Dear Y-Dang,

Dear Y-Dang,

I was asked to write a book review of your family memoir Landbridge [life in fragments], written in fragments of memory and letters to your son, Kai. Inspired, I wanted to craft my review by way of an epistolary response.

Y-Dang, much of what I know about you came to me posthumously, through this incredible book about your parents’ migration (with you and your two brothers in tow) to Canada as Cambodian refugees. I’ve also learned so much about you from your tour-de-force scholarly monograph Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, which I now regularly assign in my classes. But I also knew you, in the flesh and in person, before your untimely death in 2022. The last time I saw you was at Kitsilano beach. You had already undergone treatment. There was a promising break in late summer during which you gathered friends and colleagues. You spoke excitedly about your upcoming film shoot. You looked a little frail, but you still had a lively spark in your eye. You were, as always, making sure everyone had something to drink and nibble on. We hugged and I pressed my cheek to yours.

I thought you had more time, and I was devastated when I heard from Chris that you passed not long after that.

These were the versions I knew of you before you left us: a fierce and savvy ally who told me not to feel bad when negotiating for my job (“Ask for everything!”), a first-time mother who also had a scary C-section, the always-responsible Capricorn who brought our junior cross-departmental group together (and you were ever the one to think of the little things—forks, napkins!), a woman with a searing wit and effervescent laugh.

But I had not known about your family’s arduous and “miraculous” journey from Kampong Thom to Goderich, Ontario.

You were named after Khao I-Dang, the UN-run holding camp on the Thai-Cambodian border where your mom, dad, and brothers found refuge after the genocide, and where you were born. But this was after the family having been split apart at various checkpoints along the way. Your parents marvelled that they always found their way back together. And you carry that sense of wonder into your book. I linger with your sense of the extraordinary throughout the book, your appreciation of cosmic timing—which you don’t approach with panic or insecurity, but instead with the light graze of someone who knows not to tamper too much with the mysterious (otherwise you destroy it).

People will say that your book demonstrates the resiliency of your family, as if y/our bodies were meant to endure constant bruising. Yes, of course, Landbridge is about surviving through and surviving against. But it also shows us how we hold and are beholden to stories, and the patterned ways these stories neatly map onto the insatiable and unimaginative appetites of state-building, war, and capitalism. I revel at how much you held in your body. Not only stories about yourself, your parents, and your brothers, but also those of your extended family, your neighbours, friends, and artists and writers whose works you write about and share in these pages. You held so much pain, Y-Dang, and you never forgot the promises you made to share what happened to others.

Landbridge tells of the many crossings you have undertaken in your life, geographically, and also, ontologically, as when you fell in love with your soulmate Chris in Hong Kong, or when you became a mother. Such bridges can never be uncrossed, and you were alchemically and forever changed after each crossing.

There is a certain madness to inherited trauma and strange echoes across time, what your therapist called “rhyming” (68). You were robbed in Phnom Penh, which caused existential reverberations that surprised you. Your mother lost her jewels when she was bartering for a hen in Kampong Thom during the last days of Pol Pot time. Your mother lost her mother to the Khmer Rouge, and you lost your mother during her bouts of uncontrollable rage, which she directed at her only daughter. Then there are the geopolitical rhymes: Trudeau, Jr., welcoming a Syrian child refugee, just as his father “welcomed” you (79), a PR campaign smeared all over the media. These are just a few of the harmonic cadences in the book, which brims with so much insight and richness: for example, shedding light onto little known intra-Asian minor feelings and unofficial relationships. (North Koreans sunbathing in Phnom Penh!) You also sought a certain rhyming in your life and work: for instance, returning many times to Tuol Sleng to find out what had happened to your mother’s brother, a promising engineer and father who lived in Russia, and who came back to Cambodia under the pretense of ambassadorship. On one trip with your mother (her first time since the end of the war), you both find out that he was tortured to death at the S21 Tuol Sleng prison camp.

You say, “I feel my brain disintegrating. I’ve become incapable of writing, except in short fragments” (24). I relate to this so much. The fragmented form of your book ties into the Khmer concept of baksbat; your preferred translation is “broken form, because it invokes a sense of fragmented surface and impermanence” (62). You remind us, “Breaking of the body is not necessarily the same as broken strength or broken spirit” (62). Y-Dang, these days, my mind is also fragmenting. I don’t have any more words to offer about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the unrelenting and senseless suffering inflicted onto innocent people, including children and newborns. Sometimes it feels like we are screaming in the dark. You wouldn’t believe the silence of our supposed friends and allies. We see the images of this slaughter daily on our phones, and yet people somehow want to talk about how Barbie is an underrated feminist masterpiece. Oh, the shit-talking we would do!

Here’s another rhyme: you were with the Umbrella Movement protestors in Hong Kong, and I am now here with the student protestors for Palestine. You say, “I am elated to live here. The art of action is here, and it is all-embracing” (155). Your words express exactly how I feel: “I am in awe of their courage, their youth, and the futures they are risking in this moment” (156). Just as the Cambodian genocide was ignored, minimized, and disputed, so the same is happening with Gaza. As for me, I am trying to write through the anger and confusion, trying to offer a way to think and live in psychotic times. You remind us that asylum is “a word that means both a sanctuary for the displaced and a ward for the mentally ill, both the entanglement of refugee-ness and the madness of war” (63). And then you say, pointedly, “Yes . . . My family was granted asylum” (63).

You remind us that Canadian racism is not unlike the patterns of power and abuse your parents experienced during Pol Pot time. (Your dad said his foreman at the manufacturing plant was just like the Khmer Rouge, “cracking bayonets over people’s heads if they stopped working fast enough” [36].) You and your brother were bullied and beaten by white kids in school. You remind us that we will never be fully embraced by the nation-state, nor should we long to be. At best, we are tolerated. Despite this tolerance, you demonstrate why we don’t need Canada to survive; Canada needs us. It needs our labour, it needs our compulsory gratitude, it needs our radical ideas, because it has become unthinking, doomed to repeat its own settler-colonial fantasies and fetishes again and again. You were a refugee poster child, blessed by Trudeau, Sr., as the last of sixty thousand Cambodian refugees in the Canadian “Indochinese Refugee Program” and celebrated on the covers of newspapers without your consent (81), which means Canada will broadcast these images over and over in perpetuity, in its self-congratulatory commemorations.

You talk about the VICE article that colourized and digitally added smiles to the mugshots from Tuol Sleng in order to “humanize” them (116). You ask, “For whom would a Cambodian victim of torture and death not be human, except when smiling?” (116). (We know the answer.) When I taught Landbridge, one student loved how you talked about smiling as “the price of first-world admission” (117). There is the compulsory smile of refugees, extracted by opportunistic media and politicians. But there is something else that quickly follows this critique. It is the moment when you finally gaze upon the memorial photo of your uncle, unaltered. You write, “We smile together, and marvel at each other’s beautiful faces” (118).

There is still so much beauty.

Dearest Y-Dang, I hesitated before agreeing to do this review, because I knew it meant facing the grief of losing you again. You don’t reveal your cancer diagnosis until midway through the book. This feels telling. And although I know what happens, I cry again when confronted with these words. I am embittered by the fact that the disease which you fought was “linked, in unknowable ways, to the war [your grandparents] once fled” (168)—through the bomb residue, chemicals, and toxins that coursed through your mother’s pregnant body and through your own. You bring us into the intimate folds of your pain. You lived out the persistent debility that Jasbir Puar points out is part and parcel of settler colonialism and imperial warfare. This debility also shows up in y/our anger, the kind of rage that comes from the guts and hungrily scorches everything in its path, as we see after the vicious fight you and your mother had in front of Kai:

What I wanted to say to Kai was please forgive your grandma, for she has been through enough pain for a dozen lifetimes, and it has taken root deep within her. Seeing her daughter in pain has driven her to the edge, because she feels helpless to lessen my suffering, to stop the illness growing inside of me. I want to tell him that his grandmother has felt this way before, for four years when she could not feed her own children, and when she was pregnant with me and there were no doctors or hospitals left. Wars and their aftermaths turn the world upside down, turn parents into children and children into parents. I had to be an adult well before my time, but I don’t want this for my son. (224)

I am crying again as I read this passage. Anger is also something I know quite well. I have been fleeing my parents’ stories for my whole life, and I’m still trying to understand how I carry the persecution of my parents and grandparents during the Cultural Revolution. After Landbridge, I’m ready to listen.

I can’t thank you enough for sharing this lifesaving work with the world.

We miss you so.

Love,

Mila