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Exiled Memory: History, Identity, and Remembering in

Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Diaspora

Khatharya Um

positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 20, Number 3, Summer 2012,
pp. 831-850 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article


https://muse.jhu.edu/article/483980

Access provided by Central University of Gujarat (26 Dec 2018 08:56 GMT)
Exiled Memory: History, Identity, and Remembering in Southeast Asia
and Southeast Asian Diaspora

Khatharya Um

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, Cambo-
dia. That fateful spring is an indelible historical referent not just for Cam-
bodians but also for Vietnamese and Laotians. The long, tortuous political
histories of former “Indochina,” defined as much by shared experiences and
political genealogies as they were by dissension, conflict, and distrust, con-
verged in an ignominious ending. For the Lao and the Cambodians, what
would otherwise be a time for celebration of a new year, of august begin-
ning and togetherness, was instead marked by separation and loss, violent
uprooting, and dispersal. As the dominoes fell — first Phnom Penh, then
Saigon, and finally Vientiane — the promises of peace and prosperity gave
way to the horrors of reeducation camps; “seminars”; ethnic, political, and
religious persecution; mass flight; and exile. For Cambodians, it was the
beginning of a spiraling descent into one of the nation’s darkest eras. Of that

positions 20:3 doi 10.1215/10679847-1593564


Copyright 2012 by Duke University Press
positions 20:3 Summer 2012 832

traumatic chapter of the country’s political history, Michael Vickery wrote,


“It rarely happens that a historian can look back over the recent past of any
contemporary society with the feeling that a curtain has been rung down
on a play, and that what happened up to that time may be studied without
regard to what is going on at present, or what may happen in the future.
Such is the way Cambodia appears.”1 For many Cambodian survivors, April
17, 1975, was when history stops, when time bends and refracts under the
illusion of irreversible rupture. “Year Zero” is not simply a marker of an
apocalyptic shift in history: it is an erasure of history, an intraversible tem-
poral divide that is encoded in the way national and personal histories are
narrated.2 The feeling conveyed by survivors is one of living with “one body,
two lives” — one before, and one after Pol Pot. For Cambodian diasporas,
forcibly dispersed by this history, it is a rupture that is defined even more
emphatically by exile.
For many Southeast Asians, April is thus a site of ambivalence, where the
promise of a new beginning is forever marred by the haunting of the past
that intrudes into the daily present. Over three decades in the aftermath,
the memorials and commemorations that wedge themselves amidst the new
year festivities every April have become a persisting and insistent leitmotif
in which renewal and celebration register under the unlifting shadow of loss
and mourning. Out of this historical trauma, a new panethnic identity, at
once empowering and emasculating, comes to bind Cambodians, Vietnam-
ese, Lao, Hmong, Mien, Thai Dam, Kammu, Dega, and all other commu-
nities uprooted by the “Vietnam War” as Southeast Asians and as refugees.3
No longer just a geographical location, the Southeast Asia in America, both
in its tragedies and in its valiance, becomes a signifier for the living lega-
cies of war, genocide, forced severance, and, not the least, the indomitable
human capacity for resilience.

History, Memory, and Belonging

Where home and history evoke the imagery not only of familial warmth
and belonging but also of reeducation camps and killing fields, memory
itself is fraught with contestation and contradictions. The source that con-
notes the solace of belonging and the security of sameness also evokes the
Um ❘ Exiled Memory 833

memory of death and deprivation, signifying both an indelible connection


and, simultaneously, a rupture. War, revolution, and genocide have virtu-
ally resulted in a generational death in Cambodia, leaving a very young
surviving population. The magnitude of loss and the finality of the rupture
echo in the reflection of this elderly refugee: “They are all gone. There’s just
silence. Not a trace, not a sound, as if someone just took a broom and swept
it all to the wind.”4 For survivors, it is a silence that always intrudes through
the clutters of reconstructed lives, an “absence that is always present.”
For many survivors, the wounds are kept raw by the denial of any real
opportunity for mourning. Many who survived have no way of ascertaining
what had happened to their loved ones, knowing only that they had “dis-
appeared.” Lives have withered in liminality in wait for the return that in
their hearts of hearts they know will never be; after thirty years, Oeun still
looks up at the sound of a car or a bicycle peddling by on the village road, in
hope of her husband’s return.5 For the deceased, there can be no markers of
remembrance, save on mass or makeshift graves. Upon my initial return to
Cambodia in 1995, I found myself, as others must have done as well, looking
at lone trees lining the roads leading out to the countryside, or past verdant
rice fields, and thinking whether this could have been the place where my
family had perished. It is thus that Ernst Fischer speaks of disappearances
as a “censorship of memory” that denies mourning, and possibly, any hope
for transcendence.6
In essence, what was sought by revolutionary transformation under
Southeast Asian communism was not simply the destruction of the old soci-
etal structure but of a whole way of life. Submitted to a system that sought
the ultimate severance from the past, social memory was systematically
undermined as the regimes worked to revolutionize language, culture, and
traditions and to destroy what they could not transform or suppress. What
remain are memory fragments of a past that are hidden and preserved in
recollection. As it is for many communities emerging from the ashes of his-
tory, memory for Southeast Asians is filtered and refracted by time, distance,
and the trauma itself, hence mediated in many instances by the need to pre-
serve and magnify the treasured fragments of prewar moments that intensi-
fies against the starkness of the present condition.7 The memory imperfec-
tions engendered by time passing conjoined with the desperate desire to
positions 20:3 Summer 2012 834

buffer against the bleakness of the present with selective recollection of the
past. Over time, generational shifts, linguistic loss, and the natural erosion
of temporality further dilute and alter the reservoir of memory.
On the enduring legacies of historical traumas, Hannah Arendt reflects,
“What has been lost is the continuity of the past. . . . What you then are left
with is still the past, but a fragmented past.”8 In that sense, what is presented
to survivors is, as Pierre Nora puts it, no longer “a history sought in the con-
tinuity of memory but . . . a memory cast in the discontinuity of history.”9
For communities such as the Cambodians and the Chăms, the layering of
historical traumas — war, genocide, occupation, and forced dispersal — has
evoked a sense of loss so acute, and of an unimaginable magnitude, that it
stirs not only a personal feeling of dislocation but also a collective sense of
anxiety about national survival. Especially for cultural communities whose
tradition rests on orality, there is an underlying fear that physical death — of
approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, and virtually the
whole nation of Champa — would also mean cultural death, and, in turn,
the death of the nation, that the erasure of time will leave behind nothing
more than a suggestion of a richly textured culture. Champa left no imprint
on the political map and only smudged contours of its grand civilization.
Enshrouded in political domination and conquest, cultural memory atro-
phies and disintegrates.
The struggle to remember for many of history’s battered subjects is there-
fore also a struggle for relevance. The consuming preoccupation with loss
and extinction is not new for many Southeast Asian communities, but it
is rendered acute by the circular, seemingly repetitious spirals of histori-
cal experiences in which trauma stands out as an undeniable feature of the
countries’ pre- and postcolonial political landscape. Hopes and expectations
left behind from the wounding encounters with colonialism were further
punctured, and punctuated, by postcolonial disillusionment. Decolonization
had not yielded peace and prosperity but political partition, continued sub-
jugation, and deprivation. Displacement, for some, became a state of being.
Tracing his community’s long history of repeated dislocation over a topog-
raphy of hate and violence that extended from China to North Viet Nam,
onto the South, farther still to Laos, and finally to Des Moines, Iowa, a Thai
Dam friend once said, “We, Thai Dam, have many places to go but nowhere
to stay.”10 As the body moves, where, then, does memory live?
Um ❘ Exiled Memory 835

Exile and Remembering

For Southeast Asians, the tear in the social fabric, hence in social memory,
is exacerbated by the forced and unexpected severance from the ancestral
womb. Exile, in a fundamental sense, is the ultimate dislocation. For the
politically displaced, diaspora connotes both physical and metaphysical dis-
persal. What is entailed is, as Amy Kaminsky puts it, “a removal in space
as well as in spirit,”11 involving at once a physical uprooting and a psychical
and spiritual disconnect from land, history, and identity. Loss and separa-
tion are made even more acute by distance and by the seeming permanency
of exile.
In that sense, exile further fractures. The evacuation from the origi-
nary source denies refugees and diasporas of a milieu de memoire,12 where
memory can be enveloped and anchored. Instead, memories, like the refu-
gee body that they inhabit, are fractured, dispersed, multiple, and diverse,
foregrounded and invisible. Memory shards necessarily locate themselves
and are located in different scattered places, spaces, and acts — in makeshift
memorials, in public commemoration and private mourning, in family nar-
ratives, in cultural practices and habits, in the here and the there. In 2004,
some twenty years after the peak resettlement of refugees in the United
States, the Cambodian American Heritage and Killing Fields Memorial
Museum opened in Chicago. The first of its kind for Cambodians in the
United States, this living memorial was the realization essentially of one
man’s, Mr. Kompha Seth’s, long-cherished dream to establish a site where
collective memory can be housed, and a commemorative center for an other-
wise dispersed community. Although a symbolically important site where
collective trauma is memorialized in the fifteen hundred names etched in
glass, mostly of relatives of Cambodians in Illinois, the museum remains
largely inaccessible to the Cambodian American community at large. The
ornate façade, even the sacred water transported all the way from Cam-
bodia, could not effectively close the geographical, economic, generational,
and even aesthetic distance that stands between institution and commu-
nity, between homeland and the memory of it. With its stated mission “to
raise awareness of the Cambodian genocide and celebrate the community’s
renewal in the United States,” the museum is more of a testament of the
Cambodian American presence, rather than the absences.13
positions 20:3 Summer 2012 836

Combined, the ruptures of history and an almost somnambulant and


forced reinsertion into an alienating context translate into a liminality that
shapes Southeast Asian diasporic identity and informs their sense of place
and belonging. The place of their being is not necessarily, and certainly not
singularly, the place of their longing. Refugees are here and there — simulta-
neously and, to borrow from Edward Said, contrapuntally.14 Diaspora is thus
a site inhabited simultaneously by continuities and discontinuities — ghosts,
memory fragments, interruptions, and contradictions. Loss and joy, trauma
and inspiration, despair and hope, rupture and renewal, all coexist in accus-
tomed tension. Uncertainty and ambivalence are no strangers to refugees.
At times, it is the disquieting feeling brought on by mundaneness that seems
most unsettling. Against the cacophony of war, revolution, and genocide,
quotidian life disturbs with its deafening ordinariness.
Where exit and, by extension, the relationship with the originary source
are defined by forced severance, and where reincorporation into a new
society is characterized by differentiation and marginalization, nostalgia
becomes a way of reclaiming history and identity. It is to this longing for
re/attachment, meaning, and purpose in the face of the loss, disorientation,
and liminality of the exilic condition that Aeschylus spoke when he said,
“I know how men in exile feed on dreams.” While nostalgia of the dis-
placed may be rooted in the inability to let go of an idealized past, it is also
a longing that is nurtured by the alienation of the present. As much as the
ruptures elsewhere, the negation felt here and now breathes life into the
nostalgic longing.
Against the backdrop of irreparable loss and separation, memory, how-
ever faulty and frail, is “key to personal and collective identity.”15 It is the
connective strand that links the stateless body of the displaced with the roots
and identities that history and politics have pried away from them. Dis-
avowed at the ancestral hearth and unembraced in refuge, refugees have
only their memory to inscribe onto them an identity beyond that of the
tattered “remnants of a war lost in an unknown country,”16 the unwanted.
Remembering, as such, is a struggle to reconnect, reclaim, and reaffirm. It
is as Pierre Nora astutely observes, “Through the past, we venerated above
all ourselves.”17 Amidst the alienation of all things foreign, there is solace in
the recollection of the familiar. In blighted enclaves of America’s inner cities,
Um ❘ Exiled Memory 837

memory materializes in the brightly painted calligraphy on storefronts of


“little Phnom Penh” and “little Saigon” that harks back to familiar sounds
and places of belonging — “Danang,” “Pailin,” “Pakse,” etching onto Amer-
ica’s ethno-topography not only the refugee presence but also moments in
interrupted histories. At the juncture where the Mekong meets the Merri-
mack, where dragon boats skim along in the shadow of old New England
mills, lies the Southeast Asian America that defies the discontinuities and
discordance of displacement.

The Politics of Remembering

Remembering and recollection, however, are precarious and fragile pro-


cesses. Power, as Pierre Bourdieu underscores, continues to dictate how his-
tory is written, commemorated, and memorialized. It defines not only what
is to be remembered but how. In critical ways, memory has always been a
casualty of politics in Southeast Asia. The violence perpetrated in Indonesia
in the 1960s remains shrouded in national silence half a century later.18 In
Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouge, charges of sedition were levied against
not only counterrevolutionary acts but also counterrevolutionary thoughts.
In its totalism, Democratic Kampuchea was content with the eradication
not only of the ancien regime but of the very memory of it. Even after the
regime’s collapse, memory continues to be censored. Where perpetrators
exist alongside victims, wielding their power and presence with impunity,
where the rule of law remains elusive and power dominates over conscience,
fear is the ultimate silencer.
Politics also deliberately appropriates and subverts. In Cambodia, the
institutionalization of political memory in the forms of the Tuol Sleng geno-
cide museum, the Choeung Ek memorial, the Day of Anger, and even the
ongoing tribunals speak to the power to select, represent, and inform. Once
overseen by a Vietnamese political commissar-cum-curator, the Tuol Sleng
Genocide Museum, with its blood-stained rooms and a constructed map
of skulls, ceases to be a place of mourning and instead becomes a political
architecture, erected not as a memorial to the perished and for the purpose
of remembrance and healing, but for regime legitimation.19 In the ultimate
exercise of power, the state has appropriated the nation’s social memory.
positions 20:3 Summer 2012 838

In diaspora, survivors’ memory was dealt a metaphysical blow by the dis-


missal of refugee testimonials and by refugees’ own selective recounting — at
times deliberate to ensure the well-being of self and families, at times sub-
conscious to preserve the wholeness of self and dignity, threatened by guilt,
shame, and fear. Refuge provides for little reprieve as the exigencies of the
present compound and provoke the haunting of the past. Marginality, invis-
ibility, and racism deprive refugees of the luxury of contemplation. Linguis-
tically isolated, many first-generation refugee survivors kept to themselves,
even within the confines of their own families. The struggle to mourn,
memorialize, and heal thus competes with the struggle to survive against
poverty and other symbolic forms of violence that are enacted daily upon
vulnerable communities. For many, grieving comes as stolen moments.
In the United States, Southeast Asian refugees also feel the oppressive
weight of a history that receives little public acknowledgement, their losses
and sacrifices expunged by the amnesia of a nation entangled in its own
self-deception, culpability, and guilt. The absence and the yearning for rec-
ognition are penned in wrenching eloquence in Mai Neng Moua’s eulogic
poetry:
I stood my ground
It’s not enough that I am here
I want the imprints of their names
Some American proof that they were known
Their courage recognized
The sacrifices of their lives acknowledged
The ranger in khaki shorts and Smokey-the-Bear hat said
“You have to know someone who died there”
I stood my ground . . .
My mute tongue could not scream
“But I do know someone who died there.”20
The losses, amounting to virtually a generational death for some commu-
nities, seem to matter to no one, and over time, perhaps not even to their
own posterity who may hear but do not listen, who may know but do not
understand.
Um ❘ Exiled Memory 839

In this sense, memories not only define survivors, and as such are central
to their existence; they are also their constant source of pain because they
constitute reminders of things lost, fragmented, shattered, things that can
never be made whole again. A Cambodian refugee compared her fractured
life to a mirror that “has been shattered and the pieces are scattered, and
we carefully, slowly put them back together. It will always be a cracked
mirror, because our lives were nearly crushed to dust. I survived, most were
killed.”21 What is provoked by the kind of violence that was done unto these
nations is a “dramatic loss of . . . meaning,”22 resulting in a tear in the social
fabric that cannot be easily mended. Whether in speech or in silence, the
pain is made even more acute by the recognition of the irreversibility of
those realities. It is this void that will always stand between the world of
survivors and that of ordered normalcy: “The more I remembered, the more
I felt excluded and alone.”23 The condition of sudden blindness that affected
Cambodian refugee women is a manifestation of this retreat into them-
selves.24 Withdrawn into a world where the eyes need no longer see and the
mind no longer reasons, they exist, “lost in a silence crowded with memo-
ries.”25 In the desolation of exile, even pain is a cherished companion. As a
young Cambodian American poet so eloquently expressed, “My life in exile,
homesick for the sentimental miseries of things I had known / even pain is
desirable whenever I need to redefine my own humanity.”26 For some, pain
became a prison from which there can be only one exit. In Seattle, a grand-
mother who simply wanted “quiet in her head” took her own life and that
of her family.27

Justice, Reconciliation, and Healing

For survivors of the Cambodian auto-genocide, the seeming impunity of


the atrocities is perhaps the most tragic of injuries. The quest for justice has
spanned three decades. When it was finally brought about, the long-awaited
tribunal came amidst political compromise, scandals, and protracted immo-
bilism. Ultimately, whether or not it serves a purpose depends largely on
what that purpose is, and who defines it. While public discourse regarding
the tribunal frequently evokes notions of justice, reconciliation, and healing,
these concepts are often spoken of as if they are interchangeable, mutually
positions 20:3 Summer 2012 840

reinforcing, even causally determinant. Yet reconciliation, if it necessitates


the burying of past transgressions as some have proposed, may thwart the
quest for justice, as others have pointed out. In that sense, these concepts
are potentially contradictory and even conflictual. In the same vein, both
remembrance and forgetting have been argued, compellingly, to be key
to healing. Yet in a land where 80 percent of the population is Buddhist,
the public display of the remains as evidence of Khmer Rouge crimes is
regarded by many as an assault upon Cambodian cultural sensibilities. For
many Buddhists, the state’s refusal to permit the cremation of the remains
impedes both the transmigration of the dead and the moving forward of
the living. For others, these remains constitute the singular most incontro-
vertible indictment of the genocidal regime, ever more critical given the
incredible nature of the crimes, the disbelief of the young generation, and
the political readiness to forget. How, then, can justice and healing be rec-
onciled? Would and could the pursuit of certain forms of justice thwart
the very process of healing? And where, in this process, are memory and
remembering located?
Though they have been bantered about in legal courts and in the arenas
of public opinion, concepts such as justice, reconciliation, and healing are
rarely examined and articulated through cultural prisms, rarely in terms
of how Cambodian survivors think of and envision justice, or how those
notions may be mediated by generational factors, by gender, by class, and
by faith. For most Cambodian survivors, their experiences cannot be easily
reconciled with political rhetoric and imperatives, nor with legal principles
and constraints. While both national and international leadership are preoc-
cupied with juridical concerns, survivors such as Van Nath, who was one of
only seven detainees to have emerged alive from the infamous S-21 in which
at least fifteen thousand people were known to have been exterminated,
wanted to confront their victimizers with a simple question: Why? They
simply wanted an answer. More than justice with its abstract and elusive
promise, they wanted reason and meaning. More than any other grandiose
hope, they wished to restore their faith in the order of things, and through
the implied sense of accountability, their recovered humanity.
Um ❘ Exiled Memory 841

Memory and Resistance

Thus as Marianne Hirsch points out, “For survivors who have been sepa-
rated and exiled from a ravaged world, memory is necessarily an act not
only of recall but also of mourning, a mourning often inflected by anger,
rage, and despair.”28 Of his autobiographical work, Pin Yathay wrote, “In
this book, I want those memories to live on.”29 Writing is thus transformed
into the utmost commemorative act. Emerging from a cultural community
where self-effacement is an inculcated value and memoirs are in some fun-
damental aspects seemingly countercultural, the need to document, pub-
licize, and transmit must be understood as an extension of the simple but
insistent desire to proclaim that those swept into the oblivion of mass death
were once here, were important, and above all were human, with personal
dreams, hopes, and disappointments. These are identities that have been
callously erased by “disappearances” and unmarked graves, and that must
be recovered if wholeness and coherence are to be regained, both for the
individual and for the nation.
In societies in which unsanctioned expressions can rise to sedition, and
threats are presumed to emanate not only from subversive acts but also from
subversive thoughts, in which justice eludes in the court of law and on the
street, what other forms and manifestations can and did remembering and
memorialization take privately and collectively, outside the official gaze? On
any given holy day, altars are lined with incense and offerings, crowded with
the absence of the dead and the disappeared. With the nation splintered
by exile, the “community” that Karl Mannheim and Maurice Halbwachs
deem necessary for the anchoring of collective memory and remembrance
is necessarily translocal and transnational. For Southeast Asian American
Buddhists, the acts of merit making and of commemoration now transcend
geopolitical boundaries as remittances from transnationally organized
Kathen make their way from the diaspora to distant towns and villages
in Cambodia for the construction of stupas or the much-delayed funereal
rites to still-wandering souls.30 At an elemental level, these transnational
engagements are acts of resistance to the state-provoked “othering” of dia-
sporas, a defiant reclaiming of the social and political space that they have
been forced, by politics and history, to vacate. For many survivors, these
positions 20:3 Summer 2012 842

ceremonies and quiet prayers that bridge the interstice between the state-
manipulated public and the unarticulated private realms, pry open a space
not only for commemoration and mourning but, ultimately, also for recon-
ciliation, not necessarily with the perpetrators, but with the very act that had
been perpetrated onto them.

Remembering across Generations

If history and homeland are sites of contradictions and ambivalence for


first-generation refugees, what do they evoke for those born outside these
realms, of history, geography, and temporality? How much more ambiva-
lent, as Hirsch queried, “is this curiosity for the children . . . exiled from a
world that has ceased to exist, that has been violently erased?”31 Straddling
the interstice between the need to speak and the inability to express, silence
is, for many refugees, a self-imposed and an externally compelled strategy
of survival. The only greater fear than that of forgetting is the fear of being
disbelieved. How, then, does memory travel, if at all, across generational
boundaries? The commanding grip of the bequeathed trauma is undeniable
for this young Cambodian high school student:
To be Cambodian is to be affected, defined, or shaped in one way or
another by a history that happened an ocean and decades away. . . . Grow-
ing up, it was normal for my mother to sit on one end of the table, sun
shining through the window, telling me about the genocide. . . . It wasn’t
a discussion but her, sharing her soul. . . . She was telling me about the
miseries, the death, the destruction but it was her voice that break [sic]
my heart every time. You have to hear it in Khmer, the language of my
people, to know how devastating it is.32
In many families, silence prevails, perpetuating both the immediate and
the mediated trauma, and contributing to the intergenerational disconnect.
A Laotian youth struggles with the war that never ended: “I have seen my
Dad grow more and more quiet over the years. I think he feels that he has
failed somehow. I want to reach out to him, talk to him sometimes when
he’s just sitting there looking so dejected. But how? Life was hard in the
mountains in Laos but it was peaceful.”33 Exiled from “the space of iden-
Um ❘ Exiled Memory 843

tity”34 to which they are at once intuitively connected and severed, a new
generation of Southeast Asians struggles to fill the void with tatters of “post-
memory,”35 and to come to term with this history, weighty and intrusive
even in its unspokenness.
Memory, as Michael Kenny puts it, “needs a place, a context. Its place, if
it finds one that lives beyond a single generation, is to be found in the stories
we tell.”36 Where both the sending and the receiving states continue to deny
certain histories, living testimonials recede into and are preserved in mem-
ory. Where textbooks reflect state-imposed amnesia and public memory is
sullied by power interests, history seeks the only refuge available — in family
narratives — inflected as they may be by fear and the pressure to survive, and
interrupted by the injury to the native tongue. For many first-generation
Southeast Asian refugees, the struggle against forgetting is not only a way of
filling a personal void but also an important political act. What is individual
and personal is also collective and national. For these reasons, remembering
is, for some, the ultimate form of resistance. It is an escape and a refuge from
the corruptive globalizing forces that render ceremonial art into commodi-
ties and sacred forests into coffee plantations and strip mines, and from the
reach of a state that seeks to deny and erase for fear of its own implication.
With these imperatives, refugees struggle against all odds to reclaim from
history that which was so violently snatched from them. For some, such
as General Vang Pao, the Cambodian freedom fighters, and the militantly
conservative Vietnamese diasporic groups bent on regime overthrow, resis-
tance can be nothing less than the forcible alteration and reshaping of the
course of history.37 For others, the act of reclaiming takes the form of the
simple, defiant refusal to forget. For many, it is in the inability to forget.
In “Lost Photos,” Andrew Lam wrote, “What I failed to retrieve in the
dream survives, if only as an exquisite longing. . . . Precious things lost are
transmutable. They refuse oblivion. They simply wait to be rendered into
testimonies, into stories and songs.”38
For others still, it is the fear of the loss of treasured memories, the con-
suming anxiety that “without commemorative vigilance, history would
soon sweep them away.”39 Thus onto story cloths they weave and stitch
their histories and identities, and piece together fragments of tradition. In
silent photographs, on fading canvasses, and on pages never to be published,
positions 20:3 Summer 2012 844

they imprint their memories so that their children and their children’s chil-
dren will not forget. In cluttered garages, factory workers turned musicians
gather to play with only nostalgia as their muse amidst the cacophony of dis-
enfranchisement. Elsewhere, between back-breaking shifts, a former soldier
patiently transforms a K-mart baseball bat into a traditional violin, while a
self-appointed scribe painstakingly codifies unwritten musical scores under
a yellowed bulb, as the faltering chants of newly ordained Buddhist novices
drift from the apartment-temple, wedged in a Section 8 housing complex.
In exile, fractured nations are reconstituted from the sheer determination
to remember.

Transnational Imagining and Reconnection

Where politics and displacement fragment and disperse, where the nation
remains bifurcated by time, distance, and ideology, “collective memory
provides both the individual and society with a temporal map, unifying
a nation or community through time as well as space.”40 For Southeast
Asians in the diaspora, the struggle to rebuild lives and communities neces-
sarily takes on a transnational dimension, for the gaze forward is forever
drawn back to a past that refuses to relinquish its grip. The act of reinsertion
takes on multiple forms, rooting and rerooting, and takes place in multiple
domains, Southeast Asia and the United States. It involves the simultaneous
imperative of securing place and belonging in a new, and at times inhospi-
table, environment, and of reclaiming “that social and political space that
has inevitably changed during their absence”41 in a nation now bifurcated
by distance, ideology, and time. This attempt at reconnection, as such, is not
without contestation. Citizenship and belonging are not simply questions of
bloodline and territorial “rootedness” but have been made to include claims
to cultural “authenticity” and the degree to which it has been altered by the
shifts and turns of history. In postgenocide, postoccupation Cambodia, the
issue of belonging is made to rest on morally ambiguous binaries in which
both flight and the inability/unwillingness to flee are viewed as an exercise
of free will. In this contest for political legitimacy, diasporas, whose flight is
regarded as a deliberate act of self-preserving betrayal, are seen as opportu-
nistic and spiritually and culturally corrupted by their exile, hence divested
Um ❘ Exiled Memory 845

of their cultural citizenship. Those who had remained behind, in turn, are
viewed by those in diaspora as having been diluted and compromised by
their existence under a colonized state. For both, the claim to membership
in this trans/national community and to the right to participate in its social,
cultural, and political life thus rests on the attendant and irresolvable ques-
tion of what constitutes the least compromising historical interruption, exile
or occupation. Ironically, the issue of belonging is spun around for Cam-
bodian American deportees whose experiences encapsulate the ambiguous
location that nonnaturalized refugees occupy. While the idea of “repatria-
tion” is rooted in the dual concepts of “return” to “one’s natal source,” these
embedded notions are problematized by the fact that most of the young
deportees were born in cross-border refugee camps.42 All are products of
American society. For these deportees, the “home-land” is hyphenated, dis-
tinct, and disconnected. Where “home” — not Phnom Penh or Battambang
but Seattle, Lowell, or Long Beach — is severed from the “land” and the
country that is unwilling to acknowledge the claim, “return” is, in fact, exile.

Betwixt History and Memory

But can anyone ever truly return to the land of one’s memory? Or is remem-
bering the only form that such return can be actualized? As Lam reflects,
“The past is irretrievable yet I can never be free from it.”43 Memory is inher-
ently flawed and imperfect, and memory work itself, fraught with pitfalls.
Politics, fear, the all-consuming survival needs, and the unstoppable stride of
time continue to intrude and hijack the process of recollection and remem-
bering. Of the nation, Ernest Renan noted, “The essence of the nation is
that all the individuals hold many things in common, and also that all of
them have forgotten many things.”44 In Cambodia, nation re/building and
regime-legitimating projects continue to deny both the individual survivor
and the Cambodian nation the healing that they need and deserve. In Viet
Nam, the exclusion of southern veterans from the halls of national heroes
exposes the manipulation of the state in the rewriting of history, a process
that can only be accomplished by suppressing, subverting, and negating
memory. Similarly, in the United States, public memory continues to erase
Cambodians and Laotians from the “Viet Nam War,” and deny them their
positions 20:3 Summer 2012 846

rightful place in US history. In these instances, public commemoration and


memorialization are not about honoring and mourning. They are about
power. In this “conquest and eradication of memory by history,”45 the very
act of remembering is at once deliberately and inadvertently selective, with
“moments of history torn away from the movement of history.”46 In this
process of remembering and reconstitution, what is left out is, as such, as
poignant as what is remembered.
Imperfect, manipulated, scaffolded though it may be, memory neverthe-
less is what connects the splintered life of the displaced. Three decades in the
aftermath, Southeast Asian American communities are at the cusp of mul-
tiple transitions — the generational evolution from first-generation refugees
to American-born citizens, from cultural nationalism and ethnic conscious-
ness to a pan-Southeast Asian identification, from national citizenship to
transnational belonging. A Southeast Asian American intellectual commu-
nity has come of age, with increasing presence and voice. For all Southeast
Asian American communities, however, each passing day marks the passing
of the old generation, another chapter of an oral history lost, of genealogy
disrupted, of collective memory unrecovered. History has bestowed on the
survivors of that generation the role as “keepers of memory” that is neces-
sary and immeasurably burdensome.47
As displaced individuals and communities, as new citizens, as trans-
migrants, Southeast Asians traverse multiple worlds and harbor multiple
identities — in dissonance and discordance, in resigned reconciliation and
defiant agency. For those of us born of this history, these changes impose
a set of questions: What role does memory play in our lives, as Southeast
Asian Americans straddling the many positionalities that we occupy? What
is evoked and provoked by the possibilities and the tension that emanate
from this complex, triangulated relationship between the ancestral home-
land, the history that we embody and the exile that we inhabit, and the
United States that is both the source of our dislocation and our refuge?
What daily negotiations do we engage as academics, community members,
family members, mentors, advocates, and students? If, as Weller Sollors
contends, “what is called ‘memory’ may become a form of counterhis-
tory that challenges the false generalizations in exclusionary ‘History,’ ”48
how can memory be used to supplement and subvert the history that is
Um ❘ Exiled Memory 847

imposed on us, to insist on our own centrality in these lived experiences?


How do we resurrect, relocate, and re-center those who are, in Helen Zia’s
words, MIH — missing in history? From our colonized past, we learn the
critical importance of inserting ourselves in places and spaces of power; for
when we don’t or can’t speak, when we are unable to write or be heard, we
become the “outsider” in our own history, looking in as others reconstruct,
interpret, and legitimate their own version — and vision — of that history.
In articulation, we give form and meaning to that which is still unnam-
able, still incomprehensible, still unacknowledged. Though US history has
long denied the war in Cambodia and Laos, those memories are deeply
etched in our oral histories, and we are reclaiming them. Though we con-
tinue to be forced into the category of “Indochina” or “Southeast Asia” or
“Laotian minus the Hmong”49 — politicized categories with deep historical
roots — we fight for our own identity through advocacy such as the “Count
Me In” initiative aimed at bringing visibility to the pluralistic features of
our communities through the disaggregation of ethnic data.50 This inter-
rogation of power and positionality must also be directed inwardly, in quiet
moments of self-reflexivity, to critically examine what we, in the process
of recollecting, codifying, and transmitting, deliberately or inadvertently
privilege or omit. Like the “frescoes on the murals,” to borrow Narrudhin
Farah’s analogy, how can we allow the past to speak to us, unfettered and
unfiltered?51 Can that ever be? Can we still hear the call of the ancestral
graves if we have lost the native speech?
Even with, and perhaps especially because of, its gaping wound of loss
and rupture, this history is not to be shunned as laments of victimhood.
For survivors, memory is the wellspring of their courage. When refugees
cast their sight onto the past, it is not simply nostalgia but a way of recon-
necting with the many parts of their selves, of bridging this present that
still shocks them with its foreignness, with a past that is familiar even in its
painful reveal, and inspiring because of its painful reveal. It anchors them
in genealogy against a future fraught with uncertainty and ambivalence,
and against a history that works to divest them of a past. At times a shackle,
at other times a spur for imagining and activism — for there cannot be one
without the other — and always imperfect, memory is, ultimately, the very
last weapon of the weak and the vulnerable. At the end of the day, each
positions 20:3 Summer 2012 848

can stand up, even in his or her isolated corner, even in small whispers, and
simply say, “No, you will not take that away from me.”

Notes

1. Michael Vickery, “Looking Back at Cambodia, 1942 – 76,” in Peasants and Politics in Kam-
puchea 1942 – 1981, ed. Ben Kiernan and Chanthou Boua (London: Zed Press, 1982), 89.
2. The Khmer Rouge considered their coming to power as the apocalyptic break in Cambo-
dian history, heralding a new utopian era under pure communism, beginning with “Year
Zero.”
3. For a critical reflection on the term Vietnam War, see Khatharya Um, “The ‘Vietnam War’:
What’s in a Name?” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): 134 – 39.
4. Khatharya Um, personal interview, San Diego, 1996.
5. Beth Pielert, dir., Out of the Poison Tree, Good Filmworks, 2007.
6. Helen Leslie, “Healing the Psychological Wounds of Gender Related Violence in Latin
America,” Gender and Development 9, no. 3 (2001): 52.
7. See Khatharya Um, “Refractions of Home: Exile, Memory, and Diasporic Longing,” in
Expressions of Cambodia: The Politics of Tradition, Identity, and Change, ed. Leakthina Ollier
and Timothy Winter (New York: Routledge, 2006). For a more detailed examination of this
theme, see also Khatharya Um, “Keepers of Memory” (paper presented at the International
Association of Forced Migration Study, Cairo, January 2007).
8. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 212.
9. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire,” trans. Marc Roude-
bush, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 17.
10. Dinh Van Lo, comments made in an oral presentation, National Coalition of Advocates for
Students, national conference, Boston, 1997.
11. Amy K. Kaminsky, After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1999), 10.
12. What Pierre Nora referred to as lieux de mémoire (Nora, “Between Memory and His-
tory,” 8).
13. Cambodian American Heritage and Killing Fields Memorial Museum, cai.maaillinois.org
(accessed April 18, 2012). For more discussion and analysis of memory and memorialization
in the Cambodian community, see also Cathy Schlund-Vials’s article in this volume.
14. Edward Said applied the concept of counterpoint used in music to refer to the relationship
and negotiations between two or more voices, perspectives, histories that are simultaneously
independent and interdependent. He wrote, “In the counterpoint of western classical music,
various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privileging given to any par-
ticular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay
Um ❘ Exiled Memory 849

that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the
work.” Edward Said, Cultures and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 59 – 60.
15. Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representa-
tions 69 (Winter 2000): 135.
16. Interview, anonymous Southeast Asian American high school student, Berkeley, CA, Octo-
ber 15, 2002.
17. Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 16.
18. On this subject, see for example Degung Santikarma, “Exploring the Meaning of Recon-
ciliation,” Jakarta Post, June 22, 2000; Leslie Dweyer, “The Intimacy of Terror: Gender and
the Violence of 1965 – 1966 in Bali,” Intersections: Gender, History, and Culture in the Asia
Contexts 10 (August 2004).
19. At his trial where he testified to horrific details of what transpired at S-21, head of S-21
Kaing Guek Ieu, a.k.a. “Duch,” insisted that the list of written rules for interrogation cur-
rently exhibited at Tuol Sleng was produced by the Vietnamese after the fact.
20. Mai Neng Moua, “D.C.,” in Bamboo among the Oaks, ed. Mai Neng Moua (St. Paul: Min-
nesota Historical Society Press, 2002), 61.
21. John Tenhula, Voices from Southeast Asia: The Refugee Experience in the United States (New
York: Holmes and Meier, 1991), 164.
22. Eyerman, Cultural Trauma, 2.
23. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Collier Books, 1991), 142.
24. Alexandra Smith, “Eyes That Saw Horrors Now See Only Shadows,” New York Times,
September 8, 1989.
25. Gian Paolo Biasin, “The Haunted Journey of Primo Levi,” in Memory and Mastery, ed.
Roberta Kremer (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 14.
26. Chath pierSath, “The Wilderness of Pain,” Khmer Voice, 1999, www.khmervoice.info/old
-KV-files/wilderness_of_pain.htm (accessed March 2, 2012).
27. Lyn Thomson and Christine Clarridge, “West Seattle Survivors Relive Terror, Struggle to
Understand,” Seattle Times, September 24, 2010.
28. Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (1996): 661.
29. Pin Yathay, Stay Alive My Son (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), xiii.
30. Kathen is a temple fund-raising, led by an individual or a family as an act of Buddhist merit
making.
31. Hirsch, “Past Lives,” 661.
32. Interview, anonymous Cambodian high school student, Berkeley, CA, June 18, 2002.
33. Interview, anonymous Hmong high school student, Berkeley, CA, June 18, 2002.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Michael Kenny, “The Place for Memory,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no.
3 (1999): 421.
positions 20:3 Summer 2012 850

37. For an in-depth analysis of diasporas’ transnational political projects, see Um, “Diasporic
Citizenship,” in Diasporas: Peace Builders or Peace Wreckers, ed. Hazel Smith and Paul Starr
(New York: United Nations University Press, 2005).
38. Andrew Lam, Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora (Berkeley, CA: Hey-
dey Books, 2005), 2.
39. Nora, “Between Memory,” 9.
40. Eyerman, Cultural Trauma, 6.
41. Kaminsky, After Exile, 36.
42. The word repatriation comes from the Latin root repatriare, which means to “restore some-
one to his homeland.”
43. Lam, Perfume Dreams, 13.
44. Ernst Renan, “What’s a Nation” in Discours et Conferences (Paris: Caiman-Levy, 1887),
277 – 310.
45. Nora, “Between Memory,” 8.
46. Ibid., 12.
47. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 177.
48. Kerwin Lee Klein, “On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,” Representa-
tions 69 (Winter 2000): 137; quoted in Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’ Mealy, History and
Memory in African American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7 – 8.
49. In the US Census, two categories exist for the people from Laos, namely “Hmong” and
“Laotian,” the latter encompassing all ethnic groups with the exception of the Hmong. This
classification reflects the desire of the Hmong and other ethnic minority groups from Laos
to distinguish themselves from the politically and numerically dominant ethnic Lao and
underscores the political capital that Hmong Americans garner through their role in the
US “secret war” in Laos.
50. In 2007, UC students successfully pressured the University of California system to create
additional ethnic categories in order to better capture statistically the diversity of the Asian
American student population.
51. Nurridhin Farah, “A Country in Exile,” Transition, no. 57 (1992): 7.

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