asianamlitfans | A Review of Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge (Duke UP, 2024) (Reply)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

I knew I would eventually review Y-Dang Troeung’s Landbridge (Duke UP, 2024), but I also knew that it was going to be a challenge. Troeung is someone that I crossed paths with in practically another academic life, when I was barely out of graduate school and had the chutzpah to try to get do a bunch of editing (thinking that I would somehow manage all that and write books and articles necessary for tenure). During that period, there were some major strikes of luck. One was the opportunity to co-edit an issue of Modern Fiction Studies with the brilliant, monstrously well-read Paul Lai and then the indefatigable and generous Donald C. Goellnicht. During the editing process, Troeung’s piece on Monique Truong would come to the top of the pile, and her piece would go on to be published in the special issue on Theorizing Asian American Fiction. Goellnicht would pass away unexpectedly around 2019. Goellnicht also happened to have advised Troeung as a graduate student, and then Troeung would pass away in 2022. Fortunately for all of us, Troeung has already left an indelible legacy with an academic monograph (Refugee Lifeworlds) and this creative nonfictional work, which was published posthumously. Let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that Canada agreed to admit. Their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the prime minister shaking Troeung’s father’s hand and patting baby Y-Dang’s head. Troeung became a literal poster child for the benevolence of the Canadian refugee project. She returns to this moment forty years later in her arresting memoir Landbridge, where she explores the tension between that public narrative of happy ‘arrival,’ and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to her family. In precise, beautiful prose, Troeung moves 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. Throughout this brilliant and astonishing book, Troeung looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence and dares to imagine a better future, with love.”

This creative nonfictional work is not for the faint of heart. You might have to take some space at times to read it, but I will say immediately that I’m so glad that this work is out in the world, as it adds to the growing and necessary body of Cambodian American cultural productions. There was a time that I really struggled to add Cambodian American literature to my syllabi. At one point, I felt like I basically only had the option of Loung Ung, but these days, the writers in this ethnic subset are truly growing. Landbridge is an anachronistically sequenced work, with short chapters typically around 1-3 pages in length. Troeung toggles through multiple time periods, but there are some major temporal concentration points. There’s of course the sections that deal with her parents’ time during the genocide and their lives as refugees. Then, there’s Troeung growing up in Canada. One of the best recurring motifs is the one about how the family would engage in digging up worms to make extra money. Though this type of activity might seem strange to some, for Troeung, it was always a time of family bonding and community building, and she comes to look back nostalgically on those moments, as evidence of her family’s resilience. Then, there’s the section where Troeung has traveled to Hong Kong, a time of budding romance and a time where she begins to wrestle with the ghosts of her past. The proximity she retains to Cambodia allows her to visit consistently, and she struggles with how to reframe her understanding of the country and to consider its history as one that cannot only be encapsulated by trauma and catastrophic death. Finally, there is her return to Canada and the challenges that come with tenure and then the diagnosis of cancer. Interspersed throughout the work are the most heartbreaking yet crucial sections: letters that Troeung is writing to her young child, some of which are dated into the future. Here, we see Troeung thinking proleptically, archiving this relationship so that there is a record for her child to return to again and again. Despite the gravity of the subject matter, Troeung has the prose of a poet, and the fragmented styling suits this lyric quality. This creative nonfiction of course reminds me more and more of the boundary breaking ways that scholars have been exploring their work and this text can easily be put alongside the many now emerging from academics, such as Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ordinary Disasters and Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia. Let’s hope it’s part of a long and enduring trend.

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