‘The Gravity of Her Existence’: Madeleine Thien on Y-Dang Troeung

This beautiful, moving meditation on Y-Dang Troeung’s work was 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 Wasafiri 116: Shorelines: South East Asia and the Littoral, our winter special issue co-guest edited by Nazry Bahrawi, Joanne Leow, and Y-Dang Troeung, which focuses on a range of creative, critical, and artistic work from Singapore, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, and Myanmar and their diasporas.

Y-Dang’s work, connections, and beliefs have profoundly shaped this special issue. The editors are grateful for the insights in this piece, and share it in the issue both to honour Y-Dang, and to create a sense of her life and work that they hope will inform and frame the rest of the issue.

I do not know how to write about Y-Dang. As soon as I try, I feel this wordless sadness. I long for her presence, for the thinking, feeling person who cannot be contained by any words of mine or ours, or by memory. I long for friendship; without her I feel an inconsolable loneliness.

Y-Dang was a thinker, a scholar. She grew up on the shore of Lake Huron, in the town of Goderich, Ontario. She was a reader. The first time I visited Goderich, I went on my own, in a rental car, driving from Guelph, and choosing narrow roads that felt like canals between the fields. I sent Y-Dang a photo of Lake Huron visible through a playground swing set. I thought of the lake itself – contained, reflective, hidden – as a reader of the sky. I knew that Y-Dang used to hide, along with her books, under the dining table of her family home. Her parents and brothers knew she was there, and thus she could be unseen yet present, unseen yet known. She could hear and sense and trust. My second visit to Goderich was with her. In the public library, she showed me the corner where she spent countless hours, partially hidden, curled up on the floor, reading. I remember that the two of us sat on the floor in that corner. Somewhere, in some overlapping time, our childhoods touched.

In 2022, at the age of forty-two, Y-Dang published her first scholarly book, Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. She had begun this book years before we met, and throughout the eleven years of our friendship, she continued to create Refugee Lifeworlds.

One could say that this book – which attends to a ‘Cambodian refugee archive that hinges on the unknowable and the uncertain, which is by nature incomplete, partial, and fragmentary’ – preceded her into her life, that she was always in its presence, and that she had to find a way to meet it from up ahead. She had to find a way in which her self could be a ‘foundation rather than a barrier’; in other words, could her self, remaining underground with the strength of a foundation, support the work from an unseen place? This sentence, that her self could be ‘a foundation rather than a barrier’, has Y-Dang’s characteristic grace and it enfolds a deeper pain. Throughout the writing of this book, she had to confront scholars who believed her selfhood, as a refugee, as the child of her parents, as the extension of her family’s survival and love, was a barrier – a hindrance, a handicap – to analysis and understanding and, implicitly, to truth.

For years, this judgement of her work elicited a wordless sorrow.

In July 2020, she shared a rejection letter with me that she had received that very day. The letter states, the ‘ … direct engagement with refugees and refugee lifeworlds that we were looking for [is] missing’ from Refugee Lifeworlds. It continues,

The interspersing of reflections about personal and family experiences is interesting and innovative, but … the link between the personal stories and the preceding analysis is not well established and ends up disrupting the flow of the argument rather than enriching it. (My italics)

Personally, I found such a judgement bewildering and the letter, as a whole, inexpressibly strange. For a little while, Y-Dang unravelled. And then she wrote to me to say: I am continuing to press on and to hope.

‘I make this picture’, says Cambodian film-maker Rithy Panh, ‘ … this missing picture I now hand over to you, so that it never ceases to seek us out.’

In Refugee Lifeworlds, Y-Dang searches for a way to express what is missing and what is wordless. On one level, what is missing includes what is factually missing, or rendered minor, in the historical record. On another level, what is missing includes ruptures of language among Cambodians who are expected to show grace, to limit their sorrow, and to understand themselves as minor, and even simple, figures in a larger, more complex Cold War conflict.

To understand how wordlessness manifests in our human bodies, in our complex selves, Y-Dang explores the neurological condition of aphasia, in which understanding and communication of language and syntax become troubled. Words might become irretrievable, they might vanish leaving a perforated fabric of expression. In some instances, speech no longer flows but is marked by omissions, substitutions or open spaces. Aphasias can be lasting or temporary; expression must now be understood to contain its silences, and to require them, in visible and audible ways.

It is my personal belief that showing wordlessness – as a scholar, as a person – has been an ethical imperative for Y-Dang. Naming things has the power to deepen our understanding; but sometimes naming things precipitously dissolves what we have not yet grasped, and become a pretence for understanding.

Refugee Lifeworlds creates a conceptual framework through which its readers can experience things rendered unheard, and things awaiting their language. The book creates pathways, and the pathways are drawn from what Y-Dang can touch and hold: her parents, her brothers, cousins, and extended family, living and dead, who experienced war and genocide; her family, who arrived here with Y-Dang in their arms. Relation – as an ethics – forms a pathway between chapters, like canals between fields. Relation is an inheritance that carries not just trauma, not only grief, but worlds of knowledge, reinvention, and creation ...

Continue reading the full piece online, free to download for the month of December, or in Wasafiri 116.