Landbridge | Litsy

Landbridge | Y-Dang Troeung

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Best NF of the year (so far) for me.

Troeng tells the story of her family's experiences in Cambodia under Pol Pot, their escape to the refugees camps in Thailand, and emigration to small town Ontario. Interspersed with these stories she examines her own experiences as a scholar studying literature, art, and the refugee experience and she confronts the West's ideas of who and what a refugee should be, and our reactions to genocide. (cont'd)

TheKidUpstairs As the subtitle states, it is told through fragments of memory and ideas. It is an incredibly effective and affecting book, giving the reader a new view of this moment in history, its continuing echoes through to the present day, and really forces you to confront how war, genocide, refugees, etc are portrayed in media, by governments, and how we talk about them and their lives.

cont'd... 7mo

TheKidUpstairs Throughout the book Troeng also begins to confront her own mortality, and how her life and death are contained within the wider story of her family and the Cambodian experience, through intergenerational trauma and migration. Troeng was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer during her writing of this story, and she passed away in 2022. Included in the book are the letters she wrote to her young son as she came to terms with the end of her life. 7mo

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TheKidUpstairs

Landbridge | Y-Dang Troeung

“The Khmer concept of baksbat translates as broken courage or broken form. I prefer the latter, broken form, because it invokes a sense of fragmented surface and impermanence. Breaking of the body is not necessarily the same as broken strength or broken spirit. Also, just because a form breaks does not mean it is broken, nor that it has become something shameful, incomprehensible, a thing to be silenced and forgotten.“

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