We were conference friends. The kind of friend where, when you see them, there’s a big smile, hug, take five to ten minutes to catch up, how old are the kids, ask when they’re presenting, then move on. These interactions with conference friends are meaningful, though, and only emerge after other substantive hangouts and, ideally, a working relationship. For instance, Y-Dang and I had presented on panels together; she edited the “Refugee Worldmaking” issue of Canadian Literature that I was in; we indulged a bit too much at the hotel bar and then attended the 2013 AAAS awards ceremony together; eight years later, she interviewed me about my book during the Southeast Asian American Studies virtual conference. We were Canadians, and had been in each other’s company at numerous dinners and tables. She was an important person in my life; I looked forward to seeing her, always, and I respected her and her work immensely. Yet we had hung out maybe a total of fifteen times in our lives.
In our circles, Caroline Kyungah Hong has popularized the term frolleague, a portmanteau of friend and colleague that speaks to this crossing of professional life and friendship. I consider conference friends an important subcategory of the “frolleague.” Particularly in a field like Asian American studies, conferences serve as a time to talk to people who don’t require lengthy preambles about the complexities of one’s work and experiences. Many feel isolated and/or ignored in their home departments and universities, and an Asian American (or Southeast Asian American) studies conference becomes a time to relax a bit and speak freely among peers in a way that is both emotionally and intellectually restorative and, often, exciting.
This makes the conference friend bond powerful, characterized by a pattern of bursts that sustain you and become something to look forward to, which is why the loss of Y-Dang was and continues to be so wounding and difficult. She just stops. Well-meaning friends tell me that they’re sorry for my loss, but is she really my loss? She meant so much more to many people. Chris, her partner, held a memorial for her at the 2023 AAAS conference in Long Beach, where a restaurant was filled with people commemorating her and her work—including some of the brightest and most committed scholars of critical refugee and Southeast Asian American studies. Yet, when speaking with them, I realized that many didn’t know or register Y-Dang personally. Neither did I, really, in a way. I didn’t even know she was sick, as we weren’t regular texters. I sensed something was up during the first couple years of her son’s life; then COVID-19 hit, so I gave her space—didn’t pry. Then she was gone. Looking around the room at the memorial, I wondered how many of us—conference friends—could disappear and be gone too. Which ones would we register or notice?
Despite her enduring brilliance, I find myself not ready to teach her work. I’ll cite it. Write about it. Ingest it. But it hurts too much to offer up the work of a dead friend to twenty-year-olds, no matter how much I like them. I’m certainly not ready to give it to graduate students to pierce and pick apart as “text.”
Instead, for now, all I can do is tell my students about the transient power of academic communities, formed, most potently for me, through the intensity, the joy, and the pain of conference friends.
Timothy K. August is an associate professor of English at Stony Brook University, and the co-chair of the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies. He is the author of The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America, with recent work appearing in Canadian Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, and Eating More Asian America: A Food Studies Reader.
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