Letters to Y-Dang: A Collective Student Response to Refugee Lifeworlds

Every two weeks from January until March 2023, the students of my Asian American Autobiographies class at the University of California, Irvine, between reading contemporary Asian American memoirs, read a chapter from Y-Dang Troeung’s Refugee Lifeworlds. In doing so, they bridged Asian American life writing with Troeung’s autotheoretical interventions to reveal the ways that the imperial haunting of US empire contours lives of individuals and peoples. Even though she had passed on two months before they began her book, my students felt palpably close to Y-Dang, as I had them each write her a letter after reading a chapter. I shared these letters with Y-Dang’s partner Chris to show him how her book opened a portal through which deep knowledge and feeling of the Cambodian archive came alive to them and, in so doing, shifted their place in the world. What follows are five excerpts from their 54,000-word conversation with her.

Your writing brings light to the refugee experience and the intergenerational trauma that comes from it. What struck me so personally was your discussion of the relationship between refugees and the settler-colonial nation-state. It highlights a really good point about how the “good refugee” is exploited to benefit the nation-state and is expected to be grateful despite little care dedicated to the reasons for immigrating. As the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, I know all too well the conflicting perspectives that make up a conflict that may seem small in world history but so large in your personal life/ancestry. I grew up with one way of viewing the Vietnam War because it was the perspective my parents had, having grown up in the aftermath of the war and living the effects of its outcome. And because of that, they hold a particular view of the US because it was the country that granted them asylum. To then learn how Americans felt about their involvement, and the atrocities committed by the US to push their own agenda, broadened my view of an event that transformed my parents’ lives. — BT

You have been in my thoughts recently as my class revisits more sections of your book, Refugee Lifeworlds. Your photo and the description of your photo of your mother and you as a baby really warmed my heart. I love how you have matching hats, and I love the expression that it captures. On the other hand, I know the photo only scratches the surface, and there is history, pain, and trauma that the camera is unable to capture. As you state, the photo primarily serves to draw readers into what it means to be a “good” or “lucky” refugee, and it captures the purity and awe of all of their firsts. It paints a picture for people and nations to feel good about themselves for being hospitable and charitable. The quote that struck me was: “These piles of charity will also teach the refugees that there is little room for remembering the past, for stepping ‘out of line,’ or for disobedience of any kind in the harsh winter climate. Survival in rural Canada will require a blanketing of all that came before” (48). — CY

In this section of the reading, I, like many of my classmates, was unable to move past the description of the Cambodian people as “collateral damage” and their villages as [caught in] “friendly fire.” It seems too evil, too dystopian to seem true, and yet, I know it is. I know that the United States, and many of the Western countries aligned with them, does not care for the lives of people of colour. I know that this nation will do anything to assume their own power on the global stage, but I didn’t expect to be confronted with a direct quote proving this. I don’t feel uncomfortable by it—rather, I am filled with rage on behalf of Cambodia. — AD

Kamleang chet—strength of the heart. Or strength of the mind, body, and soul. In times of survival the mere existence of not dying. Yet another underlying theme of the survivor’s emotional experience. I want to recognize that this phrase is complex; it doesn’t even have a translated word in English. It is grit. It is the determination to survive because death isn’t an option. It is taking back power and surviving for one’s own ability to die on their own. How empowering. How sad that a phrase needs to exist. — LM

Having read your work, which focuses largely on the manner in which the West has willfully ignored and concealed its role in debilitating the Global South, I cannot help but feel that we ourselves, in our own time, have occupied a “gap,” a “dark time” of our own, marked not by overt violence or blatant destruction, but by a far more subtle, more insidious phenomenon. Apathy, it has been said far and wide, is the defining illness of our times, and if we have failed to create communities of care, or to adequately maintain and defend them, then (for the most part) this has not been because our plans have failed, but rather because, succumbing to a collective despair, we have been to meek, too timid, too callously unaware of each other’s suffering, to constitute any plans at all. Refugee Lifeworlds, this incredibly ambitious work of yours, breaks with this trend; it has made me aware not only of what has gone wrong, or of what has been lost, but of how individuals have courageously, humanely worked to process their trauma. If, as you suggest, the act of regeneration does not so much entail regaining or recovering what has been lost, as it does acknowledging this loss and working around it, creating networks and relationships which can help to mend the whole whilst remembering that not all of its constituent parts have survived, then it seems your memoir is a perfect exemplar of what regenerative work ought to be. — NH

James Kyung-Jin Lee is professor and chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. His research lies at the intersection of literary narrative, disability studies, and medical humanities. His book Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority (Temple UP, 2022), received an Honorable Mention in the Literary Studies category from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2024 and was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022.