Bunkong Tuon’s debut novel Koan Khmer is a coming of age story of a young Cambodian immigrant, Samnong Sok, who ultimately finds himself on a writer’s journey, not unlike the author himself. The title can be rendered in English as son of Khmer, and this son—Samnang—is more or less left to navigate his teenage years on his own after his mother dies from starvation in Cambodia and his father leaves to marry another woman. His grandparents take him in. Tuon’s writing shows both the joy and pain of Samnang’s last meeting with this father.
He asked about my favorite flavor. I pointed to the rainbow-colored ice cream in a big round container because it looked so beautiful. When my father handed me a plastic cup of the ice cream, I licked the rainbow swirl as my father looked on and smiled. He kept telling me that we would be apart only for a while. We would see each other again.
But they won’t see each other again. Samnang’s grandparents, aunts, and uncles decide to flee Cambodia once Vietnam invades and the Khmer Rouge are no longer in power. The journey to Thailand is taxing and conditions in the refugee camps and treatment there are not what one would call hospitable. It’s 1982 when the family arrives in Boston and finds temporary housing thanks to their sponsor, a pastor outside Boston.
In the early 1980s, Southeast Asian refugees began arriving en masse in Revere, Lynn, and Chelsea, and by the mid ‘80s we spread into neighboring cities. The Italians, who arrived in the area nearly a century before us, weren’t too happy with us refugees showing up and living alongside them. Fights over turf exploded in back alleys and parking lots. Car windows were smashed; tires slashed. Police were called, but the officers had grown up in the same neighborhoods and knew the vandals, so there were rarely consequences.
Samnang’s family moves out of the pastor’s house before long and rents an apartment not far from the ocean. Samnang’s grandparents encourage him to excel in school and for a while he does. It’s very difficult for him to make friends, though, because he’s one of the only Asian students in his school and the other students are not friendly. Many are downright mean. Living without parents and with relatives who don’t want to dwell on the terror they’ve left behind, Samnang learns about the Cambodian genocide through the film The Killing Fields; to was too young to remember much firsthand from those years.
While the bulk of the story takes place in Massachusetts, Samnang moves to Southern California with an aunt and uncle after he graduates from high school. This move shows that immigrants often fare better when they can live in a community with people who speak their language and understand their culture.
When I had money I went to Cambodian restaurants, shopped at food markets, and perused music and video stores adorning what the Khmer people called “Ana-herm” Street. It was an area of Long Beach that, later, would be officially named “Cambodia Town.” It felt surreal to step inside a restaurant, speak Khmer and order Khmer food from a bilingual menu, listen to Khmer music playing in the background, and momentarily forget that I was in America.
It’s in this environment that Samnang will start to write. He enrolls again in community college and finds a love of English literature. A Malaysian Chinese literature professor becomes his mentor and Samnang goes on to enroll in a four-year university, studying comparative literature, before beginning a doctorate in Pennsylvania, something he could never have envisioned back in Cambodia or even Massachusetts.
Like Samnang, Tuon’s childhood, and teenage and adult years followed a similar path. And if Samnang’s character can shed some light into Tuon’s career as a poet, English professor, and now novelist, perhaps this passage summarizes it well:
I felt a little better after writing about my demons, but total exorcism was never attained from writing. Yet, like breathing, I had to write. For me, writing was survival.