[fleeing catastrophe]

[ruptures] 

My mother was thirteen when, in 1976, she was forced to evacuate Vietnam. Like the nearly 100,000 Người Hoa (ethnic Chinese) still living in the country after the liberation of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), my mother and her entire extended family travelled by boat to camps across the region. After reaching mainland China, then resettling a year later in Hēung Góng (Hong Kong), my mother and her kin were stateless for three years before relocating to the western prairies of kanata (Canada). 

I was not born a refugee. My birth certificate lists my place of birth as Red Deer (wâwâskêsiw-sîpiy), Alberta, where a great-aunt first received asylum and then sponsored, with the help of a community church organization, the rest of her extended family. I don’t know much about this part of my maternal family’s refugee story because my mother rarely talks about this time of her life. Over the years, every time I have asked about it, she waves my insufferable questions away, muttering at me, as though she is fighting off a headache, that it was so long ago, that she hardly remembers anything anymore. But she clearly does remember. Every time I ask, she keeps a tight hold of the past, concealing details from her inquisitive daughter, until a few sparse details manage to burst through her protective filter, unprovoked by my feeble attempts at being the family ethnographer, details that crack open by a fragment of memory triggered in the most unremarkable mother-daughter moments of our lives . . . 

Like the time she tells me that she remembers sleeping in military bunk beds, often four to a bunk, in the refugee camp in Hong Kong—the only time she has ever talked so freely about her life as a teenager. I can’t remember what provoked the memory. Only that it was so unremarkable that I can’t remember what we were doing. We could have been watching a news segment about the ongoing migrant crisis in Europe. We could have been walking by camping displays at a department store. More likely, we were peeling fruit and snacking over advertisement flyers of linens on sale. Whatever the context, the minor detail, triggering the fragment of memory, burst open so briefly with such controlled emotion, that it fizzled out as soon as it emerged. I know better than to ask for more when precious crumbs of her refugee past are divulged. When it comes to my mother and her memory of such a formative experience of her past, I turn to examine what a lifetime of refugee silence might mean, paying close attention to the minute details that manage to seep through. 

[silent capacities] 

Talking is overrated. You can be close to someone even if you hardly see or talk to one another. These days, my mother and I talk once a week on Facetime so that she can see her little grandchildren grow up, but before they were born, we would go for several weeks at a time without chatting on the phone. And every time we would get on the phone, the perfunctory call would last not more than five or ten minutes. 

Perhaps it’s the language barrier. Perhaps it’s my Vietnamese, the stunted vocabulary of a prepubescent child, frozen at the age that I stopped dreaming in Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese), my mother tongue, to adopt Tiếng Anh (English) as my dominant tongue. It would be so much easier if I just switched over to this colonial language; I could communicate so much more to her in English and could elicit deeper conversations about her past, but I can’t switch because it would be so alienating, after more than four decades of being her daughter, suddenly to speak to her in a language other than our shared native tongue. 

I’ve come to view my mother’s silence as her sovereign prerogative even though silence is treated with suspicion or medical intervention in the West. Silence—voluntary or involuntary—never seems to be treated as a viable ontology or epistemology, even as it may require access to appropriate health care and support. Silence is often pathologized or, in the context of oppression and social injustice, construed as political cowardice and complicity in wrongdoing. Silence circulates overwhelmingly as a sign of trauma, repression, or mental or social deficiency, a moral failure of upholding ethics and social justice. 

In her illuminative literary and cultural studies analysis of the Cambodian refugee archive, Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, Y-Dang Troeung proposes, when confronted with refugees and the full lexical range of aphasia, from “speechlessness, impermissible speech, difficulty speaking, language loss, and silence” (138), that we push past the disabled/non-disabled binary and its biopolitical discourses that restrict aphasia to the realm of medical regulation and discipline, and instead reposition such forms of lexical debility and disability within the regenerative possibilities of the afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. Rather than discerning whether an expression of refugee aphasia constitutes a medically diagnosable condition, thus determining whether such expressions deserve medical care and empathy, Troeung’s argument that refugee aphasia forms a creative refugee lifeworld carves out room for all forms of lexical perforation and silence as requiring “a different kind of ethical engagement and labour of radical care—a practice of refugee and disability justice that honours the need for access and treatment while refusing the criminalization, pathologizing, and stigmatizing of the ‘deficient’ brain” (139). 

Troeung’s intervention, gleaned from a Cambodian refugee archive of texts including Madeleine Thien’s novel Dogs at the Perimeter, as well as anecdotes and stories that Troeung’s Cambodian refugee family and community have passed down to her, blurs the line between voluntary and involuntary silence. This is not intended to turn Cambodian refugee illness and disability into a socio-cultural metaphor but rather to understand a broad range of aphasic expressions as not only traumatic but also vital and creative refugee responses to US imperial violence and its transpacific Cold War geopolitical formation of all the devastating hot wars and genocides that have ensued that have irrevocably impacted the lives of South East and West Asian peoples, from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine. 

Refugee aphasia, like cognitive difference or neurodiversity, is not some pitiful, individualized, pathological disorder of linguistic loss or deficiency to be primarily managed and disciplined in institutional isolation but rather a connective, solidarity-building refugee condition of vulnerability that calls for an ethics and practice of radical care, capacious listening, and new ways of collective and intergenerational meaning-making that would benefit humanity overall. As Troeung puts it, “[a]phasia generates its own creative language, like the refugee condition. . . . aphasia exists in the realm of creativity and translation that affirms the personhood and creative vitality of living the afterlife of loss” (163). Refugee aphasia forms not just an index of loss but an archive of creative life-making in the wake of such loss, an archive that also comes with great responsibility for the next generation, the generation of vigilant witnesses. 

[dam-doeum-kor]¹ 

Until recently, it never occurred to me that I did not know the Vietnamese word for “refugee”: người tị nạn—which means a person (người) fleeing from danger (tị nạn). I find it strange that I never had occasion to use the word, that I have a hard time remembering my mother ever saying the word out loud. In the last four decades of her adult life of relocating to kanata and becoming a mother, a cosmetology college graduate, a Chinatown businesswoman, and now Maa4 Maa4/Poh4 Poh4 (grandmother) to my nephew and two children, did she ever stop seeing herself as a refugee? Did she ever self-identify as such? 

My mother has never been one to ruminate. This has been her survival mechanism. The past never seemed to bother her or get in the way of living. She has survived war, loss, displacement, refugee boat crossings, and domestic violence, yet you wouldn’t know it unless she told you herself. 

In her lifetime of refugee silence, my mother has chosen to shield me from the trauma of her past. But has it been a maternal choice of demonstrating resilient strength, a psychological response to repressed trauma, or an intergenerationally learned strategy of performative nescience to shore up “emotional resistance,” much like the Khmer epistemology of dam-doeum-kor (Troeung 28-36), which one cultivates to survive repressive regime changes in a colonized land not your own? Whichever it is, I’ve come to accept that, after many unsuccessful inquiries over the years, it is no longer my place to probe, even if her refugee story is also my refugee story to inherit and pass down to my children. It is up to me to make do with whatever fragments of memory have been disclosed to me over the years, to honour and absorb the silent gaps and omissions as I continue to make sense of our reluctant family refugee story that is uniquely—and not so uniquely—ours to bear. 

Notes

1. Troeung conceptualizes a Khmer epistemology of disability drawn from dam-doeum-kor, “to plant a kapok tree,” which is a Khmer proverb that she traces throughout the Cambodian refugee cultural archive, particularly from her family’s teachings and anecdotes. It is a performative disability to “see nothing, hear nothing, and say nothing” that is both survival strategy and “emotional resistance” passed down intergenerationally among survivors of the Cambodian genocide to avoid persecution by the Khmer Rouge (Troeung 28–36; 108–109). 

Work Cited

Troeung, Y-Dang. Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. Temple UP, 2022. 

Malissa Phung is a second-generation settler descendant of Sino-Vietnamese refugees who have resettled on the territories of the Tongva, Néhiyawk (Cree), Dene, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, Nakoda (Stoney), and Anishinaabe (Ojibway/Saulteaux). She is a teaching stream professor in the School of Communication and Literary Studies at Sheridan College. Her literary and cultural studies research on Indigenous and Asian relationalities has been published in Canadian Literature, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures of the Americas, Postcolonial Text, and edited collections such as Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada, and Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity.