme is “bark and branches.” After looking at branches from a distance and abstracting their shapes, we are invited to make rubbings—frottage—directly from trees. What might we learn from nature’s marks? Her infinite variety? Her rhythms and natural order? We use heavy graphite sticks and wax crayons and relatively thin paper in order to pick up the subtle designs of our subjects. The paper heats up under my hand.
I feel the tree’s warm imprint and I feel you here, your ongoing presence and frictive warmth, in all your different ways of making and leaving a trace. Thank you, Y-Dang.
Kyo Maclear is an essayist, novelist, teacher, and children’s author. Her non-fiction books include the hybrid memoir Birds Art Life (2017), finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and winner of the Trillium Book Award, and Unearthing (2023), winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. She holds a doctorate in environmental humanities and teaches writing at the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA.
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