KOAN KHMER

In Tuon’s novel, a boy escapes the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia with his family and comes of age in America, where he becomes a writer.

Samnang Sok is 5 when his family flees Cambodia’s Communist dictatorship in 1979, but he was only about 3 when his mother died, unable to receive treatment because “there were no doctors and nurses under Pol Pot.” This tragedy, along with the execution of two uncles and multiple episodes of starvation, causes his family—led by his grandmother, Lok-Yeay, and grandfather, Lok-Ta—to make the difficult decision to leave their home.They head first to a United Nations refugee camp in Thailand, which has its own horrors, including an attack by Khmer Rouge soldiers that forces the family to hide in a communal toilet; however, they’re eventually sponsored for entry into Massachusetts. Samnang’s childhood there is far from idyllic—his family is constantly working to get by, and his cousins are the only Cambodian children he knows. He faces nearly constant racism and never truly feels at ease in America until he moves to Long Beach, California’s diverse community. His desire to “take the language that is not given to [him] at birth [English], possess it, INFECT it with [his] presence, my history, [his] voice, and hurl it back” drives him to become a writer, which he uses to tell his own story. Tuon effectively uses this framework throughout the novel—no matter how long Samnang spends in the United States, he can’t leave his Cambodian roots behind, and he deeply understands that he doesn’t want to do so. Indeed, the novel opens with Samnang asking his maternal relatives to tell him about his mother; he’s eager to know more about his parents, whose “absence had always been a haunting presence in [his] life.” The overall tone of the novel is straightforwardly memoiristic; Samnang relates his experiences primarily chronologically and includes additional information only as he learns it from later interviews, giving the work—which closely mirrors events from the author’s own life—a sense of verisimilitude.

A quietly affecting novel of the refugee experience.