DAUGHTER OF SONG

A medical professional recounts an immigrant family’s tragedy and their encounter with the American justice system in this nonfiction book.

Hood didn’t go looking for Panna Krom, but circumstances conspired for their paths to cross. In 2011, he was winding down from a career in Connecticut as a physician’s assistant when a friend suggested that he volunteer for a writing group at a local women’s prison, York Correctional Institution, in Niantic. Through another prisoner in the class, he met Krom, a Thai Cambodian refugee who’d been charged with first-degree manslaughter at 17 after delivering a baby in her family’s apartment bathroom; the investigation concluded that the baby had drowned in the toilet and that Krom had hidden the body in her closet. Panna and her parents complied with whatever the police said, and authorities eventually arrested Krom; by the time she and Hood met, she’d already served six years of an 18-year sentence. Despite his admitted lack of legal acumen, Hood does his best over the course of this book to try to parse her and her family’s story and get to the truth of what happened. What the police determined to be a straightforward homicide, he asserts, was actually a tragic situation that was the result of a teenager’s acute panic, compounded by intergenerational trauma and the coping mechanisms of war and genocide survivors; he describes the latter in detail, using such sources as a report by Khmer Health Advocates, a group of psychological clinicians who interviewed Krom: “Men and women who lived through the Khmer Rouge genocide, their final report noted, needed lies in order to survive.…To talk about it was tantamount to making the trauma happen again.”

In a time of increasingly tenuous immigration and reproductive freedoms in the United States, Krom’s case illuminates a number of failures in interlocking systems: failure to support traumatized refugees, justice proceedings that give women of color longer sentences, and the media’s failure to protect the identities of minors. Hood’s yearslong association with Krom and her parents bleeds into the story, offering an intimacy that many true-crime stories lack; over the course of years, he managed to get Krom’s parents to divulge accounts of the suffering that they faced in Cambodia and in refugee camps in Thailand. Krom’s personal narrative and those of her family members make up the core of the book, with some detours to fill in Hood’s personal details and to chronicle situations that were similar to Krom’s but had very different outcomes, in order to contextualize the relative severity of Krom’s sentence. The book, at times, feels closer to Krom’s parents, Chan and Song, than it does to Krom herself; she rarely divulged how she felt about the baby, for example. There are occasional typographical errors over the course of the book, which readers may find to be distracting. Overall, though, Hood presents a sad story with a great deal of empathy, as well as an ample amount of detail.

A true-crime tale told with earnest compassion and cultural sensitivity.