Teaching Landbridge: Fragments, Memory, and Life Writing

Reflections on Teaching Landbridge

April 2023
I am trying to decide whether or not to include Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge: [life in fragments] in my fourth-year seminar on life writing. Based on what I have heard so far, it is going to be an important book on refugees and life writing. But book orders for fall are due soon, and the book has yet to be published. Normally, I would never put a book on my syllabus before reading it, but this case is different: I know how good Y-Dang’s work is and can’t wait to read the memoir.

August 2022
UBC has asked me to be one of Professor Y-Dang Troeung’s external assessors for promotion to Associate Professor, and I have before me her book, Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, as well as her many articles and chapters on Canadian and postcolonial literature, on refugee studies. Y-Dang’s scholarship is rich, smart, dense, and filled with historical and cultural references, as I expected it would be. I am bowled over by Refugee Lifeworlds. It is unlike any academic monograph I have ever read. Y-Dang uses personal anecdotes, factual research, theory, images, interviews, poetry, and film in her analysis. Y-Dang’s use of the personal and the political is very powerful. Her CV mentions a forthcoming memoir. I think, if it is anything like Refugee Lifeworlds, it is sure to be excellent.

In my letter as an external reviewer, I write:

Troeung’s book is groundbreaking and important, not only because it fruitfully and insightfully “melds critical theory, autobiography, and textual analysis” (4), but also because of the new theoretical paradigms she is using. Troeung argues that the traumatic wounding of refugees is not located in a discreet and distant past but that the impact of disability is ongoing. She asks us to see refugees as people who live with “multiple forms of incapacity, debilitation, impairment, madness, and disability” (13), proposing the terms “debility, cripistemology, and aphasia” (13) for her analyses. She brings critical refugee studies and critical disability studies together in a productive and imaginative way. At the same time, she provides hope by highlighting Cambodian people’s “survival, resilience, and regeneration” through their use of images, such as the kapok tree (32). The book will reshape the way we think about refugees from Cambodia, transpacific relationships, and our part in the ruins of war.

I do not yet know that Y-Dang is ill. I think I am simply reviewing the work of a colleague. I have long been an admirer of her scholarship. At conferences, I make a point of going to Y-Dang Troeung’s papers because they are always so packed with insights and innovative ways of reading texts.

November 2022
I receive an email from Chris Patterson on November 28, 2022, letting me know that Y-Dang has passed away after a struggle with pancreatic cancer. She went “gently and without pain,” he writes.

Not having heard earlier that she was sick, I am devastated. It is, for me, as shocking and as unjust a blow as the unexpected news of our friend Donald Goellnicht’s passing in October 2019. I associate Y-Dang with Don because she was his PhD student, and it was through Don and our research on Asian North American literature that I met her.

I feel an immense sense of loss for a brilliant colleague, a scholar and friend who had so much potential and so much to give to the world. This is so unfair . . .

November 2023
For my seminar, I do adopt Landbridge for the course on life writing. The publishers allowed me to read page proofs before the book came out in the summer. We study it along with Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, and Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? The book list is designed to show the diversity and range of life writing.

The two weeks we spend reading Landbridge are strange. It is near the end of term, and students are bogged down with essay-writing. When we discuss her memoir in class, they are mostly silent, offering only the most minimal answers. I thought the memoir was very moving when I read it, but was it just because I knew Y-Dang and her circumstances? I begin to worry that the book has been a flop for the course, that it is too sad, and that it is beyond my students’ “relatable” world. I think they are silent because there are too many new things to learn and absorb. Many of them can barely find Cambodia on a map; their world is far removed from refugees, poverty, and political repression.

Yet, at this time, the world described by Y-Dang in Landbridge keeps colliding with what is happening in the news. Hamas has attacked, kidnapped, killed innocent Israelis attending a concert on October 7, 2023. In retaliation, Israel is dropping bombs in Northern Gaza, on residential areas, on hospitals, while claiming that it is targeting Hamas. The news is full of images of casualties; the number of deaths keeps rising. A Palestinian student finds it near-impossible to come to class, to concentrate on their studies. A Jewish student says the atmosphere in the university is starting to feel unsafe. These are fraught times to be teaching Landbridge, which is also about bombings, displacement, and loss.

Y-Dang’s descriptions of the “land bridge,” or Cambodian people, like her family, living off bowls of rice for almost four years, become eerily familiar as Israel’s war on Hamas continues. She writes that, “from 1979 to 1980, Cambodian men, women, and children walked for days to pick up rice, seeds, and tools that had been stockpiled at the border camps” (Landbridge 272). She is drawing parallels between the land bridge of people in Cambodia and what has happened in Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen. The history of border closures and starving people repeats itself in an ugly and horrible way before us.

Teaching Landbridge: Providing Background and Context

As many of my students did not know much about Cambodia, my introductory lecture included a few slides that sketched out its history from the twelfth century, briefly sweeping through the Khmer Empire, Hinduism, Buddhism, colonization by France, independence, the Vietnam War, and finally the Khmer Republic of the seventies. We looked at maps showing the shifting borders of Cambodia from when it was part of Indochina to today. I assigned a student presentation on the introduction to Refugee Lifeworlds.

The preface and introduction provided much-needed context and served as companion pieces for understanding the rest of the memoir. Refugee Lifeworlds opens with the devastating fact that “the US military secretly dropped over 2.7 million tons of bombs on a neutral country that it was not officially at war with, bombing beyond officially declared boundaries, irrespective of the cost to life and the social consequences of institutional collapse” (ix). Y-Dang argues that this bombing paved the way for Cambodia’s genocide under the Khmer Rouge (1975 to 1979). These opening sections explained why it was so easy for the Khmer Rouge to take over the country.

Approaches to Landbridge

A Family Memoir
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s Reading Autobiography lists “sixty genres of life writing” in its appendix A (253). Tellingly, the list does not include the refugee memoir. In the course, I highlight Landbridge as a family memoir first, a refugee memoir second. This was based, in part, on observations made by Thy Phu, at a panel she moderated at the 2023 Wild Writers Literary Festival in Waterloo, Ontario, that featured David Chariandy, Madeleine Thien, and Christopher Patterson. Phu emphasized that the book was a collective memoir or a family memoir. As Y-Dang first demonstrated in Refugee Lifeworlds, the Cold War in Cambodia from 1970 to 1979 affected members of her family and community in different ways (Refugee xi).

Smith and Watson note a recent increase in memoirs about family because of “migratory societies, smaller families, greater mobility, and women’s increasing participation in work and public life” (154). However, their example of a family narrative is very different from Troeung’s. Following Thomas Couser, they write, “[n]arratives of family and filiation are often memoirs—usually of a father, less often a mother—by a son or daughter whose parent was remote, unavailable, abusive, or absent” (155; see also 270). They observe, “narratives of family may offer analyses of the dysfunctional family or trace complex genealogies linking one generation of the family to another” (155). These can also be “narratives of disaffiliation in which the motivation seems to be scandal, outing, and revenge on a parent for the failure of love” (155). These examples are unlike Y-Dang’s memoir, which pays tribute to, rather than finding fault with, her parents. It is closer to a filiation narrative than the typical family narrative Smith and Watson describe. Western narratives of family seem to stress the individual, often trying to break free of the bonds of family or recounting a dysfunctional family, while Y-Dang’s memoir—perhaps more typical of Asian family narratives?—focuses on the great effort of the whole family, often united against outside forces and hardships.

Y-Dang’s parents struggled to survive, from 1970 onwards. Fear of US fighter jets’ bombing became “part of their everyday lives for over five years” (Refugee xiii). One way Y-Dang creates a sense of immediacy and empathy in her narrative, as my students noted, is by linking historical events to personal experiences. For example, she writes, “[i]n 1971, the war arrived in the city of Kampong Thom, as it had throughout Cambodia. My father remembers how the sky was regularly filled with US military scanning drones and fighter jets” (Landbridge 18). To ensure their safety, her parents left and took shelter in a Buddhist temple for a night, but when they returned, “the US-backed Lon Nol army ha[d] taken over their home.” She writes: “The house is now filled with soldiers coming and going. Rockets fire from the rooftop” (18). The war hit her father literally: “One morning, my father watches in horror as a rocket hits a man on the street, killing him on the spot. My father is standing so close to the blast that a piece of shrapnel wounds him” (20). The vignette concludes with her father pointing to his neck: “The scar is still here” (20). Y-Dang’s memoir highlights the horrific first-hand experiences of her parents, their ability to survive, their struggle as refugees.

A Refugee Memoir
Y-Dang’s memoir is shaped by her research on Southeast Asian diaspora, on refugees, and in critical refugee studies. In Refugee States, Vinh Nguyen and Phu point out that “scholars in critical refugee studies take up issues of forced migration by foregrounding a refugee-based perspective and by developing theoretically grounded methods for analysis. The field is concerned with the underlying and structuring conditions that produce the need to seek asylum and with the ways that refugees negotiate these conditions” (8). Nguyen and Phu’s Refugee States and Y-Dang’s Landbridge are both concerned with helping us “understand the larger political, historical, social, and cultural forces that shape how we view and ultimately treat refugees” (8–9).

Y-Dang talks about the difficulty of doing this research as a refugee: “The barrier between myself and the work sometimes feels so thin, the furthest thing from the lens of a neutral observer” (Landbridge 23). She tells her therapist that she feels anger as “a force that’s always moving. It’s both a vortex and a void drawing in all my mental energy and thoughts, growing bigger with each passing year” (23). Her identity is closely tied to refugees; she is named after the refugee camp Khao-I-Dang in Thailand, where she was born. Her name is bittersweet for her mother, she says, as it “carries the memory of our survival through multiple crossings” (4).

In class, we talked about Y-Dang’s ironic position as the poster child of Canadian hospitality, memorialized by CBC. Even as a child, she was incessantly reminded of her own and her family’s refugee status. As the last of the sixty thousand refugees sponsored by Canada under the “special ‘Indochinese Refugee Program’” (81), her parents, upon their arrival in Canada in 1980, were welcomed by then-Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. A Khmer interpreter tells her father, “Your family is so lucky. Important people from a small town have sponsored you” (82). Their arrival is well documented; a video and a photograph of them with the prime minister and Immigration Minister Lloyd Axworthy are still in the CBC archives. For Canadians, Trudeau’s welcome is a symbol of Canadian generosity (101), but for Y-Dang and her family, the moment of arrival is more complicated. It “held a deeper pain, the pain of losing a country, the hurt of leaving people behind, the heartache of smiling in the wake of death” (83).

Postmemory
Marianne Hirsch coined the term postmemory to describe “the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences they ‘remember’ only as the narratives and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right” (“Surviving” 9). Postmemory is a useful way of understanding Y-Dang’s relationship to the trauma her parents experienced, as she was not born when the bombings happened, nor when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia. She is able to describe these “memories” vividly in Landbridge, but these incidents are not experienced first-hand; they are mediated through her parents’ narration, through historical documents and photographs.

For example, in a chapter called “[hometown],” Y-Dang recounts the story her mother has told of how she saved Y-Dang’s father. He becomes ill when he is sent out to work in a co-operative in 1976, and Y-Dang’s mother “begs the village leaders to let her go see him” (64). She walks for days by herself through “the jungle, foraging for food along the way, stopping to rest and to sleep on the earth” (64). Finding her husband gravely ill, she implores the leaders to transport him to the hospital. She then gets “down on [her] knees” to beg them to let her accompany him and, when they refuse, she screams, “[Y]ou kill me, kill me. You shoot me, then I die, I don’t care! But I will go with him!” (65). Y-Dang’s father eventually recovers, and her mother’s story becomes a story of the extreme acts people performed in order to survive. It is recounted in detail, even with precise dialogue, by Y-Dang, even though it happened four years before her birth. Hirsch writes,

Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. (“Generation” 107)

Y-Dang worries, wondering how her parents “were able to come back to themselves. What selves were even left to go back to? If kamleang chet could be passed down, could their broken selves be transmitted as well?” (Landbridge 62). At the same time, she is afraid of not getting the story right, of the “burden of expectation, the life-engulfing experience of being thrust into the spotlight. If we fail, we fail not just ourselves but our entire history” (90).

Form and Images
In class, we talked about the use of fragments, and how these fragments mirror the experience of people who have difficult experiences of the past. Landbridge highlights fragments in its subtitle and, I told the class that, at the Wild Writers session, Thien noted that fragments are connected to shattering, evoking the way that language cannot tell the full story, that there is something between the spaces. Similarly, Chariandy said fragments reflect the way memory works. Students appreciated and understood the use of the fragmented form, and we discussed the way fragments were also used effectively in Winterson’s and Kalanithi’s memoirs. Fragments also highlight incompleteness and gaps in our memories. Astrid Erll points out that we never have a complete picture of the past: “Memories are not objective images of past perceptions, even less of a past reality. They are subjective, highly selective reconstructions, dependent on the situation in which they are recalled” (8). For Y-Dang, who heard the memories of her parents, her recollections are memories of her family’s memories. Hirsch argues that

postmemory is not an identity position but a generational structure of transmission deeply embedded in such forms [stories and images] of mediation. Family life, even in its most intimate moments, is entrenched in a collective imaginary shaped by public, generational structures of fantasy and projection and by a shared archive of stories and images that inflect the transmission of individual and familial remembrance. (“Generation” 114)

One image Y-Dang highlights is the kapok tree, a symbol used by Cambodians during Pol Pot time to suggest rebirth and regeneration after being silenced (Landbridge 254). Before Pol Pot, however, the kapok tree provided food and raw materials. For Y-Dang’s father, “the tree was like magic, its fluffy cotton the material of all the pillows and cushions that lined his household. The kapok tree grew everywhere, belonged to no one, and provided for everyone” (257). The kapok tree is an example of a “collective imaginary” and “shared archive of stories and images” transmitted by generational structure (Hirsch, “Generation” 114). Indeed, it is a symbol found in the work of other diasporic Cambodians. In his graphic family memoir, Year of the Rabbit, for example, Cambodian French cartoonist Tian Veasna also recalls the old advice: “If you want to survive under the new regime, remember the old saying . . . you need to plant kapok and palm trees around your house” (86–87). Veasna’s stories of survival and escape, like Y-Dang’s, are based on the personal accounts of his parents and close relatives.

The class did not have time to talk about all the photographs and other images in Landbridge, but we did look at a couple besides the photo of Y-Dang and Trudeau. We were fascinated by “Floral Hole,” drawn by Visoth Kakvei (259), and discussed the image’s paradoxical feelings of pain and of splendour. Y-Dang associates this drawing with trauma, loss, and survival: “When we enter into that space, we delve into a spiral of infinite darkness, but we also swirl into a field of life; a lifeworld, a meditative, repetitious space of beauty, creativity, and regeneration” (258). We also talked about a photograph Y-Dang took of the lotus pond in the space of a bomb crater outside the War Museum Cambodia (234). Y-Dang writes, “[T]he Cambodian belief is that the lotus flower emerging from the mud symbolizes strength, hope, faith that a new lifeworld can be reborn from the darkest places . . . that every species, no matter how damaged, is capable of regeneration” (233). The images, and Y-Dang’s descriptions of them, gave an added poignancy to our reading of Landbridge, providing a different way to visualize her narrative, to give a sense of hope amid darkness.

Reflections after Teaching Landbridge

December 2023
I am surprised and pleased to find that several students have chosen to write on Landbridge. I misjudged their initial reticence in class. They were, in fact, deeply affected by the book. In their final essays and creative responses, a few relate it to their own experiences. They tell me that they liked the book and were just trying to understand everything because there was so much new information—about history, about the Vietnam War, about refugees. I feel rewarded by my decision to include the work and would like to teach the book again. It is important that Y-Dang’s story of Cambodian refugees be taught, and I sense that Y-Dang would also have been pleased with the result. At one point in her memoir, she laments: “There are so few scholarly, research-driven books about Cambodian experience authored by Cambodian refugees themselves. So few Cambodian refugees are in academic positions in the first place, and so few are willing to take on the burden of expectation, the life-engulfing experience of being thrust into the spotlight” (90). With Landbridge, she has broken the silence, sharing the experience of Cambodian refugees in a powerful and affecting way.

Excerpts from Student Essays and Creative Responses

Troeung is writing on a topic that many authors would shy away from. Her story is real, raw, emotional, and vulnerable, and her memoir makes her and her family reflect on painful and traumatic memories and experiences. Troeung’s ability to look inward makes her writing authentic and successful; however, it also takes a toll on her emotionally over time: “How to express the effect of listening, reading, writing, and translating these accounts for a decade as a researcher, and a lifetime as a daughter?” (Troeung 23). Troeung’s vigorous research and writing are consuming her life. She has no work-life balance and feels she cannot escape the content of her research or writing. The personal nature of her work does not benefit her mental or emotional health, as her work and life are interconnected and directly affect one another.
Refugees come to Canada and are wounded physically, mentally, and emotionally. They are living with multiple forms of incapacity, disability, and mental illness, and are deeply harmed and hurt. Regardless, they are still expected to be the image of gratitude and happiness, even though that could not be further from the truth. The forced suppression of complex and traumatic situations and experiences such as death and war can make people feel increasingly isolated and broken while promoting and encouraging their silence. Y-Dang challenges this idea by stating, “Just because a form breaks does not mean it is broken, nor that it has become something shameful, incomprehensible, a thing to be silenced and forgotten” (Troeung 62). — CK

In her parents’ recollection of the war that ensued during 1979 in Cambodia, there is a great sense of pain and struggle in the stories. There is also a presence of pain felt by Y-Dang in reiterating these stories. The weight to carry the legacy of her parent’s story is heavy but needed in some way. Is it to commemorate her parent’s struggles? To perhaps, for her, let go of the weight that she has been carrying on for so long? Or perhaps for that weight to be let go from her parents? These are the questions I asked myself when reading this memoir and historical account. The struggles of writing on this allows for therapy, a scene in the memoir that captivated me because it captures how generational trauma can be so influential on future lives, especially those that get the chance to write about it. “The barrier between myself and the work sometimes feels so thin, the furthest thing from the lens of a neutral observer. I know there is a cost of knowing, but I don’t know how this cost has been paid by me personally” (Troeung 23). This theme of burden in the novel, it seems, takes place both physically and mentally in Troeung’s instance. At times it is hard to pick up the pen and continue recounting, and seemingly living through, an experience that you did not experience head-on. — BM

Works Cited

Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Translated by Sara B. Young, Palgrave MacMillan, 2011.

Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 1, 2008, pp. 103–28.

—. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 14, no. 1, 2001, pp. 5–37.

Kalanithi, Paul. When Breath Becomes Air. Random House, 2016.

Nguyen, Vinh, and Thy Phu, editors. Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada. U of Toronto P, 2021.

Noah, Trevor. Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Doubleday Canada, 2016.

Phu, Thy, et al., panelists. “Fragments of Life: On Memoir and Y – Dang Troeung’s Landbridge.” Wild Writers Literary Festival, 28 Oct. 2023, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, ON.

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed., U of Minnesota P, 2010.

Troeung, Y-Dang. Landbridge: [life in fragments]. Alchemy, 2023.

—. Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. Temple UP, 2022.

Veasna, Tian. Year of the Rabbit. Translated by Helge Dascher, Drawn and Quarterly, 2020.

Winterson, Jeanette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Grove Press, 2011.

Eleanor Ty, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Fulbright Canada alumna, is professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has published on life writing, graphic novel, Asian North American, and eighteenth-century literature. She is the author of Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority (U of Illinois P, 2017); Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (U of Minnesota P, 2010), and The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (U of Toronto P, 2004). Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (Ohio State UP, 2022) won the Comics Studies Society’s 2022 Prize for Edited Book Collection.