Making Our World Together: Building New Relationships to Asia with Y-Dang

“I’m so angry that I didn’t know anything about this part of Hong Kong history until now!” This was what a student of mine exclaimed during my office hours after reading that week’s required materials, including Y-Dang’s 2015 article “Buried History and Transpacific Pedagogy: Teaching the Vietnamese Boat People’s Hong Kong Passage.” I was teaching Y-Dang’s article in a global Chinese course in Vancouver. We had just started a new module that discussed Hong Kong as a century-long borderland connecting South China and Southeast Asia. Many of us in this class, including me and the student visiting my office hours, have personal relationships with these regions. The relationship between Hong Kong Chinese people and Southeast Asian peoples is a key concept that I explored in my doctoral dissertation over the past few years in Canada. Repeatedly during that time, across the many hours sitting at my writing desk in my New Westminster rental home, my memory kept going back to one particular moment in the summer of 2014 in Hong Kong, when I first met Y-Dang. I thought of it again during that office hour. And, pulling myself back from these meandering thoughts, I said to the student, “I was angry, too, and I think this is the right response.” This is true. The student reminded me so much of myself a decade ago, when I first realized the deep urge to learn more about Asia, even though by that time I had spent almost my entire life in China. Y-Dang did not know it, but she was one of the first people who inspired me to write, teach, and think about Asia in the ways I do now. 

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In July 2014, in Hong Kong, I participated in a summer program dedicated to themes of world literature. I have a few distinct memories of those three weeks: the out-of-place feeling of staying in freezing AC seminar rooms when it was boiling outdoors, the struggle of writing my MA thesis on postmodern American literature, the deep confusion of navigating (what I later would know as) whiteness at my first multi-institution academic event. And then along came Y-Dang, who, during the event, lit a candle for me that made me feel warmer and showed me different possibilities of worldmaking. One afternoon during the seminar meetings, a young and energetic Asian woman woke up the room by co-leading the discussion. She introduced herself as an assistant professor in English at the City University of Hong Kong, and the handout she circulated read: 

Participant’s name [sic]: Aparna Shukla, Y-Dang Troeung

Text for Discussion: Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013)

Seminar: . . . Session 8 (Troeung and Shukla)

Instead of giving Eurocentric lectures on topics of memory and forgetting as in the previous seven days, Y-Dang and her co-presenter were to screen a documentary film about Asia and Asian experiences. As the handout stated: 

Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture is a 2013 Cambodian-French documentary that follows the filmmaker’s traumatic personal experience through Pol Pot’s communist regime. The film begins with a quest for a picture that can show the mass violence that was perpetrated during Pol Pot’s communist revolution, a picture that is missing from the official archives. The narrative begins with Panh’s happy childhood with his family in Phnom Penh, and follows him through the several rural dwellings and various undertakings that he is assigned as a subject of the regime. And, it is only viacinema, Panh’s declares, that the truth of Cambodia’s genocidal violence can be told.

“How strange and exciting!” I thought to myself, sensing similar mixed energy coming from the seminar participants, half of whom were Chinese scholars from the mainland. By that time, I had dedicated most of my time as an English major throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies in mainland China, the US, and Hong Kong, to reading and analyzing Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Byron, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Conrad, Poe, Thomas Pynchon. I was taught that these were the great writers I should admire and mimic. Although no one said this explicitly, I was made to feel that to be an English major meant to be dissociated from contemporary Asian stories—that is, stories happening where I grew up and featuring people whom I knew and cared about. Only once had I studied an Asian American text, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly. This would be a common experience for any English major who studied in a university in mainland China or Hong Kong. But Y-Dang’s presence helped confirm a desire that I had yet to articulate: I wanted more. 

Y-Dang’s screening of Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture was a wake-up call for me on many levels. The history of the Khmer Rouge is both foreign and familiar. In my first year of graduate school in Hong Kong, I had been researching the history of the Cultural Revolution and the Tian’anmen Square Massacre outside of class time. I was hopeful that my questions about contemporary China would be answered if I focused on learning more about China’s history. However, I didn’t really know that the kind of violence enacted in China was also experienced by people in other Asian countries until I saw Panh’s documentary about the Communist Revolution and its subsequent violence in Cambodia. I left the screening in shock, not so much by the level of atrocity committed during the Khmer Rouge—I was familiar with atrocity—but because I realized that China and the Chinese people were not alone or exceptional in facing such violence and continuing to produce dreams. There was so much more for me to learn from and explore in the stories of my fellow Asians. 

But retrospectively and perhaps more importantly, since the screening event, I had begun to see the self-censorship of my Asianness that I had learned to perform whenever I was in an English-speaking, Western space. Watching and discussing a documentary about Cambodian history in an internationally renowned world literature seminar hosted at a Hong Kong university caught me off-guard. I realized that the purpose of learning new histories and experiences was not just to add one more item or name to the cultural capital that I was told to accumulate. I had never felt so eager and engaged when learning stories that were not mine but nevertheless close to my heart. A new world was slowly unfolding in front of me. 

Ultimately, this is the lesson learned: If we are truly to interrogate the asymmetries in understanding world histories and cultures, there is no wrong place or time to tell my story, a Chinese story, an Asian story. Of course, it remains a personal project to stop running away from my accent, my ways of imagining, and the smell that my favourite food has left on me. When I continue to do this work, I will always remember Y-Dang for her energetic presence, her warm smiles, and her confidence in telling stories that matter. 

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During the first two years after this initial encounter with Y-Dang, I shifted my research interests, completing my MPhil degree with a thesis on a translated novel by the Hong Kong author Chan Koon-chung in the English department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and entering a PhD program to further study Asia in Canada. At Simon Fraser University, in the office of my supervisor, Christine Kim, I was surprised to find a postcard featuring a baby Y-Dang. On the postcard, Y-Dang was held by her mother; her family had just arrived in Canada from Cambodia via a Thai refugee camp. What the photo captured was an intimate and vulnerable moment. I could hardly associate this image with the young scholar I had met, without exchanging any words, two years ago in Hong Kong. Y-Dang’s approach to her past and routes once again opened my mind, as I was a newly arrived international student still trying to hide my migratory journey in the Canadian classroom. I later learned from Y-Dang how personal histories could be carefully turned into a critical teaching method in “Buried History and Transpacific Pedagogy.” When discussing the challenging and necessary work of building intimacy between Asian North Americans and Asians after decades of forced separation due to imperial wars in Asia and racist immigration policies in North America, Y-Dang shares her experience of “embody[ing] a somewhat uncanny image for the students” in the Hong Kong classroom: 

[B]orn in a Thai refugee camp in the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide to Chinese Cambodian parents and then raised and educated in Canada before relocating to Hong Kong, I physically pass as a local citizen, yet I have quite a different set of roots and routes than my students, the majority of whom have lived their whole lives in Hong Kong. It is not uncommon for students to ask me with sincere curiosity why I do not speak Chinese or if I was brought up learning Chinese cultural traditions. I try to turn these questions into teaching moments and prod students to reflect on the Asian American texts in the course in which themes of immigration, assimilation, refugee experience, and (the challenging of) cultural authenticity come up repeatedly. Eventually students acquire an understanding of the harm culturally essentialist discourses of authenticity and purity have had on the formation of hybrid Asian American subjectivities. (242)

No longer a stranger to the feminist approach that blends the personal and the political, I still find this passage moving each time I read it. What Y-Dang conveys here is not a neoliberal version of self-victimization or self-chastisement in an apologetic manner—two styles that we often see when personal account slides into self-indulgence. Instead, Y-Dang writes with sharp honesty about how to care for the self and the other in moments of encountering difference. That is, the personal experience is not a property of oneself but a reference point for repairing old wounds and building new relationships. I began taking up this approach in various classrooms where I teach Asian American literature, postcolonial literature, and global Asian and inter-Asian relationships. 

In the global Chinese course that I was teaching, I divided materials along three borderlands, each bearing traces of my family’s migration history and my personal commitment. What initially felt like a risky pedagogical method (I could hear the voices of criticism: “too subjective, no professional boundary”) had become a rewarding experience for me and the students, who indeed came from diverse sets of “roots and routes.” As someone born in Northeast China who spent formative years as a child and migrant in Shenzhen, a city bordering Hong Kong, I grew to be interested in articulating belonging in ways that national, colonial, and legal terms cannot. My story resonates with the various experiences of the students. Some of them are Chinese diaspora who might or might not speak the languages of their parents; some are international students recently arriving from mainland China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan; some are mixed with Chinese heritage; and some have non-blood intimate relationships with their Chinese friends and kin. The idea of China, hence, evokes different memories and points to different futures. In some cases, referencing our personal relationships to China encourages students to reconnect with their cultural identity and heritage; and in other cases, it means unlearning and relearning about their homelands. The challenge—and promise—in this diverse classroom is to collectively rebuild non-binary relationships with Asia despite—or because of—not sharing a unified, single origin. 

In the class when we discussed how Hong Kong bears marks of the cultural intimacies between China and Vietnam, I used Y-Dang’s essay “Buried History and Transpacific Pedagogy” to emphasize the historical inter-Asian relationship prior to the Vietnam War and in its aftermath. This approach allows students to re-imagine Asia beyond the Western humanitarian discourse that reinforces binaries of China versus Vietnam, saviour versus victim, and self versus the Other. The compassionate connection that Y-Dang makes between the two folk legends of a rock waiting for its husband—based on the rocks Hòn Vọng Phu (located in the Vietnamese coastal province of Quang Ninh bordering the Chinese province of Guangxi) and Mong Fu Shek (located on the Lion Rock Mountain in Shatin, Hong Kong), respectively—enabled a provocative conversation about the Sino-Vietnamese cultural connections in the multilingual classroom in Vancouver. Because the class included speakers of Cantonese and Vietnamese, students learned from each another that the two languages share many phonetic similarities in the pronunciation of concepts related to the landscape and the natural environment. These include the four seasons (cheun1 in Cantonese and xuân in Vietnamese for spring, ha6 and hè for summer, chau1 and thu for autumn, and dung1 and đông for winter); the four directions (dung1 and đông for east, naam4 and nam for south, sai1 and tây for west, and bak1 and bắc for north); and other coastal terms, such as island (dou2 and hòn đảo), sand (sa1 and cát), and boat (syun4 and thuyền). These geocultural and linguistic proximities between Cantonese and Vietnamese reveal the longer coastal history across South China and Southeast Asia. 

With this inter-Asian knowledge, I was able to situate the course’s Cantonese cultural materials, which depict postwar Vietnamese nationals and diaspora on the screens of Hong Kong cinema and television, alongside and beyond the US-centred refugee narrative. By analyzing Ann Hui’s narrative film Boat People (1982) and her standalone television episode, “Boy from Vietnam” (1978), I show that the so-called Vietnamese refugee crisis in Hong Kong needs to be re-examined within the longer China-Vietnam intimacy. The coastal lives of the Vietnamese and the Chinese have been more intertwined than the dominant imaginations suggest. This is seen in the non-Western meaning behind the term boat people in multiple Asian languages. As Y-Dang explains in “Buried History and Transpacific Pedagogy”: 

For most Hong Kong citizens, the term “Boat People” refers to the Tanka people, known as “on-water people” or “Nam Hoi Yan” in China, who first settled in the Yau Ma Tei area of Hong Kong beginning in 1916. Traditionally living on junks in coastal parts of Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, Hainan, and Zhejiang provinces, a small number of Tanka people also live in Northern Vietnam, the reason the term “Boat Person” in Vietnamese originally referred to this ethnic group from China. (245)

In other words, although in post-1975 English, the term boat people is strictly associated with the image of harrowed refugees travelling by sea on small fishing yachts, the term has had more dynamic, if equally challenging, lives across Asia. The Tanka people, whose name derives from a derogatory Cantonese term originating during the Tang Dynasty, are also known as tinghu (“boathouse owners”) for their late 1970s protest in Yau Ma Tei against the colonial government’s discriminatory land-based accommodation policy. Tracing the etymology of the Chinese term for boat people back to the sea nomad group along the shores of South China (245), Y-Dang reminds us that British Hong Kong was not merely a temporary haven for the Vietnamese Boat People, but also a coastal colonial port that needed to confront dissent from its own Boat People, who also suffered the inequalities generated by colonial modernity and imperial wars. It was on this basis that I invited students to consider the 1970s tinghu protest, usually seen as a local Hong Kong issue, in juxtaposition with the experiences of Vietnamese migrants in Hong Kong. 

Although students are usually not the target audience for scholarly writing on pedagogy, I find that Y-Dang’s piece offers a rare opportunity for students to see their own roles as involved in the discussion of a social issue that is otherwise considered “irrelevant” to their immediate lifeworlds. When I asked students to select one impactful quotation from Y-Dang’s article, many of them chose sentences that reflect on how a personal position to the text—whether of the author or instructor, the storyteller, or Y-Dang’s students in Hong Kong—can deepen our critical understanding of our fellow Asian communities. As a result, the class showed a surprisingly high level of engagement with these rather difficult, originally unfamiliar materials. For instance, in a response to one of my viewing questions about Hui’s film Boat People, one student noticed a minor plot line that alluded to how, only two years after the US war in the Korean Peninsula, South Korea contributed to “more soldiers per capita to [the Vietnam War] than any other country, including the United States” (Nguyen 188). The student recognized that the Hong Kong film about the Vietnam War hence represents a wider inter-Asian relations, not only between the Vietnamese and the Chinese, but also among the Japanese and the Koreans in the context of multiple empires in Asia. The class discussion of the multilingual scenes in “Boy from Vietnam” is another example of students’ commitment to expanding their relationships with the less familiar. Students noticed that the process by which the Vietnamese boy learns Cantonese was similar to how Asian migrants learn English in Canada. On this point, a couple of students drew the connection between the colonial history of British Hong Kong and ongoing coloniality in Canada. 

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My final interactions with Y-Dang were in the winter of 2021, four years after she relocated to British Columbia, Canada. In mid-September, Y-Dang offered to be my emergency referee for a postdoctoral application in Hong Kong. As in the past, I was surprised by her incredible warmth and generosity. Three months later, I was in communication with Y-Dang in preparation to take over her course at the University of British Columbia the following semester. I knew Y-Dang, to make such an urgent arrangement, must have been quite ill. Despite the shock and despair that she must have been feeling, Y-Dang answered all my questions with great kindness, patience, and enthusiasm towards life. 

In many ways, teaching and thinking with “Buried History and Transpacific Pedagogy” was one small way for me to live and work in Y-Dang’s spirit. As I told the student in my office hours, this article not only teaches us something that we did not know about Asia before; it also teaches us that one’s own sorrow can only be addressed in relation to others’. This might be a well-circulated scholarly idea, but it is rarely practised to its full extent in everyday life as Y-Dang had done. 

In her spirit, I make and face mistakes. In her spirit, I seek honesty. In her spirit, I struggle to love. We will make a different world together. 

Acknowledgements 

I would like to thank all students in the class of GA302: Global Chinese Studies at Simon Fraser University in the summer of 2024. I especially appreciate Everly Chan for her permission to share her experience and responses within and outside the class. 

Works Cited

投奔怒海 [Boat People]. Directed by Ann Hui, Greenworld Company / Bluebird Film Company, 1982. 

“來客” [“Boy from Vietnam”]. Directed by Ann Hui. 獅子山下 [Below the Lion Rock], series 1, episode 22, Radio Television Hong Kong, 1978. 

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “Memories of Murder: The Other Korean War (in Viet Nam).” Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnson, Hong Kong UP, 2019, pp. 188–213. 

Troeung, Y-Dang. “Buried History and Transpacific Pedagogy: Teaching the Vietnamese Boat People’s Hong Kong Passage.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 46, nos. 1–2, 2015, pp. 239–55. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.1353/ari.2015.0014. 

Troeung, Y-Dang, and Aparna Shukla. “Viewing Questions on Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture.” Institute for World Literature, 23 June–17 July 2014, City University of Hong Kong. 

Holding a PhD in English from Simon Fraser University, Dr. Yiwen Liu is SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled Cold War Hong Kong: Genres of Everyday Resistance in Sinophone Literature, 1945–1989. Her book reviews and translations have appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, Feminist Media Histories, and Lausan. She teaches theories and literatures of postcolonialism, diaspora, migration, and global asias.