Exclusive Extract: Landbridge by Y-Dang Troeung

The late Y-Dang Troeung co-guest edited our winter special issue, Wasafiri 116: Shorelines: South East Asia and the Littoral, which focuses on a range of creative, critical, and artistic work from Singapore, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Myanmar and their diasporas, along with Nazry Bahrawi and Joanne Leow. Y-Dang’s work, connections, and beliefs have profoundly shaped this special issue.

To mark the arrival of Wasafiri 116, we're privileged to share this timely extract from her memoir, Landbridge, which draws attention to the US bombings of (neutral) Cambodia, following Henry Kissinger’s recent death. You can also read a beautiful, moving meditation on Y-Dang Troeung’s work, written and delivered by Madeleine Thien on the occasion of a celebration of life held at the University of British Columbia on 7 March 2023 and published in the issue.

[confer]

July 2019.

I am in Phnom Penh, at an international conference on genocide studies, a gathering of over five hundred scholars from around the world. For the first time in the organization’s history, the conference is being held in Cambodia.

I’m on edge, incapable of calming my mind. I feel waves of nervousness being here on the other side of the world, away for the first time from my two-year-old son who has a rare medical condition. Over the past year, since his illnesses began, a new level of mental agitation has set in. I feel as though I have stopped sleeping almost entirely. One doctor believes I have untreated postpartum depression. Another tells me I have post-traumatic stress disorder from witnessing my child’s medical emergencies. I read obsessively about the epi gen etic transmission of trauma, asking my son’s doctors, all ten of them, about the possibility that his condition stems from the methylation caused by histories of violence.

My therapist doesn’t offer any official diagnoses for me, but he tells me I can’t hold all the things that have been accumulating, for years, perhaps decades, any longer. I agree with his assessments. But I do nothing to slow things down. I’m at the beginning of a new job, a new start, just hanging on by a thread. So many are depending on me, so much remains unfinished. I can’t afford to stop.

[program]

I ride a tuk-tuk for thirty minutes to the university where the conference is being held. Along the way, I observe the rapidly changing cityscape of Phnom Penh and think about the war raging on in Syria. I imagine what it would be like forty years from now, when Syria is a different place, if hundreds of Western scholars were to descend upon the country to present their expert interpretations of the atrocities happening now. All week I have been listening to authoritative speakers explain Cambodia’s history to me and other Cambodians. Finally, at one conference panel, a young Cambodian student seemed fed up, and stood to voice his frustration at a panel of speakers: I appreciate your analysis and look forward to reading your book, if it will be made available here. But I would like to ask you now, Where was your country when the genocide was happening?

I recall the grumblings I heard in the lead-up to the conference about how difficult it was to make this historic event happen. The Cambodians need to do something to organize their own conference, one organizer said. We can’t do everything for them.

I flip through the conference program and notice the dozens of presentations listed on the topic of Tuol Sleng. The academic obsession with this space—the scores of scholarly books, articles, and talks that it has generated—never ceases to amaze me. Articles written by scholars from the West, such as “The Authoritative Guide to the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes,” continue to get churned out year after year. It is not enough for them to write about Tuol Sleng. Reproducing the Tuol Sleng mug shots over and over again in their articles, some have turned the sheer amount of academic knowledge about Tuol Sleng into a topic of academic inquiry itself. Is it a morbid fascination with the macabre? An easy pretext for a holiday in Cambodia? A self-righteous quest to “give back”? An abstract fetishization of the dark aesthetic? Tuol Sleng seems to offer all of the above.

If tourists feel a sense of catharsis for having gone to the Killing Fields, how do scholars of Cambodia feel when writing their endless treatises on Tuol Sleng? But perhaps I am too cynical.

[oun]

After the first full conference day, I visit my friend Anida, a Cambodian American artist and poet, on a rooftop patio. She tells me to look at the new and developing skyline full of glitzy new towers, made with investors from China, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea—what seems Cambodian about this? she asks me. I cannot say.

She tells me I look shaken, in disarray. I tell her I’m not doing well, Bong. I can’t keep up with academia, my work, being a mother, caring for my aging parents, and also coming to conferences like this.

You need to slow down, oun. I feel the warmth of the word oun, little sister, younger cousin. They say academia kills your maternal instinct. She is a mother of three girls, who were raised partially in Phnom Penh. But by maternal instinct, I think she means more than our need to mother children. She means our need, when it comes to our histories, to reach beyond study and research. To care, to honour, to love. To mother, to sister, to cousin.

How can these Western scholars even begin to understand our history, or our work?

The industrial noise of an erecting skyscraper continues from a cluster of high-rises. Its discordant sounds blend with the chimes of a nearby wat. For now, I am calm.

[noise]

On the second day of the genocide conference, I find myself in a room listening to a panel of three speakers discussing aesthetics, the law, and Cambodia. The audience consists mostly of Western intellectuals—a mixture of academics, NGO workers, and lawyers involved in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) tribunal. The speakers themselves are trained as lawyers. A handful of Cambodians are present in the room. One of the presenters, a smartly dressed woman with brown hair and black-rimmed glasses, speaks about her recently published book on who gets to decide who gets to be a victim. As she speaks, a slideshow of images plays on rotation behind her.

A panel of three S-21 mug shots—photos of three young Cambodian girls captured and tortured at Tuol Sleng—fills up the entire projection screen, dwarfing the three presenters at the front of the room.

Every couple of minutes the S-21 images appear again, a dizzying rotation. The girls in the photos, depicted on the precipice of their death, remain unidentified. They are background wallpaper for this woman’s presentation. One of the panellists shrinks in embarrassment. A mug shot in the middle of the panel shows a girl no older than twelve wearing a white uniform shirt and a number “3” tag. I wonder if her loved ones are still searching for her, where they are in the world, if they are present in the room today.

I feel the distortion of time and space around me. I hear people speaking, but I can’t understand their words. The room is full of incomprehensible noise.

[verveine]

I make my way back to the conference to deliver my own presentation, a paper on “Emotional Survival during Pol Pot Time.” When I’m up there, in front of that room full of experts with hostile eyes, I find I can barely speak, as if I’m being strangled from within. My mouth is completely dry. My hands and voice tremble embarrassingly. I am unable to look up at the audience, even for a moment. I muddle through the presentation, but my emotional breakdown is laid bare for all to see.

I am grateful for my friends Keiko and Colin, who skip the rest of the conference and ride the tuk-tuk back to Phnom Penh with me. I first met Colin many years earlier, when he approached me at a filmmaker’s talk at Meta House, a German-Cambodian cultural centre, theatre, art gallery, café, and bar in Phnom Penh. The film was Waiting for Cambodia, a 1988 film about Site 2, which was the largest refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, and for a time the largest in all of Southeast Asia. During the Q & A, I asked the film’s director,  David Feingold, if he had any footage from camp Khao-I-Dang, as I had yet to see any. He had none, but a man in front of me turned around and said, I was there in 1980. I have plenty of photos. I learned his name was Colin, and he had been in camp Khao-I-Dang as a relief worker with the World Food Programme. The photos were sitting in a file he had kept all these years, just waiting to be exhibited someday. Would you like to see them?

Today, Colin notices that I am a different person, my optimism and confidence sheared away. We sit down for a Japanese lunch and I ask if they can help me somehow. Please help me. I don’t even know what I need help with, but it’s all tangled together. I tell them I feel like I haven’t slept for months; my life is a mess, even though everyone probably thinks it’s perfect.

You could try verveine tea, Colin says, with his trademark British humour. But it looks like you need something much stronger, like valium!

[trial]

August 7, 2014.

I am sitting in a courtroom near Phnom Penh. I am about to witness history in the making. The media around me are asking, Is this history for the world, or just for Cambodians?

In 2010, the ECCC convicted the first Khmer Rouge leader, Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, of crimes against humanity. This landmark case has now been followed by the case against Nuon Chea, second-in-command to Pol Pot, and Khieu Samphan, who was Cambodia’s head of state during the Khmer Rouge. The New York Times has described the case as the “largest and most complicated prosecution since Nuremberg in 1945.”

Today is the day of the verdict. Tears stream down my face as the historical account is read out loud.

guilty for crimes against humanity and genocide

Despite my mixed feelings about the tribunal, I cannot deny that I too feel a palpable weight in the air about what this day represents for us, the survivors. The significance of this day for Cambodian people gathered inside and outside the auditorium is undeniable. This verdict means something affective and intangible. It means something for my mother, who is following the news from her home in Canada, to see if her brother’s S-21 executioner will finally be held accountable for his crimes.

Since the inception of the ECCC in 2003, scholars (myself included) have questioned the value of the tribunal within the broader context of war and justice worldwide. Are the trials even necessary? Do these international courts— costing over US$300 million total—have any benefit to the Cambodian people, or are they merely a test of Western human rights laws? Are there more culturally specific forms of justice that are rooted in Cambodian tradition and daily practice? Can lifelong imprisonment come close to distributing justice for the millions of dead? And what of the difficult, existential questions about what had happened? Are we to forget that the entire moral and spiritual world of Cambodia was, from the US bombing onwards, turned upside down?

My partner Chris holds my hand as I continue to cry and more questions pour into my mind. What about the justice demanded from the Americans who bombed Cambodia, who turned everyday farmers into Khmer Rouge soldiers fighting for their right to live? Or what of the justice demanded from the North, the Communist cadres who oversaw, influenced, encouraged, and armed the Khmer Rouge, happy to let Cambodian people fight their hot wars for them?

I cannot cry enough tears for the closure that this trial does not bring. But what it does bring, the acknowledgement of our history, the evidence of our collective memories, I continue to carry.

[open]

Is existence, persistence, continuation, the opposite of closure?

I ask myself this question as I watch a panel of lawyers debate the ECCC’s decision at Meta House. The lawyers discuss the legal designation of the term genocide. How can we call this a genocide, when genocide is defined as one racial or religious group against another? Is Communism a different race?

The Dutch lawyer for Nuon Chea rebukes the charges of crimes against humanity. What about the United States, who bombed Cambodia? The US is contributing millions of dollars to the tribunal in order to cover up its own unredressed injuries.

I’m beginning to lose hope in definitions, and perhaps in language itself. As the lawyers declare the importance of reserving certain words for some peoples and not others, I do not laugh or cry or shout. Instead, I marvel at what is happening before us in this country, at the machinations of an entire legal-humanitarian-academic industry, speaking for the millions of Cambodian people still left grieving with open wounds.

How do we respond? I am as silent as the survivors around me.