Throughout her brief yet rich writing career, Y-Dang Troeung was relentlessly attentive to her own construction as a scholar, writer, and public intellectual, and to the way these positions were deeply imbricated with her experiences as a refugee, daughter, and mother shaped by the difficult histories of war, genocide, displacement, and resettlement. Her very name invokes the refugee camp she was born in, the Khao-I-Dang Holding Center, on the Thailand border near Cambodia. Before she turned one year old, her face had already appeared in newspapers across Canada, which featured her as the last of the sixty thousand Southeast Asian refugees resettled in the country in 1980. Before she had a chance to speak, she had already posed in photos with then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Before she ever held a pen, her hands had been captured on national television, holding a Canadian flag. In 2021, before the publication of her first book on the afterlives of Cambodian war, genocide, and refugee life, her body was diagnosed with a disease that would, after only a year, end her life.
Like her life, Y-Dang’s works consistently weave her personal story with historical and political movements. She left behind a small but impactful archive: her articles on Cambodian refugee art and history, the first of which was published in Canadian Literature; her multi-award-winning academic book, Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia (2022); her trade-press book of autotheory, Landbridge [life in fragments] (2023); her guest-edited special issue of Canadian Literature on Refugee Worldmaking: Canada and the Afterlives of the Vietnam War (2021); the international forum for the Bophana Center’s exhibition Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later (2021); and her short film Easter Epic (2024), co-directed with Alejandro Yoshizawa.
This special issue of Canadian Literature celebrates and engages with Y-Dang’s capacious thinking on themes of migration, memory, diaspora, family, autobiography, war, race, illness, and justice within diverse fields such as Canadian literature, transnational Asian literatures, critical refugee studies, transpacific Cold War studies, and critical disability studies, just to name a few. We have gathered intellectually stimulating engagements, reflections, and musings that are genre-fluid, pushing the boundaries of academic and creative writing in ways that reflect Y-Dang’s own desire to explore and create various forms of genre expression. Pieces here directly take up concepts that Y-Dang developed or utilized: refugee lifeworlds and worldmaking, muteness and the kapok tree (dam-doeum-kor), refugee aphasia, minor anecdotes, fragments, autotheory, family memoir, Cold War episteme, race-ability, and asylum, among others. They are inspired by the embodied methodologies and the fragmentary, anecdotal writing styles Y-Dang practised, and they are ignited, more generally, by the spirit of her thought and her way of being.
This special issue collects works that converse with Y-Dang in the Latin senses of conversare, “to keep company with,” and versare, “to raise or hold suspended.” We have sought to curate a collection of pieces, a chorus dwelling in togetherness, suspended on the page. These include scholarly articles that engage with her ideas, as well as “refugee pedagogies” that share stories of teaching her work and creative reflections that draw on her imaginative vision. In the spirit of Y-Dang’s writing, we have been open to experimental and hybrid pieces, including fragments, musings, and collaborations. Like Y-Dang’s own work, many of the writings and images here flout conventions, are generatively experimental, and show how Y-Dang’s writings have made so many others possible.
In our role as curators of these works—holders and keepers of memory, thinking, and grief—we have followed Y-Dang’s own form of editorial care, that is, a style of collage she often pursued as both a form of bearing witness and a form of love. Her most frequent gift to others were scrapbooks—to her husband Chris following their engagement, to her friend Madeleine Thien upon Y-Dang’s cancer diagnosis, and in other forms to her students, family, and loved ones. These scrapbooks took her love for interior design, colour, memory, photography, found art, and poetry, and arranged them into softer, intimate expressions of humour, playfulness, and affection. In Landbridge, Y-Dang’s collage style transforms into a spiral of fragmented texts: a mixture of photography, art, histories, cultural analyses, personal story, and letters to her son, Kai. Like her scrapbooks, her last book, too, was meant to hold real memory, historical violences and their resonances in our bodyminds, within playfulness and love—that is, within the creativity of refugee lifeworlds that, in responding to unimaginable tragedy, seek to create, and create, and create.
Y-Dang’s commitments to revealing the histories and hopes of Cambodian refugee artwork always followed currents from our present, channeling the stunned rage from histories of genocide and bombings toward the same violences happening in the now. As Y-Dang wrote in the opening paragraph of her editorial for her own special issue of Canadian Literature in 2021, “these scenes of wartime upheaval, refugee evacuations, and people left behind in the ruins and ravages of war to fend for themselves are with us once again—not from Cambodia, Vietnam, or Laos this time, but from Afghanistan” (6). Looking to the past must anchor our attention to the urgent needs of the contemporary moment, to think and act against state and imperial violence. As an outspoken and persistent protestor, marcher, speaker, and author, Y-Dang saw much of her life’s work within the orbit of the so-called War on Terror, and of the oppression and bombing of Palestine, an instance of colonial bloodshed that has turned, in our present, into a once-unimaginable genocide. As we see frequently in this special issue, Y-Dang’s fortitude and bravery in capturing the forms of racism, complicity, and indifference toward imperial war, colonial oppression, and genocide in Cambodia begins a conversation that inevitably includes Palestine and other imperial wars past and present. As Omar El Akkad writes in this issue, Y-Dang’s work is from a scholar “made to face evil, [while] the world gorges instead on silence” (185). As well, writes Jasbir Puar in this issue, Y-Dang’s words “teach us, yet again, what remains after genocide” (155).
We hope this special issue does justice to Y-Dang’s strong and constant refusal to allow injustices to go on unnamed, unaccounted for, and unchallenged in their effects on bodies and minds. The loss, oppression, and madness in her work was always counter-balanced by an unending trust in the ability of writing itself to change our views of history, reality, and the future, and thus to change reality itself. Thus far, these new realities have already begun to take shape. As erin Khuê Ninh writes, reading Y-Dang’s first book, Refugee Lifeworlds, is “to have the synapses connect, lighting up the ways that refugee legacies, disability, and mental health have always been meant to speak to each other, but only now can” (Patterson 98). Likewise, Y-Dang’s second book, Landbridge, is Y-Dang’s life unabridged—it is her memories, her humour, her intelligence, her life, mixed with the stark realities of war, displacement, genocide, and the ongoing normalization in the silence of institutions state, literary, and academic. Spoken with love and longing, Landbridge shows us the connective tissue among events, peoples, and powers, revealing the slow death of our real connections with others and our own moral imagination. For Y-Dang, these complex interlocking currents of war and displacement are not merely a spiral, but a swirl, allowing us to flow into a “lifeworld, a meditative, repetitious space of beauty, creativity, and regeneration” (258). We hope this special issue can move with this swirl that was Y-Dang’s life and works.
Works Cited
Easter Epic: A Short Film. Directed and produced by Y-Dang Troeung and Alejandro Yoshizawa, 2024.
Patterson, Christopher B., (and the still-surviving chorus). “In Memoriam: Y-Dang Troeung (張依蘭) (រ្រទឿងឣីដាង) (1980–2022).” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 2023, pp. 87–101.
Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later. 1–31 July 2021, Bophana Center, Phnom Penh. Y-Dang Troeung, https://Y – Dang.com/remembering-cambodian-border-camps-40-years-later.html.
Troeung, Y-Dang. Landbridge: [life in fragments]. Alchemy, 2023.
—. “On Refugee Worldmaking.” Troeung, Refugee Worldmaking, pp. 6–14.
—. Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. Temple UP, 2022.
—, editor. Refugee Worldmaking: Canada and the Afterlives of the Vietnam War. Special issue of Canadian Literature, no. 246, 2021.
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