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