Y-Dang Troeung

The inaugural title from Alchemy by Knopf Canada: A searing account by an exquisite writer who came to Canada as a baby, escaping war in Cambodia. In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head. Forty years later, in her brilliant, astonishing book, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy “arrival,” and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family. In precise, beautiful prose accompanied by moving black-and-white visuals, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son’s illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Through it all, Y-Dang looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence, refusal of gratitude, becoming a scholar, and love.

life in fragments

Landbridge

The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia

Refugee Lifeworlds

Born in, and named after, Thailand's Khao-I-Dang refugee camp, Y-Dang Troeung was - aged one - the last of 60,000 Cambodian refugees admitted to Canada, fleeing her homeland in the aftermath of Pol Pot's brutal Khmer Rouge regime. In Canada, Y-Dang became a literal poster child for the benevolence of the Canadian refugee project - and, implicitly, the unknowable horrors of Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia. In Landbridge, a family and personal memoir of astonishing power, Y-Dang grapples with a life lived in the shadow of pre-constructed narratives. She considers the transactional relationship between a host country and its refugees; she unpicks the demand for 'testimony' and the conflicting demand for disinterested academic rigour; she delves into the necessary contradictions between ethnic, regional and national identities; and she writes to her young son Kai with the promise that this family legacy is passed down with love at its core. Written in fragmentary chapters, each with the vivid light of a single candle in a pitch-black room, Landbridge is both a courageous piece of life writing and a bold, ground-breaking intervention in the way trauma and migration are recorded.

Life in Fragments

"Utilizing the concept of aphasia, this book demonstrates how Cambodian refugee narratives resist state violence and take head-on hegemonic discourses across popular and scholarly spaces that prop up colonial, imperial, capitalist, heteropatriarchal, and ableist formations of the Cold War in Cambodia"--

Carrie Jenkins

Purang Abolmaesumi

Michelle Stack

Jennifer Black

Lara Boyd

Hoi Kong

M. V. Ramana

Steven Reynolds

Sheila Teves

Chromatic: Ten Meditations on Crisis in Art and Letters is a collection of essays and illustrations as diverse as the subject of crisis itself. Imagined and brought to life by leading UBC scholars in collaboration with local artists, Chromatic asks what it means to be in crisis and grapples with the personal and societal impacts of crisis during a time of unprecedented global upheaval. Each contributor to this diverse collection takes a profoundly different approach yet fascinating and unexpected connections emerge. The result is a book that juxtaposes gorgeous, colourful artwork with writing that will surprise and challenge you, outrage and enlighten you.

Ten Meditations on Crisis in Art and Letters

Chromatic

Y-Dang Troeung

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