Diasporic Genealogies of War and Genocide In

11-11-2011

INTIMATE RECONCILIATIONS: DIASPORIC GENEALOGIES OF WAR AND GENOCIDE

IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Y-Dang Troeung

McMaster University, [email protected]

INTIMATE RECONCILIATIONS: DIASPORIC GENEALOGIES OF WAR AND GENOCIDE

IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Y-DANG TROEUNG, B.A., M.A.

A Thesis

Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies

in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements

for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

McMaster University

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2011) McMaster University

(English and Cultural Studies) Hamilton, Ontario

TITLE: Intimate Reconciliations: Diasporic Genealogies of War and Genocide in

Southeast Asia

AUTHOR: Y-Dang Troeung, B.A. (University of Waterloo), M.A. (University of

Waterloo)

SUPERVISOR: Dr. Donald Goellnicht

NUMBER OF PAGES: vi, 236

ABSTRACT

This dissertation investigates the traumatic legacies of colonialism, imperialism and authoritarianism in Southeast Asia, the diasporic conditions of

Southeast Asian refugees in North America after 1975, and the relationship among literature, ethics, and reconciliation more broadly. Focusing primarily on contemporary novels that intervene in the cultural memory of the Cambodian genocide, the War in Viet Nam, and the World War II Japanese Occupation of

Malaysia, my dissertation conceptualizes an intimate politics of reconciliation that routes the study of justice foremost through questions of affect, epistemology and ethics. An intimate politics of reconciliation, I argue, encapsulates a set of intimate memorial acts—ritual, testimony, collaboration, gifting, and narrative reconstruction—that operate within and against macro-political and juridical modalities of justice. My research highlights productive scenes of convergence between discourses of post-genocide reconciliation and alternative spiritual cosmologies, between refugee collaborative writing and theories of gifting, and between theories of forgetting and social and psychic reparation. In arguing that

Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies paradoxically foreground the necessity of both remembering and forgetting trauma in the collective work of reconciliation, this dissertation engages with and challenges two key theoretical paradigms in

Asian American Studies—a politics of social justice premised upon a discourse of

“subjectlessness” and a psychoanalytic paradigm of productive melancholia theory.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the support of many colleagues, friends, relatives, and family members. First, I would like to thank my supervisory committee—Donald Goellnicht, Daniel Coleman, and Helene Strauss—for their always constructive and insightful engagement with my project and for their continued confidence in me. I am very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with such committed and generous supervisors. A special thank you goes to my supervisor Donald Goellnicht for being Don, a patient and caring mentor whose steady presence followed this dissertation even as it meandered off its charted course and found its way back again. Thank you to Viet Thanh Nguyen, my external examiner, for providing thoughtful written feedback on my dissertation and for helping to make the defense such an enriching experience.

Other faculty members at McMaster and elsewhere who have supported my research by providing me with research/workshop opportunities, letters of support, or feedback on various parts of this dissertation include Lily Cho, Chris Lee, Steven High, Thy Phu, Eleanor Thy, Lorraine York, and Imre Szeman. I would like to thank the members of my “JLC” thesis group—Lisa Kabesh, Malissa Phung, Farah Moosa, and Vinh Nguyen for many stimulating conversations about Asian diasporic studies and for being there for me on the day of the defense. Thank you to everyone at the Laurier Writing Centre for supporting me from the very beginning.

I was fortunate to have had such a strong support network that sustained me throughout the various stages of the PhD. I am immensely thankful to Adrienne Hafemann, Bridget Coady, Emmy Misser, Jim Weldon, Georgia Clarke, Katie O’Connell, the Krismanich family (Gloria, Peter, Anthony, and Derek), Michelle Dankovic, Michelle Peek, Mary Tsoi, Phanuel Antwi, Riisa Walden, Sarah Brophy, Peter Walmsley, Sarah Blacker, Stephanie Pogue, and the Truscello family (especially Tony and Valerie). Thank you all for your constant encouragement, for keeping me on track, and for your gifts of friendship. I am grateful to Johanna Skibsrud and Madeleine Thien for teaching me, throughout the course of one long dinner, a great deal about ethics and fiction. A special thank you to Madeleine for writing novels that anchored me throughout the writing of this dissertation.

To Michael Truscello, my partner in love and life, for gently hearing all my ideas, titles, and stories, for walking with me night after night during difficult times, and for always believing that I could do it, thank you.

Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to my relatives in Cambodia and to my immediate family—Sophia, Amy, Pheng, Meng, Yok, and Heung—whose unconditional love and life stories have propelled this dissertation from beginning to end. For everything my family has done for me, I am truly lucky.

Chapter Two of this dissertation is a revised and expanded version of my published article, “ ‘A gift or a theft depends on who is holding the pen’: Postcolonial Collaborative Autobiography and Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt”:

Copyright © 2010 for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared in Modern Fiction Studies 56.1 (2010) 113-135. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Chapter Three of this dissertation is a revised and expanded version of my published article, “Forgetting Loss in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty”:

Copyright © 2010 for Canadian Literature by the University of British Columbia. This article first appeared in Canadian Literature 206 (Autumn 2010): 91-108. Reprinted with permission by Canadian Literature.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ~ SCENES OF CONVERGENCE ……………………………………………… 1 Why Southeast Asian Diasporic Genealogies? ………………………………………………… 16 Asian American and Asian Canadian Critique ………………………………………………… 29 Challenging Subjectlessness ………………………………………………………………………….. 36

CHAPTER ONE ~ WITNESSING CAMBODIA’S DISAPPEARED: HAUNTING, JUSTICE, AND ALTERNATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY ……………………………………………………………… 47 Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats ……………………………………………………… 50 Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared and Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter ………………… 65 Haunting …………………………………………………………………………………………………... 68 Disappearing ……………………………………………………………………………………………... 80 Witnessing ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 90

CHAPTER TWO ~ GIFTING MEMORY: COLLABORATIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, INTERSECTIONALITY, AND VIETNAMESE AMERICAN REFUGEES …………………….102 Vietnamese American Literature: Collaborations and Reconciliations …………...105 Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt ………………………………………………………………116 Gifting Memory …………………………………………………………………………………………...142

CHAPTER THREE ~ FORGETTING LOSS: DECENTERING SOUTHEAST ASIA, POSTMEMORY, AND THE ETHICS OF REPRESENTING TRAUMA ……………………… 150 The Cost of Looking Back …………………………………………………………………………… 152 The Value of Forgetting ……………………………………………………………………………… 162 Madeleine Thien's Certainty ……………………………………………………………………….. 170 Anchoring the Past, Failing to Save ……………………………………………………………… 181 Forgetting Loss ……………………………………………………………………………………………194

CONCLUSION ~ ON RELATIONALITY AND JUSTICE .………………………………………….195 The Cham …………………………………………………………………………………………………... 199 The Khmer Krom …………………………………………………………………………………………201 Relational Justice …………………………………………………………………………………………209

vi PhD Thesis – Y. Troeung; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies 1

Introduction ~ Scenes of Convergence

Although Southeast Asians have been coming to the Americas since the sixteenth century,1 they represent a relatively recent diaspora in North America, arriving in Canada and the United States primarily in the late 1970s and 1980s in the wake of mass violence linked to histories of colonialism, imperialism, civil war, and genocide in their homelands. In the past two decades, speaking about the aftermaths of these histories has become increasingly linked to globalizing discourses of transitional justice. According to Alexander Hinton, transitional justice can be narrowly defined as “the process of redressing past wrongs committed in states shifting from a violent, authoritarian past toward a more liberal, democratic future” and more broadly defined as the process of “advancing development and social justice” in the context of widespread human rights violations (2). Ascendant in the aftermath of the Cold War “amid euphoria about the ‘new world order’ and the possibilities of humanitarianism, human rights, and international law” (2), the field of transitional justice is organized around key terms such as peace-building, redress, apology, reparation, justice, reconciliation, and healing. As Joanna Quinn notes in her edited collection Reconciliation(s): Transitional Justice in Postconflict Societies, despite the relatively recent emergence of the field, we can already discern a standard body of scholarship that has sought to address and theorize the significance of these terms in relation to a wide array of post-conflict contexts (3).

1 From 1565 to 1815, trade flourished between the Spanish colonies of the Philippines and Mexico.

Quinn further explains that the “canon” of scholarship on transitional justice can generally be divided into four categories according to the emphasis placed on one of the following aspects of the transitional process: 1) memory and remembering, 2) truth, 3) peacebuilding and transformation of institutions, and 4) forgiveness (3-4).

One theme that unites and cuts across these categories is that of reconciliation, the process of “building or rebuilding relationships today that are not haunted by the conflicts and hatreds of yesterday” (4).

If transitional justice and reconciliation mechanisms such as truth commissions and war crimes tribunals have emerged as the favoured means of redressing the wounds of history over the past few decades, the normative assumptions of these mechanisms—most closely aligned with legal studies and political science—have come under critical scrutiny from a remarkable number of disciplinary perspectives. Hinton notes an overall sensibility of “hesitation” on the part of anthropologists about transitional justice—a term that suggests a “hierarchy and teleology, with an implicitly more ‘backward’ or ‘barbaric’ society using the tools of liberalism to ‘develop’ into a modern, ‘civilized,’ liberal, democratic state”

(6). For anthropologists, Hinton notes, “such language is reminiscent of late nineteenth and early twentieth century ‘stage theory,’ which posited that all human culture naturally progresses from a relatively simple state of savagery to one of civilization, this higher state being characterized by progress, complexity, and rationality” (7).

Writing about the treaty negotiations that have been ongoing between First

Nations and the governments of British Columbia since 1992, Andrew Woolford asserts that normative understandings of transitional justice “suggest a certain ethnocentricism that views only nondemocratic nations to be in need of transition. It also limits the notion of a Westphalian framework in which transition is located within the spatial confines of the nation-state” (138). South Africa’s Truth and

Reconciliation Commission serves as an example of transitional justice that has been significantly critiqued by scholars. As Julie McGonegal explains, “[d]rawing extensively on studies of the Shoah, and on the psychoanalytic insights of Dominick

LaCapra, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, and Cathy Caruth, critics of the TRC hearings have invoked the argument that testimony can approach the site of trauma only imperfectly” (17). But in relation to this critique of the TRC, McGonegal importantly asks, “Is there not an ethical imperative to acknowledge not only the difficulties inherent in the TRC’s promotion of testimony but also the benefits it has afforded many victims—for instance, in providing a space of articulation for the voices of those who have suffered?” (17). McGonegal’s study thus “seeks simultaneously to imagine and critique the conditions under which forgiveness and reconciliation might emerge, maintaining a poststructuralist suspicion of the universalism/Eurocentrism inherent in Western humanist visions of the future while also taking seriously the capacity of an agonistic humanism to hold out the possibility of a just future” (5). The work of anthropologists such as Leslie Dwyer and Kimberly Theidon also foreground the tension between the universalist aspirations of transitional justice and the complex, particularist realities of violence

and intimacy at the local level—realities that problematize the epistemological assumptions of transitional justice. In her study of transitional justice in post-1965

Bali, Dwyer calls for a revaluation of alternative narratives and practices of mourning that have remained marginalized in public discourse—“for example, stories of women’s experiences of sexual violence, or of the intimate betrayals and suspicion that have marked families, or of the ritual work of recalling the dead through processes of divination, death ceremony, and reincarnation” (“Intimacy”

241). In a similar vein, Kimberly Theidon’s study of community mental health and the micropolitics of reconciliation in post-TRC Peru examines how “transitional justice is not the monopoly of international tribunals or of states: communities also mobilize the ritual and symbolic elements of these transitional processes to deal with the deep cleavages left—or accentuated—by civil conflicts” (“Justice” 436).

These critiques of the canonical, Eurocentric, macro-political, and juridical notions of transitional justice and reconciliation provide an entry point for this dissertation, which seeks to bring the field of intimacy and affect studies into conversation with what might loosely be called “critical transitional justice studies” in the context of Southeast Asian diasporas in North America (Hinton 7). Hinton explains that scholars working in the vein of critical transitional justice studies “are wary of potentially enabling a sort of neoimperialism that, in a situation of unequal power, produces, via transitional justice mechanisms, certain forms of knowledge

(for example, human rights discourses, liberal ideals, new histories), persons (for example, democratic, law-abiding citizens), and practices (for example, voting, free

market economies, due process procedures)” (7). They are skeptical of international actors and local elites who, under the umbrella of transitional justice, intervene in local politics as “engineers or mechanics who have the expertise and knowledge to rebuild the ‘broken society’ or ‘failed state’” (7). Finally, they resist the normative spatial-temporal framework of transitional justice, whereby “long, complicated histories are reduced to an immediate past of conflict [and] future horizons are delimited by the promised end of the transition, an idyllic state of civilized society”

(7).

Such concerns about the ethics of cross-cultural encounter, epistemic forms of violence, teleologies of progress, colonial civilizing missions, racial and cultural classification systems, and histories of colonialism and imperialism have long been the focus of postcolonial, diaspora, and critical race studies. As McGonegal writes,

“the vast majority of the reconciliation movements opening up around the world are aimed at moving beyond the inequalities produced by the colonial encounter.

Postcolonial theory has worked assiduously to disinter the traumatic memories of colonialism, so as to unearth its overwhelming, lasting violence” (5). Whereas

McGonegal adopts a postcolonial framework in her reconceptualization of justice

(3), this project considers the productive potential of turning more explicitly toward affect studies (informed by feminism, critical race studies, psychoanalysis, diaspora studies, queer studies, and postcolonial studies) to interrogate the complexities of transitional justice and reconciliation as they relate to the experience Southeast

Asian refugees in North America. I suggest that this critical dialogue between the

study of affect and critical transitional justice studies is particularly generative because the two fields share a commitment to mobilizing a definition of the political that is inextricable from everyday social life and community concerns. While critical transitional justice studies has tended to interpret this commitment as a recognition that “justice is always enmeshed with locality and that transitional and other justice initiatives are often quite messy and often fail to attend to critical on-the-ground realities” (Hinton 17), scholars in affect studies have tended to explore the significance of the local and the everyday through attention to questions of epistemology, embodiment, and ethics.

For instance, the work of Lauren Berlant in The Queen Goes to America and

Intimacy reminds us that intimacy is “more than that which takes place within the purview of institutions, the state, and an ideal of publicness,” but neither is it a romanticized ideal that exists outside of the normalizing power of institutions

(Queen 4). Berlant provides a non-prescriptive definition of intimacy as the “modes of attachment that make persons public and collective and that make collective scenes intimate spaces” (Intimacy 8). These spaces include the spaces of sexuality, romance, close kinship, and friendship, all the other “kinds of connection that impact on people, and on which they depend for living” (4). In this thesis, I suggest that the space of alternative spiritual cosmology can also be conceived as a mode of intimacy that challenges state-authorized forms of justice. Anne Laura Stoler’s work on the intimate spheres of colonialism in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in

North American History draws attention to how the management of intimacy has

functioned as a tool of empire and how, in modernity, the map of colonialism’s inside and outside is far from stable (“Tense” 67). Stoler’s theory of the “tense and tender ties” of empire is a useful paradigm that enables me to approach a critique of colonialism, imperialism, and authoritarianism in Southeast Asian and Southeast

Asian diasporic contexts through a focus on intimacy.

Lisa Lowe’s three-fold definition of intimacy in “The Intimacies of Four

Continents” as 1) spatial proximity, 2) bourgeois privacy, and 3) and cross-racial alliance among colonial labourers (203) reinforces Stoler’s claim that while intimacies were “recruited to the service of colonial governance,” they were “never wholly subsumed by it” (“Intimidations” 4). As Lowe writes, “[c]olonial labor relations on the plantations in the Americas were the conditions of possibility for

European philosophy to think the universality of human freedom, however much freedom for colonized peoples was precisely foreclosed within that philosophy”

(193). In particular, Lowe’s third definition of intimacy as “the volatile contacts of colonized peoples” (203) informs the present study’s consideration of the ethics of cross-cultural encounter and collaboration. Picking up on Lowe’s argument that modern liberal humanism’s narrative of freedom is dependent upon “the forgetting of its conditions of possibility,” that is, the forgetting of racialized labour (11), David

Eng argues in The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of

Intimacy that the “racialization of intimacy” can be thought of as “the political, economic, and cultural processes by which race has been forgotten across a long history of colonial relations and imperial practices, dissociated from or subsumed by

other axes of social difference” (10). According to Eng, “the racialization of intimacy indexes other ways of knowing and being in the world, alternative accounts of race as an affective life-world within but ultimately beyond the dictates of a liberal humanist tradition, eluding conventional analytic description and explanation (10).

Offering a theory a racial and psychic reparation that foregrounds the relationship between intimacy and trauma, Eng’s work suggests how subjects of racial melancholia might, for instance, refuse the hegemonic forms of closure induced through political projects of redress and reparation (such as national apology or state monetary compensations) while, at the same time, work through trauma and psychic injury at an individual level. This tension between the psychic healing of the individual and collective projects of justice and reconciliation is a central focus in this dissertation.

Writing about the usefulness of affect studies for critically attending to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, Ann Cvetkovich asserts that

we have yet to attend to the past adequately and . . . one measure of that neglect arises at the affective level. Affect is often managed in the public sphere through official discourses of recognition or commemoration that don’t fully address everyday affects or through legal measures (ranging from the abolition of slavery and segregation to affirmative action) that don’t fully provide emotional justice. The goal is something more than statues and monuments, something that involves ways of living, structures of feeling. (“Public” 7) 2

What constitutes emotional justice? What are the politics and ethics of speaking the violent past in the pursuit of justice and reconciliation? How are notions of trauma

2 In addition to the scholarship discussed in this introduction, see also the following influential work on intimacy by Bersani and Phillips, Boym, Povinelli and Shah. For more on affect theory in general, see Raymond Williams, Massumi, Ngai, Sedgwick, Terada, and Clough.

read differently across cultural, national, gendered, and generational divides, and what are the implications of these epistemological differences for thinking about what constitutes justice? Where might literary and cultural studies be positioned in relation to these issues? Literature, McGonegal asserts, is one site that negotiates

“competing perspectives on forgiveness and reconciliation” and that opens “up new perspectives and new worlds, for imagining alternatives, in other words, to normative conceptualizations of justice” (3). This dissertation thus constitutes an attempt to consider what an intimate politics of justice and reconciliation might look like by examining its representation in five contemporary works of literature:

Charinthy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats (2000), Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared

(2009), Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003), and Madeleine Thien’s Certainty (2006). While these five novels comprise the primary literary archive of this study, I examine them in relation to a wide range of relevant secondary material (short literary essays, radio documentaries, news archives, author interviews, and more).

In formulating my methodological approach to analyzing this archive, I am influenced by Avery Gordon’s stated method in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the

Sociological Imagination of “producing case studies of haunting and adjudicating their consequences” (24). This method, Gordon writes, resists “operationalizing discrete explanatory theories” and allows the theories and critique to emerge from the cases (novels) themselves (24). It is for this reason, among others, that I have selected relatively recent primary texts (published since 2000) that are not yet

attended by a large body of critical scholarship. These texts not only challenge normative discourses of justice and reconciliation, but also prove to be resistant to the psychoanalytic paradigms, such as theories of melancholia and mourning, that have become dominant in the explanation of how literary texts register traumatic loss. Rather than attempting to make these texts conform to a pre-established theoretical rubric, this study seeks to adopt Gordon’s method of engaging readers and critics in “a different way of seeing, one that is less mechanical, more willing to be surprised, to link imagination and critique” (24). Gordon’s treatment of literature as haunted knowledge that necessarily and importantly stands on the other side of what is empirically verifiable is an assumption that underpins the central claims of this dissertation. Literature’s resistance to verifiability is particularly appropriate for the study of alternative conceptions of justice and reconciliation since, as

McGonegal notes in the context of Mark Sanders’s discussion of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Truth Commissions in general have tended towards a “privileging of discourses of forensic truth and a devaluation of stories and literature” (180). At the same time, my commitment in this dissertation to studying literature in dialogue with other discourses of reconciliation and justice, such as anthropology and social psychology, is rooted in Gordon’s reminder that “fictionality and the inventiveness of social constructionism are not ends in themselves” (27).

As I have been suggesting, there is a concerted effort in this study to regard the literary texts under analysis as self-theorizing texts that undo the binaries between literature and theory. This respect for literature as theory is especially

important in the context of studying texts written mostly by writers of colour since, as Donald Goellnicht argues in “Blurring Boundaries: Asian American Literature as

Theory,” “[t]o view Asian American literary texts as theoretically informed and informing” is to deconstruct the false binary whereby the creative texts of people colour are seen as the unsophisticated raw material or the sociological information that “proves the white critics’ abstract theories” (341). To read Asian American literature as theory, Goellnicht asserts, “is also to appropriate for Asian American texts the power usually reserved for European texts” (341). In order to explore in detail how literature can theorize an intimate politics of reconciliation, this dissertation limits its focus to the context of Southeast Asian diasporic experience in

North America since the mid-1970s. Although such a temporal delimitation is appropriate because it marks an era of transitional justice and reconciliation “after” the trauma of war, genocide, and displacement experienced by Southeast Asian refugees, most of the texts that I analyze index temporalities that extend back to the colonial era, necessitating this study’s critical engagement with the histories of

British, French, Dutch, and American colonialism/imperialism in Southeast Asia.

While I acknowledge that a clear limitation in constructing my primary archive is the exclusion of texts about Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies written in languages other than English, I suggest that the five texts I have selected to analyze are particularly illuminating for the type of study I undertake in this dissertation for a number of reasons. These texts not only index a history of the longue durée in Southeast Asia, but they also foreground a “memorial impulse to

turn and return traumatic history” in the service of exploring the possibility of justice and reconciliation in the aftermath of mass trauma (Simon, Rosenberg, and

Eppert 4). Furthermore, these texts exhibit a remarkable self-consciousness about the ethics of remembrance, about what Viet Thanh Nguyen describes as “the obligations of ethical behavior in relation to both political and other acts, including the act of representation in culture, and the more personal, intimate acts that take place in memory, family, and community” (“Speak” 10). A key claim that I make in this dissertation is that an intimate politics of reconciliation entails not only a critique of the exploitative tactics and Eurocentric discourses of Western policymakers, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and co-writers working under the auspices of transitional justice, but also of an ethical critique of those us who have

“become tellers of ghosts stories” (Espiritu xix). As Nguyen asserts, “[w]hat ethics forces us to answer is the question of the harm that we ourselves can do. Writers, artists, and critics can inflict various kinds of harm with the symbolic power they wield. So can minorities, and those who stand up for them, do damage” (“Speak” 10).

In their attention to how trauma affects and ruptures relations of intimacy (familial, romantic, spiritual) and to how relations of intimacy, in turn, complicate and mediate the ethics of representing trauma, the texts under investigation in this study highlight the messy and entangled interpersonal attachments that undergird processes of reconciliation and reparation. Each chapter in this dissertation explores the intimate politics of reconciliation in Southeast Asian diasporic contexts from various perspectives, sometimes focusing on an issue strongly located in a

(trans)national context (i.e. post-genocide justice in Cambodia), sometimes foregrounding an intervention into a theoretical issue (i.e. refugee collaborative autobiography or the ethics of representing trauma).

Chapter 1, “Witnessing Cambodia’s Disappeared: Haunting, Justice, and

Alternative Epistemology,” considers how Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass

Floats, Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared, and Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter mobilize representations of intimacy to bear witness to the repressed social violence that continues to haunt twentieth-century collective memory. This violence or mode of disappearance ranges from American imperialism in Cambodia, to the Khmer

Rouge’s attack on intimacy, love, and the family, to the human rights abuses that characterize Cambodia’s contemporary era of transitional justice, to the disciplinary tactics employed by Western biomedicine on Cambodian refugees in North America.

Whereas Cambodian American autobiography has been read as “evidentiary testimony . . . on the terrain of American justice and the prosecution of international crimes against humanity” (Yamada 148), I consider how the novels by Him, Echlin, and Thien enable us to conceptualize an intimate politics of reconciliation as inextricably linked to affect and alternative spiritual epistemology. Of the three authors analyzed in this chapter, only Him is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. I suggest that The Disappeared and Dogs at the Perimeter, as works of fiction by non-

Cambodian authors, can complement the critical discussion of human rights life writing by inviting a consideration of how testimonial fiction can speak differently to issues of Western complicity and international responsibility for genocide.

Moving from my argument in Chapter 1 to expand the field of Asian American and Asian Canadian literature to include the work of non-Asian authors such as Kim

Echlin, I suggest in Chapter 2, “Gifting Memory: Collaborative Autobiography,

Intersectionality, and Vietnamese American Refugees,” how such an opening up of the field might be problematic given the history of autobiographical collaboration between Vietnamese American refugees and non-Vietnamese Americans in the

United States—a history which has been marked by exploitation and unequal power dynamics. While a focus on this history of collaborative writing might seem to be an odd departure from the topic of transitional justice, this chapter outlines how collaborative projects between Vietnamese American and non-Vietnamese collaborators, mostly Viet Nam War veterans, have often been framed as works of reconciliation or healing. Seeking to move beyond an analytic paradigm whereby the study of alternative models of justice must always be defined against the official discourse of tribunals or public apologies, this chapter explores the intimate politics of reconciliation in relation to questions of ethical representation and ownership of voice in the production of Vietnamese American refugee narratives. While Truong’s critical scholarship on what I describe as “collaborative damage” can be read as informing the political ends of her creative novel The Book of Salt, this chapter argues that Truong’s novel ultimately deconstructs any stable binaries between victim/victimizer or gift/theft to insist instead on the need for a complex understanding of intersectionality. In this respect, I suggest that The Book of Salt illustrates Nguyen’s call for Asian American studies to “embrace what Taro Iwata

calls a ‘problematic Asian American agency’ . . . that rejects the comforts of victimization if it is to claim a viable politics and espouse a credible demand for justice” (“Speak” 12). At the end of this chapter, I explore how The Book of Salt can be read in relation theories of gifting by propounded by scholars such as Heonik

Kwon, Jacques Derrida, and Sara Ahmed.

In Chapter 3, “Forgetting Loss: Decentering Southeast Asia, Postmemory, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma,” I argue that an intimate politics of reconciliation is open to allowing a space for forgetting trauma and loss, contrary to most of the scholarship on melancholia theory that emphasizes the refusal of traumatic closure.

While the value of remembering—or rather the costs of forgetting—for political movements that seek redress has been widely theorized, this chapter argues that the costs of remembering for the individual must be held in tension with the necessary project of continuing to grieve losses endured by the whole community. Through a reading of Madeleine Thien’s Certainty, a novel set in the aftermath of trauma experienced during the World War II Japanese occupation of Malaysia, I examine how trauma is inflected differently for each generation living in its aftermath. After outlining the work of scholars who have theorized the value of forgetting from a number of different perspectives (social psychology, technology studies, trauma studies, philosophy, and anthropology), I consider how Certainty can be read in the context of what Marianne Hirsch has described as “the ethics and aesthetics of remembrance in the aftermath of catastrophe” (“Generation” 104).

Why Southeast Asian Diasporic Genealogies?

In a recent interview, British Chinese-Malaysia writer Tash Aw reflects,

for a lot of Southeast Asians, memory is something we haven’t quite got to grips with. There’s a sense in Southeast Asia, I think in Asia in general, that history and, therefore memory, is something that does not quite belong to us because our recent history is that of a colonized country, and therefore everything associated with that is associated, in some way or another, with pain and loss.

What does it mean to feel dispossessed of one’s memory and history as a condition of diaspora? This dissertation arises out my commitment to exploring what is at stake in contemporary literary articulations of diaspora, which, as Lily Cho argues should be reserved “for the underclass, for those who must move through the world in, or are haunted by, the shadowy uncertainties of dispossession” (“Turn” 19). In his article “Postcolonial Diasporas,” David Chariandry similarly argues that diaspora studies need to remain focused on “how historically disenfranchised peoples have developed inventive tactics for transforming even the most sinister experiences of dislocation into vibrant and revolutionary forms of political and cultural life.” I follow Cho’s and Chariandry’s urging of scholars to maintain a flexible understanding of diaspora while at the same time not lose sight of the concept’s historical association with traumatic exile.3 The texts that I analyze in this study have in common a concern with reconstructing Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies, counter-memories of the experiences and movements of refugees, immigrants, and exiles from this region. Foucault used the term genealogy to

3 As Chariandry notes, “[o]f crucial importance here is the uniquely robust and compelling articulation of diaspora in Jewish thought, whereby Diaspora (capital D) names specific histories of Jewish exile, and is most of the time associated with experiences of traumatic displacement and suffering tightly bound to the companion term Galut.” For an example of a scholar who does not reserve the term diaspora for traumatic dispersal, see Cohen.

theorize what he called a “history of the present” or the “counter-memory” established against official rationalist and scientific accounts of history. In his

January 7, 1976 lecture, Foucault explained that “in contrast to the various projects which aim to inscribe knowledges in the hierarchical order of power associated with science, a genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition and the struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse. It is based on a reactivation of local knowledges—of minor knowledges”

(Power/Knowledge 85). In using the term “Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies,” instead of, for instance, “Southeast Asian diasporic literature,” I am seeking to move away from speaking of the novels I am analyzing as bearing a necessarily referential relationship to the identities of the authors. Instead, I focus on how these texts generate “counter-memory” or a “history of the present” about Southeast Asian diasporic experiences of war, genocide, and displacement. Doing so enables a consideration of how the work of a white Canadian author such as Kim Echlin might be considered a part of a Southeast Asia diasporic genealogy.

Southeast Asia is a region that consists of eleven nations, each with differing histories, ethnicities, cultural traditions, languages, and political-economic systems.

According to historian D.G.E. Hall, the term “South-East Asia” became generally used during the Second World War to refer to “the mainland states of Burma, Thailand,

Laos, Cambodia, North and South Viet Nam and Malaya together with the two great

island groups . . . the Republic of Indonesia and the Republic of the Philippines” (3).4

Geographical proximity and tropical ecology are the two main features that can be said to coherently link the nations of Southeast Asia since the region is

“characterized by a tremendous variety of indigenous peoples, languages, and cultures” (Lim and Chua xi). Nevertheless, Clark Neher writes in Southeast Asia in the

New Era that most of these nations share certain historical and social patterns: “a colonial past; a postwar-struggle for independence and modernization; religious penetration by Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity . . . agricultural economies that have been overtaken by manufacturing in the past decades; reliance on patron-client bonds for achieving goals; and a strong sense of the village as the primary unit of identity” (2). The region’s colonial past begins as early as the fifteenth century, when Portugal and Spain colonized the Philippines. Later, Holland,

England, France, and the United States seized much of the territory of Southeast Asia for markets and resources.

As Chua Beng Huat summarizes, with the exception of Thailand, the only nation that was never officially colonized by European powers,5 all Southeast Asian nations achieved independence after the end of the Second World War. During the next three decades, “the entire region was plunged into the Cold War, proxy of the stand off contest between the so-called capitalist ‘free world’ and the emergent

4 The contemporary map of Southeast Asia consists the following countries: Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Viet Nam. 5 Ann Laura Stoler explains that “even though Siam was a noncolonized region, its ‘geopolitical’ history as a nation was shaped by impingements of European imperial expansion and colonial discourses of race, according to Winichakul, Siam Mapped” (“Tense” 67).

communist bloc of the USSR in Europe and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in

East Asia” (232). Jodi Kim writes, “while the Cold War is metaphorically cold when seen from the vantage point of the United States and (Western) Europe, it was literally hot and bloody in much of the rest of the world, the terrain on which the

West’s Cold War was actually waged and fought” (16). This was clearly the case in

East Asia (notably Korea), and also in Southeast Asia, where the politics of the Cold

War were complexly intertwined with anti-colonial struggles in almost every single

Southeast Asian nation. For the most part, these communist-led struggles against

European powers later transitioned to civil war against non-communist factions backed to varying degrees by the United States. Viet Nam, for example, transitioned from a protracted struggle for independence against French colonial rule (1859-

1954) to a war with the United States (1955-1975). The U.S. government used the departure of the French as justification for its military intervention in Viet Nam, propagandizing that economic and political instability could provoke a communist takeover in Viet Nam that would spread across Asia. Up to three million Vietnamese lives were lost during the War and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees were displaced. In Cambodia, after nearly a century of French colonial rule, the country became drawn into the Cold War politics of the 1960s when the United

States supported a coup to instate a pro-U.S. Lon Nol government in Cambodia; this event incited a civil war between this government and the Communist Khmer Rouge regime, which was later responsible for the death of approximately 2.2 million

Cambodian people in the genocide of 1975-1979. In Malaya (now Malaysia), a

guerilla war now known as the “Malayan Emergency” was fought between the

British colonial army and the Malayan Communist Party immediately after the withdrawal of Japan at the end of the Second World War. Malaya was granted independence by the British in 1957 only after the defeat of the Communist Party.

Indonesia engaged in a bloody anti-colonial resistance against the Dutch colonizers from 1945 to 1949. The post-independence movements in Southeast Asia, whose histories I will cover in more detail in each relevant chapter of this thesis, thus ranged from diffuse feelings of nationalism to strong anti-colonial sentiments. In cases where the anti-communist faction emerged as the victor, “the colonial past was not only not subjected to critical historical analysis but might even be reinterpreted as ‘benign’ [notably Singapore]” (233).

As I previously noted, the migration of Southeast Asians to North America dates back to the sixteenth century with the arrival of Filipino migrants, but as

Shirley Goek-lin Lim and Cheng Lok Chua explain in Tilting the Continent: Southeast

Asian American Writing, the majority of Southeast Asians arrived in North America during three historical times periods: 1) following the Spanish-American War of

1898, 2) in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon in 1975, beginning with the evacuation of 86,000 South Vietnamese refugees from Viet Nam to the United States, 3) and finally, after the U.S. revised its Immigration Act in 1965 and Canada revised its in

1967 (xvi). In this dissertation, I focus particularly on the historical context of the second two waves of Southeast Asian immigration to North America, acknowledging the limited focus of my study, which does not engage the histories and textual

production of all Southeast Asian diasporic communities and which employs the term Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies somewhat generally to refer, for the most part, to Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Malaysian diasporas.

Aihwa Ong explains in Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, and the New

America that the late 1970s and 1980s was an “era of moral limbo” in which

“Southeast Asians were the most prominent group of refugees to enter the United

States” (82). During this period, refugees from Southeast Asia arrived in the United

States in two major waves. The first came after the fall of Saigon in 1975 when waves of “boat people” fled the War in Viet Nam while the second wave, after 1980, consisted of Cambodians, Laotians, and ethnic Chinese Vietnamese—all of whom had fled to various camps throughout Southeast Asia (mostly in Thailand). Despite the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980 that allowed for increased levels of immigration from

Southeast Asia and for a relatively high rate of social assistance for these refugees, they were viewed unfavourably compared to mid-century European refugees who came to the U.S. and Canada after World War II. In the United States, post-1975

Southeast Asian refugees were reminders of America’s military defeat in Viet Nam

(82). As the recession began in the mid-1980s, public opinion began to turn against

Southeast Asian refugees. Americans began to experience “compassion fatigue” and a “climate of antagonism greeted the growing influx of refugees of color from Asia,

Latin America, and Africa” (82). Southeast Asian refugees were perceived as a burden to the state at a time when America was abandoning welfare-state policies

and adopting a domestic political ideology of personal responsibility under the

Reagan Republicans.

As Ong writes, “the metaphor of the underclass was now extended beyond long-resident American inner-city groups to include refugees from Cambodia and

Laos. The term refugee came to adhere more tightly to Cambodians, Hmongs, and

Miens, and to be synonymous with welfare recipient” (86). Marked as being more depressed, disorderly, and “affectively oriented” (85), refugees from Cambodia [and also Laos] were seen as being incompatible with the model-minority stereotype of other Asian Americans, “who were celebrated for their ‘Confucian values,’ family businesses, and can-do attitudes” (86). The Vietnamese refugees—the so-called

“boat people” of the late 70s and 80s—had to transition into being part of the model minority, which originally applied to Japanese and Chinese Americans. Originally,

Vietnamese were stereotyped as “gang members” who operated outside the law. In deriving these socio-cultural portraits of Southeast Asian refugees in reports such as a report to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), scholars generally made “no reference to the possible influence of the recent decades of war, social upheaval, and camp life” on the behavior and attitudes of Southeast Asian refugees (85). These social-historical conditions greatly influenced the reception and resettlement experiences of Southeast Asian refugees. Most of Ong’s study focuses on analyzing how state agencies, such as mental health social services, played a central role in the state’s attempts to discipline and manage Southeast Asian refugees. Ong focuses particularly on the case of Cambodian refugees who encountered “novel kinds of

social regulation” (18) designed to discipline and normalize them as “ethnicized, self-reliant, flexible laboring subjects” (281).

The experiences of Southeast Asian refugees in Canada in the early years of resettlement have many parallels to the American context. In his book Strangers at the Gate: the ‘Boat Peoples’s First Ten Years in Canada, Morton Beiser writes that “the sixty thousand refugees admitted to Canada between 1979 and 1981 had suffered oppression, were forced out of their home in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and endured experiences that seemed to push the capacity for suffering to its limits.

They found sanctuary in Canada, though not always welcome” (3). Beiser acknowledges that his use of the term “boat people” is a misnomer in many respects since “more people left Southeast Asia by land routes than by the sea”; nevertheless, he uses the term to invoke the public discourse in the early 1980s around Southeast

Asian refugees, who “will probably always be remembered as the ‘Boat People’”

(20).

Although Beiser outlines, as many other scholars have done, the Canadian government’s legacy of racist polices designed to keep refugees and immigrants out of Canada, he makes the claim that “Canada’s response to the Southeast Asian refugee crisis marked a transition from indifference to caring” (41). Laura Heller reinforces Beiser’s point in The Greater Toronto Southeast Asian Refugee Task Force

Report when she notes that, while the federal government’s decision in 1979 to take in 50,000 refugees from Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos was clearly, in part, a decision born out of political opportunism, this policy was also in part the result of

“the incredible response by the Canadian public, at the grass roots level, to a human crisis” (Heller 7). This humanitarian response on the part of the Canadian public was seen, for example, in the national organizations and church groups who petitioned the government to do more to help the refugees, in the hundreds of newspaper editorials that appeared in 1979 expressing support for the refugees, in the organized grassroots responses of Operation Lifeline and other citizens’ groups, and in a public march and rally in Toronto on July 16, 1979 (Heller 3). Private sponsors had already played an important role in the “Indochinese refugee program” by coming forward with enough money to support 40,000 refugees—25,000 more refugees than the federal government had originally anticipated—and then by pressuring the federal government to commit to a two-year quota of 60,000 (Beiser

42-43).

Parallel to the American context, however, Southeast Asian refugees began arriving in Canada during a period of economic downturn; the 1982 recession diminished enthusiasm for immigration and, in the eyes of the public, Southeast

Asian refugees “were becoming villains in a drama of competition for jobs and resources” (45). Using the case of Southeast Asian refugees, Beiser’s study debunks myths about Canada as an ideal resettlement country, discusses the value conflicts encountered by Southeast Asian refugees upon arrival, examines the difficulty refugees faced in negotiating relationships with sponsors, elaborates extensively on the “mental health” of Southeast Asian refugees, and profiles “success stories” of refugees. In many ways, Beiser’s book, which derives from his work on a task force

created by the federal government to study Southeast Asian Refugees in the 1980s, aligns Beiser with the kind of government disciplinary apparatus that Ong is critical of in her book. Beiser draws extensively on psychiatric research to chart and classify the modes of mental health among Southeast Asian refugees and also to offer recommendations to the government for improving conditions of sanctuary and resettlement in Canada. Although Beiser implies at times that Canada is a more hospitable place for refugees than other countries such the United States, he ultimately asserts that “the contrast between Canada’s multiculturalism and the U.S. melting pot is probably overdrawn” (46). He cites as evidence “a cross-border survey in which 47 per cent of Americans compared to 34 per cent of Canadians thought it better for newcomers to preserve their heritage than to assimilate” (46).

This brief overview suggests how the term Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies implies an undisputable heterogeneity at the same time that it implies an interconnected history of colonialism, imperialism, and displacements. Despite the association of contemporary Southeast Asia with transnational capital

(especially in the case of countries such as Singapore or Malaysia), this dissertation illustrates how Southeast Asian diasporas are rooted in legacies of trauma and dispossession, legacies which, as Aw reminds us, we have yet to come to grips with.

Cho writes that “diasporic subjectivity requires both a lateral engagement across multiple diasporic communities and identities and vertically through long histories of dislocation” (“Turn” 21). In her work on the intersections between the diasporas of Asian indenture and African slavery, Cho also suggests that “the ‘old’ diasporas of

indenture and slavery are not fully distinct from the ‘new’ ones of jet-fuelled transnational mobility. Rather, these diasporas are contemporaneous and can draw attention to the ways in which the past is constitutive of the present” (“Asian

Canadian” 195).6 In their attention to mass violence, forced displacement, perilous routes of diasporic passage, and the struggles and traumas of resettlement, contemporary Asian American and Canadian literature about Southeast Asian refugees also troubles binary distinctions between “old” and “new” diasporas. For this reason, Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies can be situated in the context of a larger shift since the late 1980s in Asian American Studies from concerns about cultural nationalism to ones about diaspora and cultural transnationalism. As Zhou

Xiaojing notes in the introduction to Form and Transformation in Asian American

Literature, the arrival of refugees from Southeast Asia and revisions in U.S. immigration laws as a result of the aftermath of the War in Viet Nam are two of the material factors that have prompted scholars of Asian American studies to call for new critical methodologies and literary theories that reflect the “demographic transformation of Asian America and the rapid expansion of Asian American literary productions” (3). For instance, Susan Koshy contends that “if the expansion of the field proceeds at this pace, without a more substantial theoretical investigation of the premises and assumptions underlying our constructions of commonality and difference, we run the risk of unwittingly annexing the newer literary productions

6 For more on old and new diasporas, see Gayatri Spivak’s “Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World” and Vijay Mishra’s “(B)ordering Naipaul: Indenture History and Diaspora Poetics.”

within older paradigms” (37). Over a decade ago, King Kok-Cheung explained in An

Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature that early Asian American literature was for the most part dominated by the writings of Chinese, Filipino, and

Japanese Americans but has evolved to also include the writings of Americans of

Bangladeshi, Burmese, Cambodian, Korean, Indian, Indonesia, Laotian, Nepali,

Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Thai, and Vietnamese descent (2,3). While scholars have noted the large amount of cultural production by or about diasporic Southeast Asians

(Cambodian and Vietnamese Americans in particular) in the past two decades, only very recently have we begun to see book-length studies devoted to analyzing the implications of these texts.7

In his introduction to a recent special issue of Postcolonial Studies, Chua Beng

Huat notes a similar theoretical silence about Southeast Asia in the field of

7 Acknowledging that there exists a great deal of critical scholarship on the Viet Nam War and on Southeast Asian refugees from other disciplinary perspectives, I make this claim primarily in reference to the small amount of existing scholarship on Cambodian and Vietnamese American literature and cultural production, anthologies excluded. As Lim and Chua note in Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing (2000), which they state is “the first anthology of Southeast Asian American writing to be published,” a number of anthologies on the writing of specific national-descent groups from Southeast Asia have been published. For example, they cite Nick Carbo’s Returning a Borrowed Tongue (focusing on Filipino American authors) (1995) and Tran, Truong, and Khoi’s, Watermarks: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose (1997). Other anthologies that focus on Vietnamese American writing include: Karlin, Khue, and Vu’s The Other Side of Heaven: Post-War Fiction by Vietnamese & American Writers (1995), and Lam’s Once Upon a Dream (33). Most recently, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud’s This is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (2011) represents the first book-length study of Vietnamese American literature. Pran’s Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields (1997) is the first anthology of Cambodian American writing and Cathy Schlund-Vials’s Cambodian American Memory Work: Genocide Remembrance and Juridical Activism (forthcoming) will be the first book-length study of Cambodian American cultural production.

Postcolonial Studies.8 Despite it being “one of the most colonized regions of the world” (231), Huat points out, for example, that there are only passing references to

Southeast Asia in influential works such as Robert Young’s Postcolonialism: A Very

Short Introduction and Diana Brydon’s Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts. 9 Two potential reasons for this academic silence, Huat suggests, can be traced to the Cold

War and the subsequent rise of capital in Southeast Asia. As Huat explains, in the U.S. academy, Southeast Asian studies has tended to be located within an area studies model in which “the history of civil wars between communists and anti-communists in the nationalist movement and the success or failures of the victorious party in the subsequent nation-building process have been, and continue to be, the scholarly preoccupation of Southeast Asian scholars” (233). Furthermore, the road to capitalist economic development in many parts of Southeast Asia after the end of the

Cold War has resulted in amnesiac memory about the history of colonialism in some

Southeast Asian nations. This history is to be remembered, Huat writes, “only if it serves to drive the people forward, if only to forget the underdeveloped, materially deprived ‘bad’ old days” (234). Huat thus frames his special journal issue as an attempt to address the gap in which “Southeast Asia does not figure significantly, if at all, in the expanding archive of what is constituted as the academic field of

8 For a discussion of the relationship postcolonial studies and Asian American studies more broadly, see Viet Thanh Nguyen and Tina Chen’s introduction to a special issue of Jouvert on “Postcolonial Asian America.” 9 Huat is correct in noting this theoretical silence about Southeast Asia in postcolonial literary studies; however, there are a number of relatively recent scholarly books from various other fields and disciplines that adopt an explicitly postcolonial framework in the study of Southeast Asia. See, for instance, Norindr Phantasmatic Indochina, Ann Laura Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Rule, Sylvie Blum-Reid’s East-West Encounters: Franco-Asian Cinema and Literature, and Penny Edwards’s Cambodge: the Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945.

Postcolonial Studies” (231). It should be noted, however, that although they do not explicitly adopt a postcolonial framework, special issues of the Manoa Journal

(2002) and the Michigan Quarterly Review (2004 and 2005) have sought to leverage some focus on Southeast Asian studies. Other critics, such as Marita Sturken in her book Tangled Memories: The Viet Nam War, the Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of

Remembering, have called attention to the fact that it is not that colonial and imperial wars in Southeast Asia have been ignored, but rather that a location like

Viet Nam is remembered only as a war. In a literary context, Viet Than Nguyen in

Race and Resistance has examined what part the marketing and reception of

Southeast Asian American literature (specifically the work of Le Ly Hayslip) has played in how we approach and study Southeast Asia.

Asian American and Asian Canadian Critique

In this thesis, I consider what it means to study the literary production of

Southeast Asian diasporic subjects, whose work is emerging at a critical moment when the scholars have been increasingly embracing a school of thought that can be best described as Asian American or Asian Canadian critique. The term “Asian

American critique” came widely into use after the publication of Lisa Lowe’s influential essay “The International within the National: American Studies and Asian

American Critique.” In considering the place of Asian American studies within

American Studies, Lowe argues that “Asian American critique asks us to interrogate the national ontology through which the United States constructs its international

‘others,’ and through which the nation-state has either sought to transform those

others into subjects of the national, or conversely, to subordinate them as objects of that national ontology” (30). Lowe focuses specifically on the representation of

Asian immigration to the United States, showing how there has been a tendency in the United States to confine these representations to either a national or an international paradigm. By conceiving of “Asian American” as “a racial formation, as an economic sign, and as an epistemological object,” Lowe argues that we can begin to recognize the ways in which “ ‘new’ Asian immigration conjoins with the earlier history of Asian racialization” (30). Lowe cites, for example, how U.S. transnational corporations have garment sweatshop factories in both the United States and in

Asia, “yet this dimension of ‘new Asian immigration’ is rendered invisible by the stereotypes of new Asians as exclusively technical professionals or successful independent merchants” (37). Asian American critique reveals not only how Asian

American relations unfold as overlapping geographies and temporalities that are never purely national nor global in orientation, but also “initiates a truly necessary inquiry into the comparative history of racialization: for example, the interrelationship between African and Asian American racial histories” (42). Lowe thus formulates a conception of Asian American critique that is necessarily dialogic and open to pushing boundaries, connecting new and old histories of racialization of

Asian Americans and connecting these histories to those of other ethnic groups.

In her book Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique, Kandice Chuh draws on Lowe’s previous work, taking up Lowe’s call to move beyond nation-based paradigms in the study of Asian American cultural politics. Going a step further than

Lowe in an adopting deconstructionist perspective, Chuh seeks to deconstruct the relationship between the field of Asian American Studies and what has been previously regarded as its properly referential objects of knowledge. As Chuh explains, “ ‘Asian American’ emerged in the 1960s as a representational sign alternative to the predominating image of the forever-foreign, unassimilable

‘Oriental’ through which Asianness in the United States had historically been coded”

(20); since then efforts have been made in the field to continually reiterate “the political activist narrative of Asian American studies” (5) and to constantly adjust, pluralize, and expand the term “Asian American” to better reflect the demographic realities of the population (21); however, such efforts, Chuh argues, continually reinscribe “an understanding of language as referential, and of identity as more or less stable” (21). The term Asian American as a referent ends up, for the most part, being mobilized to resolve questions of authenticity (i.e., “whether a representation is or is not found to be 'authentic’ ”) (21). Mobilizing poststructuralist theory as a mode of keeping “contingency, irresolution, and nonequivalence in the foreground”

(8), Chuh thus calls for conceiving Asian American Studies as a “subjectless discourse”

(9) that “names racism and resistance, citizenship and its denial, subjectivity and subjection” but that is “at once the becoming and undoing” of the term Asian

American (8).

In calling for an emptying out of the referential meanings of “Asian

American,” however, Chuh acknowledges the limitations of drawing heavily on poststructuralist theory, “a deeply Eurocentric philosophical tradition that makes

difficult immediate political intervention by means of its destabilization of subjectivity itself” (5). Under current conditions in which U.S. liberal multiculturalism “manages to sediment Asian Americanness in a narrative of otherness” while simultaneously effacing the history “of racism and the deep- rootedness of racialization as a technology” of power in the United States (6), Chuh argues that “[t]hinking in terms of subjectlessness does not occlude the possibility of political action. Rather, it augurs a redefinition of the political, an investigation into what ‘justice’ might mean and what (whose) ‘justice’ is being pursued” (11). Chuh thus “problematizes the possibility of achieving justice through legal means” (11), arguing that Asian American studies as a subjectless discourse is “a designation of the (im)possibility of justice, where ‘justice’ refers to a state as yet unexperienced and unrepresentable, one that can only connotatively be implied” (8). As a field organized around “collaborative antagonisms” rather than “marginalization” (28),

Asian Americanist critique seeks to open up new horizons of justice that are not confined by the epistemological parameters of the nation state.

In Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War, Jodi Kim similarly conceptualizes Asian American Critique “as an unsettling hermeneutic” (5).

Like Lowe and Chuh, Kim wants to mobilize Asian American critique as an epistemology, a theory, and a mode of critique rather than as a referential category.

To do so, Kim draws on parallel movements in other fields such as Grace Kyungwon

Hong’s argument to regard “ ‘women of color feminism’ and ‘racialized immigrant women’s culture’ not as identity categories but as analytics for tracking and

describing American modernity” (10). Kim also cites Andrea Smith’s critique of approaches to Native Studies that are “content-driven,” that seek “an ethnographic revelation of the essential ‘truth’ of Native American ‘identity’ and knowledge” (10).

By paying attention to “the critical longings, enactments, and embodiments that are displayed in Asian American cultural works” (5), Kim’s book provides a vigorous critique of American empire in Asia during the Cold War. Kim explains that she uses the term “unsettling hermeneutic” to suggest, on the one hand, “how Asian American critique unsettles and disrupts the dominant Manichean lens through which the Cold

War is made sense of and in turn generates meaning” and, on the other hand, how it

“generates a new interpretive practice or analytic for reading Asian American cultural productions, and the very formation of contemporary ‘Asian America(n),’ in new ways” (5). Kim does not seek to name a dominant discourse of the Cold War against which to read Asian cultural productions as positivistic corrections of history. Rather, she prefers to read these cultural productions as engaging in a

“politics of refusal”—refusing to tell the story of “what the United States ‘really did’ in Asia during the Cold War,” refusing “to be a cooperative native informant” (6).

Kim reads these refusals as “generative moments” (7) for Asian American critique, which, she argues, “is decidedly not a reified identity category,” but rather an analytic “for apprehending the specificity of American empire in Asia in the second half of the twentieth century” (10). 10

10 For more on Asian American critique see also, Chris Lee’s “Asian American Literature and the Resistances of Theory” and Jennifer Ann Ho’s “The Place of Transgressive Texts in Asian American Epistemology.”

While the term “Asian Canadian Critique” has not been explicitly mobilized in the same way as “Asian American Critique” has in the American context, scholars have been mounting the same kinds of critiques of referentiality, autoethnography, and the contributory model in the Asian Canadian Studies context.11 In the introduction to their edited anthology Asian Canadian Writing Beyond

Autoethnography, Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn explore the challenges and contradictions inherent in speaking about a strategically unified field of Asian

Canadian writing while at the same time considering how individual writers classified within this field are challenging, or moving beyond, its limiting configurations. Drawing on Deborah Reed-Danahay’s definition of autoethnography as a term that combines a challenge both to the realist notion of an objective, authoritative ethnographer and to the idea of a coherent, stable autobiographical self, Ty and Verduyn are interested in exploring how Asian Canadian authors of the past decade have “consciously attempt[ed] to problematize the link between ethnic identity and literary production” (3). The underlying problem with autoethnography, according to Ty and Verduyn, “is the belief in the ‘essentialness’ of a particular group, an implication of the special ‘insider’ status of a group member”

(4). The problem has to do with the notion that an individual member of a

11 In undertaking a comparative approach between Southeast Asian diasporas in Canada and the United States, I do not seek to simplify the complex differences between the historical contexts of Asian American and Asian Canadian Studies. It is, however, beyond the scope of this introduction to deal with this topic at length. For studies that explicitly address the differences between the two fields, see Donald Goellnicht’s “A Long Labour: The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature,” Guy Beauregard’s “What Is at Stake in Comparative Analyses of Asian Canadian and Asian American Literary Studies?”, Iyko Day’s “Must All Asianness Be American? The Census, Racial Classification, and Asian Canadian Emergence,” and Eleanor Ty’s “Introduction: Reading Globality.”

community, who is included on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc., necessarily speaks for, or represents the experience of, the community as a whole.

Ty and Verduyn are quick to caution readers, however, against too uncritically celebrating a stage of “the beyond,” explaining that they “are not signaling the end of the trend of autoethnography,” nor are they discrediting its important role in the feminist and postcolonial identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s (4). What is at stake in moving “beyond autoethnography,” they argue, is the liberation of Asian

Canadian writing from a surrounding hegemonic discourse that reduces this writing to purely sociological or “authentic” information.

In his recent introduction “Asian Canadian Studies: Unfinished Projects,” Guy

Beauregard poses the question of why Asian Canadian Studies might matter now and then proceeds to make a distinction between “scholarship on Asian Canadian topics” and “Asian Canadian Studies projects” (7). The difference, Beauregard argues, lies in how the latter “work out of an awareness of the social movements, the cultural activism, and the intellectual histories that have enabled the category of

‘Asian Canadian’ to come into being” (8). The term “Asian Canadian” has always been historically- and socially-situated and, furthermore, Asian Canadian Studies projects have not emerged from a secure and stable institutional location, but rather have emerged from multiple disciplinary sites. This “unsettled terrain,” Beauregard suggests, is precisely why “Asian Canadian projects may matter now” (12). The projects have “rejected a simple additive model of knowledge production” and have

“instead sought out what R. Radhakrishnan has called . . . ‘a different modality of

knowledge’” (252) and what Stephen Sumida and Sauling Wong have discussed with reference to Asian American literature as “strategic bases from which to rethink social and cultural formations within Canada” (13).

Challenging Subjectlessness

Although the discourse of Asian American and Asian Canadian critique can be said to accommodate the deconstructionist perspective is implied in my use of the term Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies, which as I have already noted, seeks to place more emphasis on the countermemory of war, genocide, and displacement in

Southeast Asia than on the discrete identity category of a Southeast Asian author, I situate my study largely in opposition to this body of scholarship that insists on the need to “move beyond” Asian American or Asian Canadian subjectivity. In fact, in

Chapter 1, where I would seem to adopt a discourse of subjectlessness by arguing for the need open up the field of Cambodian diasporic literature to include the novels of non-Cambodian authors such as Madeleine Thien and Kim Echlin, I illustrate how these texts urgently call on the international community to recognize that there are real-life referents to the category “Cambodian American” or

“Cambodian Canadian,” which include the survival of one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century and the continuing fight for justice and reparation in a transnational context. Taking into account Sau-ling Wong’s caution about the dangers of adopting a “developmental or maturational narrative about reconfigurations in Asian American cultural criticism” (12) by which deconstructionist critique is deemed to be a progressive movement beyond identity

politics, I suggest that Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies present a challenge to the calls for a politics of social justice based on a discourse of “subjectlessness.” The emphasis on trauma and testimony in Southeast Asian diasporic literature seriously complicates to the extent to which Southeast Asian refugees would embrace postmodernist deconstructions of identity. As Roy Miki reminds us, “[w]hen we think of going ‘beyond identity,’ we would do well to keep in mind the sometimes traumatic circumstances out of which identities arise. As points of coherence, identities are not only positions of power and stability . . . [identities] function as a provisional nexus in and through which social subjects address the boundaries of cultural and political inequities and their wounding consequences” (146).

A brief detour here through a reading of Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter helps illustrate Miki’s point about the dangers forgetting legacies of trauma. In the following passage, Thien provides a description of the protagonist Janie’s sudden mental collapse: “It was January, and the ice covered everything and I didn’t know anymore, I couldn’t explain, how this could have happened, why I could not control my hands, my own body. We went through the motions, going to school, going to work, but something inside me, inside Navin, was dying. The broken world finally fell apart” (153). As I discuss in Chapter 1, we find out that Janie’s breakdown in the present is linked to the trauma that she suffered thirty years earlier in Cambodia. In this scene, Thien thus establishes the theme of the shattering of identity induced through war, genocide, and the crossing of borders.

The crossings depicted in Thien’s novel are not the jet-setting mobilities of

Ong’s flexible citizens,12 but the violent displacement of refugees forced across borders, perimeters, and oceans as subjects of “bare life”— the “living dead” condition of refugees stripped of the socio-political identity that grants them recognition as human beings (Agamben 131). These crossings involve horrors that are akin to Jacqui Alexander’s invocation of the violence of the Middle Passage, “of the enforced Atlantic Crossing of millions of Africans that serviced from the fifteenth century through the twentieth the consolidation of British, French, Spanish, and

Dutch empires” (2). In Dogs at the Perimeter, Thien reconstructs a historical moment of intersecting pacific genealogies in which Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Laotian refugees flee from war and genocide in Southeast Asia through the same underground escape route in Laos. Aboard a “shallow cargo hold filled with many people, many families … their faces etched with fear,” Janie and Sopham [Janie’s brother] “set out across the sea” (135). For Janie, the myth of journeying to the West

“like the great Hanuman, leaping across oceans” (66) and going “into another life”

(135) is shattered the moment “Time stopped” aboard the refugee boat. At this moment, when pirates attacked the boat, crossing becomes a shattering experience of visceral, bodily suffering of such an unimaginable degree that Janie “had no words for what was done.” For Janie, the experience of crossing is one that is eternally repeating: “Sopham appeared and we fell into the sea. I fell, I kept falling, and then my body rose to the surface. Still they were behind me, holding me, crossing oceans

12 See Ong, Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality.

and continents. Coming into every room, every place, preceding me into my life”

(137). Although she has tried to repress the memory of being at sea and watching her brother drown right before her eyes, thirty years later, the shattering begins anew: “Something has turned over in me, broken and come undone” (139).

This conflation of images of crossing and shattering also extends to the

Thien’s characterization of Nuong, a Cambodian refugee who suffers a tragic loss on the way to a Thai refugee camp: “leaving Cambodia was like trying to walk through a forest of glass. They set off a series of mines. Within seconds, all of his brothers were dead” (158). Lead by the ghosts of his dead brothers, Nuong is eventually able to bring himself to crawl across the border, arriving alone in 1976 at the Aranyaprathet camp in Thailand (157). These camps along the Thai-Cambodian border, Ong explains, were “prisonlike, encircled by barbed wire and armed military guards . . .

The soldiers terrorized [the refugees], raping women and taking children to sell into prostitution. Refugees were vulnerable to military recruiters and thieves, as well as being at the mercy of hunger and boredom” (53). The title of Thien’s novel is suggestive of this history in which Cambodian refugees suffered such abject conditions in the camps that many of them, like Nuong in the following passage, attempted to return to Khmer Rouge-controlled Cambodia: “The Khmer Rouge guard taunted Nuong to step forward, to throw the stone, to cross the bridge back into Cambodia, to come home, but the boy just stood there like a sick dog, a dying child” (160). Years later, Nuong eventually undertakes this crossing back to

Cambodia, but under conditions of forcible deportation from the United States: “he

was a refugee who had committed a felony and now, under the law, he was subject to deportation. He was being sent back, forcibly, to Phnom Penh” (159).13 Forced to start over for a third time in a country and a language that he can “barely remember”

(159), Nuong returns to what Khatharya Um has described as “a presumed fixed originary source that never was, to a land that is merely a geographical space, and a

‘home’ that signifies banishment rather than belonging” (“Refractions” 99). Thien’s refugees stand at the perimeter of citizenship, forced to cross and re-cross borders that discipline and shatter their subjectivities and futures.

These scenes from Dogs at the Perimeter—in which traumatized Cambodian refugees such as Janie and Nuong have yet to begin the process of reclaiming a stable ground of identity, to reintegrate their shattered memories and lives—call into question the extent to which the deconstructionist critiques of referentiality can be reconciled with the social justice commitments of Asian American and Asian

Canadian studies. Even by the end of Dogs at the Perimeter, it is ambivalent whether

Janie and Nuong will ever be able to reclaim a sense a psychological wholeness.

Thien’s depiction reflects a material reality reported on in the United States that, over thirty years after the end of the genocide, first-generation Cambodian

Americans continue to be in extremely poor health, suffering from an “epidemic of

13 See Um, “Refractions,” 97-99, for a discussion of the forced deportation of Cambodian Americans. As Um writes, in 2002, six young Cambodians were sent back to Cambodia, and “over one thousand more non-citizen Cambodian Americans await deportation from the US to Cambodia for the commission of felonies. Though they had served the sentences for their crimes, they were handed an even longer sentence upon release, activated by an extradition treaty that was signed between Cambodia and the US in May 2002 that made deportation to Cambodia possible” (98). See also the David Grabias and Nicole Newnham’s documentary film Sentenced Home.

heart disease, diabetes and stroke” linked to the long-term effects of trauma

(Shaddox). As I discuss in Chapter 1, this trauma for Cambodians included not only the witnessing of physical violence, torture, and death, but also the experience of being forced to self-erase their former identities and to abandon the search to recover the missing bodies and remains of their loved ones. I ask in thesis then how an emphasis on “contingency, irresolution, and nonequivalence” (Chuh 8) would enhance projects of social justice and healing for such refugees? While Chuh’s desire to seek “otherwise” frames that problematize “the possibility of achieving justice through legal means” (11) coincides with the critical aims of the present study, I suggest that the act of developing these alternative frames of justice need not do away with the referential assumptions attached to Asian American identity. If social justice is about fairness or equality or restitution, are not these elements about attending to demographic groups who have not been treated fairly or equally or have not received restitution for past traumas?

That trauma continues to be a central focus of Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies is undeniable.14 The texts that I have selected to analyze in this study explore the effects of trauma in its various forms and stages, from the immediate moments of traumatic dissociation in the aftermath of witnessing murder, torture, or disappearance, to the belated “return of the repressed” decades after the

14 In making this claim, I am not suggesting in any way that trauma is no longer a focus in the writing of other Asian diasporic groups such as Chinese Americans or Japanese Americans. Rather, I am suggesting that perhaps the large scale and the relative temporal recentness of the atrocities that took place in Southeast Asia, in addition to the contemporary context of transitional justice and human rights discourse, make trauma and testimony a more prominent feature of Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies.

traumatic event, to the redoubled effects of trauma triggered in the context of displacement, acculturation, and return, to the pain of having one’s traumatic life story stolen, to the intergenerational inheritance of trauma and the crisis of uncertainty that besets the second generation. In an era of neo-liberalism, crisis, and disaster in which scholars have called for putting the politics of difference aside in order to focus on the “totality” of the crisis at hand,15 these texts bring our attention

“back” to trauma as a useful and relevant critical concept for interrogating the oppressions of colonialism, imperialism, and the state. The claim that Southeast

Asian diasporic literature has not yet “moved beyond” trauma is a defensible one, I argue. And, furthermore, I suggest that this fact is generative for Asian American,

Asian Canadian, and postcolonial studies, not because it is an opportunity for academics to capitalize upon the trauma and suffering of Southeast Asians, but because it troubles those master narratives of teleological development, whereby post-1980s Asian American cultural production is celebrated as expressing a “more advanced or more capacious” phase of subjectivity characterized by diasporic fluidity and postmodern flux (Wong 17).

For example, Teri Shaffer Yamada argues that, given the failure of international justice in the context of the Cambodian genocide, Cambodian autobiographers have not so readily embraced the “fictive potentiality” that is characteristic of many other contemporary autobiographies (153). Rather, as

15 See especially, Masao Miyoshi’s “Turn to the Planet: Literature, Diversity, and Totality” and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, 137-159.

Yamada asserts, Cambodian autobiographies are concerned with the importance of truthful representation and historical accuracy in their construction of a form of testimonial discourse that seeks to engage the attention of the international human rights community (153). The concern with historical veracity has also been identified as a feature of Vietnamese American exile narratives, which seek to rewrite and contest “the dominant Euro-American construction of the shared past of the war [in Viet Nam]” and which insist on “the intertwining of the shared past and shared future destinies of Viet Nam and America” (Christopher 26). In exploring what is at stake in the act of cross-cultural collaborative autobiography, Monique

Truong’s critical and creative writings suggest why Vietnamese Americans might not welcome, for instance, the notion of “Asian American” as a category of critique rather than an identity. Writing about grief in the aftermath of multiple and intersecting traumas in Certainty, Madeleine Thien also articulates a hesitancy to celebrate postmodern conceptions of identity: “I didn’t want to write a book that said everything is uncertain and that you can’t know anything really . . . No. I don’t believe that they — my characters, could find any peace if they believed there was nothing they could hold on to” (qtd. in Scott). Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared foregrounds the self-eroding daily violence of being denied subjecthood, of being forced, under conditions of injustice, to “have lived in intimacy with the violence of the untold life” (224). Chanrithy Him in When Broken Glass Floats testifies to the high rates of lingering trauma that characterize Cambodian American communities. Thus, while the present study draws on some of tenets of Asian American and Asian

Canadian critique—particularly the goal expressed in the work of Lowe, Chuh, and

Kim to generate new analytics for a critique of colonialism and empire—I draw attention to the dangers of a wholesale celebration of “subjectlessness” to groups of

Southeast Asian refugees who have only recently begun to attain subjecthood.

This project asserts the importance of not turning away from the literary and cultural study of trauma, but of rethinking its relevance in relation to affect and

Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies. “For all its despoiled and tiresome qualities,”

Tani Barlow and Brian Hammer note, “the thing about trauma as a concept or

‘theory’ is that it has no substitute; nothing else stands by to replace the term or to focus our attention as it does” (1). However, as Cvetkovich notes, scholars who study trauma have yet to fully engage the challenges of reading trauma across different cultures. She asserts that “[w]hile the categories used to describe genocides such as the Holocaust can be productively backdated or transported to other contexts, it’s important to note that most of the writing commonly associated with trauma theory has little to say about slavery and colonialism” (“Public” 465). At the same time,

Cvetkovich asserts there is, for instance, a powerful body of work on African

American and African diaspora culture and slavery that is “less visible within trauma studies because it doesn’t explicitly use the term trauma even as it seeks to record the affective aftermath of racisms grounded in historical events such as slavery”

(465).16 Cvetkovich thus explains that her motive for moving away from “trauma to

16 Cvetkovich cites, for instance, the critical work of Toni Morrison, Saidiya Hartman, Patricia Williams, Avery Gordon, Sharon Holland, and Fred Moten.

public feelings is to explore the affective legacy of racialized histories of genocide, slavery, and colonization, and migration” (464) since such a shift “allows for languages of affect to be generated organically from within particular histories and discourages the imposition of categories developed in other contexts” (465).

In his article “Conceptualizing Trauma, but What about Asia?”, Kenneth Surin similarly proposes that trauma will become useful as a tool of social justice only when it functions as a site for discussion about politics and epistemology. While recognizing that “the concept of trauma is beset with difficulties, both in terms of its theoretical operation as a concept and as a broader index of certain patterns of expression and agency in our wider culture,” Surin asserts that it remains

“important for us to deal with the questions of cultural and social wounds, of relationship between speech and catastrophe, of social and political place of restitution and forgiveness in the face of tragedy” (16). Surin draws attention to exoticist assumptions of the phenomenon of the “culture-bound syndrome”— whereby conditions such as koro, suo yang, shook yong, rok-joo, jinjinia bemar, latah, and many more have been regarded by psychiatrists as specific to cultural groups17—while maintaining that “it nevertheless remains the case that no such emotional and psychological state can transcend fully its cultural and social base”

(21). Surin thus suggests that in seeking to understand the effects of trauma across

17 Writing about the mental health of Southeast Asian refugees in Canada, Beiser is also critical of the culture-bound syndrome thesis that, in its most simplistic term, proposes that “North Americans psychologize distress [whereas] Asians somatize it” (71). Beiser asserts that population- based data comparing Southeast Asians and North Americans suggests that “somatization is not a substitute for depression but that each is a separate and independent way of expressing and experience distress” (72).

cultures without instating a kind of epistemic violence, we would benefit from focusing less on theory and more on the “somatic and visceral dimensions of physical and psychic injury” (30). He reasons that “approaching trauma primarily in terms of an intellectual sensibility while more or less deemphasizing an affectivity that exceeds words, leads away from the horror that lies at the heart of the tragedy at issue . . . The outcome of this is a ‘taking over’ of the event by the system or economy in which it comes to be placed” (26). Like Cvetkovich, then, Surin implies an epistemic decolonizing potential in the act of turning to affect as a basis of exploring trauma and social and psychic reparation.

While my brief reading of scenes from Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter seeks to suggest the way in which literature enables us to encounter the “somatic and visceral dimensions” of trauma in the service of theorizing justice and reconciliation,

I still remain aware of the inescapable contradiction that the critical vocabulary employed throughout this thesis (drawn from the fields of psychoanalysis, critical race studies, queer studies, Marxism, feminism, diaspora studies, cultural studies, and anthropology) continues to propagate “the prevailing authority of Eurocentric discourses . . . and unreflective dominance of these discourses in academia” (Battiste xx). While I acknowledge that self-reflexivity is an inadequate response to fighting against the “cognitive imperialism” that Marie Battiste describes (xx), it also seems important to note the overtly intimate context of writing a dissertation within the

Western academy. This context requires that I write for a specific circuit of readers whose critical language I must to some degree adopt in order for this dissertation to

be recognized as a legitimate piece of scholarship. This institutional limitation produces contradictions that arguably haunts the interstices of all academic scholarship committed to decolonizing agendas; however, my hope is that in thinking through intimacy as site that, as Lauren Berlant suggests, can “open up new potentialities and scenes of convergence,” this study will also contribute to the ongoing discussion about how we as scholars in the Western academy can strive to do less symbolic harm (“Affect” par. 5). From the “scenes of convergence” presented by the novels of Chanrithy Him, Kim Echlin, Monique Truong, and Madeleine Thien, we can glean a politics of justice that intimates unsettled, plural truths about how we can go about reconciling with our haunted pasts in the service of building emancipatory futures.

Chapter 1 ~ Witnessing Cambodia’s Disappeared: Haunting, Justice, and Alternative Epistemology

On what basis, and whose behalf, do we define and evaluate “justice” in the aftermath of genocide? On July 26th, 2010, the Extraordinary Courts in the Chambers of Cambodia (ECCC)18 convicted the first Khmer Rouge leader, Kaing Guek Eav

(known as Duch), for his part in the genocide of 1975-79, in which an estimated 2.2 million Cambodians were killed.19 While Duch’s conviction is currently under appeal, the ECCC has begun tribunal hearings for what has been described by

18 The ECCC is the official name for U.N.-backed War Crimes Tribunal that has been constructed to prosecute serious crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime. The trial, scheduled to continue until 2015, involves a 700-page indictment, hundreds of witnesses, and thousands of civil parties. 19 During the genocide, Cambodia’s minority groups—the Khmer Krom, Vietnamese, Chinese, Cham, Lao, Thai, and various hill-dwellers—were disproportionately targeted by the Khmer Rouge (Chan, Survivors 23). I return to this issue in the conclusion of this dissertation.

international co-prosecutor Andrew Cayley as “the largest and most complicated prosecution since Nuremberg in 1945” (Mydans, “Conflicts”).20 The media have insisted throughout that the tribunal represents “the last chance that surviving victims have for justice” (Mydans, “27”), but scholars and legal experts have generally been divided about its significance. On the one hand, they have argued that the trials are a necessary step in finally “bringing the Khmer Rouge to justice”

(Kiernan 221) and, if nothing else, “could have the effect of stimulating a broad national discussion of the issue” (Etcheson 150); on the other hand, they have claimed that the trials “may benefit ordinary Cambodians the least” (Margolis 153) and that justice provided in a purely legalistic, state-sanctioned framework denies

“culturally-specific models [of justice], rooted in the desires of the Cambodian people” (Urs 62). Surveys of public opinion have shown that the majority of

Cambodians are in favor of a tribunal for Khmer Rouge leadership, but Craig

Etcheson notes that “[w]hen one probes beneath the surface public attitudes in favor of a tribunal, what most often comes out is not a wish for retributive punishment, but rather a desire for answers, for an explanation to [a number of] elusive existential question[s]” (150).

20 Although not widely discussed in the media, the 1979 People’s Revolutionary Tribunal (PRT) in Cambodia was in fact the “world’s first war crimes trial since the Nuremberg Tribunal in the aftermath of World War II” (Etcheson 14). The PRT tried and sentenced Pol Pot and Deputy Prime Minister Ieng Sary in absentia, but, due to various international machinations, “a great deal of legitimate evidence relating to the charges at hand” was dismissed (15), and the verdict of death was never carried out (16). Etcheson uses the PRT as an early example of the failure of an early attempt to “construct a public record of what had occurred during the Khmer Rouge” and the perpetuation of the culture of impunity in Cambodia (15).

Given the state-authorized forms of justice currently underway in Cambodia, this chapter considers how a turn to literature is particularly appropriate for understanding difficult questions about justice in the aftermath of genocide. A study of Cambodian diasporic literature is urgent in the present context because, as Beth

Van Schaack, co-editor of the recent book Cambodia’s Hidden Scars, has argued, the transitional justice in movement in Cambodia has yet to systematically address the issue of healing and reconciliation from a mental health perspective, even as the tribunal has had the effect of “awakening a lot of the [traumatic] memories among the people” (qtd. in Sopheada). As I noted in the introduction, Julie McGonegal writes that truth and reconciliation commissions in general have tended towards a

“privileging of discourses of forensic truth and a devaluation of stories and literature” (180). Literary texts not only bear witness to a truth beyond what is empirically verifiable, but they also have a creative license to imagine potential futures beyond the trauma, a creativity that is not as readily available in anthropological, sociological, and legal texts.

While scholars have noted that the failure of international justice and the need to bear witness “provides one explanation for why there has been more life writing by or about Cambodians than by or about any other ethnic cohort in the

United States during the past several decades” (Yamada 147), this article examines the role that one Cambodian American autobiography—Chanrithy Him’s When

Broken Glass Floats—and two works of fiction by non-Cambodian authors play in

Cambodia’s still-unreconciled juridical imaginary. I begin by considering how Him’s

memoir bears witness not only to how the sexual, familial, and spiritual intimacies of

Cambodians have been ruptured through genocide and displacement, but also to how these intimacies have functioned as a mode of contestation, survival, and resistance. I then turn to a consideration of how Echlin’s The Disappeared and

Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter reflect an increase in interest in the international literary community about this traumatic and under-represented aspect of twentieth- century history. In addition to a shared emphasis on a reconstructing a traumatic past that haunts not just the memory of Cambodians, but also twentieth-century collective memory, the novels of Echlin and Thien are united by a thematic focus on recuperating Khmer Buddhist views of haunting and ghosts as an alternative epistemology of justice. Although Avery Gordon’s notion of haunting as a symptom of unresolved social violence is useful for thinking about the relationship between ghosts and state repression in The Disappeared and Dogs at the Perimeter, these texts also suggest how Western theoretical paradigms of hauntology may occlude significant elements of Khmer Buddhist spiritual cosmology.

Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats

The plot of When Broken Glass Floats coincides with what Yamada describes as the consistently similar three-part chronotope that structures Cambodian

American autobiography. As Yamada explains,

The first part of this chronotope typically begins with a short portrayal of urban life in Phnom Penh before 1975, as the city steadily devolves into chaos through the violence of civil war. The second part of the chronotope spans the nearly four-year period under the Khmer Rouge regime, which begins with ‘Year Zero,’ on April 17, 1975 . . . The third part of the chronotope

is essentially a coda. It describes the autobiographer’s escape and ultimate arrival in the United States after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979. (147)

In her memoir, Him reconstructs the pre-1975 situation in Cambodia through nostalgic memories of her happy, peaceful childhood growing up in a middle-class family in the rural province of Takeo. The narrative quickly shifts to Him’s childhood apprehension of the loss and destruction wrought by Cambodia’s escalating enmeshment in the War in Viet Nam and by the United States’ secret bombing raids over Cambodia. The chronotope ends with Him’s observations about the increasing hardship of life in Phnom Penh as word spreads that the Khmer Rouge are closing in on the city. Him entitles the fourth chapter of her memoir “When Broken Glass

Begins to Float,” signaling the rupture in her childhood when the Khmer Rouge take over Phnom Penh and order everyone to evacuate the city. The title of Him’s memoir refers to a Cambodian proverb about the impermanent nature of evil: “When good appears to lose,” Him learns from her sister Chea, “it is an opportunity to be patient, and to become like God . . . armbaeg [broken glass] will not float long” (23). Over the next three years, Him witnesses the disappearance of her father and the deaths of her mother, four siblings, her friend Cheng, and numerous other Cambodians in the labor camps and villages controlled by the Khmer Rouge. Chapter fourteen, “When

Broken Glass Sinks,” indicates the beginning of the third chronotope in which Him, now a sixteen year-old girl, and her remaining siblings escape to a refugee camp in

Thailand and subsequently relocate to the United States. Resettled in Portland,

Oregon, Him explains that she now occupies “a world of blurred boundaries” (15);

she both is a “cultural voyeur” working as a researcher who studies PTSD among

Cambodian youth and an “insider” who has experienced trauma like theirs first hand

(17).

Stoler’s theory of the “tense and tender ties” of empire is relevant to the present analysis of intimacy and justice in the context of Cambodian genocide, not because I am suggesting that the Khmer Rouge regime operated as an empire, but because, as my analysis of Him’s text will seek to illustrate, control of the intimate— of sex, sentiment, sexual reproduction, domestic arrangement, religious ritual, forms of familial and kinship address—was essential, and not incidental, to the Khmer

Rouge’s consolidation of power. My qualification about Cambodia and empire is not to discount the complex geopolitical entanglements among the regime’s rise to power in the early 1970s, nearly a century of French colonialism in Cambodia

(1863-1953), and the history of United States imperialism in Southeast Asia.21 As

Adam Jones has summarized, Khmer nationalism in the 1950s—a key component of the Khmer Rouge’s ideology—was fuelled not only by the French colonizer’s

“economic exploitation and political subordination” in the colony, but also by the ideological training it provided in the metropole for future, high-ranking Khmer

Rouge leaders to learn about revolutionary communism (186). In the late 1960s, in the context of the Cold War, the United States supported a coup to instate the pro-

U.S. Lon Nol government in Cambodia, inciting a civil war between this non-

21 For more on French colonialism in Cambodia, see Edwards; for more on U.S. imperialism in Cambodia, see Shawcross and Pilger, Year Zero.

communist faction and the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge’s anti-colonial and pro- communist education within the colonial metropole paradoxically equipped them for the building of their own empire, which was supposed to resurrect the glories of ancient Khmer empires.

From 1969-1973, the United States launched a massive, illegal B-52 bombing campaign over Cambodia, dropping more than half a million tons of munitions and killing tens or hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. As Jones writes, “probably genocidal in itself . . . the US bombing of a defenseless population was also the most important factor in bringing the genocidal Khmer Rouge to power” (189).22 When the United States abandoned Cambodia in 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized power under the leadership of Pol Pot, who renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea and declared the national time as “Year Zero,” the beginning of a radical communist state. Following the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979 and the end of the

Cambodian genocide which eradicated a quarter of the nation’s population, the

“Third Indochina War” began and, from 1975-1991, “the issue of who would rule

Cambodia and how it would be ruled drew deadly interest from virtually every country in the region and from all the world’s major powers” (Etcheson 4). Marking the end of this War, the United Nations peacekeeping mission began in 1991, but the

West’s bloody hand in Cambodia’s collective trauma continued throughout the

1990s as “the Khmer Rouge enjoyed a startling degree of international legitimacy:

22 See also Chandler, who similarly concludes that the “bombing destroyed a good deal of the fabric of pre-war Cambodian society and provided the CPK [Communist Party of Kampuchea] with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution” (295).

for the next ten years they filled Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations” (Ehrenreich

61). Finally, the United States’ image as a benevolent, humanitarian state was bolstered in the 1980s by the influx of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees into the US and then again in 1994 by the US State Department’s releasing of millions of dollars to document the crimes of the Khmer Rouge; this perspective, however, depends upon an erasure of the United States’ direct involvement in

Cambodia’s past violence.

Whereas some Cambodian American autobiographies have tended to exhibit an ideologically pro-American perspective,23 Him’s memoir is subtly critical of the historical erasure of American imperialism in Cambodia. Critics such as Yamada and

Rocio G. Davis have written about Him’s use of archival newspaper records to juxtapose her private memories with public histories of events that took place in

Cambodia. One of the first of these historical records is an excerpt from a 1973 New

York Times article that Him uses as an epigraph to her chapter entitled “B-cinquante deux”:

Washington, July 18—United States B-52 bombers made a least 3,500 secret bombing raids over Cambodia in a 14-month period beginning in March, 1969. Defense Department sources disclose today . . . Military sources did confirm, however, that information about the Cambodian raids was directly provided to President Nixon and his top national security advisers, including Henry A. Kissinger. (38)

About Him’s narrative strategy here, Yamada writes that “without polemic, [Him] nudges historically amnesiac American readers toward recognition of their

23 See Yamada, 157, who makes this argument about Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father.

government’s complicity in an unpleasant history” (157), while Davis asserts that

“Him unites the personal with the collective and reminds readers that behind detached news reports about millions lies the individual children’s stories” (79).

Him’s personal story emphasizes her childhood perception of the emotional impact of the B-52 bombs on her father, whose changing personality marks the first of the many reversals in Cambodian society that Him is about to witness: “He doesn’t say anything, but just keeps looking at the burning sky, trembling . . . Never before have I seen men cry, so much, like Pa tonight” (41). Him also recounts how the American bombings are beginning to break up rural kinship networks, as more and more

“displaced villagers and refugees are pouring into the city” (43). When Broken Glass

Floats thus links the intimacy of genocide not just to the violent tactics of the Khmer

Rouge, but also those of the United States. Him’s chapter “B-cinquante-deux” also reveals how, in Stoler’s words, “empire has appeared and disappeared from the intimate and public spaces of United States history” (“Intimidations” 1).

In When the War Was Over, Elizabeth Becker explains that the destruction of personal life and the anatomization of the family unit were crucial strategies employed by the Khmer Rouge in their attempts to convert the loyalties of all

Cambodians to a new family or parent, that of Angkar: “All human relationships were suspect. The notion of a personal life, of the rights and feelings of the individual, was denied” (211). Focusing on the case of the romance between a man named Comrade Deth and a woman named Hout Bophanna who were tortured and killed as a result of their love during the DK years, Becker details how “the Khmer

Rouge were schizophrenic about sex and procreation” (224). Romance, love, and premarital sex in the labour camps were strictly forbidden and even punishable by death, yet the Khmer Rouge eventually came to favour procreation, ordering that the population should double in order to further the goals of the revolution. As Ong details in her ethnographic account of mass marriages performed “under raised bayonets” (43), women were often forced into marriage with lower-level Khmer

Rouge cadres. Furthermore, Etcheson writes that “a growing body of evidence suggests that rape was common at the lower levels of the Khmer Rouge security organization, particularly the rape of female prisoners who were slated for execution” (185). In defiance of this repressive order, Comrade Deth and Hout

Bophanna, and presumably many other couples, wrote love letters to each other and

“refused to live a solitary, isolated, and emotionally barren life” (Becker 224).

In her chapter entitled “Mass Marriage and a Forbidden Love,” Him reconstructs the history of the Khmer Rouge’s schizophrenic management of sexual and domestic intimacy by recounting a personal memory of her sister Ra’s forced marriage. Him’s autobiographical memory achieves a haunting and chilling effect on the reader that academic and journalistic accounts such as Becker’s cannot. Him’s use of the present tense throughout When Broken Glass Floats render the horrors of genocide visceral and immediate for the reader. For example, three years after the

Khmer Rouge’s takeover, Him observes that she has lost five members of her family due to murder, illness, and starvation, and that “Cambodia is a nation that houses the living dead” (240). She recollects a horrific scene in which the Khmer Rouge enacted

a public execution of a young man and woman: “Their crime, Angka said, was loving each other without Angka’s permission. Thus they were our enemies” (245). The crowd, Him remembers, is shocked to observe that the executed woman was pregnant. Him narrates that, just months later, “as the population dwindles and rumors spread that Vietnamese troops are invading Cambodia, Angka awakens. In meetings, the Khmer Rouge stress the need for chamren pracheachun, the need to increase the population for Angka” (241). Out of fear of being sent away from the village to an almost certain death, Ra is coerced to take part in a mass marriage ceremony. After the ceremony, though, Ra manages to avoid consummating the marriage, and Him is astounded by her sister’s willful defiance: “Having seen Ra’s aversion to Na, I don’t think Angka will succeed in its goal of increasing the population. A marriage sanctioned in such an evil way will never bear fruit” (245).

Him’s testimony here places issues of gender and intimacy at the forefront of projects of collective justice for Cambodians, implicitly drawing attention to how formal political structures of transitional justice (i.e. war crimes tribunals and elections) are limited in their capacity to redress the intimate wounds of the past.

As Becker writes, “many Cambodians might have been able to bear the loss of their personal lives but they found the revolution’s attack on the family insufferable”

(226). Without adopting romanticized notions of familial and kinship relations in

Cambodian society prior to the DK years, anthropologists May Ebihara and Judy

Legerwood explain that the family/household “had been the basic unit of economic production and consumption, as well as the locus of the strongest emotional bonds.

Beyond the family, individuals also felt attachments and moral obligations toward members of a broadly defined bilateral kindred of relatives by both blood and marriage” (276). The dissolution of these familial loyalties was a priority for the

Khmer Rouge, who encouraged children and relatives to spy on their families in order to save themselves. Families were broken up through physical means—direct murder, malnutrition, and disease—but also through an elaborate program of disciplinary measures designed to “undercut sentiments and cohesion among family and kinfolk” (276). These measures included subjecting families to forced evacuations from the family home, forced displacements to the countryside, and forced segregation in the labour camps according to gender and age. The use of the family name was abolished along with practices of eating as a family; instead,

Cambodians were made to identify according to new artificial class categories and were ordered to eat communally. Anthropologists May Ebihara and Judy

Ledgerwood have written about how Cambodian widows were barred from mourning during the years of Democratic Kampuchea, how “[e]xpressions of love for family members—such as weeping over the death of a spouse or child—were denigrated, scorned, and even punished” (276). While Boreth Ly argues that “the devastation of vision among the victims of the Khmer Rouge contributed to the absence of visual representations of the genocide” (119), I suggest that When Broken

Glass Floats illustrates the extent to which the Khmer Rouge’s abolition of mourning has rendered the project of collective mourning for the Cambodian diasporic community both necessary and problematic. In Him’s memoir, the family—and

memories of deceased family—are simultaneously that which Him is constantly trying to hold or bring together and that which she has been made to fear.24

For example, Him chronicles the targeted destruction of familial intimacy throughout her memoir, commenting on the Khmer Rouge’s systematic annihilation of Cambodian cultural norms of language, comportment, politeness, dress, domestic arrangement, and mourning. As a child, Him is stunned to hear young Khmer soldiers “who don’t use the proper courtesies in addressing elders” (67) and to see how their “unwavering, direct gaze burns into Pa—an unrelenting eye contact uncommon in Cambodian culture” (85). She is equally unnerved by the way adults in the labor camps now speak to her, “without the warm, formal endearments that adults typically use” (97). After receiving the news of her father’s murder, Him explains, “there is no outward grieving, even as a family. Like other emotions, it must be tucked away” (92). As the violence and starvation continue to escalate, she observes that “traditions are being shattered daily” (109); one day, she is confronted with the impossible choice of familial intimacy or personal survival: “visits are rare .

. . We have to weigh our desire for such contact against the risk of being punished for exhibiting ‘family intimacy’—a connection the Khmer Rouge frowns upon . . . we have to sneak visits when we are supposed to be working” (121). The concept of sneaking is important in Him’s narrative, for it is through this private subversion of state control that Him is able to sustain a form of psychological survival. Him

24 At the level of narrative form, an example of Him’s symbolic attempt to hold together the family can be read in the elaborate family tree that she provides at the beginning of the memoir.

recounts how, in private, she and her siblings parody the Khmer Rouge’s newly installed forms of address (100) and how they revert back to traditional language:

“They may take our language from our family in public, but they can’t take away the family itself, the bond that binds us. Our private words are our own” (101). Him’s affirmation of the remains of familial intimacy here recalls Ann Laura Stoler’s discussion of how colonial “domination was routinized and rerouted in intimacies that the state sought to know but could never completely master or work out”

(“Intimidations” 57).

Him’s memoir also attempts to illustrate how the “hell” (228) of the genocide is temporarily recessed or held in brutal relief not only through the remains of family bonds, but also through the remains of the “inner spiritual lives” of

Cambodians (99). As Ong explains, the Khmer Rouge’s attack on the most intimate domains of everyday life during the Cambodian genocide devastated a traditional

“Buddhist-Khmer culture based on political and ritual subordination tempered by the Khmer-Buddhist emphasis on compassion, kindness, and mutuality” (19).

Intimate life for most Cambodians had always been inextricably linked to Khmer-

Buddhist values, but from 1975 to 1979 these “values had to be discarded as profound distrust guided every effort to remain alive” (47). Khmer-Buddhism also came under attack during the genocide in a direct way as the Khmer Rouge destroyed and desacralized Buddhist temples, forced monks to defrock, and killed thousands of monks and members of the Buddhist royal family. As Ong writes, “[t]o many, Pol Pot time represented a total rupture of the belief in Khmerness as a

continuing cycle of Buddhist karma and the accumulation of merit. The Pol Pot time was a period of wildness and great reversal in which the Buddhist world itself was destroyed” (40). Immigration and resettlement in the United States, Ong argues, further attenuated the Khmer-Buddhist moral ethics of Cambodian refugees, who encountered social services institutions ignorant of “Cambodian-Buddhist notions of personhood, gender, and communalism” (281).

Throughout her memoir, Him establishes the significance of Khmer-Buddhist beliefs and traditions to the mental and spiritual well being of Cambodians: “In

Cambodian culture, we try hard to please the spirits of our ancestors. Sickness, bad luck, disappointments—all are often blamed on spirits who have gone away unsatisfied. When I pray to Buddha for protection, I routinely pray to my father’s spirit as well. Food offerings are presented as thanks for our good fortune, and as insurance for our continued well being” (112). As food rations dwindle after the

Khmer Rouge takeover, Him and her family suffer intense mental and physical anguish as a result of being forced, out of necessity, to abandon this ritual: “Mak complains of a fierce stomachache. Everyone concludes that it is her punishment because my father’s angry spirit has had to go away hungry” (112). Of all the horrific information Him learns about the tactics of the Khmer Rouge, the “most appalling lesson so far” has to do with their ordering of young boys “to destroy Buddhist temples and shrines of guardian spirits called Rong Neak Ta” (99). Him recognizes the hypocrisy of this act on the part of the Khmer Rouge when she writes, “If they reject the culture of religion, if they have no fear of the wrath of spirits, why didn’t they

destroy the temples themselves?” (99). The Khmer Rouge’s destruction and disdain for the institution of Buddhism, Him reflects, inflicts the most devastating injustice upon Cambodians: “the inability to mourn” (180).

About the effect on Cambodians of not being able to bury and perform cremation rituals for the dead, Khatharya Um writes: “Disappearances and mass graves are especially significant in a Buddhist country because they deprive surviving relatives of the ability to perform the necessary rituals to ensure the successful transmigration of the soul, hence the essential closure to these tragic life experiences. In many instances, this engenders a psychical sense of ‘being stuck’ not only for the soul of the departed but for the survivors as well” (“Diasporic” 9). 25

Him’s memoir affirms the value of Buddhism in helping Cambodians survive the

“living dead” condition with which they are confronted (240): “[Him’s sister Ry] remembers reincarnation, the idea that after death we are reborn. She reconciles her internal conflicts this way, as our parents and elders did before the Khmer Rouge’s takeover” (180). In a state of desperation, Him also takes solace in Buddhist beliefs:

“I think of those who’ve died and hope they will be reincarnated to make up for this life, returning when freedom and peace have been installed in Cambodia” (180).

Near the end of her narrative, as the Khmer Rouge have begun to retreat from a losing war with the Vietnamese, Him presents an image of the potential beginnings of spiritual healing for Cambodians. Him and her siblings happen upon a

25 For more on the importance of honouring the dead through cremation rituals in Khmer Buddhism, see McLellan, 103-105.

spontaneous prayer gathering—the first she has seen in over four years: “Sitting behind the candles are old men and women with shaved heads. These elders could be former nuns or priests. In awe, I’m surprised and comforted to see candles after all these years” (254). Here, Him locates spiritual ritual as a crucial aspect of social and psychic repair for Cambodians, even if such acts can be framed by discourses of transitional justice as “backward and old-fashioned, politically defeatist, or uncomfortably resonant with state [control]” (Dwyer, “Building” 237).

Him’s memoir illustrates how Cambodian refugees continued to assert their right to perform spiritual rituals in the refugee camps to which they were displaced, even under conditions in which, as Ong explains, “camp hierarchy and rules were sometimes reminiscent of the Angkar” (54). In contrast to the previous story that

Him recounted about Ra’s forced marriage, Him recounts in the chapter “Khao I

Dang Camp” a story about Ra’s marriage ceremony in the refugee camp: “In the far corner of the bamboo deck is an offering Ra makes to the spirits of Mak, Pa, Chea,

Avy, Vin, Tha, and our ancestors” (286). In addition to the representation of ceremonial rituals such as this one, Him details the multiple ways in which refugees subverted the “camp’s organizational discipline” and how they dealt with “poverty, boredom, and low status” in the camps (Ong 54-55). Him’s narration of life in the camp includes not only stories of violence, but also vivid descriptions of family meals (272, 279), stories of adoption and the formation of new families (278),

English-language classes (287), black-market smuggling (291), childbirth (298), sports and recreation (303), and employment and volunteer work (305). Him thus

reconstructs an image of everyday life in the refugee camps that moves beyond the portrayal of Cambodian refugees as merely traumatized victims. The camp in When

Broken Glass Floats is depicted not only as a space of intimate violence, but also as a space of potential agency for refugees. Him emphasizes the creative tactics of resistance, survival, and play employed by Cambodian refugees to resist the disciplinary space of the camps.

Although Him ends her memoir with a metaphor of her immigration to the

United States as a “kind of reincarnation” (330), we know from her preface, set twelve years after her ocean crossing, that America “has also become the landscape of [her] nightmares” (15). She continues to be haunted by her past, plagued by nightmares about war and death, and still looking over her shoulder “even on the streets of Portland” (19). While Him’s description of her job in America (as a researcher studying PTSD among Cambodian youths) suggests that she has aligned herself with the disciplinary institution of western psychiatry and biomedicine that

Ong is critical of, Him ultimately negotiates a hybrid framework of healing that incorporates Cambodian spiritual beliefs: “I’m searching for the words, the incantation, to make things right in my soul” (23). As Him prepares to write her memoir—her offering to her “deceased parents, sisters, brothers, and extended family members, and those whose remains are in unmarked mass graves scattered throughout Cambodia” (21), she returns the reader to her memoir’s titular Buddhist proverb that once served as the “seed of [her] survival” (23): “ ‘Loss will be God’s, victory will be the devil’s.’ When good appears to lose, it is an opportunity for one to

be patient, and become like God” (23). Him ultimately insists on the need to locate justice and reconciliation not only within legal paradigms, but also within spiritual and affective frameworks.

Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared and Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter

In the next section of this chapter, I consider how Kim Echlin’s The

Disappeared and Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter engage the memory of the

Cambodian genocide not as eyewitness testimonies, but as works of fiction that break from what Yamada has described as “the consistently similar temporal-spatial frame” that structures most Cambodian American autobiographies (147). My choice to continue the discussion of alternative visions of justice through the novels of

Echlin and Thien, and not through memoirs that bear stronger narrative similarities to When Broken Glass Floats, 26 immediately prompts a host of methodological and ethical questions about ownership of traumatic memory, the boundaries of a diasporic community, and the perpetuation of an economy of representation whereby Cambodia’s “recent history is the near-exclusive precinct of a few foreign scholars” (Ehrenreich 64). Sidonie Smith and Kay Schaffer have discussed the role of human rights life narratives to “command attention, however unpredictable or inadequate, to call on people around the world to listen and to act” (12). In this chapter, I suggest that The Disappeared and Dogs at the Perimeter, as works of fiction

26 In addition to the titles surveyed in Yamada’s article “Cambodian American Autobiography,” see also Sokreaksa S. Himm's Tears of My Soul (2003) and After the Heavy Rain (2007), Loung Ung’s Lucky Child (2005), Denise Affonco’s To the End of Hell (2005), U Sam Oeur's Crossing Three Wildernesses (2005), Pivoine Pang and Wynne Cougill’s Vanished (2006), and Alice Pung’s Unpolished Gem (2006) and Her Father’s Daughter (2011), Sarith Peou’s Corpse Watching (2007), and Navy Phim's Reflections of a Khmer Soul (2007).

by non-Cambodian authors, can complement the critical discussion of human rights life writing by inviting a consideration of how testimonial fiction can speak differently to issues of Western complicity and international responsibility for genocide.27 While Lisa Lowe has considered “what it means for the figure of the

Asian American as US Citizen to do the ‘work’ of reckoning with the violence of empire for the US national public at the end of the twentieth century (“Reckoning”

232), this article asks what it means for the non-Asian American subject to also be engaged in this act of “tireless reckoning with America’s past” (“International” 76).

An analysis of figures of ancestral haunting and disappearance in these two texts, followed by a discussion of the narrative strategies (intertextuality, elegy, and spatial form) employed by Echlin and Thien, will seek to illustrate how alternative modalities of justice can be played out at the level of narrative form.

In The Disappeared, Echlin tells the story of the relationship between

Canadian protagonist Anne Greves and a Cambodian man named Serey. At the age of sixteen, Anne first meets Serey, who is a student in exile in 1970s Montreal. Anne is heartbroken when Serey returns to Cambodia after the collapse of Pol Pot’s regime in 1979. Ten years later, Anne travels to Cambodia and is reunited with Serey; their relationship as adults takes place against the backdrop of 1990s Cambodia—a period when discourses of Western transitional justice have begun to take hold in the country. When Serey suddenly goes missing from a political rally, Anne discovers

27 By turning to fiction, I also seek to complement the existing scholarship that examines Cambodian American life writing and cultural production. In addition to Yamada, see Lay Sody’s “The Cambodian Tragedy: Its Writers and Representations” and the following articles by Cathy Schlund- Vials: “Between Ruination and Reconciliation,” “A Transnational Hip Hop,” and “Familial Bonds.”

that he has been murdered by the totalitarian ruling government. By the end, Anne is imprisoned, prevented from claiming Serey’s remains, and forced to return to

Canada. Thirty years later, Anne is still grieving and seeking justice for the past.28

The narrative of Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter similarly begins in Montreal thirty years after the Cambodian genocide, focusing on the sudden mental collapse of Cambodian Canadian protagonist Janie, who begins to confront the traumatic memory of her past when her friend Hiroji Matsui suddenly disappears. Working at a brain research centre in Montreal, the protagonist, Janie, is currently inhabiting her third name and identity. She previously went by the name Mei, and before that, a different name that remains unknown to the reader, perhaps because it is unknown to Janie herself. In 1975, Janie was an eleven year-old girl in Cambodia when the

Khmer Rouge took control of the country and began their four-year reign of terror.

Forced to evacuate their home in Phnom Penh, Janie’s family enters the nightmare of

Pol Pot’s revolution, where all of Janie’s loved ones begin to disappear: first her father, then her mother, her friend Bopha, and finally her brother Sopham, who perishes at sea during an escape from Cambodia. Rescued from the Gulf of Thailand,

Janie is sponsored to come to Canada, where she meets Hiroji, a prominent neurologist who becomes Janie’s mentor. Hiroji’s brother James, a Canadian Red

Cross doctor, went missing in Cambodia in 1975. Janie discovers that Hiroji, in 2005,

28 Echlin explains in a historical note at the end of her novel that historical timelines have been compressed for her fictional reconstruction of the Cambodian genocide and its aftermath.

has gone to Southeast Asia in search of his missing brother, prompting Janie to also journey back to Cambodia in search of the ghosts of her own past.

Haunting

Both The Disappeared and Dogs at the Perimeter suggest that a reorientation toward the Khmer Buddhist epistemological language of ghosts and haunting constitutes one way in which testimonial fiction can begin to bear witness to the trauma of the Cambodian genocide. Ghosts, Gordon argues, are neither the projections of “pre-modern superstition nor individual psychosis” (7); they are the afterlives of historical and structural violence that take host in and constitute us. A confrontation with the ghostly elements that haunt the edges of a society’s unconscious, Gordon writes, “requires (or produces) a fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge, in our mode of production” (7). Haunting, in

Gordon’s framework, necessitates an epistemological shift in how we develop modes of resistance to the social violence of the past and present. To embrace hauntings and ghosts is not only to be guided by a utopian impulse with respect to historical recovery, but also to approach this reparative work with a kind of epistemological humility.29 While Gordon’s epistemology of haunting is appropriate for thinking about the ethics of witnessing at the ontological level of the Western

29 For more on epistemological humility and spiritual cosmology in literature, see also Coleman, “Epistemological Cross-Talk: Melancholia, Historical Trauma, and Spiritual Cosmology.” Drawing on Diana Brydon’s notion of “cross-talk” as a postcolonial pedagogical strategy that seeks to engage those moments of conflict and disagreement, Coleman stresses the importance of engaging “the alternative spiritual cosmologies, often associated with non-Western or Indigenous cultures, that have been obscured in the economy of credibility” currently dominated by secular, humanist presumptions of the Enlightenment (4).

analyst’s/critic’s/writer’s relationship to the unresolved trauma of Cambodians,

Gordon’s ghosts are, at the same time, not entirely commensurate with the variegated and multilayered meanings ascribed to ghosts within a Khmer Buddhist epistemological framework.

For instance, Janet McLellan has explained that a common affliction among

Cambodians in the diaspora “is the experience of sramay (ghost haunting), caused by the visitation of spirits (kmauit or khmoch) of family members or other loved ones who were murdered and not given proper burial rites” (104). An experience associated with psychological and emotional suffering for Cambodians, sramay is associated with the belief that ancestral ghosts are angry and that they portend punishment or possession of the living for their neglect (105). When left untreated through the lack of a ritual specialist or spiritual community, these hauntings can manifest as “physical ailments, social withdrawal, and mental anguish”—neak ta symptoms that have striking similarities to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

(105).30 Within a Khmer Buddhist spiritual framework, then, ghosts and haunting do not necessarily signify a reparative or utopian potential.31 In the sense that it bears the traces of the structural violence of U.S. imperialism and Khmer Rouge authoritarianism, the ghost in Khmer Buddhist epistemology can be likened to what

30 Ian Harris explains that Cambodians believe that they are “protected by a network of tutelary sprits (neak ta) who, though they lack any explicit association with Buddhism from a purely doctrinal perspective, nevertheless have important and complimentary functions at the level of popular ritual (52). 31 This utopian potential is implied in Gordon’s assertion that ghostly memory “not only repair[s] representational mistakes, but also strive[s] to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future” (22).

Gordon describes as the ghost as a “social figure” (8); however, at the ontological level of spiritual cosmology, Khmer Buddhism’s ghosts must also be understood as both benign and malevolent, as not necessarily charged with countermemorial content.

Ong has discussed how the arrival of Cambodian refuges in the United States in the 1980s revealed how the field of Western biomedicine and psychiatry was in a sense incapable of hearing the Khmer Buddhist language of haunting and ghosts.

Ong argues that, when they were confronted with the trauma of Cambodian refugees, social services lacked awareness of “Cambodian-Buddhist notions of personhood, gender, and communalism” (281), ostensibly forcing the refugees’

Khmer Buddhist moral ethics into the background once again. Whereas psychiatrists diagnosed Cambodian refugees as having “an unwillingness or an inability to differentiate between psychological, physiological, and supernatural causes of illness” (99), Ong explains that “Cambodians consider health to be an inseparable aspect of maintaining one’s relationship with family members, both alive and dead.

For them, illness is seldom a discrete physical phenomenon apart from the social identity of the afflicted” (104). Without adopting exoticist notions of culture-bound syndrome, Ong calls attention to how notions of social and psychic repair for

Cambodians are intimately tied to the ability to commemorate “the reciprocal relations between the living and the dead” (208).

Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter explores this tension between Khmer Buddhist notions of health and healing and what Ong describes as the Western “ ‘biomedical

gaze’—a linear model of immigrant psychology . . . that assumes the suffering of diverse populations follows generic patterns, and that mental-health constructs are universally applicable” (98). Thien does so in the novel by interrogating discourses of the neurobiology of trauma; in particular, the characterization of Janie is used to question the diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID) as a universally applicable disorder that “can be thought of as a chronic, severe form of post- traumatic stress disorder” (Spiegel).32 David Spiegel, a leading researcher on traumatic dissociation, explains that people diagnosed with DID “experience sudden loss of episodic memory, change from a sad, dependent, and helpless personality state to an angry, demanding, hostile one in seconds, and may find themselves in situations that they cannot understand.” In Thien’s novel, Janie is constructed as a character who suffers from what Western biomedicine would label as PTSD and

DID: as a child who survived the Cambodian genocide and who escaped from

Cambodia on a boat that was hijacked by pirates, she suffered multiple, prolonged, and severe forms of trauma that included the witnessing of disappearance, torture, death, and rape. Thirty years later, after her friend Hiroji suddenly disappears, Janie suffers a kind of mental collapse, during which she becomes violent toward her son and begins to lose awareness of her actions: “I didn’t know anymore, I couldn’t explain, how this could have happened, why I could not control my hands, my own body” (153). Janie explains that “[t]here was a memory at the edges of [her]

32 In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association officially changed the name of the disease from “mulitiple personality disorder” to “dissociation identity disorder.”

consciousness” (37) and that her “thoughts didn’t fit together” (152), exhibiting what modern psychiatry would label as the DID symptoms of being unable to integrate her memory, sense of identity, and aspects of her consciousness into a unified whole.

Thien’s novel questions, however, whether such a biomedical discourse can adequately account for the traumatic experiences of specific cultural groups such as

Cambodian genocide survivors, for whom the “term ‘mental health’ is not easily understood” (McLellan 105). Ong explains that while PTSD assessment tools were intended to help Cambodian American refugees during resettlement, “it is irrefutable that they played a role in constructing ethnic stereotypes of intellectual incompetence and the need for medical intervention” (99). In Dogs at the Perimeter,

Thien constructs a scene of cross-cultural encounter in which Janie is judged according to this ethnic stereotype. To take refuge from the cold, Janie goes into a church in Montreal, where an elderly woman says to her, “You’ve been drinking …

Many of your people have this illness. But you’ve come home now. It will be all right”

(26). The woman makes the assessment that Janie is mentally ill and that a conversion to Christianity will provide a cure to Janie’s condition.33 The introduction of Christianity—and likely Catholicism, given the Montreal setting—in this scene is

33 See McLellan, 123-146, for an overview of Christian conversion processess among Cambodian refugees in Ontario. Citing Ong, McLellan explains that “[f]or many Cambodians, conversion had as much to do with the traumas induced by war and flight as with reaching salvation . . . Christian missionaries promised Cambodian refugees they would find peace of mind if they entrusted themselves to God” (126). Thien alludes to this history in her novel when Nuong mentally prepares for his crossing to the United States; he remembers not to “glance back over his shoulder, the way the Christian missionaries taught them, to prevent the salt from flowing back up through his mouth, out his nostrils” (233).

ambivalently coded because on the one hand, Janie is confronted with the woman’s sense of Christian superiority over a “pagan” religion; but on the other hand, there is the suggestion that Catholicism’s belief in possession and haunting might make Janie feel more at home in the church than she does in the brain research centre.

As an adult in Montreal, Janie is haunted by the ghosts of her mother, father, and brother—“the loved ones, strangers, imagined people” who crowd Janie’s apartment and from whom she is “unable to part” (9). In order to understand these hauntings, Janie must first undergo an epistemological shift of her own. It is a shift akin to what Hiroji’s mother, a Buddhist, believes Hiroji must also undergo, for Hiroji narrates, “she used to tell me that I was too analytical, that I had no understanding of the ephemeral side of things” (14). Like Hiroji, whose life’s work has focused on researching the effect of injuries and diseases of the brain such as Alzheimers, asomatognosia, and amnesia, Janie has spent the past twelve years immersed in empirical study of the brain: “In my work, I harvest cells, gather data, measure electricity while, in the upper floors [of the brain research center], lives open and change” (34-35). Despite the methodological precision with which Janie has been trained to understand the traumas of the brain, in the end, science fails to furnish her with answers to her most probing questions about her own past: “I know too much, I have too many selves and they no longer fit together. I need to know how it is possible to be strong enough. How can a person ever learn to be brave?” (139-

140). Thien’s novel suggests here the limits of a scientific epistemological framework for understanding the traumas induced in socially— and historically—

situated contexts such as the Cambodian genocide. Janie is haunted not only as a survivor of trauma, but also as an analyst who is confronted with experience that confounds her mode of knowledge production. Illustrating the ways in which fiction can be read alongside a body of psychological and anthropological scholarship that questions the utility of PTSD as a universal diagnostic category in all postwar contexts,34 Dogs at the Perimeter reinforces what Kimberly Theidon describes as the limitations of “a clinical gaze excessively focused on ‘the psychological’ divorced from the socio-historical context” (“Intimate” 212).

In Echlin’s The Disappeared, Anne, like Janie, is constructed as a character who grapples with “the untranslatable edge[s]” of Serey’s trauma, unable to conceive of what it means to be haunted (37). Anne’s confusion is compounded (and her worldview challenged) by the complexity of local politics when she journeys to

Cambodia in search of Serey eleven years after the end of the genocide. About the political situation of the early 1990s, the well-known Australian journalist and documentary maker John Pilger wrote, “the unthinkable is being normalized in

Cambodia,” referring to a political context in which Cambodians were not only recovering from genocidal crimes, but were doing so in the face of the international legitimacy and political power that the Khmer Rouge continued to enjoy (“Return”).

Echlin attempts to paint a picture of the hypocrisy of the West’s sanctimonious attitudes about negotiating peace in Cambodia; Anne narrates: “Abroad, everyone was talking about democracy in Cambodia. They did not talk about fighting and

34 In addition to Ong, see Thiedon, Jelin, and Dwyer.

hidden jungle camps, smuggling arms and people, or a minefield called the K5 that stretched from the Gulf of Thailand to the Lao border” (99). Although Echlin’s novel illustrates how many non-Cambodians—the many “journalists and foreign aid workers and UN workers” that populate the setting of The Disappeared (63)—are well intentioned and are genuinely committed to bringing about a more peaceful future in Cambodia, Echlin also suggests that the important of work reconciliation is not without structural and epistemological limits. As Borethy Ly, survivor of the

Cambodian genocide asks, “[f]or those of us Cambodians who lived through that bloody era, during which entire families disappeared overnight, these acts of public justice leave us still asking ourselves: What happened? Should we remember or try to forget? If we remember, how do we envision the past?” (112). In The Disappeared,

Anne’s character is used to call into question Western metanarratives of justice that make recourse to arguments about the necessity of tribunals and truth commissions for enabling traumatic closure.

As Anne begins to navigate the extremely fraught psychic terrain of trying to understand Serey’s trauma in the aftermath of the genocide, the retrospective narrative voice of Anne as an older, more mature woman back in Canada invites the reader to recognize how, despite Anne’s learned facility with the Khmer language and traditions, there was much that that the younger Anne still failed to comprehend: “I did not know yet how you had changed” (76). In fact, the phrase “I did not know” is repeated eleven times in The Disappeared, a repetition that works to reinforce the narrative distance between the younger Anne, who clings to a

Western narrative of justice, and the older Anne, who, arguably, has adopted a more mature perspective of epistemological humility. As a young woman, Anne rehearses many of the tenets of what anthropologist Leslie Dwyer has described in the context of post-1965 Bali as “globalizing discourses of truth, peacebuilding, community, and social repair” (“Building” 227). Unlike Serey, who believes that a trial or a truth commission would merely paper over the “lies and violence” of the current government and allow the status quo to persist (Echlin 133), Anne holds to a politics of legal accountability and retribution, believing more than any other character in the novel that “if there was a trial, a truth commission, the country could move on”

(134). Echlin reveals her skepticism concerning such easy prescriptions by showing how Anne’s views about transitional justice in Cambodia are constantly being called into question by other characters in the novel.

Echlin illustrates how the more Anne seeks to elicit a narrative of trauma from Serey, the more strained their relationship becomes; Anne addresses a dead

Serey: “You still would not speak and that was the first time since we were together again that I spoke chill, impatient words I can hardly bear to remember. You are like a spirit I once knew, I said. Speak to me. Tell me what happened” (90). Instead of respecting Serey’s desire for silence, Anne is determined to “know” his trauma, exhibiting little awareness of the psychic, social, and political consequences of actions. Echlin’s depiction of Anne’s failure here recalls Kelly Oliver’s assertion that an ethics of responsibility for trauma entails a “witnessing beyond recognition,” an acceptance of the inability to know or witness certain psychological or spiritual

truths. As Oliver writes, “[t]he tension between recognizing the familiar in order to confirm what we already know and listening for the unfamiliar that disrupts what we already know is at the heart of contemporary theories of recognition” (2).

Whereas Oliver associates the former with the discipline of history and the latter with that of psychoanalysis, Echlin’s The Disappeared foregrounds a tension with psychoanalysis and illustrates how Oliver’s argument might be made culturally- and spiritually-specific. Writing about the particular resistance Cambodian American refugees showed to the talking-cure method of Western mental health practice, Ong notes, “Cambodians had survived war, labor camps, and flight by becoming masters in the contest between self-willed silence and forced confession . . . Silence and opacity become a shield of defense in the face of authority . . . Thus in practice, treatment often entailed a struggle between silences and truths” (107).35

Interpreted within this cultural context, Serey’s silence can be read not only as a mode of psychic self-preservation, the way “a soul protects itself from what it cannot bear,” but also as a strategy of survival learned and honed in response to the disciplinary tactics of the state authority, both in Cambodia and in North America

(79). A genuine commitment to the work of reconciliation on the part of the West,

Echlin’s novel suggests, requires not just love and good intentions, but also a recognition of, and commitment to, decolonizing the forms of cognitive imperialism that undergird secular, Western epistemologies of justice and healing.

35 According to McLellan, Cambodian Canadian refugees have shown a similar aversion to Western therapeutic methods since for them, “talking of past traumas is considered culturally appropriate only between those close relatives and friends who form part of their immediate social support networks” (107).

Indeed, in creating a plot where Anne suddenly becomes ill with dengue fever and subsequently gives birth to a stillborn baby girl, Echlin redirects what would have otherwise been an overly simplistic narrative of hope and trauma recovery, challenging the view that there can be, in the words of Youk Chang,36 one “last solution to the Cambodian genocide” (McAuliffe). In The Disappeared, Anne and

Serey’s unborn baby becomes symbolically poisoned not only by the traumatic wounds of the past, but also by the “solutions” to heal these wounds that have been imposed upon Cambodians by the international community. As Serey, suffering from what the West labels PTSD, becomes increasingly despondent, Anne begins to regard

Serey’s trauma as a threat to their unborn baby: “Shame seared me from your burning eyes. I caressed my rounding stomach and tried to protect our baby” (129).

Living in proximity to a trauma that she does not understand, Anne begins to reveal the limits of her patience; as a retrospective narrator, however, Anne feels ashamed of her selfishness: “Here, now, listen to my whisper of shame. As our baby grew, I grew tired of your nightmares. Against your closed doors I did not want to admit that your pain and silence would be part of our child. I tried to pretend that we could make something new” (113-114). Nothing truly “new” and liberatory can be born,

Echlin suggests, so long as the West remains in denial about the conditions of perpetual suffering endured by people in places such as Cambodia. Anne’s turning away from Serey’s trauma is likened to the way in which the “world looked away

36 Youk Chang is the director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia and outspoken advocate of the ECCC.

[from Cambodia] so that things could appear to be free, all solutions delicate, political, violent” (169).

Through this turn of plot in which the Buddhist cycle of life is once again interrupted and through the recurring image of bridges or river crossings as a metaphor for transitional justice, The Disappeared allegorizes the potential harm of war tribunals in post-conflict contexts. For example, after her miscarriage, a local

Cambodian woman tells Anne that she “crossed the river too soon” (153). As

Charinthy Him explains in When Broken Glass Floats, “In Cambodia the term for childbirth is chhlong tonlé. Literally translated, it means ‘to cross a large river,’ to weather the storm” (15). In The Disappeared, Anne is not told that she failed to cross the river, but just that she “crossed the river too soon”—a subtle difference in meaning that is metaphorically suggestive of a problem linked to the temporality of transitional justice processes [italics mine]. The Washington DC-based NGO World

Movement for Democracy, which coincidentally also uses the metaphor of transitional justice as something that “serves as a bridge between the past and the future,” explains on its website that one of the challenges of transitional justice has to do with “[e]stablishing the right timing of a formal TJ process: If it’s too soon, the process can lose credibility because the foundations haven’t been laid properly, but if it’s too late (e.g., in Cambodia), the perpetrators will have passed away or are too old to go through the process, and the victims’ families will not see that justice has been done.” International criminal law expert Suzanne Linton has also written about the particular problem of transitional justice that she calls “too little too late, too

much too soon, and too many cooks” (7). She writes about the “explosion of a transitional justice industry” in places such as East Timor, Indonesia, and Cambodia being largely ineffectual in improving human rights and stability in these countries

(24-25). As a result, Linton argues, “[a]ccountability for the past in East Timor,

Indonesia and Cambodia has been a very long time coming, and what has come has hardly been impressive” (26).

Disappearing:

As Craig Etcheson has discussed, the consequence of the continuing failure of justice in Cambodia is the perpetuation of a “culture of impunity,” which has strong roots in the nation, “plunging deep into the past and widely spread in the present”

(167). Etcheson points out that although impunity in Cambodia is associated foremost with the Khmer Rouge, it is a “difference of degree rather than difference of kind” that distinguishes the Khmer Rouge from the present-day regime. Since the ousting of Pol Pot in 1979, incidents of violence that have marked the ongoing culture of impunity include, to name a few, the one hundred or more people killed in the political fighting between the CPP and FUNCINPEC parties in July 1997, the public “Easter Massacre” of March 1997 against opposition politician Sam Rainsy and his supporters, and the brutal murder of more than a dozen protestors following the 1998 elections (169). A former Khmer Rouge cadre who has been linked to much of the political violence and corruption in contemporary Cambodia, the current

Prime Minister Hun Sen has, ironically, made calls to “end the culture of impunity”

and has often deployed the rhetoric of the need for peace and national reconciliation

(187).

Drawing on the research of Suzanne Linton, Colin Long and Keir Reeves remark: “Just what Hun Sen means by 'reconciliation,' however, is problematic. His definition appears to consist of 'integration' of the former Khmer Rouge back into the nation and the absence of armed conflict. Having achieved this reconciliation, he believes that the proper treatment of the country's traumatic history is to 'dig a hole and bury the past in it' ” (74). In likening reconciliation to a burial of the past, Hun

Sen and the Cambodian government have installed a collective forbidding of memory that reflects Gordon’s assertion that “disappearance is not only about death,” but also “a state-sponsored procedure for producing ghosts to harrowingly haunt a population into submission” (115). “The exercise of state power through disappearance,” Gordon writes, “involves controlling the imagination, controlling the meaning of death, involves creating new identities, involves haunting the population into submission of its will” (125).

The characters in Dogs at the Perimeter experience such a horrifying system of state-sponsored disappearance: they are illegally abducted by the Khmer Rouge

(73, 185); they are detained in secret prison centers (106, 185); they suffer death and improper burial (96, 125); and they encounter denial by authorities (82). But

Thien’s novel is especially concerned with registering how this system operates not just through direct repression, but also at the level of the intimate, or, in Gordon’s words, “on the ground of the very shape and skin of everyday life” (125). As Becker

writes, “the Khmer Rouge were threatened by all expressions of love” and under

Angkar, the ruling body of the Khmer Rouge, “everyone had to renounce personal intimacies” (224). At the outset of Thien’s novel, in the immediate aftermath of

Hiroji’s disappearance, Janie contemplates why “many of the missing . . . no longer wish to be themselves, to be associated with their abandoned identity” (1). Thien attempts to provide insight into this question by taking the reader back in time to show how Hiroji’s disappearance in 2005 is but one within a trajectory of disappearances in Cambodia’s history of the long duree: Hiroji has gone to Cambodia in search of his brother James, a Red Cross doctor who disappeared in Cambodia in

1975—the year “the Khmer Rouge won the war and the borders closed around

[Janie’s] country” (19). But, as Janie narrates, doors had been closing “all over this country” for generations, “so farmers died without anyone noticing . . . from starvation and swindling and finally bombs, until Angkar came and turned the world upside down” (104). In this “world upside down”—a product of generations of colonialism, poverty, corruption, and imperialism—new identities were created:

“Angkar had divided us into the pure and impure. On the one side were the peasants, the mulatan, the true Khmer. On the other were the April 17 people, the population that had been expelled from the cities” (79). To be relegated to the side of the

“impure,” Thien’s novel illustrates, was to be targeted for disappearance. Thien’s disappeared include Janie’s father (71), Bopha’s mother (124), Hiroji’s brother

(146), Sorya’s brother (187), James’ wife (208), and many other characters whose

deaths the state mobilizes as a public secret “discernible enough to scare ‘a little bit of everyone’ into shadows of themselves, into submission” (Gordon 126)

The public secret of disappearance, Thien’s novel suggests, instates a shattering of subjectivity that exceeds the accounts of trauma that can be supplied by universalized biomedical models. As Janie recounts: “To pray, to grieve the missing, to long for the old life, all these were forms of betrayal. Memory sickness,

Kosal called it. An illness of the mind” (79). The Khmer Rouge sought to cleanse the nation of all intimate attachments deemed to undermine the revolution: “You belong to no one, Angkar says, and no one belongs to you, not your mother or your child or the woman you would give your life for. Families are a disease of the past” (199).

Within this system, the living had to become the disappeared: in the novel, the unnamed protagonist becomes Mei, and later becomes Janie; Sopham becomes

Rithy; and James becomes Kwan. Dogs at the Perimeter ultimately demonstrates how this mode of survival—this self- shattering and disappearing—is not the liberating free play of identity celebrated by postmodernism, nor is it the “strategic, dramatic, and seductive battles among personalities that are uncomfortably sharing one hapless body” (Spiegel). It is, Thien’s novel suggests, a spiritual rupture in which one’s soul, the pralung, has disappeared from the body, awaiting the time when it can be called back and born anew. Dogs at the Perimeter illustrates how public acts of disappearance are mirrored in, or initiate private acts of disappearance, how parts of the self are stolen or hidden away, whether in response to present trauma or as a self-protective measure to allow for the possibility of future selves.

While Dogs at the Perimeter attempts to register the extremities of loss and fragmentation sustained by Cambodian refugees, it also reflects Jacqui Alexander’s assertion that “there is a great deal of urgency in reimagining wholeness as a necessary part of a pedagogy of crossing” (14). For Alexander, this work of imagining wholeness requires an engagement with “memory not as secular but as a

Sacred dimension of the self” (14). Spiritual work, “like crossing[,] is never undertaken once and for all” (14-15). As Janie prepares to depart for Canada presumably from a refugee camp in Malaysia, Janie’s oldest friend Meng, who was rescued alongside Janie from the waters of the Gulf of Thailand, guides Janie through a Buddhist ancestral worship ritual, lighting incense and “addressing [Janie’s] ghosts” (Thien 140). Years later in Montreal as Janie prepares to make another crossing back to Cambodia in search of Hiroji, she recalls Meng’s ritual and other

Buddhist traditions from her past: “I remember arak singers trying to tempt wandering souls, the pralung, back into their bodies. I remember celebrations, ceremonies, the words Meng had spoken before I flew to Canada. Your daughter is crossing the ocean. You, too, must go on. You, too, must walk to your own destiny”

(165). Meng’s character is figured here as what Cambodians would call a Krou

Khmer, “spiritual healers who could divine the cause of a person's illness or misfortune and provide treatment through prayers, blessings, or meditation with spirits” (McLellan 103).37 In this scene, Thien suggests the move from haunting as a

37 McLellan explains that “[t]o cure disease or emotional problems, Krou Khmer healers metaphorically enter the world of patient's distress, identify the spiritual and somatic causes, then drive the spirits from the body” (104). She also notes Krou Khmer “were predominant in treating

negative form of possession and illness to haunting as an enabling form of carrying the dead of family is linked to the affirmation of epistemological system that can enable Cambodians to expand realms of meaning and connections between the living and the disappeared.

In The Disappeared, Echlin also explores the psychic complexities of subjects who are attempting to come to terms with loss and fragmentation in the context of a repressive culture of impunity. She fictionally reconstructs the “Easter Massacre” of

1997, placing Serey, whose name incidentally “means freedom” (24), at the scene of this pro-democracy rally in which, Anne narrates, everyone ended up “either dead or silent” (157). After Serey goes missing from the rally, Anne finds herself confronted with the machinery of the Cambodian repressive state apparatus in the figure of Ma

Rith, the district police chief who attempts to deflect her inquiries about Serey using

“ritual phrases” about the need to extinguish “unrest” in the service of “rebuilding

[the] country and creating democracy” (191). To Anne, Ma Rith repeats the ideology of reconciliation espoused by Hun Sen: “Our leaders say we should dig a hole and bury the past and look ahead to the new century with a clean slate. All of us have family members, friends and relatives killed and left uncremated by the genocidal regime” (205). Here, Echlin draws an implicit comparison between “ritual phrases” of the Cambodian government—“If there is opposition, there will be a return to Pol

Pot” (191)—and the “foreign talk” of Western humanitarian discourse—“to end

stress and anxiety disorders within the refugee camps” and that “older Cambodians [in America] continue to associate spiritual healing and medical treatement based on neak ta principles with Buddhism and Buddhist temples” (104).

impunity is not revenge. It is a call for justice” (104). Both the Cambodian government and the transitional justice industry have vested interests in the performance of a symbolic end to impunity in Cambodia through a war crimes tribunal; however, as Etcheson comments, a “trial of just a few Khmer Rouge perpetrators goes only so far in combating the underlying social and political structures that sustain impunity,” assuming those trials are conducted legitimately and are free of corruption (187-188). Far from being in binary opposition, the discourses of justice that have been propagated by the Cambodian state and by the

West have imposed a similar interdiction of mourning, as Ma Rith reveals in his statement to Anne: “We have to move on . . . Our leaders and your leaders do not want trouble” (192).

The irony of The Disappeared, then, is that Anne’s unrelenting desire “to know” Serey’s trauma is ultimately fulfilled, but only in the experience of inconsolable grief and injustice that Anne feels after the losses she endures in

Cambodia. This irony is used to suggest that full knowledge does not produce the resolution or antidote to trauma that it promises. Held as prisoner in Cambodia,

Anne is told that she has no right to claim Serey’s remains because, in the eyes of the state, her “desire is nothing” (202).38 In response to Anne’s appeal for compassion,

Ma Rith “did not wish to talk about babies and marriage and grew cruel, as if it were a family argument, intimacy waiting to explode into rupture, violence, silence” (206).

38 Anthropologists May Ebihara and Judy Ledgerwood have written about how Cambodian widows were barred from mourning during the years of Democratic Kampuchea, how “[e]xpressions of love for family members—such as weeping over the death of a spouse or child—were denigrated, scorned, and even punished” (276).

Echlin depicts in this scene how, over a decade after the end of the Cambodian genocide, intimacy is still regarded as the ultimate threat to state control, as something that needs to be repressed through violence. Anne’s wish to know the trauma of the Cambodian genocide is fulfilled not in the fact of having experienced loss, but rather in the fact of having experienced the state’s disavowal of her desire and her right to mourn. Anne’s question to Ma Rith, “I have only one desire: to love my dead. How can this be wrong?” (208) enacts a confrontation with state repression that aligns Anne’s grief, to a degree, with that of the millions of

Cambodian survivors who continue to suffer because they have been denied the right to mourn the dead within a Khmer Buddhist spiritual framework.39

Anne’s plea for justice comes up against the Cambodian government’s recently adopted discourse about a “tribunal” and “laws, new ways that depended on neither tradition nor violence” (192)—a discourse that Anne formerly espoused, but now recognizes as “seeds without soil” (192). By demonstrating how the

Cambodian authorities propagate a secular, Western discourse of justice while Anne adopts a Khmer Buddhist epistemology, Echlin dislodges and reverses the presumed equation between race and epistemological worldview. When Anne remarks that she and Ma Rith “had pared the argument from both sides and left nothing in the middle” (208), Echlin frames the failure of epistemological cross-talk as a function of

39 For more on justice and Khmer Buddhist beliefs about cremation and burial rites, see McAuliffe’s CBC radio documentary “Justice and the Next Life.” The documentary explores the premise that providing the dead with the dignity of cremation “might be more appreciated [by Cambodians] than the international community’s current push to hold belated genocide trials for the few aging Khmer Rouge leaders who are still around after thirty years.”

power, authority, and oppression and not of essential identity politics. The transition in Anne’s character here, from secular to Buddhist, is framed by Echlin more as indication of Anne’s openness to Khmer Buddhists beliefs rather than a full comprehension or inhabitation of it.

It is significant, then, that the character in Echlin’s novel who perhaps best embodies the possibilities of epistemological cross-talk, of the potential for imagining reconciliation, is Will Maracle, a forensic anthropologist who “opened massacre sites, released the bones” (65). From the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory near Montreal, Will “got started digging Indian burial grounds, trained with a man named Clyde Snow in Argentina and ended [in Cambodia]” (65).40 By invoking the name of Clyde Snow, Echlin links Will’s character to a genealogy of transnational human rights work that asserts the importance of recovering the dead, not just for the purpose of forensic evidence in war crimes tribunals, but also for returning the dead to their families. According to Derrida, the latter is necessary for the attainment of justice since mourning “consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying bodily remains and by localizing the dead” (“Specters” 9). “Nothing could be worse,” Derrida writes, “for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt” about how or where the dead are

40 Sometimes referred to as the “bone digger,” Clyde Snow is one of the world’s leading experts in the field of forensic anthropology and has investigated mass killings in places such as Argentina, Guatemala, the Phillipines, Ethiopia, Bosnia, and Iraq (Bertino and Bertino 377). When asked why he has committed his life to digging up the remains of mass atrocities, Snow cites his reasons as the following: “One is to identify the remains of victims and return them to their families. Another is to try to bring about some justice. A third is to let the governing people worldwide who have power over others know that they cannot kill their citizens without anyone trying to do something about it. His final reason is to provide a historical record” (qtd. in Bertino and Bertino 377).

buried (9). Furthermore, Will sees his work of digging up mass graves and

“counting” the dead as a task that clearly exceeds the parameters of scientific rationalism, for he comments that “he likes the intuition it takes to get bones together, to make sense of the scene. It is human work” (66). Echlin is careful here not to romanticize Will’s spiritual “intuition” as the mystical knowledge of a noble savage. At the same time, she suggests the importance of his Mohawk identity and his intimate history of traumatic experience in informing and propelling his humanitarian work: “Imagine what it feels like to come from a place where the tourist attractions are cases of skulls” (104), Will implores Anne, telling her that that if she really wants to know Serey, then she needs “to understand this place” (107).

As a human rights worker, Will also refuses to be naively optimistic about his role in facilitating justice for Cambodians, frequently tempering Anne’s didacticism with a touch of wry humour: “I’m fucking the dog. Things stop and start. There’s no political will. The leaders don’t want to know. But I like it here” (66). In tentatively stating to

Anne that “Maybe the only hope is that our humanity might kick into a higher gear, that the more we admit to seeing, the more we will believe we are not that different from each other” (68), Will demonstrates his understanding that the work of identifying bodily remains cannot provide a complete closure to trauma, but that it can potentially ignite an ethical space of engagement between cultures. 41 It is this

41 Drawing on the philosophical work of Roger Poole, Indigenous scholar Willie Ermine explains that the ethical space of engagement “entertains the notion of a meeting place, or initial thinking about a neutral zone between entities or cultures . . . The ethical space offers itself as the theatre for cross-cultural conversation in pursuit of ethically engaging diversity and disperses claims to the human order” (202)

epistemological middle ground—between Western secularism and Buddhism, scientific rationalism and non-rational intuition—that Will occupies and that Echlin presents as a horizon of justice in The Disappeared.

Witnessing

Both Echlin and Thien have acknowledged in respective interviews that their novels were motivated by the desire to explore the notion of witnessing and responsibility through fiction: Thien has stated that she “hoped Dogs at the

Perimeter would be able to stand behind the historical and witnessing books, to say that all of us have a stake in understanding what happened there, that we are all connected to it” (qtd. in Lam); Echlin has described the Cambodian genocide as a

“trauma that the world has forgotten to witness” (qtd in Singh) and has commented that “it is the power of imagination that lets us transcend our own personal experience, to have empathy with others and to really encounter the bigger world”

(qtd. in Wilson). Creating an intertexuality with eyewitness testimonies of the

Cambodian genocide, the epigraphs in both The Disappeared and Dogs at the

Perimeter establish a context for exploring the notions of Western complicity, complacency, and ethical responsibility.

The first epigraph42 in The Disappeared is an excerpt from a 1993 article in the New Internationalist entitled “Return to Year Zero” written by John Pilger, who was one of the first to alert the world to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. Pilger’s

42 The quotation that Echlin reproduces in her epigraph reads: “Year Zero was the dawn of an age in which, in extremis, there would be no families, no sentiment, no expression of love or grief, no medicines, no hospitals, no schools, no books, no learning, no holidays, no music: only work and death.”

1993 article opens with the following passage describing what he saw in 1979 upon entering Cambodia in the wake of the overthrow of Pol Pot: “‘It is my duty,’ wrote the correspondent of The Times at the time of liberation of the Nazi death camp at

Belsen, ‘to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind.’ That was how I felt in the summer of 1979. During 22 years as a journalist, most of them spent in transit at places of uncertainty and upheaval, I had not seen anything to compare with what I saw then in Cambodia.” Rather than limiting his testimony to just describing the horrific war crimes perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, Pilger articulates a trenchant critique of the complicity of Western nations in the suffering that Cambodians have endured from 1968 onward. Writing his article at the height of the United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia (UNTAC), Pilger argues that the UN intervention in Cambodia thus far has played “a pivotal role in Pol Pot’s possible return” and in the “recolonization of Cambodia.”43 The first epigraph in

Echlin’s novel is significant, then, because it not only indexes an archival document that proclaims the Western critic’s obligation to bear witness to the trauma of genocide, but also reminds the reader of a horrific tragedy in twentieth-century history that unfolded right before the eyes of the international community. Similar to how Pilger’s documentary Year Zero had a tremendous impact on the

43 In his documentary Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia, Pilger drew attention to the effects of Nixon and Kissinger’s secret illegal bombing of Cambodia from 1969-1973, where more than half a million tons of munitions were dropped on a defenseless population. Killing an estimated 600, 000 Cambodians, this bombing campaign was a critical catalyst for bringing the Khmer Rouge to power. The film also exposed how the West imposed an unimaginable embargo on Cambodia in the years after the genocide—a blocking of foreign aid that had the effect of allowing over a million Cambodians to die by starvation and disease.

international community in the early 1980s,44 Echlin’s novel has become an international bestseller and has been translated into 17 languages, reaching a mass audience on a scale that Cambodian diasporic memoirs have yet to reach.

In her epigraph to Dogs at the Perimeter, Thien also suggests that it is the responsibility of secondary witnesses to receive the testimonies of survivors and to communicate these testimonies to others. The epigraph, “Tell the gods what is happening to me,” is an excerpt from Haing S. Ngor’s Survival in the Killing Fields, the first published autobiography by a Cambodian genocide survivor who had relocated to the United States.45 Thien uses Ngor’s epigraph to introduce her novel’s exploration of the afterlives of those who survived a brutal system of state disappearances in which testimonies, confessions, biography, and autobiography were used as tools of genocide.46 In Dogs at the Perimeter, the story of James Matsui most closely resembles that of the real life Ngor. Like Ngor, a medical doctor who was compelled to assume a new identity in order to survive the Khmer Rouge, James is a Japanese Canadian humanitarian medic who is arrested by the Khmer Rouge, imprisoned, and ultimately forced to assume the identity of a man named Kwan. If

44 Pilger’s Year Zero helped raise $45 million dollars for the relief effort in Cambodia. 45 Ngor’s memoir begins with the following statement: “I am a survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That’s who I am . . . To keep the Khmer Rouge soldiers from killing me, I had to pretend I was not a doctor. They had already killed most of my family. And my case was typical. By destroying our culture and by enslaving us, the Khmer Rouge changed millions of happy, normal human beings into something more like animals. They turned people like me into cunning, wild thieves” (1). 46 As Yamada explains, “[f]alse confessions were the prisoners’ attempts to free themselves from the various unthinkable tortures devised by the ‘truthseekers’ associated with S-21, as delineated by Vann Nath’s A Cambodian Prison Portrait. Most Cambodians were forced to lie in order to survive, as Haing Ngor also states in his lament about being turned into a liar for the sake of self- preservation (1)” (154). In Dogs at the Perimeter, Thien reconstructs this history in which “Angka had been obsessed with recording biographies,” in which the “story of one’s life could not be trusted” (25).

we are to read Thien’s novel partly as a critique of Western complicity in the

Cambodian genocide, it is significant that James signs up with the International Red

Cross in Southeast Asia the same year that “Nixon’s bombs were falling on

Cambodia” (18). Despite James’s desperate insistence that he is in Cambodia to

“treat the people hurt by American bombs” (186), the Khmer Rouge show no mercy on James’s wife Sorya, who is tortured to write a false confession and then subsequently killed. We find out that James’s witnessing of trauma in Cambodia, and his subsequent self-disappearance, is not the first trauma that James has endured: before immigrating to Canada as a child, James survived the United States World

War II firebombing of Tokyo. Inhabiting a body that is doubly inscribed with the violent history of United States empire in Asia, James functions as a figure that illustrates what Lowe calls the act “reckoning for an American public engaged for much of the twentieth century in wars in Asia” (“Reckoning” 240).

The novels of Echlin and Thien can thus be read as attempts to respond to the hail of Cambodian genocide survivors such as Haing S. Ngor or Vann Nath, whose imperative “Tell Others” is used as another epigraph in Echlin’s novel.47 Ngor’s and

Nath’s witness accounts of the genocide function as intertexts through which Echlin and Thien suggest the urgency of listening to the witness accounts of survivors who, until their deaths, bore “the burden of giving testimony” (Nath qtd. in Ly 117). In her

47 Haing S. Ngor was murdered in an act of robbery on February 25, 1996 in Los Angeles; Vann Nath, painter, human rights activist, and author of the memoir A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge S-21, was the last survivor imprisoned at Tuol Sleng. Nath passed away on Sept 5, 2011. As Boreth Ly reminds us, each of these deaths “represents the loss of another witness to the genocide” (117).

2003 essay, “I, Witness,” which won the CBC Literary Award for Creative Non-

Fiction, Echlin also emphasizes the importance of the collective responsibility to bear to witness. “I, Witness” consists of a set of interlinked vignettes narrated from the perspective of various characters connected to the Cambodian genocide— characters who are either eyewitnesses to an event, such as a “man on the road to

Choeung Ek” (171) and a “woman at Tuol Sleng” (174), or secondary witnesses, such the “foreigner” who imagines the horror of the genocide as he or she “work[s] at a mass grave, waist deep in mist” (172). The form of Echlin’s essay invites the reader to see how these witnesses are collectively engaged in the work of archiving the past, or in what Paul John Eakin describes as the “bridge-building enterprise” of eyewitness narratives (211). As Eakin writes, “when we consider the ‘eye’ and ‘I’ involved in eyewitness experience more closely, the promise of transparency, of immediacy, erodes” (201). Echlin’s titular pun on the term eyewitness, in which the

“I” functions as a collective referent for all the witnesses in her essay, moves her narrative away from an evidentiary or legalistic framework and into the realm of the intimate and subjective. Echlin’s “I, Witness” illustrates Oliver’s claim that it is the

“double meaning” of witnessing—as juridical and religious or spiritual—that makes it “such a powerful alternative to recognition in reconceiving subjectivity and therefore ethical relations” (16).

While “I, Witness” is narrated in the first person, Echlin’s use of the second- person point of view in The Disappeared enables a further exploration of the relationship between witnessing and intimacy. Thirty years after being “forbidden to

return to Cambodia” (209), Anne observes that she has “lived in intimacy with the violence of the untold life” (224). Whereas she was once impatient with Serey’s inability to move past his trauma, Anne now has become the disappeared, alienated from and unknowable to those around her: “My father watched who he thought I was disappear from his eyes” (221). After three decades of lingering grief, Anne starts to become a “boneless shadow” (173), a ghostly, disappearing figure who has been made “dead in life” (194). Echlin’s use of the second-person point of view underlines the self-eroding daily violence of being denied subjecthood as a survivor of trauma, of finally finding the voice to speak the trauma of genocide, only to have this testimony go unheard.

But the second-person point of view of the novel also invites us to consider its form in terms of what R. Clifton Spargo calls an “anti-elegy”—melancholic texts that resist the consolatory and commemorative impulses implicit in the conventions of classical elegy by employing rhetorical figures of “belatedness, the remembrance of failed intimacy, and the ambivalent wish for reciprocity” (129).48 Spargo’s figure of failed intimacy as a feature of the anti-elegy is particularly relevant here because

The Disappeared is narratively constructed as a love letter that Anne addresses to

Serey’s ghost. Spargo associates the notion of failed intimacy with a resistance to the elegiac convention that the lost “other was and remains knowable” and with an acknowledgement, rather, of a “crisis in ethics precipitated by loss” (129). In its

48 Sarah Henstra explains that classical elegy “encompasses any literary work—traditionally, poetic—written on the death or absence of a loved one . . . it laments the loss, ritually stages the mourner’s grief, pays tribute to the dead, and offers comfort by depicting the lost one as transcending earthly bonds (or returning to nature) while the poet lives on to immortalize him or her in art” (112).

staging of Anne’s melancholic introjection of Serey’s absent body49 and its suggestion that Anne achieves, by the end, a measure of ethical responsibility towards Serey’s memory through a relinquishing of the desire for complete knowledge, The Disappeared could be read as an exemplar of Spargo’s anti-elegy that mobilizes melancholia as a means of respecting “the radical alterity of the other whom one mourns” (13). I suggest, however, that a psychoanalytic paradigm of melancholia does not fully encapsulate Echlin’s elegiac form, which seeks to uncomfortably implicate the reader in a crime of responsibility and complacency.

Assuming responsibility for the Cambodian genocide as a secondary witness,

Echlin’s novel suggests, involves a constant engagement with alternative epistemologies of loss that may value the centrality of spiritual ritual in bringing about healing and traumatic closure. Observing a Cambodian woman engaged in the process of making a Buddhist ritual offering, Anne reflects: “I believe in no god but I burn incense and give food to the dead, to the monks, repeat old prayers. It is not necessary to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it” (169).

Echlin’s elegiac novel bears witness not only to inconsolable loss, but also to the epistemological dialogue that is necessary for the work of reconciliation.

Whereas The Disappeared plays with the conventions of elegy in order to demand a re-negotiated ethical response on the part of the reader, Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter employs the narrative technique of spatial form to implicate the

49 On page 227, Anne narrates: “I try to release you from a pit in my heart but unburied and unblessed you imprison me.”

reader in the work of archival reconstruction. As Jeffery Smitten explains, spatial form calls “attention to the departures from pure temporality, from pure causal/temporal sequence. When these departures are great enough, the conventional causal/temporal syntax of the novel is disrupted and the reader must work out a new one by considering the novel as a whole moment in time” (20).

Thien’s choice of a non-linear, fragmented narrative structure, which moves in and out between the stories of at least three main characters and which juxtaposes these stories with seemingly disparate medical case histories, demands that meaning be construed through the reader’s active engagement in the text. From the outset of the novel, the reader is presented with a dated “fragment,” resembling a journal entry, which documents the details of Hiroji’s disappearance (1). Since the subsequent seven chapters of the novel are entitled “Janie,” “Hiroji,” “Mei,” “Rithy,” “Kiri,”

“James,” and “Hiroji,” one would expect each chapter to be narrated in the first- person from perspective of the titular characters, as in Echlin’s “I, Witness”; however, only Janie’s first-person point-view is employed in the novel, a narrative strategy that suggests a degree of control, or perhaps lack of control, that the narrator Janie wields over these characters’ stories. For instance, the chapter “Mei” reads much less like a flashback of Janie’s time under the Khmer Rouge and much more like one of the many simultaneous temporalities taking place within the novel’s total system—like one of the many “missing” who “live on, unending with

[Janie]” (9).

The novel’s first-person point of view and spatial form also creates a close identification between the protagonist, who is attempting to piece together the fragments of Hiroji’s story, and the reader, who is implored to recognize how testimonial fictional narratives also assume responsibility through the act of archival reconstruction. The fragmented narrative structure of Dogs of the Perimeter symbolizes the complex labyrinth of Cambodian diasporic memory into which the secondary witness of the genocide must be prepared to enter. Werner Senn notes that “the labyrinth as a motif primarily invokes the visual idea of some more or less intricate arrangement and division of space seen from above. If any analogy with the literary medium can be drawn it can hardly be in the imitation of the vertical, synoptic view but only in the reader’s horizontal, sequential experience of confusion” (100). At a thematic level, Thien’s novel explores this motif of the labyrinth by invoking the notion of memory theatre: the seventeenth-century concept of a mind-map used for memory retrieval. Janie compares memory theatre to “Bopha’s imaginary book” and to a “library . . . holding the things [Janie] needed to keep but that [she] could not live with” (147). These images of Bopha’s book and the library are significant because they return the reader to the epigraph by Haing S.

Ngor,50 and to the reparative value of Cambodian American testimonial writing, with which the novel opens. Dogs at the Perimeter suggests that against the totalizing, falsified archive of the Khmer Rouge, against “Angkar’s memory” (207), the counter- archive of Cambodian diasporic cultural production, borne not out of torture, but out

50 The epigraph reads: “Tell the gods what is happening to me.”

of a concern with justice, holds the potential for transformative social repair. Thien presents the image of Janie and Hiroji, in conversation, walking together through a kind of shared memory theatre, a conceptual map and shared sense of what might be retrieved and forgotten: “For hours we talked, roaming together . . . These ideas, these metaphors and possibilities, were the gifts Hiroji gave me” (147). The labyrinth of Cambodian diasporic memory, constantly evolving and expanding, will link shattered subjects—both Cambodians and non-Cambodians—in the collective work of reconciliation for the future.

As works of testimonial fiction that seek to expand and re-texture our understanding of who constitutes Cambodia’s disappeared, the novels of Echlin and

Thien push the boundaries of Cambodian diasporic literature to speak to issues of

Western complicity and responsibility from the perspective of international bystanders. Jennifer Ann Ho has recently argued that the move to expand the boundaries of Asian American literature to include transgressive texts “is a progressive, anti-racist maneuver that reasserts the social justice agenda of Asian

American studies, one that envisions Asian American fiction and Asian American literary critique as free spaces open to all allies who wish to promote Asian

American experiences sensitively and respectfully in their writing” (217).51 Lisa

Lowe has argues that Asian American literature itself dramatizes the “necessity of further collective social responsibility to be taken for historical and contemporary

51 Specifically, Fishkin writes that transgressive texts are those “in which black writers create serious white protagonists, and white writers black ones” (121). Although Fishkin focuses on African American writers who depict white characters, she explains that the notion of transgressive texts can be used to examine the same effect in other ethnic literatures.

war. Its ethic is to hand over the labor of reckoning, which it does not and cannot complete, to the ‘tenuous we’ bound to the deaths of others” (“Reckoning” 241).

From the position of white privilege that Echlin inhabits—which, as Peggy

McIntosh has argued, encompasses the ability of white subjects to criticize the government, its policy and behavior without the repercussion of being seen as a cultural outsider (151)—Echlin is arguably less burdened than Cambodian diasporic autobiographers by the desire for inclusion and by the need to perform a narrative of refugee gratitude to the host nation. On this point, we can recall the scene in The

Disappeared where Echlin has Serey refusing to concede to the narrative of immigrant gratitude that Anne’s father is trying to elicit from him: “I am not an immigrant. I am in exile. I do not choose to stay here. But I have no other place to go.

My country is my skin” (29). As Isabelle Thuy Pelaud has explained with respect to the field of Vietnamese American literature in its early stages, “Vietnamese

American writers felt pressure to conform to the expectations and tastes of mainstream . . . publishers” (58). Those texts that emphasized a narrative of healing and forgetting the War in Viet Nam received a more favourable and wider reception than those that did not. Pelaud also writes about how Vietnamese American writers who highlight “the racism of the American war in Viet Nam and its persistence today” can disrupt the comfort level even of white progressives who may hold “naïve liberal belief in the moral standing of America in domestic and world affairs” (42).

Enacting a critique of Western complicity and complacency in the context of

Cambodia’s violent past, Echlin, in comparison to Cambodian diasporic

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autobiographers, is perhaps less hampered by the criticism that she has constructed a biased, subjective witness account of the genocide.

While Thien, by virtue of her race, may not be shielded from such a criticism, she is in the paradoxical position of also having to defend against, or at least reflect upon, charges of cultural appropriation. When asked in an interview about her struggle “with the implications of writing across a cultural and experiential divide”

(McGillis 18), Thien responds: “ ‘I asked myself, was I doing it for any other motivation than a desire to truly understand and be compassionate? . . . Because I felt I had a responsibility to the material, if I didn’t answer those questions in a way that satisfied my own morality and ethics, then I don’t think I would have published the book’ ” (qtd. in McGillis 18). Such a liberal humanist sentiment is laudable, but seems almost unnecessary given the biographical details we know about Thien and also given the preoccupation with the theme of disappearance that has characterized most of her fiction to date.52 Both Echlin’s and Thien’s novels thus provoke a reflection of the responsibility of Western writer to mobilize the literary imagination as means of claiming responsibility for a tragedy that is part of the collective memory of the international community. Exhibiting a self-consciousness about the ethical stakes of their testimonial fiction, Echlin’s and Thien’s novels enact

Oliver’s claim that “[w]e have an obligation not only to respond but also to respond in a way that opens up rather than closes off the possibility of response by others”

(18).

52 See Chong.

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The Disappeared and Dogs at the Perimeter speak to the impact of genocide not only upon Cambodians, but also upon those in the international community whose lives were shattered by the atrocities that took place. As self-conscious negotiations of competing epistemologies of justice, healing, and reconciliation, these texts follow the trace of the ghosts, leaving a haunting effect on readers who are implored to bear witness and to tell others of the unresolved social violence of

Cambodia’s disappeared.

Chapter Two ~ Gifting Memory: Collaborative Autobiography,

Intersectionality, and Vietnamese American Refugees

In the previous chapter, I discussed how alternative spiritual epistemologies function as one mode through which Cambodian diasporic subjects grapple with the psychic consequences of genocide and disappearance; in this chapter I turn my attention to the Vietnamese diaspora to consider what an intimate politics of reconciliation might look like for (queer) diasporic subjects alienated from support systems such as spirituality, family, and community. How is a proper understanding of intersectionality—what Patricia Hill Collins has theorized as sites where

“heterosexism, class, race, nation, and gender as systems of oppression converge”

(128)—necessary for theorizing an intimate politics of reconciliation? Such an inquiry is particularly important in an era of “colorblindness in our ‘post-identity’

U.S. nation-state” since, as David Eng argues, the notion that racial politics is a discourse of the past while queer politics is one of the present moment “works to oppose a politics of intersectionality, resisting any acknowledgement of the ways in

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which sexuality and race are constituted in relation to one another” (Feeling 4).

According to Eng, attention to the intimate sphere within the discourse of queer liberalism has failed to adequately account for the “racial genealogy of exploitation and domination” that underwrites the present political moment of colourblindness

(45). Eng’s work thus seeks to bring attention and specificity to this politics of intersectionality through a focus on what he calls the “racialization of intimacy.” Eng argues that “the racialization of intimacy indexes other ways of knowing and being in the world, alternative accounts of race as an affective life-world within but ultimately beyond the dictates of a liberal humanist tradition, eluding conventional analytic description and explanation” (10).

This chapter explores how Monique Truong’s The Book Salt is a generative novel for considering “these other ways of knowing and being the world” in relation to the Vietnamese diaspora and the aftermath of the War in Viet Nam. In its persistent refusal to affirm any straightforward categories of victims or victimizers in multiple allegorical contexts (in collaborative writing partnerships and cross- cultural relationships and within diasporic communities and queer communities),

The Book of Salt can be read as exhibiting what Viet Thanh Nguyen has described as an “ethical awareness” in the politics of Vietnamese refugees (“Speak” 32). This ethical awareness “rejects the comforts of victimization” (12) that may provide “an excuse from the obligations of ethical behavior in relation to both political and other acts, including the act of representation in culture, and the more personal, intimate acts that take place in memory, family, and community” (10). I explore in this

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chapter how Truong troubles stable categories of victim/oppressor (or gift/theft in the context of collaboration) by portraying the constantly shifting power dynamics between four characters in the novel: the protagonist Binh, his lover Lattimore

(Sweet Sunday Man), and Binh’s employers who are the famous American expatriate writers Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Truong’s preoccupation with

(re)constructing historical and imagined collaborative writing relationships in The

Book of Salt and with examining the stakes of autobiographical ownership and representation for Vietnamese refugees in the aftermath of the War in Viet Nam is an extension of the political concerns that Truong articulates in her earlier critical writings “Vietnamese American Literature” and “Into Thin Air.” Beginning with a historical contextualization of Vietnamese American literature and a discussion of

Truong’s critical writings, I then turn to a close reading of The Book of Salt in relation to the issues of collaborative autobiography and queer diaspora. These issues are brought together in Truong’s novel through the construction of the relationship between four queer characters: Binh, Sweet Sunday Man, Gertrude Stein, and Alice.

B Toklas. At the end of this chapter, I consider how Truong’s representation of the gift invokes an alternative epistemology of gifting in the context of Vietnamese commemorative ritual. I also draw on Sara Ahmed’s theory of queer phenomenology to discuss how Truong ultimately theorizes social and psychic reparation in the aftermath of trauma—both the trauma of War and the trauma of narrative dispossession—as a process of gifting memory, as an exploration of alternative lifelines that can facilitate the work of belonging.

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Vietnamese American Literature: Collaborations and Reconciliations

In This is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American

Literature, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud explains that before the 1980s, Vietnamese

Americans (most of whom were from South Viet Nam) seeking to publish their narratives had a difficult time finding publishers due to the writers’ problems with language proficiency and due to the political climate of the period: First-generation

Vietnamese preferred reading Vietnamese-language texts; conservative Americans did not want to be reminded of military defeat; Americans on the Left were not particularly interested in reading about Viet Cong atrocities since they had viewed the South Vietnamese as “puppets of U.S. imperialism” (25). Pelaud writes that

“After the Viet Nam War, Vietnamese Americans were the only Americans who did not want to forget Viet Nam. The country was no longer of geopolitical and economic importance to America so human rights violations there (and also in Laos and

Cambodia), while a central theme in Vietnamese American literature at the time, were mostly ignored” (26).

In the mid-1980s, large publishing houses began to show interest in

Vietnamese American literature published in English (Pelaud 26). Two texts that received a wide circulation were A Vietcong Memoir by Truong Nhu Tang and When

Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip (co-authored with Jay Wurts). In his discussion of Hayslip’s texts, Viet Thanh Nguyen insists that “one of the most crucial issues that must be addressed with [Hayslip's] work . . . is the problem of authorship, mediation, and critical reception and exploitation” (“When Heaven” 71).

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Although Hayslip’s novel was critically praised by American reviewers for “its dramatic power, its story of tragedy, survival, and redemption, and its insight into

‘the’ Vietnamese experience,” the book was not so favourably received by the

Vietnamese American community, who castigated Hayslip for her “involvement with the Viet Cong, her prostitution, her perceived self-promotion, and her reluctance to criticize Viet Nam’s human rights abuses” (68). In the context of historical relations between the United States and Viet Nam, the ethical stakes in Hayslip’s autobiographical portrayal have to do with the textual circulation of what Nguyen has called the “emblematic victim”—a version of the refugee in American popular discourse which functions to fulfill “American demands for a healing of their war wounds, a healing that assists the continuing movement of American capitalism and

Vietnamese reconstruction” (Race 124). As Marita Sturken similarly notes, the 1980s and 1990s “witnessed a repackaging of the 1960s and the War in Viet Nam—a phenomenon steeped in the language of nostalgia, healing, and forgiveness” (45).

In an effort to get their narratives out in the publishing climate of the 1980s, then, Vietnamese American writers began collaborating with non-Vietnamese writers (mostly white Americans who had some connection to the War in Viet Nam)

(Pelaud 30). In her contribution to the seminal collection An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, Monique Truong herself traces “the textual manipulations, translations, and mediations of Vietnamese American voices/text” in the first two decades after the Viet Nam War (“Vietnamese” 222). She begins by analyzing the transcribed life stories of Vietnamese American immigrants included

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in collections compiled by white American editors and ethnographers throughout the 1980s. According to Truong, these “organizing texts depended and thrived upon the 'authority' and/or 'authenticity' of the Vietnamese American voices/texts to bolster their own textual arguments and goals” (231)—namely, agendas having to do with “historical revisionism, racial tensions, and ideological maneuverings”

(219). As Truong argues, illiteracy or poor proficiency in English was used to justify the authorial control of the native-English speaking co-writer in many collaborative

Vietnamese American literary projects. In Hearts of Sorrow: Vietnamese-American

Lives (1989), which showcases fourteen transcribed oral her/histories of

Vietnamese American respondents, the interviewer/editor James A. Freeman writes:

“In asking people to tell me the story of their lives, I was not observing a pre-existing social reality. Neither the Indian Untouchables nor the Vietnamese rural woman whom I interviewed had any idea what a life story was, and certainly neither would have related theirs had I not prompted them” (qtd. in Truong, “Vietnamese” 229).

This assumption of the illiteracy of the respondents is set into a teleology of development, whereby Freeman believes that “in coming years, Vietnamese-

American writers can be expected to express themselves eloquently without the need for cultural translators” (qtd. in 233). As Truong rightly points out, such paternalistic attitudes towards Vietnamese Americans, who are presumed not to know how to tell their life stories, denies, in many cases, their actual literacy and proficiency in English, and also the validity of their oral traditions and histories that do not conform to a Western/Eurocentric tradition.

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Truong thus examines a number of collaborative texts that illustrate everything from blatant manipulation and distortion of the Vietnamese American subject's story to “a more contentious relationship, with interviewer openly vying with respondent for authorial recognition” (231). For example, Truong argues that the textuality of Shallow Graves: Two Women in Vietnam by Wendy Wilder Larsen and Tran Thi Nga reveals “the discrepant power dynamics at work in Larsen and

Tran’s cowriting” (235). Truong is highly critical of how the text displays “an unabashed (dis)regard for Tran, who is constructed as object rather than subject of her own life story” (232). What is at stake in the act of co-writing for Vietnamese

Americans, Truong argues, is “the promise of freedom—not from the physical confines of a prison camp but from the psychological isolation of displacement and exile”; because of the oppressive expectations, manipulations, and distortions of

American editors and co-writers, “it is a promise that has remained unfilled” (242).

As Pelaud puts it, “in these early collaborative works, the invisible power differential between the benefactor and the refugee, who lacked access to the publishing industry, helps to solidify a version of history wherein America went to

Viet Nam to free its people from evil” (30). Collaborations between Vietnamese

Americans and former Vietnam War veterans were also in many cases seen by the latter as a vehicle for forgiveness and reconciliation. Pelaud cites the example of

Nguyen Quang Than’s collaboration with John Balaban in Where the Ashes Are and with George Evans in The Time Tree. Whereas Nguyen’s work in the latter collaboration “is imbued with his desire to introduce Viet Nam as a country and not

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a war, and to share with a wide American audience the richness of Vietnamese culture,” Evans “was driven by the need to understand and be forgiven by his former enemies” (31). Another example of a collaboration that was seen by the editors as “a work of reconciliation” was The Other Side of Heaven: Post-War Fiction by Vietnamese

American Writers, co-edited by Wayne Karlin, Le Minh Khue, and Truong Vu (Karlin xiii). Combining literary works by Vietnamese writers, Vietnamese diasporic writers, and former American GIs, the collection emphasized the importance of “mutual recognition of pain and loss” and the “necessity for reconciliation” (xiii). Karlin explains how, in the early process of “collecting American stories” for the anthology, he came to the “realization that the anthology could not in justice be defined as a work of reconciliation unless it included voices from the other Vietnamese side of the war” (xiii).

According to Pelaud, while these earlier representations of Vietnamese

Americans tended to emphasize healing the wounds of the War (for Americans) and tended to portray stereotypes of immature and childlike Vietnamese people, of the sweet Vietnamese prostitute, of the effeminate Vietnamese man, of the model minority, and of the desperate and grateful refugee, recent Vietnamese American texts in English “articulate a new concept of home” in which the past “is often described as haunting the lives of the narrators like ghosts, at times scary and at others comforting, driving both emotions and actions” (37). These texts, Pelaud asserts, resist being reduced to what Viet Thanh Nguyen has described as simply sites of “accommodation or resistance” and instead address “the uneven process

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through which Vietnamese Americans encounter the violence of the U.S. state and the Viet Nam state within the context of colonialism and the Cold War” (49). Here

Pelaud refers to Nguyen’s influential book Race and Resistance, in which he argues that reading Asian American texts purely in terms of accommodation or resistance offers “polarizing options that do not sufficiently demonstrate the flexible strategies often chosen by authors and characters to navigate their political and ethical situations” (4). Nguyen further insists that such criticism is limited by an “ideological rigidity” and lack of self-reflexivity that resulted in a misreading of texts and a transformation of race and racial identity into commodities (4).

To give a sense of the complicated political and ethical positions of contemporary Vietnamese American writers, I turn now to briefly discuss another critical piece of writing by Monique Truong. In her 2003 autobiographical editorial piece in Time entitled “Into Thin Air,” Truong explores the relationship between her

“unwillingness to return to Vietnam” and her Vietnamese American diasporic identity. She explains how strangers who find out that she is from Viet Nam are then often confused, discomforted, when she responds to their queries about return travel with a resolute “no.” Their confusion is compounded when Truong allows her

“no to sit in between the travelers and [her] like a boulder, an impasse meant to strand words and experiences, to swerve the conversation down another road toward another country.” She plays a kind of verbal dancing game with these strangers, not allowing them to go to the place they want to go upon first seeing her—to the place that would feed their exoticist fantasies about the Other and that

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would validate their boutique forms of multicultural consumption. Viet Nam is the

“last place” Truong wants to go, conversationally, since she is “too often dragged there, politely but insistently, by people who barely know [her] but who know all about the country where [she] was born.” In resistance to this orientalist discourse that pushes her toward the homeland—a discourse that engenders feelings of cultural inauthenticity in Truong and that prompts her to repeatedly iterate that she is “no Vietnam expert”—Truong rejects the “archetypal journey back to the land of her birth.”

Truong’s conflicted attachments to the land of her birth and to her diasporic community are also linked to the memory of her forced displacement from Viet

Nam; she explains: “The paradox was that though I wouldn't allow myself to forget and to forgive my country of birth for imploding itself in an act of war, I wanted desperately to ignore that my country of refuge was taking itself down an equally destructive path.” By not returning to Viet Nam—to her “own flesh and blood”—

Truong continues to hold not only the United States but also Viet Nam responsible for the violence inflicted on the Vietnamese people during the War. Against a tradition of narrating the return to Viet Nam as a recovery of essential

Vietnameseness, Truong asserts: “If this useless violence is my history, a madness that lurks in my gene pool, a propensity that might again show itself, I am not eager to travel back to its—and my—place of origin.” Truong refuses to forgive and forget the actions of a nation that is partly to blame for waging a civil war against itself and for killing and displacing millions of Vietnamese people as a result. Truong's refusal

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to “get over” a history of injury on the part of the Vietnamese and American nation states marks her as what Sara Ahmed calls a melancholic migrant,53 as a “relic, unable and unwilling, unlike many of the Vietnamese in Viet Nam . . . to move past this sad point.” The hail of interpellation that Truong refuses to turn towards is embodied in the figure of the strangers who think of her “as being part of the place they have visited as opposed to the place they are from.” To respond to this hail would be to become like the Vietnamese in Viet Nam whom the travelers “admire for a lack of anger toward America, or an openness toward all things American, or both.”

Truong resists becoming legible as an “emblematic victim,” as a compliant, healed, and grateful immigrant American subject (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race 124).

As much as Truong’s essay “Into Thin Air” is about her fraught relationship with Viet Nam, it is also about her hesitancy to identify the United States as her home, the country she immigrated to as a refugee at the age of six. Truong's refusal to represent herself as a well-adjusted, model minority who is grateful to the adopted nation resides in her apprehension of the past and continuing structural violence of American empire at home and abroad. Linking the history of American imperialism in Viet Nam to the United States' 2003 (and ongoing) invasion of Iraq invoked a visceral reaction in Truong as she “wept, remembering the remedial

[bombs] that shook [her] family's house in Can Tho, a city to the south of Saigon, on the banks of the Mekong.” Truong is thus critical of the belief in American

53 See Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness. In the next chapter, I discuss Ahmed’s concept of the melancholic migrant.

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exceptionalism, which, as Kandice Chuh paraphrasing Henry Schwarz explains, “is the narrative that proclaims the distinctiveness of the United States in its break from the rigid hierarchies of Europe and especially England and forwards the foundational beliefs in justice and democracy as distinctly—exceptionally—

American” (126). For Truong, the nation-state of America embodies the opposite of these ideals: it is a colonial and neo-colonial power that created the conditions of her family having to hide in underground bomb shelters to survive during the War; that spared her life as one of “the lucky ones” while turning her neighbours' shelters into

“family tombs” (“Into Thin”); and that has continued to wage multiple illegal wars in other countries since Truong has immigrated to America. Consumed by the CNN media spectacle of the Iraq War, Truong is reminded that “war was above all an

American enterprise,” signaling how her refusal to identify with America is above all a rejection of a state apparatus that functions in the interest of a military industrial complex.

Truong's disavowal of America is linked not only to her rejection of an

American empire that exports much of its structural violence, but also to the forms of exclusion and racism that she experiences within the internal borders of America.

Truong explains that she is reminded of her outsider status every time strangers ask if she is “ 'from' Vietnam,” every time she is confronted with “the everyday discourtesy that comes from being Asian American.” She recounts an anecdote about being on a bus in New York with her younger sister, who offered her seat to an older

American white man. In response, Truong explains, “he looked down at her and said,

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'No, that's alright. I know you don't have chairs where you come from.'” Recalling the multiple times in the past that she had experienced “the spit of racism on her body,”

Truong is reminded that not much has changed for her sister's generation. As Lisa

Lowe has explained, “the American of Asian descent remains the symbolic 'alien,' the metonym for Asia who by definition cannot be imagined as sharing in America”

(Immigrant 6). Truong's anecdote also recalls Chuh's observation that “[a]lways there lingers the idea that those considered Asian can (or should, in some white supremacist renderings) go 'home,' which never refers in context to a location in the

United States” (124). Whereas Truong's younger sister, born in the United States, unambiguously “knows where home is” and has her “feet . . . solidly planted in a country that she will continue to define,” Truong is “still lost somewhere between

Viet Nam and the U.S.” (“Into Thin”). For her, “the physical journey was completed long ago, but the emotional one is ongoing.” Truong thus narrates a diasporic subjectivity in which the nation-state of America does not fulfill the promise of safety, familiarity, and refuge that she seeks, but neither does Viet Nam offer the potential for a restored wholeness. It is a subjectivity that reflects Cvetkovich’s claim that the concepts of the transnational and the diasporic “stand in contrast to the concept of exile, for example, which frequently presumes a place of natural origin and emphasizes the loss of one's nation as a trauma in the negative sense. Both the fantasy of return to an origin and the desire to assimilate can be strategies for forgetting the trauma of dislocation” (Archive 122).

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Truong’s complicated and conflicted relationship to home reflects Viet Thanh

Nguyen’s assessment that “Asian American memories about the American war in

Viet Nam are as conflicted, as tangled, and as ambivalent as American memory in general. In the same way that Americans are often at odds over how to remember the war, so do Asian Americans sometimes find themselves opposing each other”

(“Speak” 13). While Nguyen insists that much of Vietnamese cultural production is

“about the problem of mourning the dead, remembering the missing, and considering the place of the survivors in the movement of history” (8), he also explains that “American nationalism, Asian American and minority discourse, and

Vietnamese nationalism fight over these ghosts, seeking to reclaim them for their own brand of justice” (31). The “communist revolution” in Viet Nam mobilized social justice movements around the world, including the Asian American students’ movement, “but the revolution—as well as French colonialism, American aggression, and South Vietnamese nationalism—divided families, persecuted the opposition, killed the innocent, and struggled to erase the history and the memory of those associated with their enemies” (12). This history complicates any easy correlation between radical political movements for justice and identity or ideology (12).

Yet, Nguyen insists that in the midst of these competing political interests and agendas, there is an “ethical awareness, combined with sophistication of technique and a certain political sensibility” in speaking of the ghosts of Viet Nam that can be discerned in certain works of art and literature. To do justice to the ghosts of the past, Nguyen suggests, is to resist a struggle for self-representation that is “premised

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upon the uniqueness of each minority group’s historical experience of victimization,” upon pure dichotomies of victims versus oppressors (32-33). In the context of

Vietnamese American refugees’ struggle for self-representation, such a narrative for recognition on the American landscape is predicated upon an effacement of how the

War was also waged in the homes of Viet Nam’s neighbours (of Cambodians,

Laotians, and various indigenous peoples in the mountain highlands). Viet Nam, as a minor imperial power in Southeast Asia, has a long and vexed history with its neighbouring countries; in the West, “the Vietnamese overshadow other Southeast

Asian refugees” (33). Nguyen thus concludes that “ in considering Vietnamese refugee memory and the way it serves the interests of the Vietnamese Diaspora, we should be skeptical of how the so-called ‘Viet Nam War’ is retold as a story in which the Vietnamese are the victims but not the victimizers” (33).

Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt

Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt resists reiterating precisely such a story about the ‘Viet Nam War’ in which there are clear-cut victims and victimizers at the same time that the novel indexes the history of collaboration between Vietnamese

Americans and non-Vietnamese Americans summarized above—a history that might be aptly described as a history of ‘collaborative damage.’ This history raises concerns about the stakes of ownership of memory and narrative in the process of reconciliation for Vietnamese American subjects. What is compelling about The Book of Salt is that these concerns are projected onto a narrative that takes place in 1930s

Paris, over thirty years before the War begins. This narrative strategy reflects an

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ethical awareness in that the novel registers the complexities of speaking about the dead while it simultaneously it resists being read as “insight into ‘the’ Vietnamese experience” (Nguyen, “When Heaven” 71). Viet Thanh Nguyen reminds us that “what ethics forces us to answer is the question of the harm that we ourselves can do . . .

The type of power wielded by the minority is not equivalent to the majority’s, but for the minority to claim responsibility for the power it possesses is the logical consequence to the idea that a minority can and must resist” (11). Through the use of intertextuality, The Book of Salt explores this issue of ethics and responsibility among minorities not directly through the representation of post-war Vietnamese communities, but rather through the representation of gender and queer relations.

It is not a coincidence, then, that The Book of Salt undertakes a fictional reconstruction of one of the most famous collaborative pairs in American literary history: Stein and Toklas. As Lorraine York explains about the “implicit collaboration” between these two women, “critics remain divided as to the power dynamics of that relationship, debating whether Toklas could be considered literary collaborator or glorified amanuensis-wife” (64). Earlier critics of the text tended to adopt the latter perspective, whereby Toklas was thought to occupy a rigidly defined gender role as a female helpmate (cook, amanuensis, and entertainer) while Stein was thought to occupy the oppositional “masculine” role as a husband

(breadwinner, writer, and solitary genius). This view of a hierarchical imbalance of power in which the genius Stein exploits her wife's domestic labour has led critics to use a gift-theft dichotomy to frame the authorship debate about The Autobiography

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of Alice B. Toklas.54 In The Book of Salt, Truong demonstrates a self-conscious awareness of this debate by frequently toying with notions of gifts and thefts and also by constructing a fictional scenario in which the story of Toklas's labour is told to us by Binh. As a racialized domestic labourer, Binh occupies a subject position that enables him to frequently observe and reflect on both the similarities and differences between himself and Toklas. This conflation of Toklas's and Binh's identities also allows Truong to explore complex questions about the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexual oppression—questions that have been widely theorized by scholars of queer diaspora studies.55

Just as scholars have criticized the view of Toklas's subordinate role in the production of The Autobiography, Truong in The Book of Salt is critical of how notions of solitary authorship can underlie the reception and accreditation of collaborative autobiographies. For instance, in one scene Binh reflects: “Words are words, I tell myself. Handwritten, typewritten, all were written by GertrudeStein, and as you [Sweet Sunday Man] would say, anything written by GertrudeStein is an original” (260). Such declarations of Stein’s exclusive production of all handwritten and typewritten manuscripts would seem to completely deny all claims of Stein and

54 While the metaphor of The Autobiography as a theft has been unambiguously aligned with the view of Stein’s appropriation of Toklas’s voice, identity, or literary property, the metaphor of the text as a gift has been variously described “as a long love letter to Alice, a compensatory gift Gertrude wrote to appease her partner” (Gilmore 56), as a “subversive gift from Alice B. Toklas” to Stein on the basis of Toklas's solitary composition of the text that she hands over to Stein (Gilbert and Gubar 28), and as a “gift from Toklas to Stein” on the basis of Toklas' “enabling labour” that is crucial to the text’s production and equal in value to Stein’s contributions (Linzie 96). 55 For more on queer diaspora, see, especially, Eng, Racial, Fortier, Fung, Gopinath, Puar, “Transnational,” and Sanchez-Eppler and Patton.

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Toklas’s collaboration on The Autobiography; however, when read against the backdrop of The Book of Salt’s redefinition of Toklas as a genius and her labour in cooking as a form of reciprocal exchange of desire, Binh’s assertion that “anything written by GertrudeStein [sic] is an original” can only be read as an ironic statement.

As Coullie et al. note, “the assumption that a general culture of individualism is a precondition for the flourishing of auto/biography is often coupled with the image of the introspective author, who like Descartes [in Meditations] locks himself in a room in order to produce the truth about himself out of himself.” Coullie et al. continue by stating, however, that the interviews with authors compiled for Selves in Question reveal the “involvement of a host of people in the making of autobiographical accounts, thus challenging monological notions of authorship and the subject that are associated with European Modernity” (45). Truong’s historical fiction gives her creative license to imagine a collaborative writing partnership between Stein and

Toklas that is beyond what is publicly verifiable, a relationship in which Toklas’s role is far from secondary, but rather indispensable. From Binh’s perspective, readers come to recognize how the belief in The Autobiography as the original product of Stein’s solitary genius can be sustained only through a denial of Toklas’s labour in enabling this genius.

In The Book of Salt, Sweet Sunday Man is constructed as a kind of celebrity worshipper (of Stein) who refuses to view Toklas as an equal partner in the production of The Autobiography. Binh makes this evident: “I know, I know. It is this other Madame who interests you more, Sweet Sunday Man. But what you do not

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seem to understand is that they are one and the same” (212). Binh’s voicing of an irreducibility that exists between the two women echoes Holly Laird’s argument that

The Autobiography toys with false binaries by allowing Stein and Toklas to “double for each other as author, narrator, and subject” (189). In The Book of Salt, these kinds of role reversals—between the identities of Toklas and Stein, Toklas and Binh,

Stein and Sweet Sunday Man—repeat so many times that a vertiginous collapse of the binary hierarchy occurs. Stein is no more the solitary, original author of The

Autobiography than she is of the fictional “Book of Salt,” which is authored by Stein but enabled by the labour of Binh, or more precisely, by the story of Binh’s labour under colonialism and capitalism. While Stein is clearly presented as having written both texts, her status as a singular and unified author in the traditional philosophical sense is radically called into question.

Truong draws on the parameters of the Stein-Toklas debate to enact a critique of how, in the production of cross-cultural collaborative autobiographies, the white western co-writer is normally accredited as being the real writer/aesthetic genius while the racialized co-writer is either not credited as an author at all, or is perceived as the secondary author who simply supplies the raw, authentic material for the autobiography.56 Presenting a continuum between

“ethnographic autobiography, in which writers outrank subjects, to celebrity autobiography, in which subjects outrank writers” (40), Thomas Couser explains

56 For a similar, earlier take on how white feminist critics “use” the creativity of black women writers, see Ann Ducille’s Skin Trade.

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that it is also problematic in these situations when “mediation is ignored [and] the resulting text [is] mistaken for a transparent lens through which we have direct access to its subject” (39). Further complicating this interpretation is the fact that narrative voice is frequently unreliable also in solo autobiography, given that the self is “already implicated in a social temporality that exceeds its own capacities for narration” (Butler, Giving 8). While in both scenarios one co-writer’s efforts in the collaboration become, in a sense, “invisible,” it is the racialized co-writer who is at risk of exploitation with respect to both the (economic) partnership and the portrayal.

As Couser explains, “[c]ollaborative autobiography is inherently ventriloquistic. The dynamic of the ventriloquism, however—the direction in which the voice is ‘thrown’—may vary with the location of the collaboration on the continuum described earlier” (48). With respect to the Stein-Toklas collaboration, critics have generally argued that Stein ventriloquized Toklas,57 often employing the metaphor of cannibalism to figure this relation of power. In The Book of Salt, Truong transposes the image of Stein as a cannibalizer onto the character of Sweet Sunday

Man. Like Toklas who prepares elaborate meals for Stein within the temple-like domestic space of their home, Binh cooks for Sweet Sunday Man within the secluded confines of Sweet Sunday Man’s apartment. While Binh eagerly anticipates the

Sunday afternoon rendezvous with Sweet Sunday Man, he soon discovers that Sweet

Sunday Man is staying in Paris only until the release of “the French translation of The

57 See especially Hardack and Gilbert and Gubar.

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Autobiography” (146). What Sweet Sunday Man desires in exchange for sex, then, is inside knowledge about Stein’s life and writing, for as Binh narrates: “I am in the centre of a hive, and it is Sweet Sunday Man who is the persistent bee. The honey that he craves is the story that he knows only I can tell” (149). Here, Truong enacts a slippage in possessive form from Stein's story to Binh's story, thus associating Sweet

Sunday Man with the image of a cannibalistic consumer of a native informant's supposedly first-hand, authentic information.58

In many ways, then, Truong allegorizes Sweet Sunday Man as an exploitive co-writer whose primary connection to the collaborative partnership is a preexisting intimacy with the autobiographical subject. Sweet Sunday Man’s motivations for starting a relationship with Binh have to do with his plan to exploit Binh’s insider’s knowledge and accessibility to Stein’s books. Sweet Sunday Man preys on Binh’s vulnerability and loneliness to coerce Binh into stealing a notebook from Stein’s collection—a notebook that, of course, ends up being a story about Binh. Insensitive to Binh’s pleas for Sweet Sunday Man to recognize that Stein and Toklas “sustain”

Binh, that they “pay [his] wage” and “house [his] body” (209), Sweet Sunday Man ultimately convinces Binh to commit the theft by offering him a photograph of the two of them together in exchange. Although Binh thinks that initially their relationship is based on emotional intimacy, he comes to realize that Sweet Sunday

Man's interest has been based in calculated economics: “Value, I have heard, is how

58 See Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, especially chapters 6 through 8, for her theoretical discussion of the native informant and autobiography.

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it all begins. From there it can deepen into worth, flow . . . toward the muscle of the heart. My mistake, always my mistake, is believing that someone like you will, for me, open up the red” (151). Truong cleverly employs economic and romantic metaphors here: Binh hopes that someone will open their heart from him, but in the end, he is always left “in the red,” in debt and alone. Truong also uses the discourse of economics here to register Binh's feelings of betrayal. Certainly, the reduction of

Binh in the end to a commodity of pure use-value—an idea suggested by the utter unfairness of what Binh ends up giving Sweet Sunday Man “in exchange for what turned out to be a half-paid-for photograph of a satisfied customer and [Binh]”

(260)—is evidence in the text that would support the symbolic parallel between the

Binh-Sweet Sunday Man power dynamic and that of real life collaborative pairs such as Larsen and Nga.

This reading, however, is complicated by the suggestion in The Book of Salt that a power equilibrium—however tenuous—exists between Binh and Sweet

Sunday Man by virtue of their social marginalization as racialized subjects. Binh articulates this equation between them: “But I forget that you, Sweet Sunday Man, are flawed like me . . . I hide my body in the back rooms of every house that I have ever been in. You hide away inside your own” (151). While the surface inscription of race on Binh’s body relegates him to the margins of society, the social stigma of acknowledging his African descent forces Sweet Sunday Man to live in a condition of self-exile. Sweet Sunday Man is a mixed-race subject who attempts to pass in Paris society, but whose race is an issue of intrigue—and a mark of inferiority—for Stein

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and Toklas. What is most significant about the parallelism between Binh and Sweet

Sunday Man here is that race situates them both in socially marginal positions relative to Stein and Toklas although the class distinction between Binh and Sweet

Sunday Man allows the latter to move in Stein and Toklas’s social circle, which is closed to Binh.

The positions of Binh and Sweet Sunday Man subtly evoke American racial politics, despite the Paris setting. In some ways, the home of Binh's “two American ladies” (11) could stand in for the nation-state of America, whose racist, imperialist actions abroad result in displaced subjects desperately seeking refuge at its borders.

Binh explains: “Becoming more like an animal with each displaced day, I scramble to seek shelter in the kitchens of those who will take me” (19). Held up as a sign of the

United States' liberal humanitarian benevolence, these refugee subjects are then expected to forever display their gratitude and subservience to the nation. As Binh's narrative suggests, however, these displaced subjects are never granted full and unconditional entry, for they can be “cast adrift” (149) just as quickly as they are admitted: “I do not willingly depart these havens” (19). Binh admits that before he arrived at the doorstep of Stein and Toklas, he “worked for an embarrassing number of households” who questioned him shamelessly about his personal past (16). As

Carolyn A. Durham asserts in Literary Globalism: Anglo-American Fiction Set in

France, Truong's treatment of race in The Book of Salt “reveals the intransigence as well as the ambivalence of national identity.” Durham describes Truong's novel as

“an allegory of nation,” whereby the servants who have preceded Binh—“the

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Algerian . . . the Moroccan . . . the Madagascan”—are all “former colonial subjects in exile in France” (191). Viet Nam fits into this list of former French colonies, but unlike the other nations mentioned here, Viet Nam has a special resonance for

Americans in the aftermath of the War in Viet Nam, when hundreds of thousands of refugees were brought to the United States. Qui-Phiet Tran has written about the

“flowering of Vietnamese exile literature,” tracing the ways in which the idyllic portrayal of Vietnamese refugees by the American media in the post-war period contrasted strongly with the Vietnamese American literature being published in

Vietnamese during the same period (272). This literature, Tran explains, dealt with the refugees' “aspirations as well as their outrage, anguish, and insanity” (273-274) and depicted “their haven in America as a 'penal colony'” rather than a melting pot of freedom (272).

In something of a historical slippage, Truong evokes this “future” refugee history in her narrative about Binh and the hardships he endures in the home of his

American employers. Within this space, Binh registers feelings of belonging for only fleeting moments—usually until the slightest disobedience on his part reveals the limits of his employers' tolerance. Binh explains: “while I have been permitted to stay within the doors of 27 rue de Fleurus, I have been excommunicated yet again from that perfect circle that is at the center of every home” (103). For Binh, belonging is a state of desire that is perpetually deferred; his race and sexuality render him forever unhomed in all the homes in which he lives, including the supposed “haven” of America. Truong conveys the sense that the act of refuge

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seeking is a recurring inevitability for Binh, one that never becomes easier with time. Describing the photograph at the train station which depicts him at a decision- point between staying in Paris or returning to Viet Nam, Binh tells us that, in the moment the photo was taken, a simple refrain was going through his head: “I do not want to start all over again. / Scanning the help-wanteds. / Knocking on doors. /

Walking away alone. / And, yes, I am afraid” (10). It is a refrain because Binh first wrote these lines in a letter to his brother five years prior to the date the photo at the train station was taken, a letter he first wrote upon hearing the rumours that his

American employers might be returning to the United States. Like the photo, this refrain appears at the beginning and the end of the novel, but it also appears in the middle of a larger historical picture of the forced displacement of Vietnamese diasporic subjects. Both narrative time and historical time often become confused in

The Book of Salt, as Binh tells us: “I sometimes now look at this photograph and wonder whether it was taken before or after. Pure speculation at this point, I know”

(10).

If we adopt the perspective that Binh's entry into the Stein-Toklas home could be read allegorically as an arrival of Vietnamese refugees in the United Sates, then we could say that the hierarchy or imbalance of power that Truong calls attention to in The Book of Salt is not so much the one that exists between Stein and

Toklas or between Binh and Sweet Sunday Man; rather it is the one that exists between Stein and Toklas on the one hand—white, educated, privileged

Americans—and Binh and Sweet Sunday Man on the other—visually and/or socially

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marked racial subjects. Employed or hosted by Stein and Toklas, Binh, a Vietnamese man, and Sweet Sunday Man, a mixed-race African American man, represent the political potential of an inter-racial coalition. We soon find out, however, that much is working against this alliance, for Toklas and Stein have conspired against them from the beginning. Both Binh and Sweet Sunday Man become the objects, or the

“wounded trophies,” of Stein and Toklas’s perverse curiosity about otherness— objects that Stein and Toklas seek to know and classify like the exotic items in their household collection (19).

In this construction of Stein and Toklas’s attitudes about race and ethnicity,

Truong draws on historical information from The Autobiography, where the narrator describes Stein’s encounter with the black American celebrity Paul Robeson: “Paul

Robeson interested Gertrude Stein. He knew american values and american life as only one in it but not of it could know them. And yet as soon as any other person came into the room he became definitely a negro. Gertrude Stein did not like hearing him sing spirituals. They do not belong to you any more than anything else, so why claim them, she said” (Stein 238). Stein’s openly racist attitude towards Robeson and his cultural production is reconstructed by Truong in The Book of Salt in a scene where Stein recounts her discussion with Robeson to Toklas in the following manner: “ ‘I asked him why he insisted on singing Negro spirituals when he could be performing requiems and oratorios. Do you know what that curiosity in a suit said? .

. . “The spirituals, theys a belong to me, Missa Stein” ’ ” (188). This intertextual reference to Robeson in The Book of Salt is significant because Robeson’s character

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is brilliantly woven into the plot surrounding Sweet Sunday Man. Whereas in The

Autobiography “Robeson interested Stein” (Stein 238), in The Book of Salt Sweet

Sunday Man’s peculiar behavior in the presence of Robeson sparks Stein’s immediate interest in Sweet Sunday Man’s race and identity. Binh then becomes the person who Toklas and Stein send out to collect information that will satisfy their perverse curiosity: “ ‘Is Lattimore a Negro?’ is what they, in the end, want to know.

My Mesdames tell me that they just want to be absolutely sure” (189). Toklas and

Stein’s desire to pin down and classify Sweet Sunday Man’s identity clearly parallels their racial objectification of Binh—a parallel that reinforces the interpretation that

Binh and Sweet Sunday Man are aligned as marginalized characters.

At the same time, Truong suggests in The Book of Salt that the ambiguity of

Sweet Sunday Man’s racial status gives him an ability to move between social strata that Binh does not have. Unlike his mother, whose “drop of blood ... made her an exile in the land of her birth” (112), Sweet Sunday Man’s ability to pass affords him a social mobility and class privilege that distinguishes him from Binh and aligns him more closely with Stein and Toklas, who are, as Anita Mannur explains in a review of the book, “voluntary exiles who have mobility and the means to imagine movement”

(114). Binh narrates: “Your mother’s money has paved your way to this city. It first sent you to the north of your America for college. It knew that there the texture of your hair, the midnight underneath the gauze of your skin, were more readily lost to untrained eyes” (112). Sweet Sunday Man’s internalization of racial hierarchies draws him to the white privilege of Stein and Toklas—symbolized perhaps by his

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obsession with Stein’s manuscript—while he simultaneously carries on a secret homosexual affair with Binh. Truong invites the reader to consider the idea that white supremacist ideology not only turns racialized subjects against themselves, but also against each other. Sweet Sunday Man betrays Binh by using him to steal from Toklas and Stein, while Binh has been working as a double agent from the beginning. Truong suggests that racialized minorities are pitted against each other in a society ordered along the lines of a divide and conquer strategy. Eng argues that

The Book of Salt refuses to valorize the United States “as a melting pot or rainbow coalition undisturbed by cleavings of race, gender, sexuality, and class” (“The

End(s)” 1490). Instead, as Eng asserts, “Truong highlights their contingent and ever- shifting intersections, facilitating in the process a more sustained consideration of histories of exploitation and domination that unevenly bind Asian indentureship and

African slavery to Euro-American modernity” (1499).59

The complex exploration of intersectionality in The Book of Salt is also illustrated by Truong’s refusal to present a completely schematic division between

Binh and his two employers. Like Binh, who is a gay Vietnamese man who has migrated to France, Stein and Toklas are lesbian American expatriates living in

France: “It had been eleven years since I had made a true ocean crossing. For my

59 In his analysis of how the relationship between Binh and Sweet Sunday Man indexes colonial labour relations in which African slave and Asian coolie labour enabled the rise of modern Europe, Eng draws on Lisa Lowe's article “The Intimacies of Four Continents.” Further to Eng's analysis, I suggest that in her construction of the Binh-Sweet Sunday Man relationship, Truong is also exploring the conflicted relationship between Asian Americans and African Americans, a relationship that has a long history of alliance and animosity and betrayal, stretching from indentured labour in the South to the Los Angeles insurrection in 1992. For more on the topic of Asian American and African American connections in culture, history, and politics, see Kim, Mullen, Okihiro, and Prashad.

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Mesdames, it had been over thirty” (Truong, Book 3). The notion that Binh and

Toklas and Stein are aligned as a group of social and national outsiders60 is exemplified in the scene where Binh accompanies Stein and Toklas on their summer vacation to Bilignin.61 Here, Binh comments that the villagers view Stein and Toklas as “the only circus act in town” and him as “the asiatique, the sideshow freak” (142).

In rural France, Stein and Toklas are now objectified and watched with perverse curiosity by the villagers: “The farmers there are childlike in their fascination and in their unadorned cruelty . . . they call you ‘Caesar.’ Miss Toklas, they dub ‘Cleopatra’ ”

(142). Outside of the cosmopolitan urban environment of Paris, Toklas and Stein’s visibility as a lesbian couple suddenly marks them as deviant, demonstrating how even perpetrators of prejudice can become targets of it themselves in certain contexts. My reading here differs from Wenying Xu’s assertion in her book Eating

Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature that “Stein’s sexuality is

60 Another possible axis of difference along which Stein and Toklas and Binh could be aligned is race. Stein and Toklas’s Jewishness suggests a form of equivalency of power with Binh on the basis of histories of oppression and forced displacement; however, throughout The Book of Salt, Truong does not take up the issue of Stein and Toklas’s Jewishness at all. Binh always refers to Stein and Toklas as his “two American ladies”—the title which they themselves use in their help-wanted advertisement for a cook (11). While Truong reconstructs several aspects of Stein’s and Toklas’s personal histories that cannot logically be contained within Binh’s narratorial frame of reference (that is, Stein’s relationship with her brother and Toklas’s journey to Paris), she does not attempt to reconstruct any aspect of these histories that deal with their Jewish identity. In this seemingly deliberate avoidance of the topic, Truong follows a tradition of critical scholarship that has read Stein’s Jewishness as a minor aspect of her life and work. For an overview of this discussion, see Damon (489-506), Malcolm, and Spahr (17-50). Thus, while Stein and Toklas’s Jewishness might be implied as a factor that breaks down the hierarchy between Binh and his employers, their status as American expatriates and lesbians is emphasized by Truong to be a more significant dimensions of difference that align Stein and Toklas with Binh. 61 In The Cookbook, Toklas describes how she and Stein took their Vietnamese cook Nguyen— who “had been a servant in the household of the French Governor-General of Indo-China”—with them “to Bilignin for the long summer vacation” (188).

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described as so normal that it no longer signifies transgression” (135) while still taking into account Xu’s point that Binh’s queer diasporic sexuality operates differently from that of Stein and Toklas.

Indeed, The Book of Salt goes to great lengths to explore not only the inequalities that exist within diasporic communities as a function of gender and sexuality, but also those that exist within queer communities as a function of race and class. Throughout the novel, Truong particularly emphasizes Binh’s queer affiliation with Toklas by showing that they both leave behind patriarchal fathers in their homelands and ultimately end up at Stein's doorstep in Paris: “Many years later, standing outside the same door, I thought I was hearing my father’s voice.

[Toklas] had left hers behind. I had unfortunately overpacked” (160). In this respect, Truong holds out the possibility for a queer alliance by showing how Binh enters into a queer domestic arrangement that rescripts what Eng describes as “the pervasive stereotype of the white daddy and the Asian houseboy endemic to mainstream gay culture” (Racial 220). If The Book of Salt is read as a story of converging queer diasporas, then Binh's arrival at the Stein-Toklas household could perhaps be read as an entry not into racist America, but into the liminal, contact zone of Paris—a place that, as Durham explains, “has been linked throughout the twentieth century to fictional explorations of homosexuality” (182). Whether or not the text actually coincides with this tradition of using Paris as an ideal space to explore queerness, Truong's use of narrative flashbacks to Binh's past in Viet Nam highlights the idea that the Stein-Toklas household, as a refuge for Binh, is actually

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different from the ones he has stayed at in the past: “I have a Madame and a

Madame. As long as I am with them, I have shelter” (149).

In The Book of Salt, the flashbacks to Viet Nam give insight into a central question of the text: what would motivate a person “to take one’s body and willingly set it upon the open sea?” (57). In other words, what would cause a person to leave their land of birth? To answer this question, the reader is taken back to the colonial period in Viet Nam's history. As reviewer Christopher Benfey writes, “Truong describes in exacting detail the hierarchies and betrayals in the palatial household of

France's governor general, where Binh's brother was sous-chef and Binh himself held a menial job while sleeping with a young French chef, Bleriot.” Paralleling

Binh's clandestine relationship with Sweet Sunday Man, Binh's secret relationship with Bleriot also ends in betrayal when Bleriot's denial of their affair results in

Binh's dismissal. Just as he is far from a passive victim of Sweet Sunday Man’s sexual coercions, Binh assures the reader that he was never “naïve enough to look at Bleriot and see salvation in his arms” (Truong, Book 195). When Binh's father, who exacts a deadly combination of patriarchal, heterosexist, and dogmatic religious control over his family, finds out that Binh is gay, he disowns Binh and expels him from the home:

“he stood waiting for me at the front door of his house. From the look on his face, I could tell that no part of that structure belonged to me now” (163). This scene illustrates how, for subjects such as Binh, unhomeliness is a condition that can precede migration; emblematic of what Eng describes as the “literal ejection of queers from their homes” (Racial 205), this scene also reinforces Eng’s claim that

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queer diasporic production often illustrates how “the disciplining and ordering” of queer diasporic identities begins in the homeland—“over there”—and then continues “over here” within the domestic borders of the hostland (213).

While The Book of Salt suggests that Binh’s home in Paris institutes a queer affiliation in place of a traditional diaspora ordered by heteronormativity, the text also refuses to idealize this queer affiliation as one that is necessarily democratic or subversive. Stein and Toklas manage to leave Bilignin unscathed, if not restored, at the end of each summer, but Binh barely survives these long periods of intense isolation and alienation: “I, however, begin losing my appetite and my body weight right along with it. By the end of the summer, GertrudeStein, when greeting me, finds it necessary to repeat herself: ‘Well, hello, Thin Thin Bin’ ” (138). In Bilignin,

Binh is consistently reminded of his outsider status from the community members, who jovially barrage him with racist and orientalist questions such as whether he knows “how to use a fork and a knife” or whether he will “marry three or four asiatique wives” (143). These moments of everyday conversation, cast in the guise of rural joviality and forthrightness, are laughed away and forgotten by everyone except Binh: “no matter how much I drink, I am still left with their voices, thick with alcohol, and their faces burnt raw by the sun” (143). Illustrating how not all forms of difference are equivalent in terms of the material consequences suffered by the bearers of this difference, Truong highlights how Binh is faced with the impossible choice of returning to a patriarchal homeland (symbolized by his homophobic

Vietnamese father) or staying in a queer, racist host land (symbolized by his

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employers).62 It is important to emphasize that The Book of Salt does not fix hetero- patriarchy or racism as essential characteristics of the East or the West, but rather illustrates the complex hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality that Binh struggles against in both Viet Nam and France, and that subjects like Binh will face in the future America. In the portrayal of Binh’s homophobic father, Truong indexes, through stories such as that of Father Augustine and Jesuit Alexander de Rhodes

(162), the historical legacy of French missionaries who began converting the

Vietnamese to Catholicism in the seventeenth century, missionaries who played a large part in helping the French establish colonialism in Viet Nam during the colonial campaign from 1858-1883.63

A central tension in The Book of Salt involves the ambiguity of whether Binh will or will not return to Viet Nam in the end. In the photograph described by Binh that frames the narrative, he is sitting on a bench in the background of Stein and

Toklas, who are about to depart for their return journey to the United States. The photo captures the psychic pain of indecision with which Binh is riddled, for he explains: “I am a man unused to choices, so the months leading up to that day at the

Gare du Nord had subjected me to an agony, sharp and new, self-inflicted and self- prolonged. I had forgotten that discretion can feel this way” (10). Realizing early on that he is not welcome to accompany Stein and Toklas to America (258), he is left with only a small sum of cash, courtesy of Toklas, that will allow him to “purchase a

62 In addition to Eng, a number of critics have discussed this conflicted position for queer diasporic subjects. See, especially, Fung (255-256). 63 For more on the history of Roman Catholicism in Viet Nam, see Nhat Hanh.

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one-way ticket to some other destination” (259). The class difference here between

Stein and Toklas’s and Binh’s exilic conditions is brought into sharp relief: whereas

Stein and Toklas are returning to a country that will embrace and celebrate their presence, Binh suffers from crushing anxiety about the prospect of either being cast out onto the hostile streets of Paris again, or of returning to Viet Nam to face his father and/or the memories of his father.

On the one hand, Binh understands that accepting his brother Anh Minh’s imperative that “it is time for [Binh] to come home to Viêt-Nam” (7) would help to repair the broken familial intimacy between Binh and his mother and brother; on the other hand, the memory of his father reminds Binh that some intimacies are perhaps beyond repair: “As they say, Old Man, blood is thicker than water. But in our case, you have mired the seas with so much refuse and malice that no ship, Old Man, can navigate those waters and bring me back again” (230). To render the conflicting attachments and loyalties that home represents for Binh, Truong employs the metaphors of a gift and a theft: the Old Man is “a drunk and a gambler, a thief who took away [Binh’s] home,” but he is also the recipient of the home that Binh “gave” away by choosing exile (196). The Law of the Father expels Binh from his beloved motherland—symbolized by the gift of the red pouch that Binh’s mother gives to him before he leaves Viet Nam (192). But this Law is also what Binh has consciously and calculatingly willed himself to defy: “In [Bleriot’s] blue eyes, I, unlike you, did not see my saviour. I saw a man worth gambling for because I had faith—” (196).

Truong refuses to present Binh’s relationship to Viet Nam as a nostalgic, nationalist

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longing for the past since he continues to be haunted by the violent memory of his broken kinship: “Every day, I hear the Old Man’s voice shouting at me from beneath the earth, where, I tell myself, he now lies. The moment that he took his blood from mine, separated it as if his were the white and mine the yolk, I placed him there”

(193). Binh’s nostalgia is one practiced in defiance of the Law of the Father, of the heteropatriarchal order of conservative diasporas.64

In The Book of Salt, Truong explores the trauma of dislocation via metaphorical allusion to the scholarly debate about the Stein-Toklas collaboration and also via direct intertextual references to the writings of Stein and Toklas.

Although Binh never steps foot in the United States in the narrative, Truong’s novel unmistakably addresses concerns of Asian American identity that relate to, among other issues, the continuing struggle of Asian Americans against exclusion, exploitation, homogenization or orientalization. The epigraph of The Book of Salt is taken from The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, a cooking memoir in which Toklas writes:

“We had certainly luck in finding good cooks, though they had their weaknesses in other ways. Gertrude Stein liked to remind me that if they did not have such faults, they would not be working for us” (173). Such statements reflect the derogatory attitudes Toklas and Stein held towards their servants in general. Linzie explains in her discussion of The Cookbook that “the domestic workers in the Stein-Toklas

64 Truong has commented on Binh’s nostalgia in an interview published online: “For me, the title is also a nod toward the Biblical connotation of salt, in particular to the turning of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt for looking back at her home, to the city of Sodom. That story says to me that the Catholic God, whom the cook is so wary of, disapproves not only of the activities of the Sodomites but also of nostalgia. Bình is a practitioner of both.”

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household were not domestic in a wider sense, but instead ‘colonials’” and that

Toklas often defined these colonials/servants “in terms of race and always in terms of nationality,” commenting frequently on their exotic recipes and their mastery of foreign dishes (179). Citing specific passages from The Cookbook in which Toklas interacts with two male Vietnamese cooks—one named Trac and the other named

Nguyen—Linzie illustrates how Toklas “objectifies Asian cooks” (179).

The similarity between Toklas’s objectification of Trac and Nguyen in The

Cookbook and Stein’s objectification of Robeson in The Autobiography is worth noting here. Truong illustrates how the story of the “everyday discourtesy” of being a racialized subject in America can also be told by revisiting canonical works of

American literature and by holding them accountable for the forms of discursive racial violence that they perform and continue to perform through their canonization. Couze Venn has argued that three forms of violence work together with physical violence at the heart of colonialism: “epistemic violence, that is, the denial of the authority and validity of the knowledge of the colonized; ontological violence, namely, the refusal to recognize the (non-assimilated) colonized subject as a fellow human being; and symbolic and psychic violence, the silencing of the voice of the colonized, the denial of the latter's ability to tell his or her story” (11). One method by which The Book of Salt tells the story of this violence is through the comparative characterization of Binh and Toklas.

This strategy is perhaps best exemplified in Truong’s play on the meanings of the term ‘secret’ in relation to the domestic labour of both Binh and Toklas. In one

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passage, Binh describes how people usually react when they try his omelets: “Like children, gullible and full of wonder, they always ask, ‘What is your secret?’” (153).

Here, Truong perhaps makes reference to scenes in The Cookbook where Toklas intimates that Trac must use some kind of exotic secret ingredient in his dishes. For instance, in one passage Toklas comments that “there was no way of knowing how

Trac prepared any of his delicious food. He was not secretive, but he was a master in the kitchen. Much later ... his wife told me [Toklas] the ingredients he used in some of his dishes ... but even she never knew the measurements” (187). In The Book of

Salt, Binh addresses the Toklas of The Cookbook, exposing her condescending, orientalist assumptions: “If there is a ‘secret,’ Madame, it is this: Repetition and routine. Servitude and subservience. Beck and call” (154). The “secret” of Binh’s genius resides in his negotiation of the everyday—the routine, mundane intimacies of daily life and memory that Binh must draw on for both imagination and survival.

As Ahmed argues, the gift of a lifeline—that which “gives us the capacity to get out of an impossible world or unlivable life”—“can also be something that expresses our identity, such as the lines carved on the skin that are created as an effect of the repetition of certain expressions: the laugh line, the furrow created by the frown, and so on. Lines become the external trace of an interior world, as signs of who we are on the flesh that folds and unfolds before others” (Queer 18). These lines written on the surface of his body—self-inflicted knife scars on his fingertips (Truong, Book

70-74), facial lines reflected in “a small speckled mirror” that Binh carries around

(19, 149)—remind Binh of an interior psychic life-world of love and desire that

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cannot so easily be stolen or effaced. The accumulation of these lifelines tells an exacting story of Binh’s existence that is belied by the archive of Stein and Toklas’s writings about their Vietnamese servants.

Although Toklas and Binh are aligned throughout the narrative, then, as subjects who have laboured tirelessly behind the scenes for little or no recognition, and who have both been misread by the world as “an empty page inviting a narrative” (158) and who “have in common” a “compulsion to wake” their bodies to queer desire (161), their labouring bodies are indelibly marked by different lifelines, for Binh asserts: “I have prepared thousands of omelets. You have attempted three, each effort wasted, a discarded half-moon with burnt-butter craters, a simple dish that in a stark and economical way separates you and me” (154). The crucial difference between Toklas and Binh has everything to do with the asymmetrical relation of power that exists between the two characters by virtue of Toklas’s subject-position as an elite, American expatriate employer and Binh’s as a racialized, colonized servant. The Book of Salt ultimately calls for a renewed critical consideration of how such relations of power can be exploited and abused, particularly in the context of cross-cultural autobiographical collaborations.

From the outset of the narrative, Binh aligns Stein and Toklas with the type of employers whom he calls “the collectors” (18). He explains: “collectors are never satiated by my cooking. They are ravenous. The honey that they covet lies inside my scars . . . They have no true interest in where I have been or what I have seen. They crave the fruits of exile, the bitter juices, the heavy hearts. They yearn for a taste of

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the pure, sea-salt sadness of the outcast whom they have brought into their homes”

(19). The image of cannibalism is used here again to figure not only literary appropriation but also a dominant mode of relating to refugee subjects. Rather than being interested in Binh's present life circumstances, “GetrudeStein, like the collectors who have preceded her,” is only interested in seeing “the stretch marks on

[his] tongue” (36), the stories born out of his experienced oppression and his melancholic imagination. They do not care to distinguish whether he hails “from Viet

Nam, Cambodia, or Laos” (152). To them, Binh is simply “Indochinese”—a signifier of subordination under French colonial rule (152). Out of necessity, Binh is obliged to provide them with the tall tales of exoticism that “they crave” and “yearn for”

(19): “I grudgingly reveal the names, one by one, of the cities that have carved their names into me, leaving behind the scar tissues that form the bulk of who I am” (16).

Reading the passage above, Xu argues that “with his labour, his art, and his stories devoured by his employers, Binh becomes an allegory for the colonized vulnerable to the cannibalistic practices of colonialism—practices that nourish the Self by consuming the Other” (141). I would add to this interpretation that, by figuring Stein and Toklas as “collectors” who are indifferent to the hardships of the subjects they employ and who approach these racial subjects as cultural objects and sources of exotic information, Truong enacts a strong critique of Western co-writers who exploit and capitalize on the past and present suffering of their racialized counterparts.

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This critique of exploitive Western collaborators and of the way in which racialized subjects become dispossessed of their life narratives is most clearly effected through Truong’s incorporation of the metafictional device “The Book of

Salt.” In creating a plot centered on Binh’s realization that “The Book of Salt” is in fact an (auto)biographical sketch written by Stein about Binh, Truong again draws on the well-documented fact of Stein and Toklas’s penchant for writing about the cooks and servants they employed. As Binh scans the pages of the notebook, he has an impression of drowning at sea: “I am surrounded on all sides by strangers, strung along a continuously unraveling line that keeps them above the water’s surface. It’s a line that I cannot possibly hold onto. GertrudeStein knows it, and she has cast me in there anyway, I think” (214-215). This passage recalls Ahmed’s phenomenological discussion of the effect of being “out of place” as a queer and/or migrant subject:

“Jacques Rolland’s description of seasickness as disorientation uses the metaphor of sinking . . . The ground into which we sink our feet is not neutral: it gives ground to some more than others. Disorientation occurs when we fail to sink into the ground”

(Queer 160). Through the extended metaphor of drowning and sinking in the novel,

Truong renders the bodily intensity and psychic pain that Binh feels as a result of being hailed by “the hostility of the white gaze” and compulsory heterosexuality

(Ahmed, Queer 160). Aboard the Niobe, Binh suffers from “crippling seasickness” when he thinks about his father’s betrayal of their kinship (Truong, Book 248); on land, attempting to read “The Book of Salt,” Binh cannot understand most of the words he sees on the page, aside from the word “Bin,” which he recognizes as his

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employers' American misspelling of his name (214). Since the story is written in

English – the language which Binh compares to a house to which he is “too often uninvited and without keys” (155) – Binh is unable to tell how much of his story has been “compacted” or “distorted” to fit a generic, commodified mold (152). All he has to go on in the end is a bittersweet note from Sweet Sunday Man that reads: “‘Bee, thank you for The Book of Salt. Stein captured you perfectly’” (238). The irony of the

Sweet Sunday Man’s assessment, given his ignorance about the circumstances of

Binh's life, emphasizes the idea that not only are the autobiographical accounts of refugee subjects too often appropriated by Western collaborators who are in positions of power, but also that these stories are commonly distorted to suit the goals of the Western collaborators.

Gifting Memory

In the end, Truong ultimately does not position the metafictional “Book of

Salt” as the true and authentic story of Binh's marginalized experience that has been stolen by the American ladies and then stolen back by Binh; rather, Binh's assertion that “a story is a gift” destabilizes the theft paradigm altogether. About the oral tradition and history of the Vietnamese rural woman who Freeman configured as illiterate, Truong writes that “it is a story that literary theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha would characterize as 'a gift' ” (“Vietnamese” 230). According to Trinh, the narrative structure of an oral society is “[A]n empty gift which anybody can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess. A gift built on multiplicity. One that stays inexhaustible within its own limits. Its departures and arrivals. Its quietness”

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(qtd in Truong, “Vietnamese” 230). Trinh's stress on “taste” in this quotation links to

Binh's analysis of the different kinds of salt—the various subtleties and gradations of flavor that Binh has mastered in his cooking, but which are not understood or appreciated by Stein. The gift, then, is the story of Binh's secrets and memories that he gives, not to Stein and Toklas, but rather to his imagined community of the underclass, the long line of servants, migrants, and queer exiles who have preceded him through the master's door and who have laid claim to this gift in the past.

The gift of memory in The Book of Salt can also be read in the context of “the commemorative gift” offered in the ritual practice of commemoration in the tradition of central Viet Nam (Kwon 86). Writing about the War in Viet Nam’s traces of death, disappearance, and displacements—the mass excavations, MIA missions, and the missing and unknown dead—Heonik Kwan explains in Ghosts of War in

Vietnam that this ritual takes place on “two different surfaces of memory”: “The actor kowtows to the ancestral shrine placed in the interior of the house, and then turns his body around and walks to the outside to repeat the act of worship towards the imagined world of street-wandering ghosts” (86). According to Kwan, these acts have been interpreted by anthropologists as the intention of the ritual practitioner to affirm the “domain of kinship and that of anonymity” respectively, or put another way, the domain of ancestors and that of angry ghosts (87); however, Kwon asserts that “classical Vietnamese literature gives a very different picture of the meaning of the gift for ghosts” (87). Examining the verse of the eminent eighteenth-century mandarin scholar Nguyen Du, Kwon argues that “Nguyen Du’s poetic world

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introduces a multitude of displaced and wandering spirits of the dead, and these beings appear as close companions to the living in their arduous journey of life. This intimacy between humans and ghosts speaks of a reciprocal relationship of sympathy between the displaced spirits of the dead and the living person in exile”

(88). Kwon’s analysis calls attention, then, to an alternative epistemology of the gift linked to registering the complex conditions of what he calls “displaced afterlife”

(86), both the wandering souls of the dead and the lived experience of exile in the aftermath of war. As Kwon asserts, for Vietnamese subjects in this afterlife, “their ritual familiarity with the displaced spirits of the dead may be an expression of their own intimacy with a history of mass displacement” (90).

Binh’s gift in The Book of Salt, then, can also be read as one that narrates (and re-gifts) the moments of intimate encounter (with loved ones, dead or alive) that enable the work of belonging. Significantly, Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenemonology:

Orientations, Objects, Others uses the metaphor of a gift to describe moments of queer disorientation, which can be understood as “a bodily feeling of losing one’s place, and an effect of the loss of place” (160). Ahmed writes:

How ironic that “a lifeline” can also be an expression for something that saves us. A lifeline thrown to us is what gives us the capacity to get out of an impossible world or an unlivable life. Such a line would be a different kind of gift: one that is thrown without the expectation of return in the immediacy of life-and-death situation. And yet, we don't know what happens when we reach such a line and let ourselves live by holding on. If we are pulled out, we don't know where the force of the pull might take us. We don't know what it means to follow the gift of the unexpected line that gives us the chance for a new direction and even a chance to live again. (18)

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The lifeline is that which saves the disorientated body when it refuses to turn to face the hail of compulsory heterosexuality or whiteness. It is what enables the queer and/or racialized body to turn towards other oblique lines of orientation, for Ahmed insists, “having not turned around, who knows where we might turn” (107). Like in the parable of the Vietnamese basket weaver who sets out at sea supposedly in search of a new land where the cuttings of his family’s water hyacinths will finally grow (Truong, Book 56-57), Binh takes with him into exile the gift of his mother’s red pouch filled with “gold leaf, one sunlit layer on top of another” (192), a lifeline resonating with his mother’s imperative “‘Don’t look back’” (229). The memory of his mother’s unconditional love enables Binh’s psychic survival in the diaspora:

“From the morning of my birth to the night of my death, I will never have to want, to question, to solicit your affection. That is the gift that you [Má] have given to me”

(249).

Ahmed explains that although it takes time, the “work of inhabitance does ultimately take place. It is a process of becoming intimate with where one is: an intimacy that feels like inhabiting a secret room that is concealed from the view of others” (Queer 11). In The Book of Salt, such intimacy constitutes a lifeline that can pull Binh out, at least momentarily, of the economy of use-value that has structured so many of his relationships under colonialism and capitalism. The economic language of “risk” (195) and “profit” (52), “barter and trade” (62, 150), “commerce”

(62) and “even exchange” (83, 88, 212) defines Binh’s interactions with Bleriot, the

Old Man, Sweet Sunday Man, Toklas, and Stein, but, with Bao, his Vietnamese lover

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at sea, Binh shares a language that refuses this logic and opens up new meanings of partnership and solidarity: “The First Officer heard in our Southern market banter the unfamiliar language of a lower class of whores. This is all to say that Bao and I had built a safe house, and we were its only inhabitants . . . As long as we were together, we had shelter” (25). Whereas Binh is never allowed to forget the conditions of his Mesdames’ beneficent gift of “shelter” (149) and is viscerally aware of the risks he assumes in stealing ‘The Book of Salt’ for Sweet Sunday Man, Binh’s relationship with Bao operates according to a different logic of the gift, one that approaches Derrida’s theory that “the genuine gift must reside outside of the oppositional demands of giving and taking, and beyond mere self-interest or calculative reasoning” (Reynolds). Although Derrida argues in Given Time:

Counterfeit Money that a pure gift is generally an impossibility, that the recognition of the gift’s status as such by both the sender and recipient would instantly instate a cycle of restitution and repayment “that would annul the gift in the ritual circle of debt” (23), it is generally thought by Derrida scholars that “he does not intend simply to vacillate in hyperbolic and self-referential paradoxes,” but, in using deconstruction, seeks “genuine giving” (Reynolds). Truong’s deconstruction of the gift-theft binary in The Book of Salt also seeks to arrive at a genuine model of solidarity and gifting.

In discovering that Bao has stolen Binh’s mother’s red pouch and has departed for a ship bound for America, Binh expresses only regret that Bao had not taken more: “if he had only asked, I would have given this man of my own free will

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my mother’s gold, my father’s skin, my brother’s hands, and all the bones that float loose in this body of mine now that he has gone” (242). In the end, we find out that

Bao took the red pouch in order to return it to Binh’s mother in Viet Nam. A genuine act of kindness and sacrifice that demands no repayment, Bao’s return to Viet Nam is an undertaking that Binh still cannot, even eleven years later, bring himself to do.

The intimacy shared between Bao and Binh at sea becomes a kind of lifeline indeed since Binh admits that when he first “boarded the Niobe [he] had no intention of reaching the shore” (250). He had “wanted to slip into [the deepest water] and allow the moon’s reflection to swallow him whole” (250). Binh’s time at sea with Bao illustrates Ahmed’s point about queer phenomenology that, in response to the

“straightening devices” of whiteness and compulsory heterosexuality (Queer 107),

“the body might be reoriented if the hand that reaches out finds something to steady an action” (157).

If the search for home in The Book of Salt entails an exploration of alternative lifelines that resist both “the fantasy of return to an origin” (Cvetkovich, Archive 122) and “assimilation to the dominant narratives of integration, development, and identification” (Chuh 139), then Truong demonstrates how this work of inhabitance is inextricably bound up with longing and desire. Ahmed explains that “in landscape architecture they use the term ‘desire lines’ to describe unofficial paths, those marks left on the ground that show everyday comings and goings, where people deviate from the paths they are supposed to follow” (Queer 20). In The Book of Salt, this path that Binh is supposed to follow is one that would lead him back to Viet Nam in order

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to fulfill his filial duty. Although Truong constructs a narrative in which, as Benfey argues, “two homecomings are imminent,” through the introduction of the mysterious figure of the “man on the bridge,” Truong hints that Binh's return to Viet

Nam may not be as imminent as the reader is initially led to believe. Eng has read

Binh’s encounter with the man on the bridge, who is coded as the historical figure

Ho Chi Minh in the year 1927, as one “‘lost’ to time, their desire and brief affair untranslatable ‘in between’ moments of laughter and moaning, movements of shoulders, hips, and lips” (“End(s)” 1482-1483). This irruption of queer desire, according to Eng, functions as Truong’s staging of “an alternative historical time and space discontinuous with the sanctioned historical development, conventional historical narratives, and authorized representations” (1484). The intimacy between

Binh and the future Ho Chi Minh also functions to link the Paris axis of colonialism in

Indochina to American imperialism in that region. Binh narrates: “Time, in deference to its reflection, to the spiraling sadness that accompanies its consideration, had stopped, taken a breath, and was slowly beginning its journey again, while we stood side by side, two men on a bridge that connected us neither here nor there” (Truong,

Book 92). In a symbolic moment of Vietnamese diasporic solidarity, Binh and Ho Chi

Minh meet on a bridge that signifies a pause in between overlapping, but also mirroring, histories of French colonialism and American imperialism in Viet Nam. In this scene on the bridge, Binh looks forward to the future of the War in Viet Nam and

Ho Chi Minh looks back to the past of French colonialism. As this passage encapsulates, Binh's story not only tells of the structural, epistemic, ontological, and

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symbolic violence done unto him, but also of the connections, secrets, and memories that Binh develops in opposition to this violence. “What keeps you here?” (85, 93,

261) is the question posed to Binh by the man on the bridge. In the context of Binh’s story, this question asks not only what keeps Binh in Paris, but also what enables his psychic survival in the diaspora. In the end, the man on the bridge becomes a crucial lifeline for Binh: “The man on the bridge was a memory, he was a story, he was a gift.

Paris gave him to me. And in Paris I will stay, I decided. Only in this city, I thought, will I see him again. For a traveler, it is sometimes necessary to make the world small on purpose. It is the only way to stop migrating and find a new home” (258).

The Book of Salt suggests that it is the memory of intimacy honoured and respected—and the future promise this memory inspires—that can help us repair our broken pasts, that can help us, in Truong’s words, “put down our tender roots and stay” (Bitter 282). Thus, while history’s pen might tell the story of an illiterate, untrustworthy, and inscrutable Vietnamese cook who stole from his employers' cabinet, The Book of Salt reminds us that, as Binh aptly remarks, “A gift or a theft depends on who is holding the pen” (215).

Such a statement is not an affirmation of relativism, but rather, as the novel’s rich exploration of intersectionality demonstrates, a reflection of an ethical awareness that there are no such things as pure ideologies or revolutions, pure victims or victimizers. As Viet Thanh Nguyen writes, “the problem of damage is that it warps intimate life, rendering impossible any attempt to separate individual, personal failure from its historical causes. Art’s enduring emotional power and claim

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to legitimacy in representing injustice can only be nailed down by its truthfulness about the harm we inflict upon each other in everyday scenes of living” (“Speak” 11).

Truong’s novel tells the story of such harm, but also of the intimate gifts that we can bestow upon each other in the attempt to heal our collective pasts. Whereas Chapter

1 of this dissertation argued for the important contributions that non-Cambodian authors such as Echlin and Thien make to the issue of justice for Cambodians, this chapter has explored the way in which cross-cultural and cross-racial autobiographical collaborations are hamstrung by the power dynamics between

“collectors” and “informants.” Just as The Book of Salt invites us to consider how these categories are never pure and how a subject can simultaneously inhabit both categories, this dissertation has also sought to demonstrate how white writers such as Kim Echlin can also participate in the intimate gift economy (rather than the colonial one) of narrated memory.

Chapter Three ~ Forgetting Loss: Decentering Southeast Asia, Postmemory, and the Ethics of Representing Trauma

In my previous chapter I explored the concept of gifting memory as a significant part of the intimate politics of reconciliation; in this chapter I explore a contrasting, although not contradictory, perspective by arguing for a turn to forgetting. Theories of melancholia have been ascendant in the fields of gender, queer, postcolonial, and critical race studies in the past two decades; however, scholars of this topic have tended to keep coming back to the same problem: if subjects of racial melancholia refuse to forget, what happens in politics and what

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happens to them emotionally? These two effects do not always map onto each other in the same way. Critics in the field of affect studies have done an exceptional job of thinking through all the ways in which continuous grief can be mobilized for creative, political, social, and ethical projects and ends, but they have only hinted at the psychic harm that this process can incur. Perhaps in their concerted effort to move the discussion of melancholia beyond its associations with narcissism, pathology, and the psychic domain in general, they have gone too far in one direction. What is the effect on traumatized subjects who turn, or who are turned, back to look at their trauma? How can we envision a political project that takes better ethical care of those who bear the burden of remembering? Going a step further, I ask: is there a space left for forgetting in our endeavours to develop an intimate politics of reconciliation?

This chapter engages this question through a reading of Madeleine Thien's novel Certainty, a novel that seems to pose most urgently questions that have to do with the ambivalent value of continually returning to and revisiting a traumatic past.

In its exploration of how reengaging the past is inflected differently for different generations living in the aftermath of World War II, Certainty can be read in the context of what Marianne Hirsch has described as “the ethics and aesthetics of remembrance in the aftermath of catastrophe” (“Generation” 104). Drawing on

Heather Love's concept of the “backward turn” and Hirsch's concept of

“postmemory,” I argue that the impetus to keep certain wounds open and alive in the public sphere—to keep our gazes focused on a difficult past in order to combat

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historical erasure—must be tempered by a consideration of the psychic and material costs of such acts. Thien's novel calls attention to these costs through an emphasis on the theme of return to trauma and on the necessity, sometimes, of forgetting.

The Cost of Looking Back

In attempting to restore a productive value to forgetting in relation to critical discourses of melancholia, let me first contextualize why remembering has been so important for scholars of critical race and queer studies.65 In their influential introduction to their edited book Loss: the Politics of Mourning, David Eng and David

Kazanjian focus on melancholia as a basis for examining “both individual and collective encounters with twentieth-century historical traumas and legacies of . . . revolution, war, genocide, slavery, decolonization, exile, migration, reunification, globalization, and AIDS” (2). Eng and Kazanjian note that although Freud initially drew a distinction between mourning—“a psychic process in which libido is withdrawn from a lost object”—and melancholia—“an inability to resolve grief and ambivalence precipitated by the loss of the loved object, place, or ideal”—he later blurred the distinction between these two states (3). Taking this ambivalence in

Freud's theory as a point of departure, Eng and Kazanjian suggest that “a better understanding of melancholic attachments to loss might depathologize those attachments, making visible not only their social bases but also their creative, unpredictable, political aspects” (3). The melancholic thus signifies an agential

65 In addition to the scholarship that will be outlined below, see also the influential work on melancholia by Crimp, Flately, Gilroy, Munoz, Nichanian, and Mishra.

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subject position because she does not simply engage in “a 'grasping' and 'holding' on to a fixed notion of the past but rather a continuous engagement with loss and its remains” (4). Eng and Kazanjian go so far as to suggest that melancholia is constitutive to the subject formation of marginalized groups when they assert that

“it is the ego's melancholic attachments to loss that might be said to produce not only psychic life and subjectivity but also the domain of remains” (4). Melancholia, in

Eng and Kazanjian's view, then, opens up a realm of signification that can transform catastrophic loss into psychic and material practices that are “productive for history and for politics” (5).

The potential usefulness of affect in racial politics is also the focus of Anne

Anlin Cheng's influential book The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, which opens with two guiding questions: “How does an individual go from being a subject of grief to being a subject of grievance? What political and psychical gains or losses transpire in the process?” (3). In other words, Cheng asks the profoundly important question of how affects—specifically, melancholia felt as a result of racism—can be mobilized to serve political and social justice for racialized subjects in the United States. She turns to the famous Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Board of Education as a case study of how the decision was the first instance in

United States history of “the expansion in the notion of justice to accommodate the

'intangible' effects of racism” (4). While Cheng uses Brown v. Board as an example of the potential link between racial grief and social grievance, she is also quick to point out the difficulty of talking about the “'melancholia' of racialized peoples, especially

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since it seems to reinscribe a whole history of affliction or run the risk of naturalizing that pain” (14). Remembering and speaking about the psychical damage caused by racism can quickly become naturalized as an inherent disability on the part of the speaker (5). A liberating concept in some contexts, racial grief can become a “racist weapon” in other contexts (5). Yet, as Cheng acknowledges, “it is surely equally harmful not to talk about this history of sorrow” (14). Cheng does not prescribe a way out of this dilemma, but argues that an approach to literature through a paradigm of melancholia can at least provide us insight into the components of racialization—“the institutional process of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others” (10).

According to David Eng and Shinhee Han in their article “A Dialogue on Racial

Melancholia,” it is this hegemonic ideal of whiteness from which Asian Americans are continually estranged since a social structure is in place in America that ensures they remain in a state of “suspended assimilation” (345). Adopting a psychoanalytic approach to studying depression among Asian American youth, Eng and Han bring the question of race to bear upon Freud's psychoanalytic theory of grief in

“Mourning and Melancholia.” Challenging Freud's association of melancholia with a pathological condition that “emerges from the disturbance of a one-person psychology,” Eng and Han emphasize the social basis of melancholic feelings (345).

While the mental health issues of Asian American students have been for the most part individualized and attributed to essential cultural difference, Eng and Han

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argue instead that these issues may be traced back to structural forms of racism and exploitation that are ongoing and linked to a long history of racist institutionalized exclusions, from Japanese internment to Chinese exclusion (347). The melancholic refusal to “get over” this history thus signifies an agential subject position rather than a pathological one since, as Eng and Han explain, “[d]iscourses of American exceptionalism and democratic myths of liberty, individualism, and inclusion force a misremembering of these exclusions, an enforced psychic amnesia that can return only as a type of repetitive national haunting” (347). Collective remembering, then, functions as an important antidotal force against racial melancholia—the “psychic splitting and national dis-ease” of Asian Americans engendered through experiences of immigration, assimilation, and racial formation (349).

Judith Butler in her book Precarious Life similarly asks: what can be gained from “grieving, from tarrying with grief, from remaining exposed to its unbearability and not endeavouring to seek a resolution for grief through violence?” (30) Whereas

Eng and Kazanjian are primarily concerned with how melancholic formations are creative, cultural responses to loss that present challenges to cultural dominants,

Butler is more specifically concerned with the link between grieving and ethical responsibility for an Other, or put another way, the link between not grieving and state-sanctioned violence against an Other. Like the other theorists of melancholia discussed so far, Butler is interested in how the “narcissistic preoccupation of melancholia” can be recast into the realm of the political, “into a consideration of the vulnerability of others” (30). Using the example of the outpouring of public

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mourning in the aftermath of 9/11 and the United States government's call to replace grief with military action, Butler asks, “[c]ould the experience of a dislocation of First World safety not [instead] condition the insight into the radically inequitable ways that corporeal vulnerability is distributed globally?” (30)

Vulnerability, Butler argues, is a precondition for life since “it precedes the formation of 'I'” (31); in grieving, we recognize the precarious condition of others, and it is this recognition of fundamental dependency and collective responsibility that can furnish “a sense of political community of a complex political order” (22).

If Butler is concerned with how melancholia can furnish new political collectivities that dismantle the dominant logics of United States empire, then Sara

Ahmed in the Promise of Happiness is interested in how melancholia can be thought of as an affect that undermines the logics of state multiculturalism in the UK “in which empire is remembered as a history of happiness” (123). Rethinking Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia from a phenomenological perspective, Ahmed

“consider[s] what it means to recognize loss when the loss does not take the form of the loss of someone,” but rather the form of the loss of an abstract ideal projected by the state (139). In other words, “rather than assuming others are melancholic because they have failed to let go of an object that has been lost, [Ahmed] want[s] to consider melancholia as a way of reading or diagnosing others as having ‘lost something,’ and as failing to let go of what has been lost” (141). Ahmed is thus hesitant to ascribe an ontological priority to the condition of melancholia, preferring instead to conceive of it in the context of migration as a condition of refusing an

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orientation towards “happy multiculturalism” (122). “The figure of the melancholic migrant,” Ahmed explains, “appears as the one who refuses to participate in the national game,” the “migrant who won’t let go of racism as a script that explains suffering” (143). Melancholic migrants continually bring up a history of racism and injury, thus impeding, in the eyes of the state, their own happiness and integration as well as that of their children: “their love becomes a failure to get over loss, which keeps them facing the wrong way. The melancholics are thus the ones who must be redirected, or turned around” (141). In contrast to theories of melancholia I have outlined above, Ahmed does not locate a productive potential in melancholia so much as she does in a phenomenological critique of how melancholia is mobilized in discourses of empire and multiculturalism.

In her book Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather

Love reveals the similar political stakes of recuperating memory for queer subjects who have had their histories and identities under erasure. Love argues that “we need to pursue a fuller engagement with negative affects and with the intransigent difficulties of making feeling the basis for politics. Such an approach means engaging with affects that have not traditionally been thought of as political and also dealing with the disjunction between affective [sic] and the social” (14). What distinguishes

Love from other theorists of melancholia is not her goal to recuperate negative affect as a politically productive tool, but her nuanced consideration of the challenges that this approach imposes upon “groups constituted by historical injury” (1). As Love observes, “it is much easier to distinguish between productive and paralyzing

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melancholia on paper than it is in psychic life” (150); she is therefore interested in how a paradigm of melancholia can challenge a “progressivist view of history” while it also takes into account the complexities of traumatized psychic life (151).

To illustrate her concept of the “backward turn,” Love invokes a number of classical figures who turn to the past: “Lot's wife turning to look at the destruction of

Sodom and Gomorrah; Orpheus turning back toward Eurydice at the gates of the underworld; Odysseus looking back at the Sirens as his boat pulls away; Walter

Benjamin's angel of history turning away from the future to face the ruined landscape of the past” (5). Love seems to position these figures along a spectrum of sorts—one that recognizes the differential costs paid in the act of turning back: Lot's wife is destroyed as she turns to a pillar of salt; Orpheus saves himself, but loses

Eurydice; Odysseus and the angel of history continue to move forward, but the former is bound to the mast and the latter has the wind tearing at this wings. In other words, none of the figures escapes the engagement with the past unscathed, and some suffer complete annihilation. Yet Love reminds us that “an absolute refusal to linger in the past may entail other kinds of losses” (10). In the end, Love asserts that “as long as homophobia continues to centrally structure queer life, we cannot afford to turn away from the past; instead, we have to risk the turn backward, even if it means opening ourselves to social and psychic realities we would rather forget”

(29). The wider goals of the movement supersede the risk to the individual, who cannot afford to forget but who will pay a price for not forgetting.

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In their introduction to the critical collection Between Hope and Despair: the

Pedagogical Encounter of Historical Remembrance, Roger I. Simon, Sharon

Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert also insist on the strategic value of remembrance, explaining that “the remembrance of mass violence has sustained the demand for institutionalized practices of justice, reparation, and reconciliation, through not only memorial recognition but also legal prosecution, institutional apology, and state- funded compensation” (3-4). The shift in terminology from “melancholia” to

“remembrance” should be noted here. These are related states of being, but they are not identical since the shift in terms implies different levels of agency on the part of the melancholic—the person who has introjected the lost object—and the rememberer—the person who is arguably less paralyzed by grief. According to

Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert, “remembrance as strategic practice” lies in “the anticipation of a reconciled future in which one hopes that justice and harmonious social relations might be secured” (4). Acknowledging that calls to “never forget” provide no guarantee of this reconciled future, Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert propose the notion of “remembrance as a difficult return”—remembrance in which

“the memorial impulse to turn and to return traumatic history is an assignment, not simply a matter of choice” (4). In other words, remembering is a painful process that intrudes upon the traumatized psyche as “ ‘unworked-through past,’ a past that continues to pose difficult questions of what it means to live in the shadows of mass violence” (4). That there may not be a choice in this process does not preclude the reality of psychic harm that can be caused through the act of remembrance, for

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Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert note that “remembrance as difficult return also risks .

. . overprivileging such a continuity [between the living and the dead] through practices of identification that threaten to collapse differences across space/time and through performances of surrogacy that may leave the living in the breach of melancholia” (5). “Recognizing the costs of such risks,” they “posit the need for remembrance/pedagogy that introduces discontinuity as necessary to a learning from the past, a learning that resides in a relationality that respects differences while honouring continuity” (5).

Given that Heather Love and the authors of Between Hope and Despair ultimately endorse a politics of remembering even as they acknowledge the cost, I am prompted to ask again: is there a space for forgetting within the fight for social grievance? How can we move forward in this fight at the same time that we allow ourselves, and others, to turn our backs on past events that remain too painful to look at? Might it be that some subjects are not yet ready to look back while others are ready to stop looking? I am not convinced that traumatized subjects should have to risk the turn backward at the cost of losing others and themselves to, as Love puts it, the siren song of the past. Surely, giving oneself over in this way cannot but weaken the collective fight. I am interested in theorizing the value of forgetting, of turning away from a traumatic past in a way that is not at odds with the project of becoming subjects of grievance.

I am cognizant, however, that such an argument raises delicate problems when we are talking about the pasts of marginalized groups. To speak of forgetting

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these pasts in order to move forward immediately triggers alarm bells of reactionary, conservative discourse. Whereas alternative modes of remembering and remembrance are often regarded as subversive cultural forms, forgetting is, for the most part, seen as complicit with hegemonic forms of power. For instance, Gary

Kinsman, writing about queer liberation movements in Canada, argues that in “much of the Left and within gay/lesbian communities our rich queer histories of struggle have been forgotten creating a kind of social and historical amnesia” (par. 1). Butler reminds us, with respect to the state’s response to national trauma, that violent responses to injury can be made in the name of ending grief (Precarious). Forgetting carries a particularly negative moral connotation with respect to the institutional memorialization of past atrocities, for, as Jean Baudrillard puts it, “forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself” (23); writing about second- generation Holocaust witnessing, Rachel Baum cites Elie Wiesel’s novel The

Forgotten, which opens with the main character’s statement “to forget is to abandon, to forget is to repudiate” (91). In the realm of gender and racial politics, Wendy

Brown suggests that “the counsel of forgetting . . . seems inappropriate if not cruel” for marginalized subjects who have yet to have their pasts recognized (74), and

Sarah Ahmed argues that “forgetting would be a repetition of the violence or injury.

To forget would be to repeat the forgetting that is already implicated in the fetishisation of the wound” (33). Ahmed writes that “[i]n order to break the seal of the past, in order to move away from attachments that are hurtful, we must first bring them into the realm of political action. Bringing pain into politics requires we

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give up the fetish of the wound through different kinds of remembrance. The past is living rather than dead; the past lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present” (33). For the past several decades, then, we can see that forgetting has been seen, at best, as a kind of moral failure and as an impediment to social change, and, at worst, as a tool of domination; however, more recently, scholars from a number of disciplines such as social psychology, technology studies, anthropology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis have begun to be interested in theorizing the productive potential of forgetting.

The Value of Forgetting

In his article “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Paul Connerton adopts a socio- historical approach to the concept of forgetting and seeks to challenge the commonly-held view “that remembering and commemorating is usually a virtue and that forgetting is necessarily a failing” (59). Connerton argues that while forgetting can be complicit with regimes of silence and oppression, it can also be a necessary adaptive mechanism to safeguard against “too much cognitive dissonance” (63).

Forgetting does not always bear the same relationship to power although it tends to be regarded as a “unitary phenomenon” (59). As his title suggests, Connerton asserts that we can distinguish at least seven types of forgetting, some of which can actually be active and reconstructive in nature. In his discussion of type 3,

“forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity,” Connerton implicitly assigns a productive value to forgetting:

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The emphasis here is not so much on the loss entailed in being unable to retain certain things as rather on the gain that accrues to those who know how to discard memories that serve no practicable purpose in the management of one’s current identity and ongoing purposes. Forgetting then becomes part of the process by which newly shared memories are constructed because a new set of memories are frequently accompanied by a set of tacitly shared silences. (63)

Connerton's focus on the “gain that accrues” through the act of forgetting destabilizes the conventional binary association of remembering with gain and forgetting with loss. Shared silences that enable forgetting are not always indications of failure, but can be a way of taking agency as well. Forgetting can be a way of negotiating identity by letting go of fossilized memories that have inhibited the formation of new relational ties. In some ways, this view of forgetting resembles the process of unlearning.

In his book delete: the Virture of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-

Schonberger situates his discussion of forgetting in the context of the ubiquity of digital recording in our present cultural climate. He argues that these tools and practices have unsettled the historical balance between forgetting as the default position and remembering as the costly, selective one. What is at stake in this cultural shift, according to Mayer-Schonberger, is both power and time since the heightened accessibility, durability, and comprehensiveness of recording technologies go “beyond the confines of shifts in information power, and to the heart of our ability as humans to act in time” (117). To suggest how the demise of forgetting can undermine human reasoning, Mayer-Schonberger alludes to Jorge

Luis Borges's short story “Funes, the Memorius,” in which the title character has a

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riding accident and loses his ability to forget. Funes' new capacity to remember everything enables him to retain a massive number of classic works in literature, but he is unable to see beyond the words. Thus, “[p]erfect remembering for Borges threatens to afflict its victim with a never-receding cacophony of information from which no clear abstract thought emerges, that thus imprisons those afflicted” (117).

The surfeit of information about the past engendered by digital recording alters the reconstructive dimension of remembering because “as the past we remember is constantly (if ever so slightly) changing and evolving, the past captured in digital memory is constant, frozen in time” (106). Mayer-Schonberger is ultimately concerned that, faced with too much of the past, people may gravitate to the other extreme and seek to live in an eternal present. Comprehensive digital remembering, without any ethical checks, can deny “humans the chance to evolve, develop, and learn, leaving us helplessly oscillating between two equally troubling options: a permanent past and an ignorant present” (127).66

In the context of the proliferation of memorial museums and archives that seek to remember past atrocities, critic Moris Farhi also argues that forgetting should be seen as a kind of virtue. The title of Farhi's article, “Courage to Forget,” functions in direct reference to The Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Holocaust exhibition in Washington DC entitled The Courage to Remember. Significantly, Farhi begins by recounting his own narrative of return to memorial sites such as this one. He writes,

66 A recent editorial in The Guardian entitled “We have no right to be forgotten online” by Tessa Mayes reiterates many of Mayer-Schonberger’s points in the context of the European Union’s recent announcement of its intention to legislate for the right to be forgotten online.

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“In none of my visits did my courage to face what had happened to members of my family give me the strength to brave the world. Instead, I was gripped by despair. I felt the loss of my resolve to do everything within my abilities to prevent such atrocities happening again. In fact, I felt murderous – and righteous for feeling murderous” (23). Rather than experiencing a sense of redemption or repair, Farhi is overcome by paralyzing despair when he visits these sites. He takes particular issue with the “never again” justification of memorial museums that has fostered a collective mania for spectacularizing atrocities, for he writes:

On the laudable pretext that we must never allow such atrocities to happen again, we had elevated them to an immaculate form of suffering. We had, in effect, sanctified them . . . we have created an eleventh commandment: thou shalt remember your tortures and your torturers forever! And, for good measure, we have asserted that the observance of this commandment, the remembrance of a tragic past as a prescribed devotion, is an extraordinary act, an act of courage, no less . . . Then an antithetical idea invaded my mind. If, as the Holocaust Museum curators believe, voluntary acts of anamnesis require courage, then, surely, voluntary acts of forgetness would require even greater courage. (24)

Farhi employs the archaic word “forgetness” (instead of forgetting) due to its etymological link to the word “amnesty” (24), highlighting the deliberateness of the act and its ties to honest reconciliation. The notion of forgetness, then, places the survivors of atrocity at the foreground of the debate about institutional memorialization and recognizes that the will to forget can also signify the repudiation of “discrimination, marginalization, destitution, famine, tyranny, ethnic cleansing, genocide” (27).

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Kimberly Theidon, in her social anthropological work on the micro-politics of reconciliation in Peru, similarly stresses the need to consider how “forgetfulness is much more than a strategy of domination wielded by the powerful over the powerless, as some would have us think” (“Intimate” 219). Following Elizabeth

Jelin’s suggestion that there are types of “forgetting ‘necessary’ to the functioning of the individual subject, of groups, and of communities” (17), Thiedon focuses on how the Peruvian survivors of mass violence in her ethnographic study were most afflicted by what they called Llakis—“the weight of the past.” Suffering from “painful thoughts or memories that reach the heart where they are charged with affect”

(218), “the villagers emphasize[d] their desire to forget” and even expressed a desire for pills that could help make them forget (219). Theidon thus concludes that

“in contrast to the logic that drives truth commissions and certain forms of psychodynamic therapy—a logic of more memory=more truth=more healing=more reconciliation—we need to recognize the role of ‘positive forgetfulness’ that may liberate both individuals and groups from the unbearable weight of the past” (220).

The most influential philosophical treatment of forgetting is arguably

Friedrich Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse of History. In this famous polemic, Nietzsche links forgetting to the notion of action, arguing for the necessity of forgetting under the debilitating burden of memory imposed by historicism. To develop his critique of antiquarian historical writing, Nietzsche describes the subject who learns how to resist this oppressive history as one who cultivates “the power of forgetting” or “the capacity of feeling 'unhistorically' ” (6). He writes:

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the man without any power to forget . . . is condemned to see "becoming" everywhere. Such a man no longer believes in himself or his own existence; he sees everything fly past in an eternal succession and loses himself in the stream of becoming. At last, like the logical disciple of Heraclitus, he will hardly dare to raise his finger. Forgetfulness is a property of all action, just as not only light but darkness is bound up with the life of every organism. (6-7)

For Nietzsche, an excess of historical consciousness causes humans to become consumed with a spectacle of the past; they are unable to leave the past behind, even momentarily, in order to commit to action. In other words, those dominated by history see themselves as caught in an inevitable stream (of historical flow) and so action becomes unnecessary or redundant. Emphasizing the affective and temporal dimensions of forgetting, Nietzsche asks the reader to consider that “the unhistorical and the historical are equally necessary to the health of an individual, a community, and a system of culture” (8). Forgetting, then, signals not an erasure of history that is permanent and entrenched, but rather an active relationship to history that is rooted in the dynamic conditions of the present. If we think of forgetting as an affective act, then certain conditions may necessitate this act. But conditions, of course, are constantly in flux, and thus so too should be the balance between remembering and forgetting. The obvious question that is prompted by Nietzsche’s formulation here is whether forgetting is a consciously willed act. The common assumption is that forgetting is an unconscious act, that we lose memory of the past without realizing that we have lost memory. The logic would seem that if we remembered losing memory, we would not have forgotten it.

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Psychological studies have demonstrated, however, that in the case of severe trauma, there may actually be a wilful dimension to a form of forgetting akin to what

Morton Beiser, in his study of Southeast Asian refugees in Canada, describes as

“splitting time to handle stress” (124). Beiser explains that while “blocking out the past may be a symptom, or precursor, of psychopathology . . . under certain circumstances, it may be adaptive. It can help victims of brutality survive” (125).

This notion that blocking out memory may protect health is not new, Beiser notes, referring specifically to Freud’s writings about Unterdruckung—a concept later elaborated by others as suppression, a “more or less conscious act of inattention,” or repression, a “motivated forgetting, a mechanism through which unwanted memories are forced into unconscious” (138). As opposed to suppression, repression, or straightforward forgetting, Beiser prefers to use the term “time splitting” to describe how many Southeast Asian refugees in his study dealt “with memory during their escape, their internment in refugee camps, and the initial phases of resettlement” (138). Beiser’s study suggests that refugees under adversity have a greater tendency towards time-splitting than people living under ordinary circumstances; the longer refugees live in a country of permanent asylum, the more likely they will be to reintegrate the past; and avoidance of the past militates against depression, especially in the early years of resettlement (131). In psychological terms, then, Beiser reinforces the notion of the costs of remembering: “Reunification of the past, present, and future does not occur without associated mental health risk.

One reason may be that temporal reintegration, with the accompanying resurfacing

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of the past, may lead to nostalgia, a condition noxious to refugee mental health”

(139). Although Beiser is generally in support of the psychoanalytic wisdom that confronting the past is a necessary part of recovering from trauma, he also notes his uneasiness with unqualified calls to remember, citing how the case of Southeast

Asian refugees “underlines the need to consider context and timing before trying to force a confrontation with the past. When wounds are fresh, it may be too early”

(145).

The work of these scholars helps clarify my discomfort with an unmeasured valorization of remembering in any cultural discourse, whether it be in the context of theories of productive melancholia, digital recording, memorializing past atrocities, or post-conflict environments. This discomfort lies primarily in the prescription to remember at all costs. As the critics summarized above demonstrate, it is not only necessary to allow forgetting at an individual psychic level, but also in a broader ethical perspective. Thus, I suggest that an intimate politics of reconciliation must involve a renewed understanding of forgetting that is, as Simon, Rosenberg, and Eppert argue about remembrance, “rooted in attempts to remain in relation with loss without being subsumed by it” (5). As Heather Love observes about the queer modernist texts under analysis in her study, “they describe what it is like to bear a 'disqualified' identity, which at times can simply mean living with injury—not fixing it” (4). In other words, these texts describe a mode of survival. The survivor is a kind of pre-political rather than apolitical figure, although she or he may never become agentially political in the conventional of sense of becoming actively

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engaged in visible, political resistance. Finding ways to live with one's own trauma or to ethically relate to the trauma of others is not to forget injury, but to allow a critical and lived space for forgetting when remembering threatens to re-injure.

Following Cheng’s assertion that one place “where such complexity gets theorized is literature” (15), I now turn to a discussion of how Madeleine Thien’s novel Certainty reveals the limits of theories of productive melancholia and reflects a turn to forgetting.

Madeleine Thien’s Certainty

Madeleine Thien’s 2006 novel Certainty uses the theme of return to explore the complexities of reencountering a traumatic past, specifically the ways in which displacement, generational transmission, and technologies of recording the past impinge upon the individual and collective memory of trauma. The notion of a perpetual return to the past could be said to structure the novel as a whole since the narrative begins not with a traumatic event that occurs in the past and which gets healed or resolved by the end, but rather with a tragic death in the present that seems to perpetuate a cycle of grief from which the characters cannot escape.

Certainty begins in the aftermath of the sudden death of the novel's protagonist, Gail, and depicts her family and friends struggling to come to terms with their loss. Before her death, Gail was consumed with her work of producing a radio documentary about the coded diary of William Sullivan, a POW during World War II; the work remains unfinished at the time of her death. The narrative then moves backward in time, unfolding layers of traumatic loss in the previous generation that are

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connected in complex ways to Gail's death. In particular, we are invited to see how events that took place during the Japanese occupation of parts of Asia during World

War II continue to haunt the lives of characters who lived through these events—

Matthew Lim (Gail's father), Ani (the mother of Gail's half brother), and William

Sullivan—as well as the lives of their children—Gail, Wideh, and Kathleen. About the significance of this period in Southeast Asian history, Tash Aw comments in an interview that

a lot of the problems that exist in contemporary Southeast Asia, for example, racial tensions, go back directly to that period . . . That period was the start of the end of the colonial experiment. The Second World War, the Japanese invasion, really signaled the end of several hundred years of colonial rule in Southeast Asia. So this hegemony that had existed for so many years, just rapidly, in the space of a couple of years, was destroyed and that left people not really knowing what to do, and to a degree, I think that we’re still sorting out what happened from that time, because that fracturing meant that we then had to explore things ourselves.

Like Thien’s grandparents, 67 Aw’s grandparents lived through the Japanese occupation of Malaysia and then dealt with the pain of this event by not talking about it. Despite his grandparents’ silence, Aw “sensed that there was a huge well of trauma” and he began “to find out through drips and drabs.” 68 The sensibilities that

Aw describes—of the confusion and tension marking the passage to independence, of the trauma and silence of the first generation, and of the curiosity and ontological

67 Thien has discussed how the recurring theme of disappearance in Simple Recipes and Certainty was influenced by the story of her Malaysian grandfather’s disappearance during World War II and by her father’s short-term disappearance when Thien was a teenager. See Mason and Chong. 68 For a social history of this historical trauma, see Paul H. Kratoska’s The Japanese Occupation of Malaya 1941-1945. Reinforcing Aw’s point above, Kratoska notes that “in Malaysia and Singapore those who experienced the occupation have kept its memory alive, but each succeeding generation finds their war stories less compelling, and young people know little about the events of the war years” (1),

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instability of the second generation—is clearly registered in Certainty, which Thien has also explained as being connected to her family history: “Because my parents were children during the Second World War, I was interested in the aftermath, geopolitically, and in people’s lives . . . People didn’t really have the words to describe that time, and they weren’t accustomed to speaking about it” (qtd. in Chong

11). Thien’s novel, then, raises a number of significant questions in relation to the larger goals of this study to explore alternative notions of justice and reconciliation: how do we conceptualize social and psychic reparation in the aftermath of a decentered historical trauma that encompasses an entire region and that offers no official discourse of transitional justice (i.e. War Crimes Tribunals or Truth and

Reconciliation Commissions)? How can we imagine an intimate intergenerational politics of reconciliation? And as I have already posed, how can we conceptualize the role of silence and forgetting in this politics?

In Certainty, the character Matthew Lim embodies the figure of the melancholic, undertaking two return trips to the site of trauma (Sandakan, North

Borneo—later Malaysia). As a result of witnessing the murder of his father during the Japanese occupation of Sandakan during World War II, Matthew suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder akin to what Cathy Caruth describes as “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or set of events, which takes the form of repeated hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviours stemming from the event” (4). From the outset of the novel, Matthew's returns are associated with a desire for a cure: “In the decades that followed [the war], [Matthew] returned only

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twice, both times thinking that he could find a reason, a person who could bind him together, contain his memories, finally” (47). This person is Ani, Matthew's childhood friend and first love, with whom he reconnects on his first trip to

Sandakan. They are reunited only to be torn apart again by the community's memory of Matthew's dead father's actions as a war collaborator. Fearing for the future of her unborn child who would bear the Lim family legacy, Ani ends the relationship with Matthew and keeps her pregnancy a secret from him. To Matthew, a future with Ani embodies “a life free from uncertainty” (166), a cure to the grief that threatens to overcome him; however, this place contains the wounds of the past, as Ani reminds Matthew: “You should have known that forgetting could not last. Not in this place” (167). It is the refusal to forget on the part of the people in

Sandakan that guarantees the impossibility of Matthew's return. Here, Thien begins to explore the notion of the cost of remembering by demonstrating how the community's memory is the basis for Matthew's exclusion. This attention to the cost of holding on to the past—to not inflicting the guilt of the father on the son—is not a call to “normal mourning” in the Freudian sense, but a recognition that the work of mourning—work that Butler reminds us is rooted in an ethical recognition of the precarity of the other—can in some circumstances necessitate the act of forgetting.

Significantly, Thien uses a parable to suggest the value of forgetting loss.

Shortly after his father's death, Matthew remembers the following story:

Ani says, The boy buried his treasure in a hidden place. In this place, all the trees were silver, and fruit fell from the trees and lined the ground. For months and months, the boy cared for his secret. He nourished the soil and

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watered the dirt. One day, the first leaves appeared. The stems grew strong and the leaves became bountiful. This is the treasure that allows the boy to return to the other side. For when he opens the leaves, pieces of gold fall into his hands. He has been trapped here for many, many years. As many years as it takes for a boy to grow into an old man. (68)

This parable foreshadows Matthew's future in Vancouver in which, “almost sixty years” later, Matthew is still “trying to hold on to his father's voice, the face of his child, the days that marked the end of the war” (47). Like Matthew, who is described as an avid gardener in the novel, the exiled boy in the parable nurtures the seeds of the past for so long that he ultimately becomes a prisoner to the past. While the boy is eventually able to witness the fruits of his labour, these fruits are bittersweet, for he has neglected so much in the interim. The boy has spent all of his years in the exiled land seeking to produce/recover the “treasure that allows [him] to return to the other side” (68), and by the time this treasure is procured, the boy has become an old man. The parable allegorizes Matthew's recognition in old age that “even now, too late, he imagines finding the way out” (47). He has spent his life looking backward to the past and has become like Borges's character Funes, afflicted by the

“surprising curse of remembering” and incapable of seeing beyond the details of the past (Mayer-Schonberger 13).

Thien's novel emphasizes that conditions of structural oppression in the present can also foreclose the possibility of forgetting. While Matthew manages to start a new life by marrying a woman named Clara Leung and then moving to

Vancouver, where he and Clara conceive their only child Gail, it soon becomes apparent to Matthew that forgetting for him cannot last in the new place either:

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“When Matthew came home, exhausted, ill, he said that he wanted to return to

Australia, to Malaysia, that he had underestimated how different this country would be. He had been mistaken, he said, to believe he could start over, leave Sandakan and all that happened there behind” (134). Both the hostility of the adopted country and the pull of the homeland are represented as mutually reinforcing factors that influence Matthew's desire to return. In a novel which strives to demonstrate what characters have in common as they struggle to cope with genealogies of loss,

Matthew's breakdown demonstrates that not all characters bear the cost of these losses equally. The racism, poverty, and everyday struggles that occur in the context of immigration can play a role in causing the traumas of racialized diasporic subjects to resurface in the hostland. Daniel Schacter has explained in his book How the Mind

Forgets and Remembers that remembering is a process of reconstructing the past based on the conditions of the present. As he puts it, “present influences play a much larger role in determining what is remembered than what actually happened in the past” (129). In seeking to account for the disparity between the degree of time- splitting exhibited by Southeast Asian refugees in the early years of resettlement in

Canada, Beiser notes that “the evidence suggests that success, financial security, temporal distance from past events, and, perhaps most all, the security of friends and family produce constructive temporal reintegration” (145). In Certainty, Thien suggests that Matthew's sudden desire to return to the Sandakan is at least partially engendered by feelings of unbelonging in Canada.

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Instead of enabling a process of repair and healing, however, Matthew's return seems to break him further apart. In Sandakan, Matthew experiences an uncanny encounter with the past as he observes a film crew shooting a movie about the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps in Sandakan during World World II. As Mayer-

Schonberger argues, the increasing reliance on digital remembering may disrupt the reconstructive dimension of human memory that filters information based on necessity. In our digital era, the ubiquity of triggers that can recall events the mind has forgotten threatens to undermine human reasoning by “confront[ing] us with too much of our past and thus imped[ing] our ability to decide and act in time”

(119). Watching a scene “repeated many times” in which a POW is shot in the head by a Japanese soldier, Matthew “felt as if a stone at the bottom of his life had rolled loose, as if the contents of his memory could no longer be contained. They spilled into the air around him, vivid and uncontrolled. Why was this happening, he had wondered, when he had tried so hard, given up so much, to leave it behind?” (Thien

284-285). Here, Thien brings together several strands of imagery that she has employed throughout the novel—the glass jar, the road, the seed—to figure

Matthew's retraumatization in witnessing a scene reminiscent of his father's murder. As Cathy Caruth has influentially argued, trauma is a kind of psychic wound that is “unavailable” to the traumatized subject as an event, but is only experienced as a latent return, a compulsive repetition. Furthermore, trauma is not merely a privatized event, for Caruth writes that it “seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that

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cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (4). What happens when traumatized subjects are turned back to look at the story of that wound if they are not yet, or perhaps never will be, ready to tell it themselves? Standing at the site of trauma, Matthew asks himself: “When would the war be over for him? Sometimes, he said, one had to let go of the living just as surely as one grieved the dead. Some things, lost long ago, could not be returned” (285). In Matthew's reflections, Thien illustrates the high psychological cost that can be incurred by subjects who are “triggered” into memory by representations of traumatic histories. As clinical psychologist Elizabeth Fortes has stated in an interview with CBC Radio, these subjects “are nervous; their system becomes flooded with neurobiological information that once again brings them close to the traumatic response.” The effects can even be fatal if trauma is triggered in the wrong environment.

Thien's novel engages this problem by linking Nietzsche's arguments about the value of forgetting to scientific theories of trauma recovery and memory. In a conversation with Ansel about how her radio interviewees sometimes recall memories unexpectedly, Gail states, “It's Nietzsche. The ability to forget is what brings us peace” (85). Gail's insight prompts her partner Ansel to add that “[h]e was on to something in a biochemical way, too. If there's trauma, or a difficult memory, sometimes that severs the links. The memories themselves don't disappear, but you can't find your way back to them, because the glue that connects the different

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streams is somehow dissolved” (85).69 The inability to find one's way back to certain memories, then, is not a failure but rather a preservation mechanism. Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Eric Kandel has recently done groundbreaking work on the neuroscience of memory and has discussed the bioethics of medicalized forgetting in an interview with CBC Radio. Kandel explains that drugs have been developed that can medically prevent “post-traumatic stress disorder, while allowing [trauma patients] the experience and some aspect of the memory, except emotionally reduced.” Kandel does not come down on one side or the other in this debate, insisting that this issue needs to be “discussed, debated, and decided upon,” not within the confines of science, but in the public sphere at large. Thien's novel also emphasizes the importance of opening up this kind of dialogue about remembering and forgetting trauma: “[Matthew] had once gone back to find it, the place between the rows of trees, but what he had tried to keep safe was lost. His childhood, a time before the war. A glass jar that moves from his father’s hand to his, a continuous question that asks, how am I to live now, when all is said and done and grief must finally be set aside” (305). Here, the past shifts from a fixed, static object into a question about survival in the present. As Certainty illustrates, the politics of loss should function not as an either/or prescription to remember or to forget, but

69 Thien is drawing here on recent developments in brain science about how memory is a function of links between neurons in the brain. As Anthony J. Greene explains, “memory is not like a video recording . . . or any of the other common storage devices to which it has been compared. It is much more like a web of connections between people and things. Indeed, recent research has shown that some people who lose their memory also lose their ability to connect things to each other in the mind” (22).

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rather as a mode of interrogation that seeks to maintain a careful, ethical balance in between.

Thien's novel also suggests that the maintenance of this ethical balance can be complicated by the medium through which trauma is represented. The character of Sipke Vermulem is a war photographer who begins his career with an optimistic view of the value of his profession, for he says to Ani: “ 'The picture shows us that this suffering is made by people, and because it is made by us, it is not inevitable.

That was the reason I wanted to be a photographer' ” (246). Sipke's words here recall Judith Butler's argument in her book Frames of War that a photograph can relay affect and institute a mode of acknowledgement that “ 'argues' for the grievability of a life” (98). Haunting images of war, Butler argues, “might motivate its viewers to change their point of view or to assume a new course of action” (68).

Sipke appears to become disillusioned with such a view of photography, however, after taking a photo at the end of the Algerian War that depicted a man with kerosene and a torch walking towards a barred house with a mob behind him (244).

Paralleling in some ways the scene in which Matthew watches helplessly as his father is shot, Sipke is unable to stop the man and the mob from setting fire to the house of a suspected war collaborator, even as Sipke tells them that the entire family is inside. The afterlife of this photograph convinces Sipke that photographs of suffering do not always do the ethical work of haunting and grievability, as Butler herself acknowledges in Frames of War. Sipke says to Ani:

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I can't bear to look at it. I keep asking myself, what happens when the context is lost and only the image remains? People look at that picture now, in magazines and books, and they speculate about it. They don't know what happened before or after. All they see is this one moment, disconnected from the past or the future. It feeds their imagination, but it doesn't give them knowledge. (245-246)

Thien is concerned here with the relationship between the medium of representing trauma and the imagination of the viewer/listener. Without an ethical context, images of war and atrocity can have the effect of desensitizing viewers and can be framed to serve both radical or violent agendas. Sipke's changed perspective on photography reflects Susan Sontag's critique that photographs elicit an ethical pathos in viewers only momentarily, whereas “[n]arratives can make us understand” (83). Just as Butler suggests that Sontag perhaps draws too stark a division between the affective mobilizing potential of narrative versus photography

(69), Thien's treatment of visual images, both photography and film, is neither uniformly condemning nor uncritically celebratory.70 As evidenced by the positive relationship that many characters in the novel have with audio and visual recording devices, technology is presented in Certainty as an important tool of remembering and transmitting the past.

At the same time, however, Thien's novel forces a reflection on the importance of thinking, more than ever, about how, why, and when we reconstruct trauma. Listening to Sipke's account of the iconic photo of the war in Algeria, Ani recalls finding her dead father's body on the airfield in Sandakan during World War

70 See Ty, “Little Daily,” in which she argues that Certainty presents a positive view of the role technology.

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II—a memory which prompts her to ask, “[w]hat good did it do, after all, to remember, to hold onto the past, if the most crucial events in life could not be changed? What good did memory do if one could never make amends?” (247). Ani's words echo Farhi's view that “memory, unless transformed into meaningful states that enable us to develop, will cause great devastation. Memories of trauma, if left to fossilise—or deliberately allowed to fossilise in blind obeisance to tradition—will wreak irreparable harm” (25). Acts of memory, Thien's novel suggests, do not always elicit ethical responsiveness or change; these acts can sometimes make us paralyzingly unfit for action, as Sipke announces: “ 'I would forget that day in

Algeria, if I could' ” (247).

Anchoring the Past, Failing to Save

While characters such as Matthew, Clara, Ani, Sipke, and William Sullivan struggle with memories of a traumatic past that they have experienced first-hand, the second-generation characters in Certainty—Gail, Kathleen, and Wideh—all bear a relationship to their parents' traumatic histories that can be characterized in terms of what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”—“a generational structure of transmission deeply embedded in . . . forms of mediation” (“Generation” 114).71

71 Like Eng and Han's theory of racial melancholia as an “intersubjective psychology . . . that might be addressed and resolved across generations” (“Prospect” 354), Hirsch's theory of postmemory is invested in remembering pasts that have been historically silenced or misremembered. Postmemory, with its emphasis on how the postmemorial generation interweaves and reconstructs both (non)verbal and archival (often photographic) fragments transmitted to them by the previous generation, is a particularly apt framework for the present study since I have adopted a methodological approach that in part applies visual cultural theory (Sontag, Butler) to talk about textual descriptions of images. Hirsch's theory of postmemory lends itself to this kind of methodology because Hirsch herself reaches for verbal (rather than strictly visual) art in her definition of postmemory. In many ways, Hirsch's notion of the second's generation's “imaginative investment,

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Although Hirsch limits her discussion of postmemory to the Jewish Holocaust, she gestures to the relevance of her analysis “to numerous other contexts of traumatic transfer” (108). According to Hirsch, postmemorial fiction “attempt[s] to represent the long-term effects of living in close proximity to the pain, depression, and dissociation of persons who have witnessed and survived massive historical trauma”

(12). Hirsch argues that in displacing and recontextualizing personal and collective images of trauma in their artistic work, the postmemorial generation “has been able to make repetition not an instrument of fixity or paralysis or simple retraumatization (as it often is for survivors of trauma), but a mostly helpful vehicle of working through a traumatic past” (“Surviving” 9). Hirsch tells us that without an imaginative and reconstructive relationship to the past, the repetition of images of trauma have the capacity to “retraumatize, making distant viewers into surrogate victims who, having seen the images so often, have adopted them into their own narratives and memories, and have thus become all the more vulnerable to their effects” (8). Dora Apel reinforces this notion of the vulnerability of the postmemorial generation, whom she describes as having a “compulsion toward forms of reenactment” (3) that often “end in a kind of crisis, a greater sense of traumatic history's elusiveness, but also its pervasiveness and its imminence” (188).

In Certainty, this crisis of postmemory is reflected in the character of Gail, who is constructed as a curious listener deeply affected by the silences in her family

projection and creation” of the past (“Generation” 106) embodies the kind of ethical context that Thien's novel suggests is wanting in the majority of commodified and mass media representations of historical trauma. For more on visual culture and postmemory, see Wasserman.

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life. She grows up knowing that there is a secret in her father's past to which she is not privy—“a secret that has coloured her life, her childhood” (259). Postmemory,

Hirsch explains, describes the second generation's “curiosity and desire, as well as their ambivalences about wanting to own their parents' knowledge” (“Surviving”

11). The narrator recounts that “Matthew would tell [Gail] stories about his childhood before the war, about Sandakan, until he realized that she remembered so much. She wanted to hear everything, to know how the story continued. His words ran dry” (18). Met with her father’s silence and hesitation to disclose details of his past, Gail infers pieces of his story instead from listening to the sounds of her father’s nightmares and the whispers of secret names, from observing the morning- after signs of his insomnia and the waking hours he spends in his armchair, letting his tea go cold (208). Thien’s novel illuminates how we encounter the question of trauma transmission as the perplexity of living, understanding, and writing the broken intimacies of the present. Matthew's past comes to have material effects on the present when the narrator recounts that “in the last few months, [Gail] has felt as if, day by day, she is losing footing. There are fissures, openings, that she no longer knows how to cover over” (259). Throughout Certainty, the trope of vertical movement, both descent and ascent, is central in figuring the structure of the trauma, and in this passage, the metaphor of falling is indicative of Gail’s precarious psychological state in needing answers that can ground or anchor her in the present.

Gail's inherited memories, filled with absences and gaps, cause her to become figuratively 'unhinged' from a stable ground of memory and identity. In many ways,

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then, Thien sets up a dramatic context in which we expect Gail to return to Sandakan to search for these answers in the same way that real life postmemorial subjects such as Daniel Eisenberg, Rea Tajiri, and Saidiya Hartman, and Thien, among many others, have journeyed to sites of trauma from their parents' pasts. 72

In something of a turn of plot, however, Thien has Gail travel to the

Netherlands not only to get what Gail believes is the missing piece of information that will allow her to complete her documentary, but also to meet Sipke Vermulem, who she believes holds the answer to the secret about her father's past. Sipke married Ani sometime after Ani and Matthew separated and later sponsored her and her son Wideh to the Netherlands, where she resided until the end of her life.

Although Gail's journey to the Netherlands is not a re-encounter with a physical site of lived or inherited memory, I suggest that Thien constructs Gail's journey as a kind of return. Scholar David Timothy Duval argues that the negotiation of diasporic identity can involve travel to a place other than one's ancestral homeland, explaining that

the return visit, as a transnational exercise binding multiple ties, need not . . . include the external homeland. As such, we should perhaps be conscious of multiple localities requiring multiple mobilities. Recalling Vertovec's (1999) notion of nodes and hubs in transnational relationships, it can be suggested that while the connection to the 'homeland' is significant, transnational networks need not necessarily include 'homeland' nodes, but rather incorporate global nodes and hubs of other transnational communities. (58)

72 See Chong, in which Thien describes her experience of travelling to East Malaysia for the first time in search of answers about her familial past. See also, Eisenberg, Tajiri, and Hartman.

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In Certainty, the Netherlands functions as such a “global node” in the transnational network of Gail's family because the Dutch colonized the Dutch East Indies, the territory that became Indonesia after World War II. Unbeknownst to Gail when she initially travels there, the Netherlands is the adopted country of her half-brother

Wideh. Like Matthew who returns to Sandakan thinking he could find “a person who could bind him together, contain his memoirs, finally” (Thien 47), Gail goes to the

Netherlands in search of the truth about a name—Ani—that “she held on to . . . as if it were a touchstone, something that could anchor her” (259). It is a temporal return to the past—an attempt to access and excavate knowledge about her father's past and also an act of binding or reconstructing transnational ties. Sipke's home, lined with photographs of Ani and Wideh, actually functions as a kind of uncanny site of recognition for Gail: “This house does not feel like a place of absence, as Gail realizes she has come to expect” (235). Here, Gail has an embodied feeling of encountering a past that she knows but does not know at the same time. Home in the diaspora is not a static, fixed geographical locale—the same place to which one continuously returns—but is a shifting, mobile space of memory that can become home through the act of return. Looking at a photo of Wideh playing a game of marbles, Gail's expression changed “[a]s if a shadow, a darkness, was becoming more than its form, as if something barely glimpsed had now been breathed into life” (261). The line between the past and the present starts to become more visible to Gail; ironically, however, it is Sipke's counsel to allow some things to remain in the past—“to respect what is mysterious, while all the while we seek to unravel it”—that ends up

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providing some measure of clarity for Gail (272). Sipke's meditation encapsulates a dimension of Thien's ethical project: Finding a way to care for the most vulnerable in the present means returning to the past in order to discover provisional, not absolute, truths that can help shape the path forward.

An ethical relation to the traumas and histories of others must entail a concept of contingent knowledge. Sarah Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotions frames the issue of trauma, ethics, and contingency in the following way:

The sociality of pain—the 'contingent attachment' of being with others— requires an ethics, an ethics that begins with your pain, and moves towards you, getting close enough to touch you . . . Insofar as an ethics of pain begins here, with how you come to surface, then the ethical demand is that I must act about which I cannot know, rather than act insofar as I know. I am moved by what does not belong to me. If I acted on her behalf only insofar as I knew how she felt, then, I would act only insofar as I would appropriate her pain as my pain . . . it is the very assumption that we know how the other feels, which would allow us to transform their pain into our sadness. (31)

Ahmed proposes that an ethics of responding to pain involves a mode of attachment to or responsibility for the subject of pain that does not presume to ‘know' the pain in its entirety. This epistemological uncertainty must not foreclose but rather form the basis of action. Thien's invocation of Bertrand Russell reinforces this notion:

“Philosophy, Russell had said, was a means to teach one how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation” (272).

Thien presents the idea that an ethics of representing trauma must entail a respect for silence—an allowance for the details that, in Thien's words, have been purposefully “lost, forgotten, or pushed away” (qtd. in Chong 11). Thien illustrates how Gail, in the production of her radio documentaries, embodies this figure of an

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ethical respondent to trauma in a recollected scene where Gail interviews the mother of a recently drowned teenaged son. During the interview, the woman suddenly becomes angry at Gail for asking questions that the woman perceives to be intrusive, prompting Gail to stop the recorder and to give the cassette tape to the grieving woman: “ 'If only you could understand,' the woman had said, clutching the tape. 'The words that I put in the world can never be taken back' ” (210). Invoking the issue of the ethical implications of interviewing victims of trauma in the media, this scene brings to mind Fortes's claim that although “there is a long tradition of testimony in the survivors of trauma . . . there is a proper environment to speak about the trauma.” Furthermore, Fortes believes that the “media has to have an ethical position to respect these traumatic histories.” Thien illustrates in her novel how this ethical position can involve taking no action at all. Sometimes the psychic costs of remembering cannot be undone. Bringing pain into politics cannot function as a relentless recuperation of affect for the purpose of spectacle or politics. Thien's novel seems to make a particular appeal to the postmemorial generation to understand most intimately when it is important to draw the line.

Allowing this space for forgetting—for some elements of the past to remain in the past—can be difficult since, as Hirsch explains, the postmemorial generation's experience is often “shaped by the child’s confusion and responsibility, by the desire to repair, and by the consciousness that the child’s own existence may well be a form of compensation for unspeakable loss” (“Generation” 12). In Certainty, this “desire to repair” is often figured as a theme of failing to save. Gail explains that “[f]or as long

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as she can remember, she had wanted to save them [her parents]. She imagined her parents turning to her, seeing her finally, and the past would fall away. That is what she had hoped for when she was a child” (212). This imagined “turning to” Gail by

Matthew and Clara is an act of turning away from the past, the trauma, and towards the future; however, it is a turn that Gail believes she has failed to bring about.

Thien's novel is, in fact, replete with characters who believe that they have failed to save someone in the past: Matthew wishes that he could go back in time to prevent the murder of his father (167); Ansel spends night after night studying Gail's medical test results, trying to find “the detail that might have saved her” from an early death

(95); Ani dreams about her mother telling her “to stop searching backwards,” that

Ani “cannot save” them because “the past is done” (172); Clara is told by her father

“that what she believed was false,” that she could not have saved the boy she watched fall to his death from a roof (123); Sipke is plagued by the memory of failing to stop the mob from setting fire to the family of the war collaborator. Thien uses this theme of the failure to save not only to comment on the dangers of becoming fixated on changing the past, but also perhaps to engage in a critique of historiography as being what Heather Love describes as a fantasy of “heroic rescue”

(50).

Engaging with Michel Foucault's writing in which he discusses the myth of

Orpheus and Eurydice, Love argues that Foucault exposes how our desire to recuperate figures from the past often has more to do with our desire to secure an identity in the present than with saving those figures. According to Love, the

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classical myth offers an apt emblem of the work of the historian since Orpheus'

“failed attempt to rescue Eurydice is a sign of the impossibility of the historical project per se: the dead do not come back from beyond the grave, and this fact constitutes the pathos of the historical project” (50). The practice of queer history is doomed to failure, yet not turning back at all, Love insists, would be a betrayal of the dead. In this sense, failing to save the dead is not a failure at all, but rather an acceptance that “[t]aking care of the past without attempting to fix it means living with bad attachments, identifying through loss, allowing ourselves to be haunted”

(43).

In Certainty, William Sullivan, like the figure of Eurydice, appears to Gail as a ghost from the past who is calling out to be saved. When he was a Canadian POW in

Hong Kong during World War II, Sullivan encrypted his diary so that the enemy could not read it, but later he could not remember the encryption code. Gail's friend

Harry Jaarsma explains that “ 'Cryptography is a kind of protection,' ” and he advises the listeners of Gail's radio documentary to “ '[t]think of the Sullivan diary as a message from the past, but one that has been buried beneath many layers' ” (104).

The forgotten code of Sullivan's diary reinforces Thien's recurring Nietzschian theme that forgetting is a survival mechanism of the mind. But Thien also uses the diary as metaphor for the lures of the past that can threaten to consume those in the present, for Jaarsma further explains that, as a cryptographer, “you assume that there is something to be pursued, some meaning to be unravelled. It is exactly the kind of thing that can destroy a person” (105). Thien suggests that the postmemorial

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generation is particularly susceptible to this condition since their inherited memories are already so thoroughly permeated by narrative voids. They are like the obsessive codebreakers of Jaarsma's analogy, the Orpheus of Love's analogy of queer historiography.

In this respect, Thien constructs many parallels between Gail and Kathleen as subjects of postmemory: Kathleen believes that cracking the encryption of the diary will reveal something about the trauma her father endured in the camps— something that will, in turn, explain the years of alcoholism and domestic abuse that he subjected his family to after the war. While Kathleen wanted to believe “in the possibility of a perfect answer to the mystery of her father” (203), Gail “wanted to believe that once the code was broken so much in William Sullivan’s life, in his children’s lives, would come clear, that a line could be drawn from beginning to end and a true narrative emerge” (216). The “true narrative” that Gail seeks is not so much a pure, unbiased history, but rather answers that can explain the broken intimacies of the present. When the “perfect answer” turns out to be Sullivan's log of the mundane, daily rituals of living in the POW camp, rather than a witness account of violence and torture, Thien insists that such intimacies cannot be repaired by simply turning to the past for singular, all-encompassing explanations. Rather, what subjects of grief can hold on to as they look to the future are the everyday truths of how, in Cathy Caruth's words, “we are bound to each other's traumas” (24), for the narrator of Certainty explains: “Gail works with the belief that histories touch . . . So she weaves together interviews, narration, music and sound in the hope that stories

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will not be lost in the chaos of never touching one another, never overlapping in any true way” (210). The last radio piece that Gail finishes before she dies brings her story together with her father’s story, providing insight into Hirsch’s inquiry about how we can best carry the stories of atrocity survivors “forward without appropriating them, without unduly calling attention to ourselves, and without, in turn, having our own stories displaced by them” (“Generation” 105). Rather than reproducing the horror and shock of past atrocities, Gail’s documentary—and

Thien’s novel—lets the truth of the trauma become visible tangentially through the intimate sounds and voices of those puzzling the perplexity of living in the trauma’s aftermath.

Thien takes care, however, not to celebrate the production of the postmemorial project as a redemptive endpoint in a teleology of intergenerational trauma transmission. The most important puzzle that Thien presents in the novel does not have to do with Matthew's or Sullivan's pasts, but with the mystery of Gail's sudden death by illness. Gail's death establishes a kind of circular model of grief in the novel that mirrors melancholia's self-reproducing structure. By the end the question that continues to hang over the text is: what is the meaning of Gail's death?

Or rather, to what kind of metaphorical speculation does Gail's fatal illness lend itself? At one point, Ansel, Gail's partner, who is a doctor of internal medicine, speculates that Gail had an undiagnosed underlying medical condition, possibly inherited, that made her susceptible to pneumonia (95). The suggestion that Gail dies from an invisible inherited illness that suddenly surfaces at a specific point in

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her life invites us to connect Gail's death to Freudian melancholia—specifically the

belated return of the repressed traumatic event. Thien introduces the possibility

that Gail's death is linked to the trauma that has been transmitted to her from her

father.

The notion of a biological effect of transmitted trauma has been studied by

theorists such as Teresa Brennan who argues that the “the emotions or affects of one

person, and the enhancing or depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into

one another” (3). Emphasizing the physiological impact of transmitted affects,

Brennan seeks to challenge the “taken-for-grantedness of the emotionally contained

subject [that] is a residual of Eurocentrism in critical thinking” (2). Although she

does not explicitly draw a parallel, Brennan's theory of the “process whereby one

person's or one group's nervous and hormonal systems are brought into alignment

with another's” (9) bears many similarities to the notion of sympathy or

sympathetic attraction that has its roots in nineteenth-century medical discourses.73

While Brennan actually moves away from the view of a genetically-inherited basis to

73 See Mary Ann Doan, who explains that “the meaning of 'sympathy' in physiology and pathology is, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, 'a relation between two bodily organs or parts (or between two persons) such that disorder, or any condition of the one induces a corresponding condition in the other.' Sympathy connotes a process of contagion within the body, or between bodies, an instantaneous communication and affinity” (67).

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affective conditions, she draws on Jean Laplanche's understanding of the “child as the repository of the unconscious of the parents” (32). Laplanche theorized that the unconscious of the parent could be transmitted to the child, who is especially susceptible to the forceful projections of the parents (33). Brennan explains that her theory differs from Laplanche in that she locates the “transmission of the

'unconscious' of the other within an intersubjective economy of affects and energy, in which transmission occurs as a matter of course” (173). These theories of affective transmission provide insight into the physiological dimension of the postmemorial generation's lifelong proximity to their parents' traumas. As Hirsch has explained, the children of atrocity survivors can inherit the weight of their parents’ traumatic knowledge through nonverbal and unconscious forms of communication since postmemory is “often based on silence rather than speech, on the invisible rather than the visible” (“Surviving” 9). Within this interpretive framework, Gail's illness in Certainty could be read as a physiological manifestation of the affects that have been transmitted to her from her father—affects that not only influence and shape the direction of Gail's life, but that actually physiologically

'imprint' themselves on Gail in a manner that has fatal consequences. Thien's novel prompts us to consider whether the weight of historical trauma can become even more unsupportable for some members of the second generation who want to remember more than their parents did. What is at stake in allowing a space for forgetting is not only the psychic survival of those who have suffered atrocity first-

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hand, but also of those in the postmemorial generation who perhaps feel most acutely that it would be a failure to forget.

Forgetting Loss

In “After Loss, What Then?”, the afterword to Eng and Kazanjian's Loss: The

Politics of Mourning, Judith Butler describes how the losses of genocide, slavery, exile, and colonization can form the basis for a new sense of community—a site that

“turns out to be oddly fecund, paradoxically productive” (468). Butler, however, wants readers “to be clear about what this productivity is,” arguing that “[w]hatever it is, it cannot constitute a rewriting of the past or a redemption that would successfully reconstitute its meaning from and as the present” (468). What is notable in Butler's definition here is not its clarity, but rather its ambiguity. Butler tells us only that productive melancholia is a response to loss that captures the traces of the past while not seeking to rewrite or redeem it. At the end of Butler's essay, this ambiguity extends to the productivity of melancholia itself as she writes:

Many of the essays here refer to the sensuality of melancholia, to its form of pleasure, its mode of becoming, and therefore reject its identification with paralysis. But it probably remains true that it is only because we know its stasis that we can trace its motion, and that we want to. The rituals of mourning are sites of merriment . . . but as [Benjamin's] text effectively shows, it is not always possible to keep the dance alive. (472)

Butler implies that while critics have been intent on recuperating the “sensuality” and “pleasure” of melancholia as a “mode of becoming,” they have perhaps not balanced this approach with a consideration of melancholia's potential to incite

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psychic paralysis. A politics of loss, in Butler's view, requires an acknowledgement that melancholia's mode of becoming and its mode of paralysis operate dialectically.

In many ways, the title of Butler's afterword resonates at the centre of

Madeleine Thien's Certainty. Set in the aftermath of loss that is both private and historical, Thien's novel explores the value of forgetting in an age when the atrocities of recent history have become increasingly commodified and mechanically reproduced. As the survivors and the descendents of the atrocities of the past half- century increasingly revisit their catastrophic pasts, Certainty demands a critical conversation among trauma, diaspora, postcolonial, and globalization studies that not only recognizes the value of remembering for the collective project of redress and reconciliation, but that also takes stock of the relentless call to remember and of the kinds of representations of trauma that are reproduced in the name of remembering. Thien's novel reminds us that melancholia is, at root, a condition of the traumatized individual psyche. The fragility of this psyche—and its vulnerability to retraumatization through discourse and representation—is not something we should forget or strive to move beyond in our efforts to develop an intimate politics of reconciliation.

Conclusion: On Relationality and Justice

We, Khmer Krom, respond that we love Khmer—that’s our dream, to have only one Khmer people. But geographically we have been divided. The Khmer Krom have no voice; we are the Palestinians of Southeast Asia. The indigenous people have no claim to their own identity, their nationhood, their religious rights. ---Bunroeun Thach (qtd. in Chan, Not Just 262)

Throughout two thousand years, Cham conceptions of the world have been deeply shaped by our indigenous traditions, our trade relations, and our cultural adaptations . . . And even today, as the Cham communities around the world have scarce knowledge of one another, this geographical and

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conceptual isolation can obscure not only our mutual struggles, but also the deep historical and cultural continuities between the Cham in Viet Nam, in Cambodia, and in the diaspora. ---Julie Thi Underhill, (“Democratic Kampuchea’s Genocide of the Cham” par. 17)

In 2009, I produced an autobiographical radio documentary in collaboration with CBC Radio-Canada.74 The documentary, entitled “The Lucky One Returns,” focuses on a trip that I took to Cambodia in the winter of 2008 with my mother, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide returning to be reunited with her remaining family members for the first time in over thirty years. 75 As I narrate in the documentary, there were two main items on our trip agenda: a family wedding and a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Documentation Centre of

Cambodia (DC-Cam). The purpose of the latter was to look for archival documentation that would confirm a rumour that had haunted my mother for over thirty years: that her “disappeared” brother had been taken to the infamous S21

Tuol Sleng Prison during the genocide and had been tortured to death.

In my introduction I attempt to outline a systematic and “objective” justification and methodology for my project, but it is undeniable that this dissertation has been deeply influenced by my own subjective ghosts—my family history, my trip to Cambodia in 2008, and my experience of producing the

74 A podcast of the 15-minute radio documentary can be listened to at: http://english.uwaterloo.ca/Y-DangTroeungCBCOutFrontpiece_001.mp3 75 The documentary details how my family escaped from Cambodia in 1979 to a refugee camp in Thailand, where I was born. Coincidentally, the refugee camp—Khao-I-Dang—is the same camp represented in Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats. In the documentary, I also explain how my family was the last of the 60,000 refugees to be admitted into Canada as a part of the Canadian government’s “Indochinese refugee program” of 1979-1980. For this reason, upon arrival in Canada in 1980, my family participated in several press events with Canadian political figures such as Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Immigration Minister Lloyd Axsworthy. As an infant, I became in a sense a “poster child” for state Canadian multiculturalism at the time.

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documentary. Because the documentary registers, I think, so many of the different issues covered in this dissertation—witnessing, disappearance, autobiographical collaboration, intergenerational trauma transmission, the ethics of representing trauma, transitional justice, and the diasporic experiences of Southeast Asian refugees in North America—I had intended to conclude the present study with an

“intimate” self-reflexive meditation on the issues of trauma, justice, ethics, and aesthetics embodied in the documentary. Perhaps I was hoping to emulate Boreth

Ly’s compelling self-reflexive essay “Of Performance and the Persistent Temporality of Trauma: Memory, Art, and Visions” in which he describes how he was unprepared for “the emotional experience evoked by [his] reading and performance” of an essay he wrote about his experience of surviving the Cambodian genocide (110).

In returning to the events of 2008, I also felt the resurfacing of the painful emotions that I had felt throughout the process of producing the documentary.

Whereas Ly, in his essay, manages to movingly and critically reflect on “the violence, the fragmented (or fractured) sensory experience, and the unpredictable and persistent temporality of trauma and memory” in his essay (110), I found myself unable to undertake the kind of analysis of the documentary that would be required to nicely “wrap up” the dissertation. The irony is not lost on me that in a dissertation about the politics of intimacy and justice, I ultimately shirked my intended goal to draw on my own intimate autobiographical experience.

I also regret the failure of my study to fully respond not only to Lily Cho’s call for interventions within diaspora studies that undertake “comparative work

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between multiple sites of Asian migration [and] comparative work between minority communities” (Cho “Asian Canadian” 186), but also to the question Viet

Thanh Nguyen poses about the ethics of minority discourse: “How do we mourn for the dead, the missing, and the lost, including those who are among our enemies, or those for whose absence we bear some responsibility” (“Speak” 12). As I discussed in Chapter 2, Nguyen asserts that Vietnamese American refugee discourse needs to constantly problematize its own claims to visibility on the American landscape by acknowledging how these claims are “shadowed by a ghostly past” in which the

Vietnamese were not just victims but also victimizers (33). To recall Nguyen’s point once again, “what is often forgotten and overlooked are the others who were their neighbours, Cambodians, Laotians, and the various ethnicities of the mountain highlands. The war was waged in their homes as well, something easy to forget with

Viet Nam occupying center stage” (33).

As suggested by the two epigraphs of this conclusion, the Cham and the

Khmer Krom are two examples of such groups in Southeast Asia whose histories of suffering and displacement and whose visions of justice in the present context have been inadequately addressed in public and academic discourse. While I recognize that there are hundreds of different indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in

Southeast Asia, I single out the Cham and the Khmer Krom for discussion in this conclusion because of the distinct and disproportionate suffering that these two

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groups experienced during the Cambodian genocide. 76 A brief overview of the

Cham and Khmer Krom communities in Cambodia and Viet Nam is necessary to provide some context for suggesting that one crucial area for further study of

Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies is to consider articulations of alternative justice and reconciliation in a comparative or relational framework.

The Cham

A distinct ethnic and religious minority in Cambodia and Viet Nam, the Cham arrived in Southeast Asia over two thousand years ago, and through prosperous maritime trade, established the ancient Kingdom of Champa once located in Central

Viet Nam. To escape from incursions into Champa by the Vietnamese, over five thousand Cham refugees fled to Cambodia in the fifteenth century. By this time, many Cham had adopted Islam as their religious faith, but still retained many Cham beliefs and practices (Underhill par. 9). In 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over

Cambodia, the relatively peaceful existence of the Cham came to an end.

As Ysa Osman explains in Oukoubah: Justice for the Cham Muslims under the

Democratic Kampuchea Regime, the extent of suffering experienced during the

Cambodian genocide differed according to ethnicity and religious practice and

“among those who were killed disproportionately by the Khmer Rouge were the

Cham ethnic group” (2). Osman’s research estimates that 400,000-500,000 Cham were killed by the Khmer Rouge, a mortality rate double to triple that of the general

76 In Cambodia, the ethnic minority groups include the Vietnamese, Chinese, Cham, Lao, and Thai. The indigenous people of Cambodia consist of the Khmer Krom and various hill-dweller groups.

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Khmer population (2); Ben Kiernan’s research puts the figure at approximately

90,000 (Pol Pot 461). Just as the Khmer Rouge targeted Buddhism for eradication, they forbade the Cham, by the threat or use of force, to practice their Islamic tradition (462). The Cham were forbidden from sambabyang (prayer), fasting, attending mosques, alms giving, and various religious ceremonies (Osman 3). In addition to a policy of evacuation and dispersal of the Cham, the Khmer Rouge forced the collection of Cham sacred texts such as the Qur-an, the consumption of pork, the cutting of female hair, and uncovering of the head, and the relinquishing of all Cham-style names and language (3-5). According to the legal definition of genocide, Kiernan writes, “there is no doubt that the Democratic Kampuchea regime intended to destroy the Cham Muslim religious group ‘as such’” (Pol Pot 462).

As Julie Thi Underhill writes, it is “particularly troubling and heartbreaking that the Cham who sought refuge in Cambodia during the conquest of their Kingdom were then targeted for extermination hundreds of years later, in such proportions, during the Khmer Rouge” (par. 15). The population of the Cham was decreased drastically during the genocide with approximately only 308,000 Cham people living in Cambodia today; 127,000 in Viet Nam; 15,000 in Laos; and smaller numbers in

Cham diasporas in the United States, Malaysia, Australia, Hainan Island, France, and other countries. Recently, however, the Cham have begun to rebuild their identity and Cham testimonies of genocidal acts committed by the Khmer Rouge have played an important role in transitional justice efforts in Cambodia so far. The

Documentation Centre of Cambodia (DC-Cam) has collected 500 testimonies from

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the Cham, testimonies which will be accessible at a new museum scheduled to open at the site of a Marabak mosque outside Phnom Penh in the near future (Masis par.

5). DC-Cam has also assisted 200 Cham religious leaders in the filing of their complaints to Extraordinary Courts in the Chambers of Cambodia (Underhill par.7).

Like many scholars I have referenced throughout this dissertation, Underhill expresses an ambivalent perspective about the form of justice the ECCC will provide for the Cham; at the same time, she recognizes the importance of the trials: “Even as

I knew that the guilty verdict—once issued—would honor the Cham in Cambodia, I wondered if this form of visibility and recognition would truly heal their memories and losses . . . For those facing such a rupture in the aftermath of genocide, justice may remain elusive, if only because their losses are incommensurable and irreparable” (par. 14). The work of Cham scholars such as Osman and Underhill remind those of us who are studying “alternative” visions of reconciliation in

Cambodia’s era of transitional justice that these alternatives cannot be generalized to all those who live with the wounds of the genocide, particularly if these alternatives are premised on claims about spiritual cosmology. As Underhill points out, the Cham have only recently begun to rebuild their collective identity and their international visibility has so far been confined to the parameters of the transitional justice movement in Cambodia. Because Cham communities around the world today are struggling to overcome “geographical and conceptual isolation,” their stories of trauma and their articulations of justice have yet to be heard (Underhill par. 17).

The Khmer Krom

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Sharing parallels with the modern history of the Cham, the history of the

Khmer Krom is also marked by dispossession and displacement. Today, the Khmer

Krom are regarded as an indigenous ethnic Khmer minority living in Southern Viet

Nam, in an area that Cambodians call Kampuchea Krom. Translated as “Cambodia from below” or Southern Cambodia, Kampuchea Krom is the unofficial Khmer name for the Mekong delta region that measures up to 65,000 square kilometers. The region was historically known as Cochin China and formed a separate French colony until 1949, when the French ceded it illegally to Viet Nam (Thach, Not Just 261).

Along with other indigenous and ethnic minorities in Southeast Asia such as the

Hmong in Laos and the Montagnards in the highlands of Viet Nam, the Khmer Krom fought alongside the United States military during the Viet Nam War (990). As a result, thousands of Khmer Krom, accused of collaboration, were sent to reeducation camps in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon and were subject to drastic assimilation policies (990).

During the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, up to 150,000 Khmer Krom were murdered by the Khmer Rouge (Minahan 996), who singled out the Khmer

Krom in addition to the country’s other minority groups for the most severe punishment, simply because they were not Khmer (Chan, Survivors 23). From 1979 until 1993, when the Vietnamese withdrew from Cambodia, another 20,000 Khmer

Krom died in detention and in labour camps, and by other violent ways (Minahan

996). They fled to refugee camps throughout Southeast Asia or escaped as ‘boat people,’ eventually resettling in countries throughout the West. An estimated one

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million Khmer Krom currently live in Cambodia and an estimated quarter million

Khmer Krom live in the diasporas of the West (Chan, Not Just 262). Although the

Vietnamese government only acknowledges a population of 1,000,000 Khmer Krom in Viet Nam, many activists, scientists, and journalists claim a Khmer Krom population of at least seven and up to twelve million (Minahan 990).

As Khmer Krom American refugee Bunroeu Thach asserts, “[t]he world in general is still ignorant about what is Kampuchea Krom. Today, the origin of

Kampuchea Krom is being systematically effaced from the world history by the

Vietnamese colonialist government and its supporters. Kampuchea Krom history, its geography, its people, its culture, and its people’s identity are now being questioned by even the scholars” (“Khmer Krom” par. 1). In addition to having their land claim rights called into question through historical revisionism, the Khmer Krom continue to be persecuted throughout Southeast Asia, often resorting to hiding their identities in order to escape persecution (Minahan 996). Thach writes, “even though we are the indigenous people, we do not have the right to our own land, to our own dignity, to our own way of life, the way as human beings should have. We have been discriminated against by the Vietnamese in Kampuchea Krom. When we come to

Cambodia . . . they’re accusing us of being Vietnamese” (qtd. in Chan, Not Just 263).

The Khmer Krom have begun a human rights project to let the world know of their plight. Khmer Krom grievances were presented to the United Nations High

Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland in 1999. In June 2001, on the 52nd anniversary of the transfer of Kampuchea Krom territory to Viet Nam,

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more than 1,500 Buddhist monks assembled in Phnom Penh to plead for increased human rights for the Khmer Krom (Minahan 966). The demands of the Khmer Krom include: an apology by the French government and by the Vietnamese government for the illegal transfer and acceptance of Kampuchea Krom land; a United Nations condemnation of the illegal act; and the granting of Khmer Krom autonomy within

Viet Nam as a first step to the rebirth of sovereignty (996).

Significantly, an article published by Khmers Kampuchea-Krom Federation

Youth Committee (KKFYC), draws an explicit analogy between the plight of Canadian

Aboriginal peoples and that of the Khmer Krom. Taking an idealistic perspective on the Canadian government’s June 11, 2008 national apology and reparations to the

First Nations, Metis, and Inuit Peoples of Canada, the KKFYC writes in the article that, “we also hope that Government of Viet Nam will take the initiative in stepping up to recognize the Khmer Krom People as the Indigenous Peoples in the Mekong

Delta of South Viet Nam. No one could ever imagine that one Government could deliver the dream of the First Nation people to reality. Maybe, the dream of the

Indigenous Khmer Krom people will come to fruition” (8).77 The Khmer Krom have also drawn comparisons between their conditions and that of Native Americans in the United States, for as Thach writes, “[h]ere, the Americans, the Whites, have dominated, have persecuted all the indigenous people, the American Indians, until

77 Clearly, the idealistic portrait that is being painted here of the significance of the Canadian government’s national apology does not reflect the reality of the oppressive conditions of racism and inequality that Aboriginal peoples in Canada continue to endure. For recent critiques of the Canadian national apology to Aboriginal peoples, see Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham’s “Colonial Reckoning, National Reconciliation?”, Matthew Dorrell’s “From Reconciliation to Reconciling,” and Julie McGonegal’s “The Great Canadian (and Australian) Secret.”

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they became very small in numbers. The Vietnamese cannot do that to us because our numbers are so large and we occupy almost the entire territory in Kampuchea

Krom . . . One day, the Khmer Krom will rise up” (qtd. in Chan, Not Just 263). Like the example of the Cham, the case of the Khmer Krom importantly reminds us as scholars that the calls for justice and reconciliation being made by the Khmer Krom bear a vexed relationship to the transitional justice movements of “mainstream” groups such as Cambodians and the Vietnamese. As suggested above, indigenous diasporic communities such as Khmer Krom Americans may feel a stronger solidarity and affiliation with Native Americans than they do with Cambodian

Americans.

Relational Justice

How can future research on Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies begin to map these solidarities and affiliations? A number of excellent studies have recently focused on examining relations between Indigenous people in Canada and other racialized minorities within a settler colonial framework.78 Building on this scholarship, we might consider, for instance, the relations between indigenous communities, such as Native Americans, and diasporic indigenous communities, such as Khmer Krom Americans. Or, we might draw the connection, as the KKFYC article I cited above does, between Aboriginal people in the Canada and the Khmer

Krom in Viet Nam. Attention to these continuities in a relational and transnational

78 See especially, Rita Wong’s, “Decolonizasian: Reading Asian and First Nations Relations in Literature,” Marie Lo’s “Model Minorities, Models of Resistance: Native Figures in Asian Canadian Literature,” and Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua’s “Decolonizing Antiracism.”

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framework would provide a more complex and nuanced understanding of transitional justice and Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies.

In offering preliminary thoughts on an area of future research that seemingly calls for the study of something along the lines of “alternative alternative justice,” I acknowledge the problem of unstrategically advocating an infinite pluralism that threatens to undermine already marginalized social justice movements for

Southeast Asians. If Kandice Chuh argues that efforts to continually adjust, pluralize, or expand the meaning of Asian American “cannot but end in a dead end” (21), then would efforts to illuminate the multiple and sometimes competing visions of justice among Southeast Asians be doomed to collapse as well? While Chuh’s argument about the need for Asian American studies to reinvent itself as a “subjectlessness discourse” (9) is premised upon an assumption of competition between Asian

American studies as demographic equality and Asian American studies as analytic critique, I have sought to demonstrate throughout this dissertation that such either- or claims are ultimately indefensible. To bring this issue back to the question of justice and relationality, I contend that pluralizing and expanding Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies to reflect the histories and claims of groups such as the Cham and the Khmer Krom should not be seen as a competition of traumatic memory.

As Michael Rothberg asks in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the

Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, “how [do we] think about the relationship between different social groups’ histories of victimization”? (2). “Against the framework that understands collective memory as competitive memory—as a zero-

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sum struggle over scarce resources,” Rothberg suggests that “we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (3). Rothberg’s model of multidirectional memory enables us to envision how the study of race and traumatic memory in a relational framework need not establish a hierarchy or scale of victimization in which some groups “win” by claiming the position at the bottom.

Multidirectional memory is a useful theory for considering how, for instance, the spread of indigenous consciousness and redress discourse around the globe has been taken up as a platform through which Southeast Asian groups such as the

Khmer Krom have been able to articulate their own justice claims; or how the Cham are working within the system of tribunal justice in Cambodia to promote a transnational consciousness of “the deep historical and cultural continuities between the Cham in Viet Nam, in Cambodia, and in the diaspora” (Underhill par.

17). As Rothberg asserts, if we acknowledge that “memory is as susceptible as any other human faculty to abuse,” then we also need to “emphasize how memory is at least as often a spur to unexpected acts of empathy and solidarity; indeed multidirectional memory is often the very grounds on which people construct and act upon visions of justice” (19).79

As examples of literary acts of empathy and solidarity, the novels of

Chanrithy Him, Kim Echlin, Madeleine Thien and Monique Truong illustrate

79 See also David Theo Goldberg’s “Racial Comparisons, Relational Racisms” for a useful discussion of how we can approach the study race and racism in a relational framework.

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precisely how memory, in all its entangled and contentious forms, can function as a ground for constructing visions of justice. In my introduction, I invoked Lauren

Berlant’s optimistic proposition that “thinking affect and emotion epistemologically might open up new potentialities and scenes of convergence” (“Affect” par. 5). By drawing attention to the historical and epistemological dimensions of intimacy and melancholia in the context of Southeast Asian diasporic genealogies, this dissertation has sought to illuminate unexpected scenes of convergence between discourses of post-genocide reconciliation and alternative spiritual cosmologies, between refugee collaborative writing and intimate gift economies of narrated memory, and between theories of forgetting and social and psychic reparation. This study’s desire to seek productive intersections has been inspired by the novels of

Him, Echlin, Thien, and Truong, all of which are attentive to how social and psychic life are affected by the losses of history in direct and intimate ways. These texts challenge approaches to the study of justice and reconciliation that ignore the intimate spheres of life, that relegate matters of the intimate to the narrow sphere of privacy in favour of paying attention to the “politics” of institutions and states. These novels imagine paths toward social and psychic repair through the small, yet powerfully meaningful acts of love, friendship, memory, and testimony. These intimate acts have, in Echlin’s words, the capacity to “transcend all the differences . . . between all of us and somehow create a point of contact that allow[s] us to exist together” (qtd. in Nersessian), to reveal, in Thien’s words, how “the corners of improbable things touched” (Dogs 1

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