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Agents of war: Cambodian refugees and the containment of radical opposition

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Content AGENTS OF WAR
Cambodian Refugees and the
Containment of Radical Opposition

by

Jolie Chea

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2017

Copyright 2017 Jolie Chea
2

Some of us, white and black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into
existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and
do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name.

If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and
render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you
in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.

James Baldwin

from An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis

3

Dedicated to my grandmothers
Chhuor Kim Guech and Tan Yiv Teang

4
Acknowledgements

I could not have completed this dissertation without the guidance, support, and
assistance of so many. In particular, I would like to thank my dissertation committee for
helping me get to the finish line. In particular, I owe a great deal to my dissertation
advisor, Dorinne K. Kondo, who has read every draft I have ever written. Her
commitment to me as her student has never wavered. She has always challenged me to be
a more rigorous scholar and writer, and I am better because of her fierce support. I am
thankful for Viet Thanh Nguyen’s engagement with my arguments, his honesty, and his
example. My experience working with him as a teaching assistant has been invaluable
and I look forward to applying the skills I have gained in my own classrooms. I am
especially grateful for the support and encouragement of Kara Keeling and Panivong
Norindr. They believed in me even when I ceased to believe in myself and provided the
warmth and reassurance I needed to get through difficult moments.
At UCR, Dylan Rodríguez and Setsu Shigematsu were a beacon of light in a
moment when I believed school (the academy) was not for me. Because of them I found
my way back to Los Angeles, a place I had to leave (temporarily) because of heartache. I
came back a stronger and more confident person. I will never forget their love and
mentorship for me during that brief but crucial time in my life. Thu-huong Nguyen-vo,
Lucy M. Burns, and Keith Camacho were the best committee members I could’ve asked
for at UCLA. They exemplified for me what friendship could look like in the academy, in
a professional setting.
My friends—family, really—have been there alongside me every step of the way.
In many respects, I feel like I wrote this dissertation for them, or at least with them in
5
mind. They know exactly who they are and what they mean to me, and I intend to always
ensure they are aware of it. There is a saying that goes, “Some people come into your life
for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” Whatever the case—whether I met you in or outside
of the academy, and for however long our lives overlap(ped), I am grateful for the time
we spent together.
My greatest gratitude goes to my mother, for whom no amount of words can
demonstrate my love, admiration, and respect. You may never read this, Mom, but

thank you

for always allowing me to be exactly who I am, on my own timeline. You have been
through so much in your life, from the moment of your birth, and yet you remain soft,
compassionate, and warm-hearted. You have never asked anything of me except to be a
good and kind person. I am not always good or kind, but I will always try to do better.
You are my role model, and I feel truly blessed to be your kid in this lifetime. There is
still so much I don’t know about you, but my feelings and sense of connection to you is
like a bottomless ocean or the infinite universe. My father passed away in 2012, halfway
through the writing of this dissertation. Though our relationship was not always the
easiest, he had always stood behind me—and sometimes in front of me, to protect and
defend me from those who did not agree with the way I live my life. He showed me both
the best and worst parts of himself. I am who I am because of their example. My sisters
and cousins: we spent the early years of our lives as siblings, as one unit. Things were
crazy at times but we also had loads of fun. I would not have changed our experiences
6
growing up together as “American” children of refugees for anything else. I love you all
so, so much, and I am sorry for the harm I did to you.
I would not still be here if not for Moose and, now, Belly. More than just pets,
Moose and Belly are my friends and they have the most beautiful souls. They are my
babies, my family—they are me. Actually, that is not true. They are better than me. I
have learned so much about how to be a better human being through sharing my life with
them. Lastly, but not at all the least, Irina Contreras has read every single word I have
written. Her enthusiasm and excitement, and sometimes irritation (haha), for all that we
do together (or apart) inspires me to do more, and do better. There was a time when I was
a shy and quiet person. That has changed. I hope to always evolve into a better version of
myself. Irina, words cannot adequately convey what I feel for you, and with you, but I
hope to always try. Being in this life with you has taught me so much about this thing we
call love, and even more about friendship, about patience, understanding, compassion,
and so much more. I never want to stop learning. Ixi Ia Joy, you are magic. From the
moment you were born—from the moment I found out you were on your way—I have
loved you. I love you more than I love my own life, and for as long as I am loving you, I
will love you with everything I have. I love and adore you both, and I will always have
your backs.
I’m certain I have failed to mention some very important people on paper. Please
forgive me, and know that I hold you all very dear to my heart. My health is not so good
anymore. If anything happens, know that I lived my best life, and that I will see many of
you again in the next lifetime. All shortcomings and errors in this dissertation are my
own. I look forward to further revisions and continuing this work for the book project.
7
Table of Contents

Introduction: Agents of War: Cambodian Refugees 8
and the Containment of Radical Opposition

Chapter One: “Fuckin’ Black Bastard”: Anti-black Racism and the 40
Racialization of Cambodian Refugees in Spencer Nakasako’s
aka Don Bonus (1995)

Chapter Two: The Haing S. Ngor Murder Case and Refugee Performativity 78
In US Empire

Chapter Three: Fruits of the Harvest: U.S. Empire and the Conscription 112
of the Cambodian Refugee Figure

Chapter Four: Epiphytic Lives: Cambodian American Nonmemory 158
and Silence as a Condition of Possibility

Epilogue: A Ghost Story 198

Bibliography 203

8
Introduction

The mid- to late 1970s saw the mass migration of Cambodians to the US as
refugees of war. Two weeks before the US pulled out of Vietnam and Saigon fell to the
North, communist Khmer Rouge troops marched into Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital.
There they declared victory and briefly celebrated the end of the American war before
they began their evacuation of city dwellers into the countryside. On April 17, 1975, the
Khmer Rouge regime put into action what they believed would bring balance and
stability, towards a new “Democratic Kampuchea.”
Allowing no room for resistance or opposition to their newly gained power, and
intolerant of all who they deemed “enemies of the people,” almost immediately Khmer
Rouge troops began to execute those who bore the appearance of wealth, royalty, elitism,
and the West. To the Khmer Rouge, the working peasant was pure and untainted by
western culture and capitalism. Peasant folks were the face of honest labor and who, in
their view, could lead and guide Cambodia out of the growing abyss of inequality and
economic exploitation. After all, what scholars have described as an “agrarian utopia”
was rooted in their vision of a society where all members bore the burden of work and
reaped its profits equally. Their plan however did not come to fruition the way they
hoped.
Perhaps to blame were the regime leaders who sought too quick and easy a
transformation. Perhaps those tapped by regime leaders to carry out their plan did not
wholeheartedly subscribe to the same ideals and goals. It could have been that they did
not have adequate resources, human power, nor consent and commitment from the people
they believed they represented. Perhaps it was an impossible task. In the brief duration of
9
their rule, just shy of four years, approximately two million Cambodians died. The
majority of Cambodians died not by (political) execution but from illness, disease,
malnutrition, or starvation—all of which would have been easily treatable under different
circumstances. By the third year of their rule, skirmishes between Khmer Rouge troops
and the North Vietnamese taking place along their shared border increased in number and
intensity. Then, in January 1979, the North Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. Given that
the system put in place by the Khmer Rouge was beginning to crumble—if it was ever
stable to begin with—the North Vietnamese successfully toppled the Khmer Rouge
regime. Hundreds of thousands of Cambodians fled west to Thailand, where there was no
war, while others stayed behind to look for family members and loved ones.
Although the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge regime had apparently ended,
Cambodians encountered another set of hardships at the Thai border. Extensive political
and bureaucratic procedures kept them entrapped in the camps where their vulnerabilities
were further exacerbated. Many were subject to abuses of power by Thai authorities, or
other Cambodians, and faced more violence in the refugee camps until they were airlifted
out to countries of second asylum. Between 1975 and 1994, roughly 160,000
Cambodians were relocated to countries such as France, Australia, and the US.
Given the US’s role in the destruction of Cambodia during the US-Vietnam war,
this project is concerned with how the US has incorporated Cambodian refugee families
into its body politic since their arrival on American soil forty years ago. More
specifically, it is concerned with the incorporation of the Cambodian refugee figure into
the empire that helped to produce the Cambodian refugee in the first place. This
dissertation, Agents of War: Cambodian Refugees and the Containment of Radical
10
Opposition, traces a critical genealogy of the “refugee” in order to dislodge normative
understandings of citizenship and belonging as fused to a history of global racialized
warfare and imperialist state violence. It rejects hegemonic narratives that cast the
refugee figure as “objects of rescue” and provides an analysis of how Cambodian
refugees are racialized vis-à-vis other communities in the American racial order. I argue
that the incorporation of the Cambodian refugee into the US body politic is an extension
of ongoing efforts to discipline and contain radical opposition to a US nation-building
project founded on racism, genocide, war, and the colonization of racialized bodies.
Prior to 1975, there was virtually no Cambodian migration to the US. Since the
early 1980s, research and publications related to Cambodian refugees have proliferated in
the fields of psychology, sociology, social work, and genocide studies, along with
numerous memoirs, poetry, performance art, fiction writing, and approximately one
dozen films. The narratives that emerge from these studies however tend to isolate the
years of conflict and source of trauma to the Khmer Rouge’s four-year rule. Yale
University’s Cambodian Genocide Project, under which the Documentation Center of
Cambodia (DC-CAM) was founded, houses the largest archive of regime data, including
victim photos and biographies maintained at the regime’s interrogation prisons, maps of
the regime’s reorganization of the country according to new “economic zones,”
information regarding US involvement in the Cambodian war and genocide, and an
extensive list of publications.
Scholars such as Ben Kiernan, David Chandler, Alexander Hinton, Michael Vickery, and
journalists Elizabeth Becker, Philip Short, and Nate Thayer have uncovered information
11
and produced knowledge about the Khmer Rouge regime that remains invaluable to our
understanding of the regime itself.
More recently, sociologists and anthropologists working in the interdisciplinary
field of Asian American Studies have produced studies that broaden our understanding of
the social impact of the regime and the larger war. Notably, Aihwa Ong’s Buddha Is
Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America and Sucheng Chan’s Survivors:
Cambodian Refugees in the United States both emerged just after the turn of the 21
st

century as the first full-length studies on Cambodian refugees living in the US.
1
Both
texts are indispensable for their focus on how Cambodian refugees have fared since they
first arrived in the US, including challenges they have encountered and successes they
have celebrated while navigating the ins and outs of American life.
Since the mid-1990s, Cambodian writers have published numerous memoirs
detailing life under the Khmer Rouge regime. Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass
Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge, Pin Yathay’s Stay Alive, My Son, Loung
Ung’s First They Killed My Father and sequel Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia
Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind, Haing S. Ngor’s Survival in the Killing Fields,
and most recently Rithy Panh’s The Elimination are just a few titles that have gained
fame and the attention of scholars and readers worldwide.
2
Additionally, Roland Joffé’s

1
See Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2003) and Sucheng Chan, Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United
States (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
2
See Chanrithy Him, When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge (New York and
London: W. W. Norton & Company: 2000); Pin Yathay with John Man, Stay Alive, My Son (New York and
London: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1987); Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of
Cambodia Remembers (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), Lucky Child: A Daughter of
Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005); Haing S. Ngor
with Roger Warner, Survival in the Killing Fields (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1987); and Rithy
Panh with Christophe Bataille, The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and
the Commandant of the Killing Fields (New York: Other Press, 2012).
12
1984 feature film The Killing Fields, along with documentary films such as Spencer
Nakasako’s 1995 aka Don Bonus, Socheata Poeuv’s 2008 New Year Baby, David Grabias
and Nicole Newnham’s 2006 Sentenced Home, Rithy Panh’s 2014 The Missing Picture,
and Thet Sambath and Rob Lemkin’s 2010 Enemies of the People are just some examples
of media forms used widely in high school and college courses and which have reached a
wide audience.
3
Like the scholarly texts, these nonfiction writings and films produced by
Cambodians explore some aspect of the Cambodian refugee, Cambodian American, or
Khmer Rouge regime experience.
Adding to the growing field of Cambodian American studies, this project
examines the aftermath of war from the perspective of a Los Angeles-based second
generation Chinese Cambodian born in the US in the immediate years following the war
and resettlement. My examination of the ways Cambodian refugees have been
incorporated into the US body politic is framed by an understanding of US foreign policy
as motivated more so by imperial interests rather than an ethical duty to aid a
humanitarian crisis. Asian Americanist Sucheng Chan asserts, “US refugee policy has
been used as a weapon in the cold war and has strongly favored people escaping from
communism.”
4
She argues, “American leaders think of refuge seekers from communist
countries as people ‘voting with their feet.’”
5
Writing about Central American migrants,
María Cristina García’s research on the politics of refugee resettlement affirms Chan’s

3
See The Killing Fields, directed by Roland Joffé (1984; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1985), DVD;
aka Don Bonus, directed by Spencer Nakasako and Sokly Ny (1995; San Francisco, CA: National Asian
American Telecommunications Association, 1995), DVD; New Year Baby, directed by Socheata Poeuv
(2008; USA: Broken English Productions, 2008), DVD; Sentenced Home, directed by David Grabias and
Nicole Newnham (2006; New York, NY: IndiePix, 2006), DVD; The Missing Picture, directed by Rithy
Panh (2014; France: Bophana Production, 2014), DVD; and Enemies of the People, directed by Rob
Lemkin and Thet Sambath (2009; Old Street Films, 2010), DVD.
4
Chan, 62.
5
Ibid.
13
position. Arguing the US assisted Cubans because they were fleeing a communist
government at the height of the Cold War, she states, “laws were bent if not broken to
accommodate them [Cuban migrants].”
6
For people fleeing repressive right-wing
governments particularly in Central and South America as well as Haiti—countries with
whom the US maintains “friendly” relations—the US has not been welcoming.
7
In her
discussion of how US sovereign power gains legitimacy through its capacity to decide on
matters of who will be included or excluded, Yen Le Espiritu argues, “In the case of
refugees, the decision over who will, and who will not, be granted refuge is not just a
humanitarian consideration but also a moment when the sovereign state reasserts its
monopoly over matters of security.”
8
Moreover, she argues that the admission of refugees
bolsters the image of the US as a place of refuge, even if the US played a central role in
the production of refugees in the first place.
9
It also, as Espiritu has argued, provides a
form of justification for military intervention around the world.
Walter Benjamin writes, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state
of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.”
10
Since, and prior to,
the US’s inception as a nation-state, war has been the order of the day. From the conquest
and colonization of indigenous people on the continent, to the enslavement of African
peoples, and the dawn of global imperialism, when the US pushed through the western
seaboard of the continent to establish military outposts in the Pacific Islands, the US has
always been at war. Espiritu’s recent study on the Vietnam War and what she terms

6
Maria Cristina Garcia, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and
Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), x.
7
Chan, 62.
8
Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2014), 174-175.
9
Ibid., 175.
10
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257.
14
“militarized refuge(es)” emphasizes “the war’s irreconcilability and ongoingness,”
11
or
“the endings that are not over.”
12
But as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made clear in his
lesser-known speech Beyond Vietnam, the US’s wars abroad have to be understood in
direct relation to its wars at home, against domestic populations.
13
Thus I examine not
only how the incorporation of Cambodian refugees into the US body politic enables a
national and global exportation of a narrative of US freedom and democracy but also the
ways Cambodian refugees have been racialized in the US, vis-à-vis subjugated Black,
Brown, and indigenous populations, and their transition from refugee to citizen—from
Cambodian refugee to Cambodian American.
Scholars in the field of Asian American Studies have examined the ways in which
Asian Americans, and later, Southeast Asian Americans, have been pitted against Black
and brown populations in the US. As the Civil Rights movement gained momentum,
mainstream media began to promote Asian Americans in the image of a hard working,
law-abiding, family oriented “model minority.” The model minority figure was intended
to give the impression that racism did not exist, for here were Asian Americans, a
nonwhite people, with high household median incomes, high rates of educational
attainment, and so forth. The underlying message (rebuttal) was: if Asian Americans
could make it, there was no reason why Black people could not. At its core, the model
minority myth was anti-black; it had the effect of delegitimizing social protests and
rebellions against white-led oppression across the nation. While Asian American Studies

11
Espiritu, Body Counts, 174.
12
Yen Le Espiritu, “Thirty Years AfterWARd: The Endings That Are Not Over,” in 30 Years AfterWARd:
Vietnamese Americans & U.S. Empire, eds. Yen Le Espiritu and Nguyen-Vo, Thu-Huong (Los Angeles:
UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2005).
13
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” (American Rhetoric: Online
Speech Bank), delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City, NY.
15
scholars have worked tirelessly to debunk the model minority myth, by explicating its
overgeneralizations and false or misleading claims (such as, for example, the fact that
high household median incomes can be attributed to having multiple income-earners
under one household as opposed to traditional single breadwinner families),
disaggregating data by ethnicity, or highlighting continued challenges and struggles faced
by Asian Americans, it is equally important to consider and address the ways in which
Asian Americans fulfill the function of the model minority position. As subjects of an
inherently anti-black settler colonial nation, conscious efforts to address anti-black racism
and violence against indigenous populations must be hypervigilant and persistent.
In the broader field of Ethnic Studies, scholars have laid theoretical foundations
for the study of race that are central to this dissertation. Ronald Takaki’s Iron Cages:
Race and Culture in 19
th
Century America urges scholars to think through the ways
racialized groups have experienced oppression in relation to rather than independent of
one another.
14
Takaki is deliberate in his comparative analysis of racial domination of
communities of color; he consciously rejects the treatment of racial groups as separate
entities. Racism is not simply a matter of attitudes, he argues.
15
Rather, “the domination
of various peoples of color in America had cultural and economic bases which involved
as well as transcended race.”
16
Critiquing the shortcomings of contemporary historical
scholarship (which continue to hold true today, almost four decades after the publication
of Iron Cages), Takaki produces an “integrated analysis of the past” by examining racism
in American society as a “total structure” rather than the product of fragmented historical

14
Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19
th
-Century America (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1979), xiii.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
16
scenarios and accidental factors.
17
Takaki’s work has inspired an array of scholars in their
own endeavors of comparative race studies, and have shaped the understanding of racial
domination and formation among various generations of students across different
academic and community settings. Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s theorization of
racial formation is fundamental to any understanding of race in the US. They define
“racial formation” as “the process by which social, economic, and political forces
determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are in turn
shaped by racial meanings.
18
Tomás Almaguer, in his text Racial Fault Lines: The
Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California, examines the history of race and
ethnic relations in California among Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese workers in the
second half of the 19
th
century. In doing so, he calls our attention to “the evolution of
racializing discourses as well as the hierarchical structuring of racial inequalities in a
context where more than two racialized populations contest for group position within the
social structure.
19
Struck by the major differences in the experiences of each racial group
as they were subject to white supremacy and domination in California, Almaguer argues
the reason for this stems from the “different social evaluations” made by European
settlers as they were forced to reckon with varying racial groups in the US.
20
While
Spanish colonization conferred upon Mexicans a status that resulted in the general
perception that Mexicans were worth of partial assimilation into the US body politic,
indigenous peoples were viewed as “in the way” of their new society and were thus slated

17
Ibid., vi.
18
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s
(New York: Routledge, 1994).
19
Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California
(Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994), 2.
20
Ibid., 4.
17
for elimination.
21
The presence of Black people in the west was unwelcome because their
association with slavery was viewed as “a symbolic threat to California’s becoming a
‘free’ state.”
22
Chinese and Japanese male immigrant laborers, on the other hand, were
viewed by the white working class as competition and were thus hated—so much so that
they remain the subjects of the nation’s only immigration act to target a specific
racial/ethnic group.
23

“What whites did to one racial group had direct consequences for others,” Takaki
argued. Elaborating on Winthrop Jordan’s assertion that it would be “impossible to see
clearly what Americans thought of Negroes without ascertaining their almost invariably
contrary thoughts concerning Indians: in the settlement of this country the red and black
peoples served white men as aids to navigation by which they would find their safe
positions as they ventured into America,” Takaki stated, “And I could see how brown and
yellow peoples also became ‘aids to navigation’ as white Americans established and
expanded the new nation in the nineteenth century.”
24
Following in the path laid by these
scholars, this dissertation posits the incorporation of the Cambodian and Southeast Asian
refugee figure as central to US nation-building in the late twentieth and early twenty first
centuries.
While the scholars above offer a historical assessment of conditions that preceded
the last major revision to immigration law in 1965, this dissertation is concerned with
how we might apply nineteenth and early to mid- twentieth century theories of racial
formation and racialization to Southeast Asian refugee groups. World War II gave rise to

21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., 5.
23
Ibid., 6.
24
Takaki, xiv.
18
important developments in immigration law, such as the 1965 Immigration and
Naturalization Act (also known as the Hart-Cellar Act). Judy Yung’s Unbound Feet: A
Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco provides evidence of how
immigration law was revised to meet the social, economic, and political needs of the
postwar era.
25
Less than three decades later, Los Angeles, a metropolitan city among the
American West’s most prominent regions, erupted in flames. By that time, Cambodians
and other Southeast Asian refugees had been in the US for about a decade to almost two
decades. The 1992 events led historian George Sanchez, for example, to point out
evidence of a new racial dynamic that challenged the balance of the black/white binary of
race relations and that was substantially different than that of the twentieth century.
Equally important are the ways in which race relations in the US and beyond have
evolved since the turn of the twentieth and into the 21
st
century. Whereas scholars have
analyzed immigration law in relation to and as contingent upon the demand for cheap
labor, this dissertation examines the ideological labor and function that refugees residing
in the US fulfill on behalf of, or against, global imperialisms.
The field of “Cambodian American Studies” is relatively young and still forming.
Since 2012, however, three full-length studies have added in different ways to our
knowledge base about Cambodians in the US. Cathy Schlund-Vials’s War, Genocide,
and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work examines cultural productions by
Cambodian American writers, filmmakers, and performance artists, which she argues
“juxtaposes past/present state-sanctioned directives to forget with resistive moves to
remember familial stories of survival, narratives of forced exodus, and memories of

25
Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1995).
19
contested resettlement.
26
By reading closely their cultural productions and texts, Schlund-
Vials demonstrates how they “labor to make whole […] a historical truth that moves
beyond the amnesiac registers and politicized reaches of the Cambodian Syndrome.”
27

Playing off the more widely known “Vietnam Syndrome,” Schlund-Vials offers the term
“Cambodian Syndrome” to describe how US politicians and presidents often invoke the
memory of an unfortunate Cambodia and the “fall” of Cambodia to the communist
Khmer Rouge regime upon US withdrawal, in order to justify contemporary US military
interventions and other war efforts. Against this historical amnesia, and the strategic
erasure of US’s role in the collapse of the US-backed Lon Nol regime and subsequent
rise of the Khmer Rouge, Schlund-Vials argues the cultural producers highlighter in her
text all work to center the voices, experiences, and perspectives of Cambodian survivors,
thereby offering an “alternative means to justice, healing, and reclamation.”
28
My
dissertation on the other hand examines ways cultural producers reinforce hegemonic US
narratives and popular understandings of the Khmer Rouge regime and US war in
Cambodia.
Eric Tang’s Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto
compellingly shows that resettlement—“refuge”—in the US failed to provide a material
(and not even a sense of) security for many Cambodians. Instead, resettlement in the US
“continued [their] itinerancy.”
29
While most sociological accounts portray Cambodian
refugees in terms of a linear trajectory from immigrant to permanent resident and finally,

26
Cathy Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 3-4.
27
Ibid., 17.
28
Ibid., 18.
29
Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2015), 4.
20
citizen, “with each phase supposedly bringing greater stability,” Tang’s study
demonstrates that “the cycle of uprooting, displacement, and captivity that defines the
refugee experience persists long after resettlement”—despite, he argues, the US’s
insistence that the refugee condition is temporary.
30
Delineating the casting of
Cambodian refugees as “those who would eventually achieve the successes portended by
liberalism even as all empirical evidence pointed to the contrary,” Tang offers the term
“refugee exceptionalism” to describe the positioning of the refugee figure in the
“hyperghetto” but never of it. Refugee exceptionalism is “the process whereby refugees
are resettled into and then recurrently ‘saved’ from the hyperghetto and its attendant
modalities of captivity.”
31
Arguing throughout the text that Cambodian refugees have
been hailed as a solution not only to the “bad war” in Southeast Asia, but also against
contemporary urban America’s poorest residents, Tang demonstrates how and why the
refugee must be held in perpetual captivity: to be “used over and over again.”
32
In an
earlier publication, Tang explores how Cambodian refugees and Black Americans in New
York City forged alliances to defeat efforts by city and wealthy property owners to rid the
city of its most disenfranchised residents in order to make way for high-rise luxury
condominiums.
33
As he states, “…refugees from the wars in Southeast Asia […] served
as a critical stopgap, allowing [those] properties to become viable again.”
34
Whereas
Tang’s study examines important alliances between Cambodian refugees and Black
Americans, Agents of War performs the equally necessary analysis of racial antagonisms
between the two groups.

30
Tang, 4-5.
31
Tang, 14.
32
Tang, 5, 14.
33
See Eric Tang, “How The Refugees Stopped The Bronx From Burning,” Race & Class 54, no. 4 (2013).
34
Ibid., 52.
21
Finally, Khatharya Um’s From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the
Making of the Cambodian Diaspora surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggles of
Cambodians to make sense of their lives following the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime.
35

Um analyzes the violence that transpired under the regime’s hold of power, while
focusing on its causes and consequences. Thus From the Land of Shadows is not only a
book about the transgressions of the Khmer Rouge regime but of “the ways both
survivors and successive generations, individually and collectively, understand and work
through this experience long after the genocide…”
36
Beginning with a “historicized and
holistic context aimed to produce a better understanding of the complexity of diasporic
lives and sequelae of trauma that remains neither fully present nor fully absent […] in
refugee lives and homes,”
37
Um reminds readers of the limits and the sometimes (or
oftentimes) problematic (but perhaps necessary nevertheless) nature of academic inquiry
and research. She writes:
Invaluable as they are to the scholarly world, the theorizing, debates, and
questions that preoccupy academics (such as how accurate the body counts are, or
whether these experiences constitute genocide or a “rupture”) have little
significance for survivors who are struggling to make sense of the
incomprehensible experiences that ravaged their lives. If anything, such discourse
often acts as a silencing force. As one survivor simply and poignantly asked,
“Why [do they] correct my memory?”
38

Um, along with Yen Le Espiritu, Cathy Schlund-Vials, and Eric Tang to a different
degree, reflect on the second generation’s relationship to the war and the survivor
generation. Whereas these scholars rely on the extant framework of “postmemory”

35
Khatharya Um, From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian
Diaspora (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015), 6.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid., 7.
38
Ibid., 15.
22
offered by Marianne Hirsch, Agents of War offers the term “nonmemory” to describe the
absence or the “non” nature of war memories in second generation lives. Particularly
relevant for this dissertation is Um’s highlighting of silence as “an analytic site for
culturally informed reflection and theorizing about despair and resistance, reconciliation
and healing.”
39
In this dissertation I posit silence as the condition for knowing and
understanding and therefore I argue that survivor silence should be approached with
utmost care and respect rather than an aggressive motivation to collect testimony at all
costs.
Agents of War builds on the collective work done in the field of Critical
(Southeast Asian) Refugee Studies. It contributes to our understanding of the Cambodian
presence in the US from a postwar second-generation perspective and experience. It joins
the Ethnic Studies literature by scholars working at the intersections of Southeast Asian
American and refugee studies, whose work upends the image of the passive Southeast
Asian refugee figure and take as their analytic focus US hegemony, imperialism, and the
logic of military intervention in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.”
40
This project
is thus also in conversation with critical studies not formally a part of “Critical Refugee
Studies,” but which are concerned with refugee migrants from Central America as the
result of US foreign policy. These migrants are not considered refugees; rather, they are
deemed “illegal immigrants” or “illegal aliens” and are thus subject to a wide array of

39
Ibid., 6.
40
See for example Robert Eap, “Contested Commemorations: Violence and Memory in Cambodia” (PhD
diss, University of Southern California, 2014); Ma Vang, “Displaced Histories: Refugee Critique and the
Politics of Hmong American Remembering” (PhD diss, University of California, San Diego, 2012); Thanh
Thuy Vo Dang, “Anticommunism as Cultural Praxis: South Vietnam, War, and Refugee Memories in the
Vietnamese American Community” (PhD diss, University of California, San Diego, 2008); Angela Tea,
“Chinese Cambodian Memory Work: Racial Terror and the Spaces of Haunting and Silence” (master’s
thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2014).
23
punitive measures within various state apparatuses in ways vastly different than those
admitted as refugees.
41

Central to an understanding of late 1970s and early 1980s mass migration to the
US is an understanding of neoliberalism. David Harvey’s A Brief History of
Neoliberalism remains the most cited text with regards to the emergence and impact of
the current neoliberal order in the US and around the world.
42
As Harvey explains, the
neoliberal state emerged in the 1970s, during which millions of industrial working class
jobs were lost and unemployment rates skyrocketed. By the early 1980s, the prison
population exploded—conspicuously shifting from a majority white demographic to
almost 70% people of color with Black, brown, indigenous, and poor populations most
affected in particularly. The rise of the neoliberal state occurred at the same time that the
US-Vietnam war ended, which spurred a wave of mass migration from Southeast Asia in
the years following.
Large-scale migration of Southeast Asian refugees to the US and to other parts of
the world factored into neoliberalism’s restructuring of nations and subjects. This can be
understood in terms of what Omi and Winant call a “racial project,” which is
“simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics, and
an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines.
43
Racial
projects, they explain, “connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and
the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized,

41
See for example García, Seeking Refuge, and Leisy Abrego, Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws,
Labor, and Love Across Borders (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).
42
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
43
Omi and Winant, 56.
24
based upon that meaning.”
44
Although Harvey centers his discussion around reference to
late 1970s and early 1980s US militarist campaigns in Central and South American
countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Chile), and current US wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, he makes no mention of US wars in Southeast Asia (or the Korean War,
and Philippine American War).
45
Around the same time that the Central and South
American elite class—all of whom were backed by US corporations, the CIA, and US
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger—sought to keep socialism at bay in favor of an
evolved capitalist order, Kissinger and then-President Richard Nixon were giving orders
to bomb Cambodia. When Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Nicaraguan immigrants began to
arrive in the US as a result of those US-backed coups, they were not considered refugees
but rather economic migrants.
46
Cambodian and other Southeast Asians who entered the
US, on the other hand, did so as refugees—but were subjected to vetting processes, which
required they perform a “refugee” or “victim” identity in order to meet the extremely
selective criteria for sponsorship to the US. Individuals were screened not only for
medical but ideological threats as well. As Aihwa Ong notes, these methods constituted
for Cambodians “biopolitical lessons in what being American entails.”
47
Moreover, these
methods shaped and were shaped by later modes of incorporation into the American
national body for Cambodian refugees.
Utilizing a comparative race framework, film and textual analysis, archival
theory, and performance theory, this project examines the ways Cambodian refugees
have been incorporated into the US body politic. In this dissertation, I examine two

44
Ibid.
45
I thank Mariam Beevi Lam for pointing this out, and for her comments on this chapter.
46
See Garcia, 84-119.
47
Ong, Buddha is Hiding, 93.
25
prominent autobiographical documentary films: Spencer Nakasako’s 1995 aka Don
Bonus and Socheata Poeuv’s 2008 New Year Baby. I also examine the Documentation
Center of Cambodia’s (DC-CAM) collaboration with the USC Shoah Foundation
Institute to document the Khmer Rouge regime and the genocide committed against
Cambodians from 1975 to 1979. As Robert Eap makes clear in his dissertation Contested
Commemorations: Violence and Memory in Cambodia, judicial courts tasked with
prosecuting those responsible for the mass violence committed unto Cambodians limit
their scope to senior Khmer Rouge leaders and crimes committed during the years 1975-
1979. These temporal limits, he argues, “also work favorably for the many international
actors hoping to mask their respective roles in raising, supporting, fortifying, and
sustaining the military significance of the Khmer Rouge.
48
Binding my discussion of the
mass archival effort to Eap’s discussion of the problematic of the UN tribunal is the fact
that the archival efforts were spearheaded and continue to be supported by the US State
Department—whose function, it could be said, exists to clean up the resulting mess(es) of
US wars and foreign policy. Further complicating the DC-CAM’s endeavor to archive the
Khmer Rouge regime is its collaboration and stewardship by USC’s Shoah Foundation
Institute, which has collected over 54,000 testimonies from Holocaust survivors around
the world, and hundreds more from genocide survivors in Rwanda, China, Armenia, and
Guatemala.
Because the Holocaust remains the most documented genocide event and best-
funded remembrance project of the twentieth century, concerns arise over remembrance,
memorial discourse, and the question of whether some deaths are grievable while others

48
Eap, 2.
26
are deemed unworthy of remembrance.
49
Numerous scholars have written about how
power operates in the making and recording of history. For example, calling attention to
the West’s failure (or deliberate refusal) to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt
in history, which occurred in Haiti against French colonial powers, Michel-Rolph
Trouillot argues “the production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution
of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means for such
production.”
50
In his recent book on Vietnam and the memory of war, Viet Thanh
Nguyen writes, “Wars are fought twice. Once on the battlefield, again in memory.”
51
In a
different but not unrelated context, Ilan Pappe’s The Idea of Israel: A History of Power
and Knowledge demonstrates how the state of Israel draws on Zionist ideology as the
justification for its settlement of the land through the use of Holocaust memory in
supporting the state’s ideological structure.
52

Within these narratives, certain actors take up—or, subvert, challenge, or
contradict—particular roles. As Benedict Anderson argues, nations are “imagined
political communities.”
53
Within this formulation, “…the members of even the smallest
nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them,
yet in the minds of each live the image of their communion.”
54
Despite the inequalities
and exploitation that prevails within the national community, he argues, the fraternity

49
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso Books, 2009).
50
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press,
1995), xix.
51
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 2016), 4.
52
Ilan Pappe, The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge (Brooklyn, New York: Verso Books,
2014).
53
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
revised edition (London and New York: Verso Books, 2006), 6.
54
Ibid.
27
shared amongst its members is what makes it possible for the nation to exist.
55

Nevertheless, fractures and acts of resistance persist. Aihwa Ong’s ethnographic research
on Cambodian refugees living in Oakland, CA reports Cambodian refugees deployed in
their negotiations with mental health practitioners—for many this was a requisite to
accessing state aid such as Medi-Cal—methods such as “game-playing and skirmishes
that run the gamut of persuasion and assimilation, control and subterfuge, domination and
resistance.”
56
On this note, this dissertation focuses on enactments of post-war trauma
and memory that posit the existence of the refugee as one that may challenge and disrupt
the existence of US hegemony, imperialism, and the logic of military intervention in the
name of “freedom” and “democracy.” Whereas dominant narratives portray Cambodian
refugees as a mentally bereft people seeking tutelage from the state, this dissertation
intervenes by demonstrating Cambodians as a multifarious people—actors of their own
volition—with a complex history, present, and future. Cambodians are not merely
victims; they are survivors, in the past as they are in the present.
One of the best-known theorists on the abilities of people, whether as individuals
or as collective groups, to act or take action in the various worlds in which they reside, is
the late Brazilian director, artist, and activist Augusto Boal. Boal’s Theatre of the
Oppressed remains a widely cited source and reference for community organizers and
activists to transform themselves from spectators to “spect-actors,” who possess the
ability to amend prescribed roles in order to change society in positive ways.
57
Numerous
community-based organizations and artists utilize theater and performance methods to
explore, address, and potentially resolve social problems. The Southern California-based

55
Ibid., 7.
56
Ong, Buddha Is Hiding, 93.
57
Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1979).
28
TeAda Productions, for example, uses performance as a means to raise awareness of
issues affecting underrepresented communities.
58
For their Refugee Nation, performance
artists and co-founders Leilani Chan and Ova Saopeng toured the US to collect oral
histories from Laotian families and community members in order to bring to light the
impact of the US-Vietnam war and the lesser-known CIA’s Secret War on communities
not typically highlighted in Vietnam war discourse. Armed with a repertory of
information and narrated experiences related to the US’s Secret War in Laos, the duo
created an interdisciplinary theater performance that explores the various impacts of war
on Laotian refugees. Thus, TeAda Productions follows the trajectory of artists whose
works question, unsettle, and challenge issues of race, class, gender, power, and social
justice.
59

Performance thus seems an appropriate avenue for exploring the sounds of silence
that somehow give shape to trauma but never quite betray it. Writing and performing this
piece allowed me to grapple with questions that inform this dissertation. What do we
gain, or lose, from remembering, or re-enacting, these memories? What do we gain or
lose from forgetting? When might it seem that the legacy of this trauma ceases to be
traumatic? Is it possible that via my enactment and thus embodiment of my
grandmother’s memories, I am able to halt or pause what seemed to haunt my
grandmother so persistently—and what now continues to haunt me? The act of
performing these memories enabled me to explore these ambiguities and allowed for a
speculative present of an event that took place before I was born but nevertheless laid a
foundation for my own life and that of my generation. Without this exploration, my

58
“Refugee Nation,” TeAda Productions, last modified June 24, 2017, http://www.teada.org/refugee-
nation/.
59
Ibid.
29
understanding of the events and memories that preceded my birth might be overburdened
or limited by numerical figures, statistics, and so-called “facts.”
The late ethnographer and performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood
viewed performance as a paradigm through which to understand human interaction,
particularly the relationship between structures of power and the disenfranchised.
60
In
“Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” he calls upon artists,
activists, and scholars to realize the radical promise of performance studies research via
the embrace of different ways of knowing—an act deemed radical precisely for the ways
it challenges conventional methods and understandings of how knowledge is produced
and organized within academic settings.
61
Especially because this dissertation aims to
highlight the experiences of voices deemed antithetical to the academy, Conquergood’s
guidance is an important reminder to take seriously not only subjugated knowledge but
also the very subjects from whom such knowledge is derived.
62

As an interdisciplinary field characterized by indirection as direction (per Richard
Schechner) or undefineability and definition (per Diana Taylor), performance studies
offers a mode of inquiry that challenges, resists, and overturns convention even as it
upholds convention. Further, it posits that performance is an underlying dimension of
human behavior and interaction. Given this, the indeterminate and open-ended nature of
performance studies itself challenges binaristic superior/subordinate framings of being in
the world and demonstrates rather the multiplicity of human life and beyond. Thus this
dissertation is titled “Agents of War” to point to the ways Cambodian refugees, who are

60
Dwight Conquergood, “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research,” The Drama Review
46, no. 2 (2002).
61
Ibid.
62
Ibid.
30
typically thought of as passive victims awaiting rescue, have or may participate, or are
complicit, in regimes of power on either or both sides of binaristic framings of power as
superior/subordinate.
63

Among recent publications in the field of Asian American Studies are studies that
utilize performance theory as a means to question, challenge, and complicate structures of
power. Some notable examples include Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns’s Puro Arte:
Filipinos on the Stage of Empire, Sarita Echavez See’s The Decolonized Eye: Filipino
American Art and Performance, Christine Bacareza Balance’s Tropical Renditions:
Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America, and Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson’s A
Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America.
64
Building on earlier
performance studies scholars such as Dorinne Kondo, Karen Shimakawa, Kandice Chuh,
Esther Kim Lee, and Josephine Lee, these scholars collectively advance performance as a
site of radical possibility thus giving rise to alternative ways of being that operate from a
creative radix.
65
Chambers-Letson’s A Race So Different utilizes performance theory in
the study of making Asian American subjectivity, a process he argues occurs through the
intersection of law and performance in and on the Asian American body.
66
In line with

63
Dorinne Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
64
Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stage of Empire (New York and London: New
York University Press, 2013); Sarita Echavez See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and
Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Christine Bacareza Balance, Tropical
Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
2016); Joshua Chambers-Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York
and London: New York University Press, 2013).
65
See Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (London and New York:
Routledge, 1997); Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2002); Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003); Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American
Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America:
Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).
66
Chambers-Letson, 3.
31
his assertion that “theatricality is a constitutive component of the law,”
67
through which
he argues that “the law should thus be properly understood as the union of performance
and performativity,”
68
my chapter on the Haing S. Ngor murder trial and the conviction
of three young men turns to the field of performance studies in order to explain the
refugee figure as a performative identity that reinscribes US imperial power.
As Yen Le Espiritu argues, “the Vietnam War has the potential to upset the well-
worn narrative of ‘rescue and liberation’ in US history and to refocus attention on the
troubling record of US military aggression.”
69
Writing about Vietnamese refugees as
subjects of US war and imperialism, she states, “Vietnamese political subjectivity and
practice cannot be exclusively defined within the US context; their racial formation also
has to be understood within the context of US war in and occupation of Southeast
Asia.”
70
Against the concern that Vietnamese (and other Southeast Asian) refugees
remain affixed to and thus defined by “the war,” however, Espiritu worries that
decoupling Vietnamese Americans and the war risks assimilating Vietnamese
populations in the US into the apolitical, ahistorical landscape of US multiculturalism.
71

Her impetus for moving the scholarship “toward a critical refugee study” is a concern that
Vietnamese Americans remain associated with passivity, that they are objects of
American pity, and that they should exist in the US as grateful subjects of American
missions to deliver salvation to third world subjects. She thus urges scholars to think of

67
Ibid., 50.
68
Ibid., 19.
69
Yen Le Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US
Scholarship,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1-2 (2006): 421.
70
Ibid., 419.
71
Ibid., 420.
32
Vietnamese and Southeast Asians in the US in all their complexities, as a diverse,
heterogeneous people.
Most, though not all, Americans believe that war is a necessary component of
American life, that it is waged in defense of the human right to freedom above all else, as
well as democratic ideals against (racialized) forces of evil, and that it is ultimately
carried out with good intentions. This narrative is supported and reinforced in no small
part by portrayals of Southeast Asian refugees as victims of savage and backwards
enemies of “freedom”—though “freedom” is understood by this author as freedom to act
within a global capitalist market. Portrayals of the “good refugee” help sustain public
support for US military excursions around the world. But where there are “good
refugees” there will always be “bad refugees.” As the polar opposite of the “good
refugee,” or the one who is grateful for the idea of opportunity, is willing to work hard
and sacrifice while holding out hope of a “better” life, the “bad refugee” is the one who
does not participate in the American community in “productive” ways and has not
capitalized on opportunities provided by the American Dream. The bad refugee is thus
subject to policing and punitive measures such as incarceration or repatriation to their
country of birth. In mainstream narratives, that some Cambodians remain impoverished,
“uneducated,” or continually struggle with law enforcement is either the result of their
own personal shortcomings—or attributed to the communist Khmer Rouge regime that
left them so traumatized they lost their capacity to be productive human beings. Rarely is
there a critique of the ways American society limits the quality of life for some in favor
of others.
33
What I have described above exemplifies what Espiritu calls the “we-win-even-
when-we-lose” syndrome: the ability of the US nation-state and its attendant media
prowess to turn defeat into victory by manipulating the narrative that shapes American
perceptions and understandings of the war.
72
Espiritu offers a possible direction to
counter these efforts, however. She suggests that we “imbue the term ‘refugee’ with
social and political critiques [in order to] conceptualize ‘the refugee’ not as an object of
investigation, but rather as a paradigm ‘whose function [is] to establish and make
intelligible a wider set of problems.”
73
The common narrative of the traumatized refugee-
victim, for example, can be read productively as disruptive of the myth of “rescue and
liberation.”
74
That some former Khmer Rouge members slipped through screenings
intended to filter them out may also complicate the idea of the refugee as victim.
For Espiritu, it is possible to read trauma as “the condition that makes visible the
relationship between war, race, and violence.”
75
She argues that “refugees are
marginalized not because they are pathetic but because they make visible ‘a transgression
of the social contract between a state and its citizen’”
76
—thus turning the focus on the
state instead. If the Vietnam War (and all nations that were swept into the conflict) bears
the potential to upend the narrative of “rescue and liberation” and refocuses attention on
US war crimes and military aggression, Espiritu suggests the refugee figure is the
embodiment of this potential. Thus, the refugee figure must be contained and
manipulated to work in service of rather than against US Empire. Yet, precisely because

72
Ibid., 421.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid., 422.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid.
34
the refugee figure is at once antithetical and indispensable to the global military industrial
complex, it may also be empire’s Achilles’ heel.
At the intersecting fields of media and cultural, critical race, and refugee studies,
this project rejects hegemonic narratives that cast the refugee figure as an “object of
rescue.” Instead, this research asks how the intersectional analysis of the Cambodian
refugee figure can unpack the politics of American racial order vis-à-vis the continual
history of subjugation of Black, Brown, and indigenous populations in the US.
Ultimately, I argue that the incorporation of the Cambodian refugee figure into the US
national body in turn disciplines and contains any radical opposition to the project of US
imperialism as founded through global and domestic war, racism, genocide, and the
colonization of racialized bodies. Chapter 1 begins with a reading of Spencer Nakasako’s
1995 documentary film aka Don Bonus, which he co-directed with the film’s protagonist,
18-year-old Sokly Ny. Following Roland Joffé’s 1984 feature film The Killing Fields,
aka Don Bonus was the next to feature a dimension of the Cambodian refugee experience
to a mainstream audience. Set in the San Francisco Bay Area, the film follows Ny and his
family as they navigate their new lives after resettlement. I analyze the ways Cambodian
refugees are implicated in the American racial order, racialized vis-à-vis Black
communities in the film and the San Francisco Bay Area. Contrary to prevalent
arguments upholding Cambodian refugee communities in the US as proof that the model
minority myth is false, I argue that Cambodian Americans are cast as one of the latest
iterations of the model minority figure. To be sure, Cambodian communities in the US
continue to struggle with high poverty rates, mental health issues, and deportation, to
name a few; nevertheless, to think through and beyond the power dynamics that create
35
and sustain inequality in the US, I maintain that we (scholars, activists, community
members) must contend with the ways in which Cambodian Americans do occupy the
position of model minority and perform functions of anti-blackness within US race
relations. This chapter demonstrates how American modes of racialization through
mainstream institutions (via academic discourse, media narratives, and popular
representations) images the Cambodian refugee figure as one capable of reproducing the
status quo adherent to the logic of the black/white binary.
77

Although the field of Asian American Studies frequently deployed the lives and
experiences of Cambodian (and other Southeast Asian, as well as Pacific Islanders)
refugee communities in their battle against the pervasive model minority myth, citing
high poverty rates, low educational attainment, mental health issues, and so forth, the
actual plight of Cambodian refugees remains relatively understudied. Chapter 2 examines
the Haing S. Ngor murder trial and the conviction of three young men, ages 18 and 19 at
the time of their arrest in 1996, for his death. Two of these young men were of
Cambodian descent. Despite insufficient evidence, the jury found the three defendants
guilty, compelled by the prosecution’s oratory to deliver justice to Ngor, who survived
Cambodia’s “killing fields” only to be gunned down in Los Angeles. The three
defendants were handed sentences of 26 years to life, 56 years to life, and life in prison
without parole. All three remain in prison, and all three have maintained their innocence.
Drawing on tropes of “good” refugees and “bad” refugees, I argue that the murder trial
performed a public acquittal of US war crimes committed in Cambodia by positioning the
three youth gang members as responsible for the violence and terror inflicted upon

77
Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000), 2.
36
Cambodians. Building on Cathy Schlund-Vials’s (2012) and Robert Eap’s (2014) textual
analysis of Roland Joffé’s 1984 The Killing Fields, I maintain that the prosecution’s
resolve to deliver a guilty verdict for a national (and global) audience must be understood
in light of two things: the Asian American gang problem in Los Angeles during the 1990s
and Ngor’s role in the Hollywood epic. By focusing on the discursive construction of
“good” refugees and “bad” refugees, I demonstrate how the figure of the refugee
performatively produces and reproduces the narrative of US benevolence, superiority,
and the justification of military intervention.
By the mid-2000s, Cambodians no longer remained in the margins of American
consciousness. Whereas the earlier decade was replete with images of Cambodians as so-
called “bad” refugees, the twenty first century ushered in and concretized the image of
Cambodian refugees as “Khmer Rouge survivors.” Chapter 3 investigates the
collaboration between the Documentation Center of Cambodia and the USC Shoah
Foundation Institute to document and archive the Khmer Rouge regime. I highlight the
ways in which the strategic naming of Cambodians as “Khmer Rouge survivors”
obscures the mass violence endured by Cambodians outside the 1975-1979 time frame.
Following Mimi Thi Nguyen’s discussion of “the gift of freedom,” I demonstrate how
Cambodian refugees are interpellated in such a way that augments western imperial
logics and global power. Specifically, I argue that the Shoah Foundation’s campaign to
collect survivor testimonies from genocide survivors all around the world is constituent
of ongoing efforts to amass power as the foremost authority of genocide studies in the
world. Following Yen Le Espiritu’s argument that “it is the presence of the refugees …
that enables the United States to recast its aggressive military strategy as a benevolent
37
intervention,”
78
this chapter examines ways the Cambodian refugee figure has been
deployed and proven useful—continues to be used as a solution, demonstrating Eric
Tang’s contention that the Cambodian refugee figure is “held in perpetual captivity so
that she can be used over and over again”
79
—in the consolidation of US and Israel global
hegemony and their contemporary imperial and colonial projects.
Chapter 4 returns to the genre of autobiographical documentary film in order to
examine the 2008 documentary film New Year Baby by Socheata Poeuv. In this chapter, I
discuss efforts by the postwar generation to “break the silence” of the survivor
generation. Because I understand survivor silence to be deliberate and careful, I begin by
providing a context for the phenomenon of silence among survivors. In doing so, I
intervene in narratives that have, inadvertently or not, resulted in pathologizing survivors
and the treatment of silence as a social ill that must be eradicated at all costs. I argue that
Cambodian survivors are neither silent nor passive victims but rather, actors of volition
under an unforgiving regime. I highlight moments in the film that challenge the narrative
of the “Khmer Rouge victim”—which I hold as distinct from “Cambodian survivor”
because the former strategically erases US culpability. I trouble the application of
Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” to the Cambodian postwar generation’s
experience. Instead, I offer the term “nonmemory” first, as a descriptor for the

78
Espiritu, Body Counts, 18.
79
Tang, Unsettled, 14. Tang advances the term “refugee exceptionalism” to describe the ways in which
Cambodian refugees living in the Bronx, NY are discursively removed from underclass status by policy
makers, landlords, social workers, and researchers, and are often cast as a community who would
“eventually achieve the successes portended by liberalism even as all empirical evidence pointed to the
contrary.” More specifically, he offers the term to describe how the Cambodian refugee figure is figured as
in the “hyperghetto” but never of it. The “hyperghetto” is a term forwarded by Loïc Wacquant, delineating
the conversion of the traditional ghetto into a space of “naked relegation.” As Tang reiterates, the
hyperghetto is a space “reserved for the isolation and enclosure of the poorest urban residents who are no
longer regarded as those to be recruited and disciplined into the lowest rungs of the workforces; rather, they
are seen as subjects to be warehoused” (10).
38
Cambodian postwar generation’s relation to the survivor generation—that is, to describe
a general impossibility for nonsurvivors to know the true experience of war, gesturing
towards the (problematic) ways in which nonsurvivors might go about demanding
survivors speak about their experiences. Secondly, with this in mind, I forward this term
to encourage critical thought and analysis among Cambodian Americans regarding: our
relationship to war and war’s victors, our ethical responsibility for war and war’s
casualties, then and now. Lastly, in this chapter I offer the concept and framework of the
“epiphytic,” which I understand as anticolonial in nature, as an alternative to “breaking
the silence” of survivors.
Lastly, this dissertation shares with the reader an autobiographical composition
imagined as a solo performance piece. As part of a course on solo performance taught by
writer, director, and performance artist Luis Alfaro, this performance piece was written in
response to a writing prompt in which students were asked to describe in detail and
elaborate upon either a happy or a sad memory. I chose to encompass both in my writing.
This piece explores my relationship with my maternal grandmother, who raised and cared
for me until her physical and mental capacities deteriorated, at which point it became my
turn to care for her.
In the last two decades of her life, which was spent in the US, my grandmother
endured a variety of ailments and what medical professionals call “mental illness.” As a
child, I often witnessed her re-living, or re-enacting, memories of the war, by
remembering her children who died in the war and her life in Cambodia. Even as a child
it was clear to me that sometimes the line between real and imagined was blurry, perhaps
sometimes nonexistent. It is often the case for many that mental health issues are,
39
understandably, difficult to deal with, even burdensome. It was no different in my family,
or for other families like my own. It was not unusual for family members to break down
crying at the mention of someone who had died. Some family members offered support
by encouraging the distraught to “move on,” often telling them, “don’t think about it” or
“don’t talk about it.” I understood these dialogues as part of a larger dilemma of how to
impart historical experiences they never wished for us to endure or even become familiar
with—but also of how to move away from experiences that continue(d) to haunt them in
the years after the war’s official end. Among my family members were others who were
steadfast in their mission to keep the memories alive—often to the point of redundancy.
There were also the “strong and silent” types, like my father. In the entirety of my life,
before he passed away, he may have spoken a total of less than a few hundred complete
sentences to me. And yet I came to know him through my stealth (or so I believed)
obsession with watching, observing, and studying him: his anger, his joys, his regrets, his
dreams. The previous chapter, titled Epiphytic Lives, features the concept and framework
of the epiphytic in order to propose (an already) existing model of relation for second
generation Cambodian Americans to the survivor generation. Joining creative and artistic
efforts to explore social issues, as the conclusion to this dissertation I present a “ghost
story” titled “A Ghost Story” which is also a performance piece. This performance piece,
then, is my testimony.

40
CHAPTER ONE

“Fuckin’ Black Bastard”: Anti-black Racism and the Racialization
of Cambodian Refugees in Spencer Nakasako’s aka Don Bonus
(1995)

Popular representations of Cambodian refugees in the US are replete with the
descriptors “uneducated,” “unskilled,” “delinquent,” and so forth. Often Cambodians in
the US are represented as victims traumatized by the Khmer Rouge regime to the point of
dysfunction—a mentally bereft people requiring state tutelage. These representations are
problematic; for one, they place value on Western forms of education and life skills and
they deny the US’s own record of violations and militarist violence committed on other
lands and peoples. In addition, such generalizations flatten class and wealth disparities
existing in Cambodian society prior to the regime. At the same time, Cambodian refugees
are viewed as the embodiment of the American Dream,
80
often reinforcing the idea that
all wars, no matter how costly, controversial, or immoral, were ultimately for the greater
good.
81

80
Yen Le Espiritu has written, in the same vein, about the portrayal of Vietnamese refugees as “objects of
rescue, as […] ‘incapacitated by grief and therefore in need of care’—a care that is purportedly best
provided in and by the United States.” Vietnamese refugees are simultaneously portrayed as the “desperate-
turned-successful.” Espiritu argues these portrayals produce a certain kind of Vietnamese-American subject
that reinforces the idea that the US role in Vietnam, despite being an unpopular war, was a necessary war
and a “good” war. At stake for Espiritu are the ways in which Vietnamese refugees have “continued to
serve as a stage for the (re)production of American identities and for the shoring up of US militarism.” She
suggests, “Rather than doing away with the term ‘refugee,’ we imbue it with social and political critiques
that critically call into question the relationship between war, race, and violence, then and now.” See Yen
Le Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US Scholarship,”
Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, nos. 1-2 (2006): 410-411; and Yen Le Espiritu, “The ‘We-Win-Even-
When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon,’”
American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2006): 329. See also Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and
Militarized Refuge(es) (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014).
81
Espiritu, “We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose” Syndrome,” 329.
41
In the field of Asian American Studies, Cambodian refugees are often posited as
the antithesis to the model minority figure. Citing high rates of poverty, mental illness,
youth gang involvement, and low rates of educational attainment, Asian American
Studies scholars aim to improve the plight of this new Asian/American ethnic group by
increasing the visibility of their struggles. Contrary to these efforts, I argue that the
Cambodian refugee figure embodies the latest iteration of the model minority figure.
Through a reading of Spencer Nakasako’s 1995 documentary film aka Don Bonus, this
chapter provides an analysis of ways Cambodian refugees are implicated in the American
racial order and racialized vis-à-vis Black communities.
Mainstream outlets laud aka Don Bonus as a “story of triumph
82
” that should
inspire hope among American newcomers, while others have praised the film for
inaugurating the field of “Cambodian American Studies.” This chapter problematizes
what might otherwise be described as a “story of triumph” by linking triumph to a larger
system of race, class, and gender, whereby the successes of one group is always
predicated on the oppression of another. Specifically, I am referring to the ways Asian
American “success” is predicated on anti- black and brown racism. Situated in the field
of “critical refugee studies.”
83
This chapter offers a reading of Spencer Nakasako’s 1995
aka Don Bonus, addressing anti-black racism and the ways in which Cambodian refugees
and Asian American Studies are implicated in the American racial landscape. Following
Glen Mimura, who writes, “To discuss Asian American cinema in any substantive way,
to grasp its discourse as an object of analysis, we need to examine it simultaneously with

82
Center for Asian American Media, “aka Don Bonus,” last modified June 24, 2017,
http://caamedia.org/films/a-k-a-don-bonus/.
83
Ibid.
42
the dominant cultural activity that limits and shapes its conditions of visibility.”
84
More to
the point, this chapter takes up Jared Sexton’s call for students committed to the politics
of conflict and coalition to challenge “the acknowledged rules of [our] time” (Trouillot
1995: 53) and “change the terms of debate” in order to shape differently the discourse on
US Black-Asian relations to date.
85

aka Don Bonus and the Asian American Media Arts Movement

In 1995, Spencer Nakasako produced a first-of-its-kind documentary trilogy that
brought to visibility Cambodian and Mien refugee youth and their families living in the
San Francisco Bay Area. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), on which the
documentary first aired on public television, describes the film as a “raw and revealing
video diary”
86
affording viewers to glimpse the day-to-day life of poor or less advantaged
Southeast Asian American youth living in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the state.
The films were also credited with filling a lacuna in academic literature in the field of
Asian American Studies—not only did they feature the “Southeast Asian American
experience,” their narratives and footage combatted the pervasive model minority myth
set into motion about thirty years prior as well. There were few Asian American Studies
courses that did not screen this film as an example—or the example—of the Cambodian
refugee experience in the US. During that time, in the 1990s, the field of Asian American
Studies was contending with what they considered to be the harmful effects of the model
minority myth. To counter this myth, the field often pointed to Southeast Asian refugees

84
Glen Mimura, Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2009), xv.
85
Jared Sexton, “Proprieties of Coalition: Blacks, Asians, and the Politics of Policing,” Critical Sociology
36, no. 1 (2010): 88.
86
Public Broadcast Station, “a.k.a. Don Bonus,” last modified June 26, 2017,
http://www.pbs.org/pov/akadonbonus/.
43
(Cambodian, Hmong, Lao, and Vietnamese) as proof that the model minority myth was
false.
Film has long been a mode to organize and empower underrepresented
communities and marginalized voices. Taking shape in the 1960s, the Asian American
movement was characterized by its commitment to social justice.
87
The 1960s, as a
period of intense repression against Black-led social movements across the nation, was
instrumental to the development of Asian American artists and cultural workers who,
finding inspiration in the Civil Rights and ethnic studies movements, sought to counter
racist portrayals of Asian people in the US as part of a movement to end white
supremacist and institutional violence against people of color, women, and poor people.
Asian American artists and cultural workers aimed to represent themselves through
media, counter to Hollywood portrayals of Asian-descended people as exotic dragon
ladies, heathens, savages, perpetual foreigners, model minorities, and so forth.
88

It was in this context that Nakasako met Sokly Ny
89
, star of aka Don Bonus. In
1991, Nakasako began teaching basic camera work to youth through the Vietnamese
Youth Development Center (VYDC)
90
, a community-based organization founded in 1978
to provide support and assistance to the growing numbers of Vietnamese and other

87
Renee Tajima-Pena, “Moving the Image: Asian American Independent Filmmaking 1970-1990,” in
Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts, ed. Russell Leong (Los Angeles, CA:
UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press and Visual Communications, 1991), 12.
88
Los Angeles-based Visual Communications, for example, was the nation’s first non-profit organization
dedicated to “the honest and accurate portrayals of the Asian Pacific American peoples, communities and
heritage through the media arts.” As an organization founded in the Civil Rights and anti-war movement, it
adopted the acronym “VC” as homage to the Viet Cong, the Vietnamese Communist Party that fought the
US and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War. See “Mission and History,” Visual
Communications, http://www.vconline.org/alpha/cms/.
89
According to Edward Guthmann, Ny renamed himself “Don Bonus,” picking the name off a “bonus
pack” of gun after being teased for his Cambodian name. See Edward Guthmann, “S.F. Teen’s Video Diary
on ‘P.O.V.’/From Cambodia jungle to ‘a.k.a. Don Bonus’”, SF Gate, June 25, 1996.
90
Peter X. Feng, Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2002), 8.
44
Southeast Asian refugee youth living in the Tenderloin.
91
Duong Trong Lam, a politically
outspoken Vietnamese refugee, founded the VYDC, and served as the VYDC’s first
executive director until his murder at age 27 in 1981, when he was shot dead in broad
daylight. His killer(s) were never found. Though his death remains an unsolved
“mystery,” there is speculation that his murder was politically motivated. Duong’s
political views were considered radical: he criticized US imperialism, helped Tenderloin
residents organize against slumlords, and sought to instill ethnic and cultural roots among
Vietnamese refugee youth. Some believed he was a spy for the Vietnamese communist
party, while others described him as “pro-Vietnam” rather than “communist.”
92

According to an interview in “Terror in Saigontown, U.S.A.” with Reverend Wake of
Glide Memorial, Duong formally cut ties with the VYDC in 1980 because he felt his
controversial reputation hurt the organization and the youth it served. Indeed, as the
political climate continued to heat up, those who supported the South Vietnamese
government eventually denounced the VYDC and demanded federal funds allocated to
the VYDC be cut off, citing Duong’s “communist politics.”
93

Intending to follow the spirit of a community-based social justice driven
movement, the VYDC founded its media lab project for Southeast Asian youth in 1989.
Nakasako, who received a National Asian American Telecommunications Association

91
Although the organization’s name remains “Vietnamese Youth Development Center,” the VYDC
currently accommodates youth of all ethnicities and races living in the Tenderloin.
92
Tony Nguyen’s documentary film Enforcing the Silence (2011) investigates Duong’s death in more
detail. Nguyen interviewed a variety of individuals to gather information about Duong’s life, and death,
including Duong’s former colleagues, classmates, news reporters and FBI investigators. He was unable to
speak with Duong’s living relatives, and members of Vietnamese American anti-communist groups on
camera, who feared reprisals for their collaboration with the film’s exploration of Duong’s controversial
politics. See Nathan Jackson, “ ‘Enforcing the Silence’ speaks out on a killing; The Documentary premieres
Saturday in the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 2011: D5.
93
Judith Coburn, “Terror in Saigontown, U.S.A.: How Right-Wing Vietnamese Have Brought Their Brutal
Vendetta to the Streets of San Francisco,” Mother Jones, Feb-Mar 1983, 21.
45
(NAATA) stipend to produce the trilogy, chose Ny to support his project.
94
When asked
how he became involved in the project, Ny recalls that Nakasako approached him one
summer to inquire about Ny’s participation in the project. Nakasako states in an interview
that he thought of Ny as an outstanding candidate for the project because of, not only his
comfort in front of the camera but his knack for giving directions behind it as well. These
qualities of Ny are apparent in scenes, for example, where he engages in provocative on-
camera dialogue with teachers and peers or the scene where he offers a monologue naked
while submerged in a bathtub. In other words, Ny stood out from other youth—making
him unique in ways desirable to the project.
The success of “Nakasako’s Trilogy” earned him status as the pioneer of the
“video diary” format. A statement by Nakasako in the director’s commentary, however,
reveals that the success of the film, or at least its completion, was largely dependent on
Ny’s labor and access.
Many of them I knew, because they’re all from the TL. And many of them I
didn’t know but I felt I knew because I’d been watching them all year. It’s really
kind of a great moment because you know a lot of these kids were actually my
eyes and ears. They were ones that would tell me when Don wasn’t filming. Or
they would pick up a camera and help Don film.

In addition, when asked what impressed him about the youth he worked with, whom he
referred to as “Southeast Asian street kids,” Nakasako explained,

These kids were coming back with footage that was considered amateurish. But
what struck me was it was footage I would never be able to get on my own. They
were either familiar with who they’re filming or they’re familiar with the
geography. One of the things that was apparent was they had access.
95

94
Ibid.
95
Michael Fox, “Video-Diary Pioneer Spencer Nakasako,” SF360 San Francisco Film Society, March 17,
2007, http://www.sf360.org/?pageid=7507.
46
Thus, the youth provided access to a community that Nakasako may not have gotten
otherwise, which points to larger issues of the benefits of work that relies largely on
forms of racialized and classed labor.

In fact, the film begins with a panoramic view of Ny’s family home in the
projects, revealing an unconventional interior (the apartment is unkempt in parts, empty
in others), emphasizing specific class and ethnicity markers that undermine what most
expect to find in a typical “Asian American” family home. Instead, Ny’s family are
shown in contrast to a model-minority ethnicity—middle class, proper, respectable, clean,
and East Asian.
While Ny’s decision to participate may have been as simple as responding in the
affirmative to an adult figure’s proposition, Nakasako’s was shaped by several
considerations. aka Don Bonus’s “raw depiction” of Cambodian refugee “day-to-day”
life was mediated by a search to feature a protagonist who would best fulfill the aims of
the project rather than an “ordinary” Cambodian kid. As Peter X. Feng writes, “If the
audience assigns too much faith to the ‘video diary’ as an organizational conceit—as a
concept guiding the production of the video—they will fail to consider how the video is
actually a sophisticated documentary structured as if it were a diary” (emphasis in
original).
96

From one angle, the films were exciting because not only did they feature for the
first time Southeast Asian (Cambodian and Mien) refugee youth, they were also produced
by Southeast Asian refugee youth—who had not even worked with cameras before,
making them appear as authentic and sensational. But from another angle, Nakasako is
the mastermind behind the films. In post-release interviews and conference panels,

96
Feng, 11.
47
Nakasako appears alone, without his co-director and other subjects of the film. This did
not go unnoticed. At the 25
th
San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival,
Nakasako acknowledged and responded to criticism of his work in aka Don Bonus.
Explaining that “some members of the Asian American community” accused him of
executing a “hit and run” project, since he “just gave this kid a camera, no morals, his
family didn’t know what was going on” [sic], he mused, “Did anyone ask me? People
didn’t think I had any integrity. I actually thought that people thought kids were stupid,
that they were so stupid that they would do what I told them to do,” understating his
responsibility to/for Ny and the power of mentorship in shaping young minds and
discourse.
Feng points out that the film’s first airing on PBS was preceded by a brief
interview with Nakasako, followed by another interview with Ny, thus underscoring the
film’s collaborative authorship. However, in its final distribution format by NAATA,
Nakasako’s interview is excised, leaving Ny’s to appear alone. Feng argues that this
“troubling omission de-emphasizes Nakasako as a mediating collaborator, romanticizing
Ny as a gifted neophyte and drawing attention away from the divided authoring subject of
the video.”
97
This decontextualization removes, to an extent, the film’s origins as a
product of the Asian American media arts movement and its political goals. Viewers are
led to believe that Ny comes naturally to the position he occupies in the film, obscuring
Nakasako’s co-authorship and his roots in the Asian American media arts community and
the Asian American Studies academic community—both of which have great bearing on
the film’s form and narrative.

97
Ibid, 13.
48
Taking on a life of its own after release, the film became much more than Ny’s
own personal accomplishment. It is hard to believe Ny’s family ever imagined his
participation in this project would result in what would be the wide circulation of the 65-
minute product in academic and community circuits. Sure enough, the film crew did
encounter problems. According to Nakasako, filming was halted for roughly one week
when Ny’s family threatened to disown him for his participation in the project, causing
him to pull out of the project. Ny states, “I quit for like a week or so, but when I really
think about it, you know, because I never accomplish anything in my life—I just keep
approaching her [his mother] and being more aggressive toward that [sic].” His mother’s
refusal to participate in the project, according to Ny, was due to a fear of “losing face,”
something not uncommon in Cambodian culture. He adds, “They’re [his family] very
traditional, and they felt I shouldn’t do it because I’m giving an opportunity for outsiders
to know the family very well, and they’re losing face and stuff like that.” Despite Ny’s
family concerns, the filming crew moved forward with the film anyways.
In sum, Ny captured eighty hours of footage at school and at home, including
scenes with schoolmates, community gatherings, monologues, mundane b-roll of his
family’s residence, and purposeful conversation with family members whom, it should be
noted, repeatedly objected to being filmed. The footage was eventually edited to a 65-
minute assemblage of scenes and voiceover narratives and presented as a “video diary” of
Cambodian refugee life through the lens of one refugee youth. Over the course of the
film, viewers are called to witness as Ny and his family relocate from the Sunnydale
housing projects to a studio apartment in the Tenderloin District, and finally to a spacious
house across from Golden Gate Park in the Sunset District. Ny’s younger brother Touch
49
is arrested on attempted murder charges after being “harassed by a black kid” at school;
he is the subject of another narrative that runs through the film (though he hardly speaks
in the film). While Ny’s academic struggles and Touch’s legal troubles are iconic
elements of the argument that the model minority myth is untrue—even if these elements
are nodes of intersections and contradictions that the field of Asian American Studies has
struggled (or failed) to address—and therefore harmful to Asian Americans, their
family’s trajectory out of the housing projects and into the Sunset District after a brief
stay in the Tenderloin represents an upwardly mobile path that challenges Asian
American academic and activist efforts to cast Ny and, by extension, Cambodian refugee
families, as the antithesis to the East Asian model minority figure.
I read aka Don Bonus as a political intervention intended to counter dominant
model minority ideologies (understood as harmful to Asian Americans) and to empower
Cambodian and Southeast Asian American communities. One anonymous scholar notes,
the film is “a perfect antidote to simplistic ‘model minority’ stereotypes about Asian
students.”
98
Upon viewing the director’s commentary of the film, I found that Nakasako
himself admits one of the film’s main goals was to counter the image of the model
minority stereotype.
One of the things that really struck me, ‘cause this all took place in the early
nineties, and in the early ninety’s there was this huge kind of like Asian American
model minority [stereotype]—Asians are excelling in school, they’re in all the top
colleges, other minority groups should emulate them, et cetera, et cetera—and one
of the things that struck me was that these are seniors in here taking this test and if
they don’t pass it, they’re not going to graduate—and 90% of them are Asians.
And I think that that’s one of the things that always kind of bothers me, about this
whole concept of, you know, all these model minority concept, is that most of the
kids that I work with are the type of kids that have a hard time passing this test.

98
aka Don Bonus, Center for Asian American Media, http://dev.caamedia.org/films/a-k-a-don-bonus/,
accessed 12 August 2013.
50
In the 1960s, Asian American educational success, whether real or perceived, was one of
several factors used to measure Asian Americans as different from other racialized
groups, namely Black Americans. In addition to high educational attainment,
characteristics such as high or above average family income, hard work, law-abiding,
deferential, and so forth were cited to construct Asian Americans in the image of a
“model minority.” Underlying the model minority image, however, was the figure of
Asian-descended people in the US as the embodiment of the “yellow peril.” Scholars
have pointed out this change from yellow peril to model minority occurred seemingly
overnight, demonstrating the ways in which the determining factors of “success” were to
an extent arbitrary. What is important to center in undoing the ideological power of the
model minority figure is its relational nature. Put differently, the construction of the
model minority figure was intended to suppress Black uprising against a racist, white
supremacist system. The adage went, “If Asian Americans could succeed, why couldn’t
Black people?” Or, “Racism doesn’t exist—look at the success of Asian Americans in the
US.” To focus on, or combat single nodes of the model minority myth, is to miss an
opportunity to eradicate its underlying foundation.
On the relational nature of race, numerous studies deepen our understanding of
how the oppression of one group facilitates the exploitation of another. The arguments
bear repeating: Ronald Takaki (1979) offers one such analysis. Rather than treating the
study of racial groups, women, and the white working class as separate, Takaki analyzes
how different racialized groups experience oppression in relation to each other.
Critiquing the shortcomings of contemporary historical scholarship, Takaki’s study
produces an “integrated analysis” of the past by analyzing racism in the US as a “total
51
structure,” rejecting racism as “the product of fragmented historical scenarios and
accidental factors.”
99
Tomás Almaguer’s (1994) investigation of the “different social
evaluations” made by European settlers as they were forced to reckon with varying racial
groups in the progression of American society: because of a need for their labor,
Mexicans were deemed worthy of partial assimilation, while Native people, indigenous to
the territories claimed by settlers, were viewed as in the way and slated for elimination,
removal, or assimilation.
100
Black people, on the other hand, as former chattel slaves,
were entirely unwelcome. Thomas Jefferson, widely remembered as an abolitionist who
led the enslaved to freedom, was in fact concerned that black presence in the US would
tarnish the purity of the “lovely white.”
101
He was not concerned about the
unconscionable nature of slavery; rather, as a fervent white nationalist, he insisted on the
American nation’s exclusion of black people.
102
Writing about political organizing and
activism in Los Angeles from 1968-1978, Laura Pulido describes the relationship of one
racial group to another—its status and meanings—as “contingent upon those of another.”
She states, “The idea of Asian Americans as ‘model minorities’ exists only in relation to
‘less than model’ Black, Latina/o, and American Indian minorities.”
103

Drawing on Omi and Winant’s theory of racialization, which describes the
processes through which people are defined and characterized as racial groups, Claire
Jean Kim’s (2000) study examines the politics of Black-Korean conflict in the 1990
Flatbush Boycott in Brooklyn, New York. Although the general narrative about “Black-

99
Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19
th
-Century America, Revised Edition (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), xiv.
100
Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 4-7.
101
Takaki, 15.
102
Ibid.
103
Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006), 3-4.
52
Korean conflict” portrays Korean merchants as racial scapegoats “caught in the middle”
or “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Kim’s analysis calls attention to the ways this
argument decontextualizes how power operates in contemporary America.
104
Racial
power operates not only by reproducing racial categories and meanings per se, but by
reproducing these categories and meanings in the form of a distinct racial order. Kim
offers a theory of how Asian Americans are racialized in a triangulated manner to white
and Black Americans. The American racial order is not one of hierarchy (A over B over
C) but rather, of insider/foreigner and inferior/superior. To reiterate, her notion of a racial
order emphasizes, first, that each group is racialized or positioned relative to other groups
and, second, that racial power can be measured via “the racial status quo’s systemic
tendency toward self-reproduction.”
105

Once we apprehend the workings of racial power, we can see that Korean
immigrants are not detached bystanders but rather are profoundly implicated in
the American racial order from the moment they arrive in the United States—not
because they wish to be but because each group’s position is invariably defined in
relation to those of other groups.
106

Thus, Kim’s study illustrates how “Korean immigrant merchants and their advocates are
not innocent scapegoats, mysterious ciphers, or mere bystanders but historical agents
actively negotiating the distinct opportunities and constraints presented within the
American racial order.”
107
On this note, Jared Sexton takes Kim’s diagram of racial
positioning to task; his argument challenges Kim’s positioning of Black Americans as
having “insider” privilege over “outsider,” or, perpetually perceived as foreign, Asian
Americans. This perception of “insider” (by way of a longer history inside the US) versus

104
Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000), 12.
105
Ibid., 2.
106
Ibid., 12.
107
Ibid., 11.
53
“outsider” (as a new or recent immigrant population in the US) problematically asserts
Black populations as privileged over Korean Americans, disavowing the ways in which
new American ethnic groups have reached ideals of “success” against the historically
oppressed former.
On the importance of considering the ways Cambodian Americans, and Asian
Americans embody the model minority figure, Native Hawaiian scholar Haunani Kay
Trask offers a related and crucial perspective. Unlike dominant narratives that highlight
the oppression of Asian immigrants, Trask identifies Asians in her native Hawai`i not as
“locals” but as settlers.
108
Describing the post-World War II rise of Asians in Hawai`i to
political power, she states:
Modern Hawai`i, like its colonial parent the United States, is a settler society; that
is, Hawai`i is a society in which the indigenous culture and people have been
murdered, suppressed, or marginalized for the benefit of settlers who now
dominate our islands. In settler societies, the issue of civil rights is primarily an
issue about how to protect settlers against each other and against the state.
Injustices done against Native people, such as genocide, land dispossession,
language banning, family disintegration, and cultural exploitation are not part of
this intrasettler discussion and are therefore not within the parameters of civil
rights.
109

While Asian populations in Hawai`i trace their histories to labor exploitation and
critiques of oppression, it is also necessary to recognize that their immigrant labor
contributed to the colonization of native land. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura
concur, stating, “Ethnic histories written about Asians in Hawai`i demonstrate an
investment in the ideal of American democracy that is ideologically at odds with
indigenous critiques of U.S. colonialism [and] do not address the roles of Asians in an

108
Haunani Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i, revised edition
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 25.
109
Ibid.
54
American colonial system.”
110
Instead, the scholarship tends to focus on Asian histories
of oppression and resistance in Hawai`i and, in doing so, advance a multiculturalist ethnic
studies framework that reproduces colonial claims made within white settler
historiographies.
111

Similarly, scholarship on Cambodian refugee families tends only to highlight their
struggles and hardships, magnifying them as the victimized. I contend that efforts to cast
Cambodian Americans as the antithesis of the model minority figure, by citing high rates
of poverty, gang involvement among youth, mental health issues, low rates of educational
attainment, and so forth, fail to grasp how the model minority figure reproduces white—
and Asian American—racial power in the US. These efforts reveal more about political
anxieties within the field of Asian American Studies than they do about the Cambodian
refugee or Cambodian American experience. Instead, by making Cambodian Americans
as the non-model minority, these efforts (re)center East Asian subjects rather than the
lived experiences and struggles of Cambodians in the US. In the remainder of this
chapter, I offer a close reading of aka Don Bonus that illuminates how Asian American
Studies imagines the Cambodian refugee figure. More specifically, I demonstrate how the
Cambodian refugee figure embodies yet another iteration of the model minority figure.
To do so, I begin with a discussion of mainstream portrayals of Cambodian refugees and
the politics of space in the Tenderloin District.

“New Kids on the Block”: The Politics of Space
Mainstream Portrayals of Cambodian Refugees in the Tenderloin District

110
Candace Fujikane, “Asian Settler Colonialism in the U.S. Colony of Hawaii,” ed. Candace Fujikane and
Jonathan Y. Okamura (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008), 1-2.
111
Ibid.
55
An examination of early 1980s mainstream media portrayals of Cambodian
resettlement reveals the positive valuation of refugees over other racialized
socioeconomic groups. As one example, a March 1983 Los Angeles Times article titled
“Refugees Tidy Up Seedy Area” describes:

There are some new kids on the block in [San Francisco’s] notorious Tenderloin
District. And like kids everywhere, they are busy establishing their turf. They
have elbowed their way onto streets and sidewalks that once seemed the exclusive
province of winos and panhandlers. They roam through tenement apartments that
once were nothing but flophouses for society’s down and out.
112

In contrast to portrayals of Cambodian refugees as mentally bereft, primitive, and
unprepared for Western society, this narrative relays a wholesale faith in the potential of
the “new kids on the block” to contribute positively to the growth of American society by
claiming territory atop the Tenderloin’s existing population of degraded residents:
“winos,” “panhandlers,” and “society’s down and out.” Reminiscent of historic narratives
of conquest and the colonization of indigenous people, the author’s tone alludes to
contemporary processes of social and economic gentrification of racialized working class
neighborhoods.
Whereas the Tenderloin District was “notorious” as a poor and run-down
neighborhood, the arrival of Cambodian refugees served as catalyst for renewal and
economic investment by the city and the wealthy. According to the article above, the city,
once content to let the neighborhood fall to blight, heeded the call to meet the needs of
Cambodian and Southeast Asian refugees.
San Francisco officials, accustomed to watching this neighborhood of dingy bars
and pornographic movie houses slip even further in decline, are not complaining.
Instead, they point to the presence of the children—most of them the sons and
daughters of Southeast Asian refugees who fled their native lands in one of the

112
Jane Galbraith, “Refugees Tidy Up Seedy Area,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1983.
56
largest forced migrations in history—as evidence that at long last, efforts to
revitalize the Tenderloin may finally be paying off.
113

Decisions such as these are by no means accidental or coincidental. Rather, they must be
understood as deliberate and strategic. As a neighborhood characterized as a “red-light
district, a desolate wasteland of prostitutes, drug addicts, and criminals,”
114
the
Tenderloin District was condemned by politicians, social service providers, and San
Francisco residents living elsewhere in the Bay Area. Numerous studies of the Tenderloin
District trace the naming of the neighborhood to corrupt politicians and police who
regularly patrolled the neighborhood and took bribes from criminal and criminalized
residents and thus were able to afford what was then the highest cut of steak (the
tenderloin).
115
Counter to depictions of the Tenderloin as desolate and home to persons
not worth the disbursement of city and state resources, Rob Waters and Wade Hudson
describe the Tenderloin as “San Francisco’s most diverse and unusual neighborhood, and
also one of its poorest,” made up of a diverse range of racial groups (Southeast Asian

113
Ibid.
114
Ibid.
115
The naming of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District comes from a similar district in New York City,
where famed police captain Alexander “Clubber” Williams was once overheard lamenting he would be
relegated to eating chuck steak (the cheapest cut) if he were to be assigned another part of the city.
However, because of the magnitude of bribes he was able to extract at his then-current job, he could afford
to eat a tenderloin cut of steak. Before San Francisco’s Tenderloin District was named as such, in the 19
th

century, it was known as St. Ann’s Valley. St. Ann’s Valley was an entertainment district. A notable event
occurred in 1917, when three hundred women filed into Reverend Paul Smith’s church in protest. The
women informed him that the majority of them were mothers who turned to prostitution because it was the
only way to support their children. Smith was the leader of an anti-prostitution reform movement in the
Tenderloin. So outraged by the sight of young women providing “entertainment” in cafés, bars, and streets
around his church, Smith crusaded against prostitution, claiming the brothels engulfed his church therefore
corrupting the young men in his congregation as they made their way to and from church. See Don
MacLaren, “Prostitute March 1917: Historical Essay,” originally published in the February 1988 The
Tenderloin Times under the title “Years Ago in Neighborhood History: TL Morality Crusade Draws
Prostitutes’ Wrath,” accessed via “Shaping San Francisco’s Digital Archive @ Found SF,”
http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Prostitute_March_1917.
57
refugees, African Americans, Latinos, Filipinos, and Russians) and home to thousands of
senior citizens as well as children.”
116

In the 1970s, the Tenderloin was perhaps the poorest district in the city, a
neighborhood with a large concentration of low-income seniors, people with
disabilities, and single drifters who floated in and out of he neighborhood’s
single-room hotels, eking out a living from casual labor or the meager stipends of
the city’s General Assistance program. Scores of business spaces sat vacant and
boarded up. Its residents, for the most part, came in two shades, black and white,
but its nighttime populations swelled with thrill-seekers from throughout the Bay
Area who came to the neighborhood to walk on the wild side and taste its illicit
pleasures.
117

Waters and Hudson’s depiction of the Tenderloin humanizes its residents, calling
attention to the ways Southeast Asian families living there were viewed as more
deserving, with various social service agencies advocating effectively on their behalf.
118

While social services advocated for and worked effectively on their behalf, efforts to
establish a treatment center for women with drug addictions, and who lived with children
were met with opposition from other community groups who feared the program would
attract more drug-addicted people to the neighborhood.
119
With the new demographic
shift came a sudden new resource—“the relative economic clout and entrepreneurial skill
of the Southeast Asian community.”
120
This attitude, unlike popular representations of
Southeast Asian refugees as mentally bereft, is directly related to the imposition of model
minority ideology. Or, perhaps, there was a factual element in this observation. Although
significant portions of the Southeast Asian refugee population came from peasant
backgrounds without economic clout or relevant social capital, there were many who

116
Rob Waters and Wade Hudson, “The Tenderloin: What Makes a Neighborhood,” in Reclaiming San
Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, eds. James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters (San
Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2001), 304.
117
Ibid.
118
Ibid., 315.
119
Ibid., 308.
120
Ibid., 309.
58
were formerly of the upper strata of their home economies. Waters and Hudson correctly
note that while most Southeast Asian refugee families were poor and dependent on
welfare, some were able to access the existing Asian American community’s network of
mutual support.
121

By the 1980s, the face of the Tenderloin began to change. Two major
developments led to the transformation of the Tenderloin from “downtrodden” to “one of
the most active neighborhoods in the city, a community with a growing sense of itself and
its mission, and a growing determination to fight for its own survival as a neighborhood
where low-income people could live”: the influx of Southeast Asian refugees, and a wave
of neighborhood activism and community organizing to demand better living
conditions.
122

Nevertheless, the move by city officials to direct resources into the neighborhood
in ways unprecedented for the Tenderloin marked a shift in attitude towards the
neighborhood’s residents. The Los Angeles Times noted, only when Cambodian refugees
arrived did the city purchase land and buildings for the area’s first park and provided
opportunities for mom-and-pop businesses—resources not previously offered to or made
accessible for existing residents. Consequently, “the crime-ridden neighborhood [began]
to take on the look of a stable, yet highly ethnic community.”
123
Once refugees of war,
Cambodians became agents of another war waged on the racialized poor, demonstrating
what Eric Tang terms “refugee exceptionalism.”
124

121
Ibid.
122
Ibid., 305.
123
Galbraith, “Refugees Tidy Up Seedy Area.”
124
Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2015), 14.
59
Asian American Studies’ Portrayals of Cambodian Refugees in the San Francisco Bay
Area

In the field of Asian American Studies, the Tenderloin District gained visibility
largely if not only with the arrival of Southeast Asian refugees. Conventional Asian
American Studies discourse would describe the Tenderloin District as an unofficial ethnic
enclave or “gateway” neighborhood to bigger, better places, reinscribing notions of hard
work and meritocracy as a means to upward mobility. But as Ruben G. Rumbaut notes,
the reception of Southeast Asians as refugees rather than immigrants “reflects a different
legal-political entry status conferred by the US government, a status that among other
things facilitates access to a variety of public assistance programs to which other
immigrants are not equally entitled.”
125
Ny’s family trajectory from the Sunnydale
housing projects to the Tenderloin and finally the Sunset District demonstrates this point.
aka Don Bonus has rarely been studied comparatively in terms of race. Helen
Heran Jun’s 2011 Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-
Emancipation to Neoliberal America, however, examines in more detail the civil rights
cases brought against the San Francisco Housing Authority, on which Ny’s family were a
part.
126
Demonstrating how Black-won civil rights was (and can still be) mobilized to
protect impoverished “Asian American refugees” from black criminality, Jun discusses
the 1993 suit filed by the Asian Law Caucus (ALC) on behalf of more than 100
Vietnamese and Cambodian families in seven housing projects on grounds they were

125
Ruben G. Rumbaut, “Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian Americans,” in Contemporary Asian
America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, eds. Min Zhou and James V. Gatewood (New York, NY: New York
University Press, 2000), 175.
126
Helen Heran Jun, Race For Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to
Neoliberal America (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
60
being harassed and attacked by Black residents.
127
The intention was to address the
overall sub-par living conditions for Southeast Asian refugee families living in the
housing projects. But, in order to justify the relocation for these families, the ALC argued
Southeast Asian refugee families encountered violence in the housing projects that were
racially motivated.
128

Although the ALC’s lead attorney Gen Fujioka noted “[y]ou can’t just address the
racial tensions without addressing the overall conditions of violence in the projects,”
underscoring the analysis that racial tensions are often symptomatic of violence and
poverty, the lawsuit ultimately reinforced existing ideas about race and the pathologizing
of violence as Black. He stated, “I don’t see this conflict as being between blacks and
Asians… what you have are small groups of people picking on families that are isolated
and vulnerable.”
129
And yet, Jun points out that “the only strategy available to the ALC
was to demonstrate that the racial difference of Asian immigrant residents [sic] makes
them specifically vulnerable to the crime and violence in the city’s worst projects.”
130

Black residents, on the other hand, could not, in the absence of racial epithets, challenge
their subjection to violence in the projects as a violation of their civil rights.
In this instance, to assist Southeast Asian families in the housing projects, Fujioka
effectively named the problem against “vulnerable Asians” as “Black crime and
violence.” Fujioka’s view that the conflict is not between Blacks and Asians is to a
degree viable; however, his statement elides one of the central functions of systemic and
institutional racism in American society. By reducing these moments of conflict as

127
Ibid, 144.
128
Ibid.
129
Quoted in Ibid., 145.
130
Ibid.
61
random acts in which “small groups of people pick on families that are isolated and
vulnerable,” Fujioka discounts the history of both intra-racial conflict as symptomatic of
white supremacist violence and people of color’s own capacities to subscribe to those
systems of privilege and enact violence upon one another. Furthermore, and perplexingly,
Jun opines, “this equation of better housing conditions with spatial distance from black
poverty is not an anti-black attitude or a part of racial prejudice on the part of the ALC or
Asian immigrants but a systemic effect of racial segregation.”
131
On the contrary, the fact
of better housing conditions founded on spatial distance from “black” poverty is, in fact,
an anti-black attitude.
The idea of Cambodian Americans as “model minorities” may not be easily
accepted by scholars, community organizers, or community members in Asian American
Studies and communities represented by the field. This is understandable, given the
various hardships endured by Cambodian refugee families—of which I am keenly and
personally aware. However, what I am trying to point out extends beyond culture and
even shared socioeconomic backgrounds. Despite the occurrence of Cambodian refugee
families who live alongside Black communities, adopt what might be recognized as
Black aesthetics, and speak in African American vernacular English, the “model minority
myth” describes a set of relations that govern racialized groups in the national framework
and sets into circulation certain ideas about identity, productivity, and success.
Whether the “myth” and its tenets are true or false seldom matters to the
production of the myth. Pointing out that Cambodian refugee families live in poverty,
that their children struggle in academic pursuits, or that they are “not like other Asians”
does little to nothing to address the function of the model minority figure. In fact, efforts

131
Ibid., 146.
62
to counter the myth by highlighting such characteristics reinforce Cambodians as
exceptional.
This dynamic is not unique to Asian Americans or Cambodian Americans. A
recent feature in the Los Angeles Times, titled “Shared Struggles: Latinos Now Dominate
Watts, But Some Feel Blacks Still Hold Power,” parallels the narrative of Cambodian
refugees in the Tenderloin District. Watts, a historically Black neighborhood, is home to
a growing community of Latino residents. In the opening paragraph, authors Esmeralda
Bermudez and Paloma Esquivel introduce readers to the 1965 Watts Riots using familiar
terms of “Black violence,” such as: “an angry crowd gathered” and, “violence broke out
and spread swiftly,” without mention of the deeper structural forces that ultimately
culminated in the historic 1965 uprising against white supremacist racism and police
violence. Bermudez and Esquivel cite the McCone Commission, which was tasked with
determining the “cause” of the riots to prevent future uprisings and rebellions. They
reiterate the report’s findings, which warned that Latinos should not be overlooked—
since “they [Latinos] suffered ‘from similar and in some cases more severe handicaps’
than the black community” and therefore might be prone to revolt.
132

The article goes on to describe one of the problems that Latinos face in the city:
“black leaders [who] are reluctant to share control of Watts.” In doing so, the authors
appropriate and spin on its head Black critique of white overrepresentation in political
power. In addition to naming Watts’ Black residents as responsible for the city’s
violence, the authors further emphasize a difference in Latinos, stating that for the latter
group, “survival is their priority right now.” Describing Latino residents as hard-working,

132
It is not irrelevant that the report was penned by John Alexander McCone—director of the CIA during
the height of the Cold War. McCone hailed from a conservative and staunchly anti-union family that found
vast success and wealth in the steel, iron, and construction industry in early 20
th
century Los Angeles.
63
holding 2-3 jobs while managing a commitment to help their children succeed in school,
the authors highlight Arturo Ybarra, a longtime resident of Watts who moved from
Mexico in the 1970s and founded the Watts Century Latino Organization to encourage
Latino involvement in the community. In an interesting parallel to discussions of
Cambodians in the Tenderloin, the Los Angeles Times describes how “[Ybarra’s]
organization is based in a former liquor store that once crawled with drugs and
prostitution. It is a revolving door for Latino families: Mothers show up with bullied
children, men seek immigration advice, youths inquire about summer programs.”
To its credit, however, the authors include an interview with Ted Watkins,
President and Chief Executive of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, a non-
profit organization founded in 1965 (shortly before the Watts Uprising) to “improve the
quality of life for the [primarily Black and working class] residents of Watts and
neighboring communities.”
133
Noting an awareness of, and (re)stating a commitment to
addressing the demographic shift in Watts, Watkins cautions Latino leaders to “be careful
about celebrating your arrival on the scene. […] Don’t fail to recognize that when you
stand, you’re standing on the shoulders of someone that in many cases was here before.”
Ending with plans of a new shopping center to be built along one of Watts’ largest
corridors and a $700-million plan to “redevelop the housing community,” readers are
thus left with a sense of impending doom as the specter of globalization and
gentrification looms large or, optimism and hope as these developments are often
considered “progress.” In this instance, we see yet again the “model minority” framework
applied, unspecific to Asian American populations.

133
See Watts Labor Community Action Committee, www.wlcac.org.
64
“Fuckin’ Black Bastard”: Beyond aka Don Bonus’s Artistic Sensibilities

aka Don Bonus’s narrative themes can be summed as the following: Asian
American academic struggle, juvenile delinquency, and housing instability/poverty—all
of which stand as contradictions to the model minority myth, which is characterized by
4.0 and above grade point averages, filial piety and deference, and homeownership (as
symbolic of American belonging). A press release describes the film as a story of an 18-
year-old high school senior and his family’s struggle to “stay afloat in a hostile
environment” where they are “afraid to go outside.” The family “finds refuge behind
barred windows, waiting and hoping for a better life.” With the help of the Asian Law
Caucus, Ny’s family is able to “flee the housing projects.”
134
The racial undertones in the
text are subtle: the “hostile environment” that Ny’s family faces is the largely poor and
Black Sunnydale housing projects community, where danger lurks just outside the
window of their home. As proper Cambodian subjects in the American imaginary, Ny’s
family “wait[s] and hope[s]” for someone(s) else to help them to “a better life.”
135

If the racial undertones in that press release are subtle, another Los Angeles Times
article is more explicit: “There’s a very real chance that Sokly won’t graduate. And no
wonder: he is pretty much on his own, stuck in a housing project where six Southeast
Asian families are subjected to harassment and worse by their resentful African American
neighbors.”
136
Instead of identifying displacement migration, war, poverty, racism, and a
failing school system at the root of Ny’s precarious educational achievements, the article
attributes Ny’s failures to his “resentful African American neighbors” and an allegedly

134
Juliet Brenegar and Diane Rostyak, “a.k.a. Don Bonus, A Raw, Revealing Video Diary of an 18-year-old
Cambodian Refugee, To Air June 25 on P.O.V.” Last modified May 30, 2014,
135

136
Kevin Thomas, “‘American Dreams’ Reveals the Struggle of the Asian Immigrant,” Los Angeles Times,
April 2, 1999, http://articles.latimes.com/1999/apr/02/entertainment/ca-23364.
65
absent mother. Another article states, “Whether or not they attain [the American Dream]
is not important. The process of how they go about attaining that dream is what this film
deeply exposes.”
137
Although the author of the latter piece does not appear critical of the
film, it is implied that Blackness and black bodies stand as obstacles to be overcome and
surpassed to gain upward mobility.
Further examination of the racialization of Cambodian refugees in the film reveals
how anti-black racism operates through the model minority myth—and through
Cambodian refugee presence in the American imaginary. Unlike mainstream media’s
superficial treatment of Cambodian migration to the US, Peter X. Feng reinforces the link
between the Cambodian American experience and war. He writes,
The failure of social service programs is continually linked to the government’s
foreign policy in Southeast Asia, explicitly through references to Nixon and U.S.
bombs, implicitly through a narrative structure that connects the continual
relocation of Ny’s family with efforts to protect, rehabilitate, and reconstitute the
family. […] Through a process of narration and editing, Ny links the family’s
forced migration from Asia with the dissolution of family bonds, indicting the
government’s foreign and domestic policies.
138

And yet, his critiques aside, Feng argues that aka Don Bonus is “first and foremost an
indictment of the American Dream.”
139
I argue the contrary is true. aka Don Bonus is not
an indictment of the American Dream—it is exemplary.
In the span of the film, Ny’s family moves three times (four, if you count their
initial migration from Cambodia). Running from their “resentful” and “hostile” African
American neighbors, they find a studio apartment in the Tenderloin, where Nakasako (in
the director’s commentary) goes as far as to point out that the family is in a much better

137
Koga, Noreen N., “Teenager's Video Diary Shows How America Changes a Cambodian Family,”
International Examiner, July 16, 1996, http://search.proquest.com/docview/367711983?accountid=14749.
138
Ibid., 10.
139
Feng, Identities in Motion, 12.
66
place their residence in the projects, apparently evidenced by the fact that Ny does not
run away in fear when a Black woman approaches him to ask about his camera. Finally,
the Asian Law Caucus aids Ny’s family in finding a spacious, two-story house in the
Sunset District where Nakasako comments, the “sun sets on” Ny and his family (invoking
the project of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that sought to dominate and
patronize Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Island nations during the early 19
th

century).
Underlying the narrative structure in which the continual relocation of Ny’s
family (first by the state and then by a non-profit organization serving the local Asian
American community) is an ever-present anti-black racism: from what or whom does
Ny’s family need protection? Why do they require rehabilitation? What does
rehabilitation look like? And finally, how does reconstitution of the family take place?
Feng’s reading of the film links the failure of social service programs to US foreign
policy in Southeast Asia, summoned by a narrative that connects efforts to relocate Ny’s
family in order that the state may protect, rehabilitate, and reconstitute what was the
dissolution of the Cambodian family as a result of US foreign policy and war. However,
the relocation of Ny’s family from the projects to the Sunset District falsely invokes the
relocation of Ny’s family from Cambodia to the US. Their flight from war in Cambodia
does not equate to their departure from the Sunnydale housing projects, narrated as urgent
because of danger posed by their “hostile and resentful” Black neighbors.
Although the various narrations of life in the Sunnydale housing projects paint a
picture of fear, terror, and uncertainty as a result of proximity to Black life, when Ny’s
camera pans out the window, it depicts a mundane neighborhood scene that reflects the
67
symptoms of racist institutional neglect and poverty. Nine minutes into the film, viewers
are led into the living room of the project unit where Ny’s grandmother, his sister, and
her family reside. As Ny enters the room, Ny’s toddler cousin, perhaps by this point
accustomed to the recording equipment, dances enthusiastically for the camera. The
sound of cartoons resonates through the home, contrasting with police sirens outside. As
his family eats their lunch, Ny explains in a voiceover:
This my sister, Chenda’s place, you know. She live right next to me, with her six
kids, and Grandma. Something always going on this place. I mean, since I been
here, I hardly go outside. I don’t even dare take a walk around. Cuz I’m afraid. I
always come here, ‘cause Grandma always cooking Cambodian food. Or
sometime I come here just to watch tv, cuz they have cable. Grandma said the
reason the cops are outside is because somebody got stabbed. The cops are asking
for evidence. They offering like ten thousand dollars, you know, if you know who
did it. Well, I don’t think nobody gonna say anything.

But when viewers are directed to the outside, we see just a few Black youth, a father
playing with his child, an elder person watching from the front porch, and a police
vehicle in their midst. This scene is interrupted by a (white) police officer, appearing
suddenly at Ny’s front door, who says, “Watch yourself, man. These guys are crazy.” It is
clear to whom the officer is referring, and from whom Ny and his family are expected to
seek protection. The state and its representatives do not view Ny and his family as a
threat. Rather, the scene demonstrates how Cambodian refugees are read differently than
Black Americans.
The title of this chapter comes from the scene immediately following this one.
Beginning with Ny’s exclamation, “Fuckin’ black bastard. Hate their fuckin’ ass,”
viewers are called to witness an example of the harassment and violence endured by Ny’s
and other Cambodian families in the projects. In this scene, Ny and his grandmother are
home alone when a rock is flung and breaks their window. Immediately picking up the
68
camera (Glen Mimura suggests that the camera has become a sort of friend or confidante
to Ny, thus having a “transformative effect,”
140
though in some ways I would argue the
camera serves a purpose of surveilling as well), Ny heads to the window to investigate.
Facing the camera to himself, he narrates the scene:
It is night time. There’s some kid just break the window. My sister’s house. Man,
this fuckin’ Black bastard. One right here, let me show you. See that? That’s a big
crack. Hate their fuckin’ ass. I was watching tv when I heard this sudden noise. I
just like duck down because it could be anything. It could be a bullet, coming that
way, or it could be anything, you know? My grandmother, she’s, um, terrified.
She’s in shock, you know? She’s afraid. I talk to my neighbor, and she said that
they know those kid. They live three blocks away from my sister’s house. They’re
around 11 or 12 years old. So they advise me to call the police right now, which—
I did call the police, and I hope they’ll be here soon. And sometimes people like
us Asian scared to call the police or the cops because, um, we scared that if we
call they get in trouble and then why, they gonna come back again for us, so we
gonna be more trouble. That’s how I feel, but I taking the chances right now. But
where’s the goddamn cops? Goddamn, these people are lame. No fucking cop
nearby. (turns lights off) Turn off the lights, because um, there’s a guy standing,
walking around and I’m afraid that if he see me, he might think there’s something
wrong.

Because the film was in part intended as a teaching tool for high school and college
courses, a study guide accompanies the film. Viewers and students are asked to think
critically about this scene. The term ‘fuckin’ black bastards’ is used by Don after a rock
is thrown through the window in the housing projects. It is extremely important that
students have the opportunity to examine their feelings about crimes in the context of
race relations.” Students are asked to think about why Ny “resorted to name-calling,”
whether or not they themselves have been “victimized” by someone from their own racial
group or from another group, and if they thought that racial or ethnic differences
intensified such conflicts.

140
Mimura, Ghostlife of Third Cinema, 52.
69
Although the study guide’s pedagogical approach encourages students to think
about personal and individual experiences in the context of race relations, it fails to grasp
the ways such acts of “name-calling” are not rare instances nor mere results of heightened
emotions but rather, condoned by, reflective of, and common-place manifestations of a
society structured by race, class, and gender. All three are cornerstones of white
supremacist violence premised on anti-black racism. Further, some have praised Ny for
his honesty and for choosing what might be so-called “the high road.” In a monologue
following this scene, Ny reflects:
You know right now, I don’t know what I feel like. I feel like who cares about the
cops. Fuck the cops. And one thing I’m also pissed off, I feel like I should have a
weapon with me. I should have a gun and just go out and shoot those bastard that
throw out to my window. I know they’re only 12 years old, they’re innocent, but
they’re not. I mean, we are no trouble to them? We gave no trouble to them.
Look, it’s only me and my grandma stay in this house. Man, fuck that. Make me
feel like I should always carry a weapon everywhere I go. Make me feel like I’m
a bad guy now.

To be fair, the police don’t rush to Ny’s aid either. Frustrated with their failure to respond
to his crisis, Ny calls them again. Upon connecting with an operator, he asks when the
police will arrive. He is then forwarded to an answering machine, causing him to
exclaim, “Goddamn, they put me on a answer machine. That’s fucked up. I’m gonna
hang up on them.” Returning to the window, he whispers, “Fuck this.” He turns off the
light and walks away, stating matter-of-factly: “Man, fuck the system. Again.
Motherfucker.” While he condemns his Black neighbors, he also calls out the farce of the
police “to serve and protect.” In the director’s commentary, noting Ny is terribly
distressed and nervous, Nakasako says his only thoughts while watching the footage are,
“Gee, I hope I never get robbed” (he is also referring to another scene in which Ny’s
family is subject of a burglary, leaving their home completely empty and bare)—
70
demonstrating the (safe) distance from which he views the race and class dynamics
present in this scene.
In the director’s commentary, Nakasako remarks, “It wouldn’t take a lot more for
someone to turn and go get retribution [on these children]. I think that what was good, in
terms of watching Don in this, was he was actually using the camera to get his
frustrations out.” And yet, the praise eludes what is so virulently present in this scene:
rather than giving him credit for managing to avoid shooting (or killing) his 11 or 12-
year-old neighbor(s), why are we not critical instead of a society that enables a young
person to determine such violence is a possible solution?
One could argue that the camera captured Ny’s frustrations and displayed them to
various (non-Black) academic and community audiences who might or have (naively)
applauded Ny for “not get[ting] retribution.” That the same study guide asserts that Ny’s
brother Touch was embroiled in legal difficulties because he was “harassed by a black
student at his school” again insinuates Touch’s demise, and their family’s vulnerabilities,
as a product of harassment by a criminal Black youth.
Although Touch’s charge of attempted murder constitutes one of the main themes
of the film, he is hardly seen or heard from in the film—much like their Black neighbors
in the various communities they live. Only when the trial is over and the family grapples
with the consequences of his trial do we hear from him. Unbeknownst to the viewer
(unless they watch the director’s commentary), Ny’s family objected to the filming of
Touch’s court appearances. Scenes of Touch’s court appearances in the final cut were not
shot by Ny but a VYDC staff member, since Ny would not do it himself. Elsewhere in
the film, they strongly vocalize opposition to being filmed (his brother and sister exclaim,
71
“You don’t record this! Court evidence!” and “Hey, don’t record this, man.”), they are
filmed against their wishes, and, ironically, the footage of their refusal makes it to the
final cut.
By the film’s end, we learn that Ny has graduated from high school and Touch
will be sent to reform school in Pennsylvania. As conclusion, Ny’s extended family
enjoys an outdoor picnic at Golden Gate Park across from their new home in the Sunset
District. In a voiceover, Ny claims, “One good thing that happened when Touch got
arrested is that, you know, my mom, she’s more into the family. It’s like the family is
more together now.” Ny’s optimism—perhaps of the sort necessary to make it through
day-to-day hardships—and ability to find virtue in situations like Touch’s arrest and
subsequent incarceration—as if good things could come out of state violence and, as if
state violence can bring “families” closer together—appears disingenuous, considering
prison is a major force in the dissolution of families. This final note illustrates what Feng
points to as the reconstitution and rehabilitation of the family that occurs as they make
their way out of the housing projects, the Tenderloin District, and into the Sunset
District—that is, the reconstitution of the(ir) family is founded on the successful
distancing from Blackness and Black life.

“I Don’t Deserve This Diploma”: “People of Color” and Asian Americans in the
Pipelines

Since 1978, California’s prison population has grown over 800%. Between 1947
and the early 1970s, there were approximately 200,000 people incarcerated in the US
annually. Currently, there are more than two million people in US prisons, not including
those on parole or probation. A cursory overview of this historical period reminds us
72
several changes were taking place. The criminalization of Black and Brown bodies
deepened alongside the growing characterization of Asian Americans as the model
minority, and the prison population grew exponentially as a result of the criminalization
of racialized bodies and politically dissenting persons.
141
In California, where the film
takes place, despite challenges Asian American sub-groups face in academic and
educational pursuits, as aka Don Bonus attempts to prove, Asian Americans as a racial
group make up an overwhelming percentage not in US prisons but the student population
at various California campuses.
Ethnic Studies scholar Dylan Rodríguez’s essay “Asian-American Studies in the
Age of the Prison Industrial Complex: Departures and Re-narrations” provides a genesis
for the following meditation on the “institutional formation and political location of
Asian American Studies in relation to the rise of the United States prison industrial
complex” since 1975, coincidentally the epoch of Southeast Asian refugee migration to
the US.
142
Coined in the 1990s by prison abolitions and activists, the “prison industrial
complex” is a term that describes the “overlapping interests of government and industry
that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and
political problems.” Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization seeking to
build an international movement to end the prison industrial complex, analyzes that the
prison industrial complex “helps and maintains the authority of people who get their
power through racial, economic and other privileges,”
143
such as the circulation and

141
See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007).
142
Dylan Rodríguez, “Asian American Studies in the Age of the Prison Industrial Complex: Departures and
Re-Narrations,” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 27 (2005), 241.
143
“What Is the PIC? What Is Abolition?” Critical Resistance, accessed October 4 2013,
http://criticalresistance.org/about/not-so-common-language/.
73
enlivening of pervasive stereotypes that portray racialized populations as “good” or
“bad.” According to these stereotypes, Asian Americans are deemed “model minorities”
and unthreatening to the dominant social order, while Black and Brown people are
deemed criminal, lazy, dangerous, and threatening to the dominant social order and thus
requiring containment.
While geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) focuses on how the construction
of California’s prison system from the 1980s through the 1990s allowed the state to put
certain capacities in motion, make use of idle land, and invest capital via public debt all
the while taking more than 160,000 low-wage workers off the streets,
144
Rodríguez’s
concern lies with where Asian Americans are located in terms of a US social and racial
formation that is increasingly based on technologies and punishment. More specifically,
his essay examines “whether and how Asian American Studies and its correspondent
Asian Americanisms are structurally entangled with, and actively complicit in, the
genesis and expansion of […] carceral social liquidation.”
145
He poses a question, quoted
below, to which this chapter has attempted to provide a response:
How might the field of Asian American Studies—and its professed alignment as a
critical intellectual/pedagogical practice—be transformed, distorted, or unhinged
if it were compelled to articulate a direct discursive and political relation to
contemporary technologies of racial pathologization, criminalization, bodily
immobilization, and imprisonment?
146

In conversation with Asian American Studies scholars who have examined the origins of
model minority discourse as it arose alongside the repression of Black and Brown people,
Dylan Rodriguez argues that the Asian American model minority is more than “a weapon

144
Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 5, 88.
145
Rodríguez., 242.
146
Ibid.
74
in the war against black America,” as Vijay Prashad argues.
147
Prashad, reflecting on the
ways in which South Asians in particular are a “weapon in the war against black
America,” states, “such gestures remind me that I am to be the perpetual solution to what
is seen as the crisis of black America.”
148
Rodriguez, however, advances this notion and
argues that the Asian American model minority is “both the condition of possibility and
embodied site of reproduction” [sic] of the reproduction of white hegemony.
149

The narrative through which we follow Sokly Ny in his struggle to graduate high
school fails to hold up as a token of the model minority myth’s falsehoods. In the film’s
conclusion, Ny graduates. He does so with great difficulty—but he graduates. His
brother, Touch, whose next stop is a Pennsylvania boot camp, offers an interjectory
narrative and experience. Although Touch’s narrative is crucial to the film, he is not
given much screen time. Touch appears only twice and speaks once in the film. His
storyline in the film is used to prop up Ny’s educational struggles.
In this chapter I have attempted to take up the call to examine more critically the
tensions in US Black-Asian relations. To reiterate Sexton’s point, the tensions
highlighted in this chapter are not intended to work “against progressive political
coalition, but rather is drawn from a sympathetic meditation on the need for more
adequate models of racial analysis and strategies of multiracial alliance-building in and
beyond the US context.”
150
It is my view that Asian American critical scholarship should
continue to pursue its interrogation and dismantling of white supremacy as it is enacted
upon peoples of all colors, not just Asian Americans, and not towards (re)producing

147
Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), ix.
148
Ibid., 4, 6.
149
Rodriguez, “Asian American Studies in the Age of the Prison Industrial Complex,” 251.
150
Sexton, 90.
75
Asian/American racial power and white assimilationist politics. Asian American
scholarship, in its examinations of the so-called Asian American experience, must
center, and think about and through US Black-Asian, Latino-Asian, and indigenous-
Asian, relations if the field is to remain attached to a broader critical ethnic studies rooted
in liberatory politics.
Asian Americans consciously and subconsciously enact forms of racism and
oppression in myriad ways. Efforts to dispel the model minority myth simply by offering
a list of ways in which Asian Americans do not conform to the characteristics named by
the myth itself may be reactionary. Instead, we must continue and persist at the effort to
critically examine the discursive formulation of the model minority myth in order to
confront and dismantle white hegemony and the various branches through which systems
of racial power are enacted and perpetuated—that is, if we are to take seriously the field
of Asian American Studies and “its professed alignment as a critical
intellectual/pedagogical practice.”
151

Despite the critiques of aka Don Bonus outlined in this chapter, the film’s
redemptive moment, for me, occurs in the scenes just before the joyous outing to the
park. Towards the end of aka Don Bonus, the different dynamics at play for Asian
American students emerge. Despite his struggles, Ny eventually graduates from high
school and receives his diploma. His family successfully leaves the housing projects and
the Tenderloin District. But there is still much to lament. Ny realizes his high school
graduation is scheduled for the same day as his brother Touch’s sentencing for attempted
murder. In a monologue that precedes the ceremony, Ny explains to viewers:

151
Rodríguez, “Asian American Studies in the Age of the Prison Industrial Complex,” 242.
76
Tomorrow…is my graduation day. And, um, it’s the same day as my brother
having his hearing. Tomorrow, for him, is his final court day. I think my family,
my mom, my brother, my brothers and sisters, they all gonna go to his, um, to his
hearing. So they ask me they not, can, uh, be in my graduation.

With family absent, viewers accompany Ny to his graduation ceremony, where he walks
across the stage in cap and gown. Before the film cuts to the scene in the auditorium
where the ceremony will take place, Ny looks down at the floor and mumbles, “I don’t
deserve a diploma.” This is a short pause, and he repeats, “I don’t… deserve… a
diploma.”
The film cuts to the next scene: a sea of royal purple silk cap and gowns fill the
vast auditorium. The valedictorian’s voice, inaudible at times, echoes throughout the
building: “If you have a dream, hang onto it. Because if you believe in yourself, that
dream… (inaudible).” We witness the ritual reading of graduates’ names, the turning of
the tassels, and watch as Ny bids farewell to his friends. The scene ends. We are back in
his bedroom. Posing for the camera with diploma in hand, Ny delivers one final
monologue before viewers are taken to the courthouse where Touch will receive his
sentence.
Dressed in his cap and gown, kneeling on his knees, Ny positions himself in front
of the camera and straightens his posture. Holding his diploma in front of him as one
does for a police mugshot, he says, “Well. It’s a happy day for me because I have this.
And it’s also a sad day because my parent wasn’t there. My mom, and my brother
Chandara—I thought he would show up but he couldn’t. Well, I don’t blame them
because my mom, you know, like I told you—he (sic) had to go to my brother trial.”
Caressing the diploma, he looks at it one last time before flippantly tossing it aside. He
returns his gaze to the camera and says, “Yeah. It was nice. You know, just hug all my
77
friends for the last time. For most of us, we not gonna see each other again. They gonna
go different places. I’m gonna go different places.” He pauses, perhaps gathering himself,
and says quietly, “And Touch gonna go different places.”
Ny’s statement that he does not deserve a diploma is certainly not due to remorse
for passing his exam by means of cheating (which is shown earlier on in the film—an
irresponsible move by the editors since it risked chances for revocation of his passing
score). Rather, it is due to the realization that his moment of success occurs at the same
time as his brother is entrapped in the carceral system. This profound utterance, a subtle
acknowledgement of the falsehoods of “success” based on merit and hard work, thus calls
for dialogue, debate, and theorization within Asian American Studies on its relation to
white hegemony and other peoples of color, and the different places we go.

78
CHAPTER TWO

The Haing S. Ngor Murder Case and Refugee Performativity in US
Empire

On April 16, 1998, Tak Sun Tan, 21, Indra Lim, 21, and Jason Chan, 20, members
of the Oriental Lazy Boyz gang in Los Angeles, were convicted and sentenced to 56
years to life, 26 years to life, and life without chance for parole, respectively. Despite
their defense’s argument that the evidence against them was not only insufficient but also
contradictory, the three young defendants were found guilty for the murder of Dr. Haing
S. Ngor, a Cambodian doctor turned Hollywood actor who became famous for his role as
Cambodian photojournalist Dith Pran in Roland Joffé’s 1984 film The Killing Fields.
Arrested two years earlier as teenagers and unable to make bail or seek private counsel,
the three were held in custody for over two years at Men’s Central Jail located on the
outskirts of Chinatown, Los Angeles.
On the day of their conviction, Pol Pot’s death was announced in global media
coverage. He had died the day before, on April 15, 1998, in his home in Anlong Veng,
Cambodia, a remote area in the country’s northern region. It was reported that he passed
away in his sleep due to heart failure, although there remains speculation that he was
poisoned—possibly by another former Khmer Rouge leader Ta Mok. According to
Thailand’s Army Commander in Chief General Surayad Chulanont, “intelligence and
autopsy reports suggest there were traces of toxic chemicals in Pol Pot’s internal organs
[…] which were never subjected to a formal autopsy.”
152
Believing Pol Pot’s death to be
a murder, Chulanont stated, “Those who poisoned Pol Pot were close to him. They

152
Robert Horn, “Putting a Permanent Lid on Pol Pot.” Time Magazine, March 25, 2002.
79
thought he was useless and would cause trouble.”
153
According to the tradition of
Theravada Buddhism and its karma doctrine, which states that the effects of our actions,
whether “good” or “bad” or otherwise, return to us as consequences, Pol Pot’s death
might be understood as the accumulation of karma consequence. As journalist Robert
Horn commented, “Not long after he [Pol Pot] died, the last remnants of his Khmer
Rouge signed a peace deal with the government in Phnom Penh, ending a quarter century
of civil war. If this is justice, it’s poetic—Pol Pot as the Khmer Rouge’s final victim.”
154

If Pol Pot was the Khmer Rouge’s final victim, what do we make of the death of
Dr. Haing S. Ngor, and the near-life sentences dealt to three youngsters from a quiet
quasi-village neighborhood in one of the largest US metropolitan cities? Almost two
decades since the trial’s end, many continue to believe that Ngor’s death was a political
assassination, not the result of a robbery gone awry as prosecutors argued—and that the
three young men were framed for Ngor’s murder. Deputy Alternate Joy Wilensky
expressed shock at the convictions: “They really did not have solid evidence to prove that
these kids had anything to do with his murder… What they had in common was that these
kids were all gang members and had been involved in snatching chains” at the time of
Ngor’s murder.
155

Prosecutors maintained the three young men were “dangerous crackheads” who
shot Ngor at close range after demanding money and personal property in the carport of
Ngor’s apartment building in Los Angeles’s Chinatown. Since Ngor’s Rolex wristwatch
was missing from his body and apartment home, prosecutors presented the theory that

153
Ibid.
154
Ibid.
155
Chan and Lim were already in custody for an unrelated charge when they were charged with Ngor’s
murder. See Daniel Yi and Greg Krikorian, “Three Men Convicted of Killing Ngor,” Los Angeles Times,
April 17, 1998.
80
Ngor must have hesitated or refused when assailants demanded that he give over the gold
locket around his neck, a keepsake which contained the supposedly last remaining photo
of his late wife Huoy.
156
In his closing words to the jury, city prosecutor Craig Hum
stated:
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Ngor survived the killing fields of Cambodia where
over a million people died just to be murdered in the killing streets of Los
Angeles…. Dr. Ngor never got justice for what was done to him in Cambodia, but
justice is in our hands now, and let’s make sure he gets justice for what was done
to him in Los Angeles.
157

City prosecutor Hum’s appeal to the jury did not only conflate “the killing fields” of
Cambodia with “the killing streets” of Los Angeles. His closing words suggest he
believed the perpetrators of Cambodia’s killing fields and Los Angeles’s killing streets to
be one and the same—and that US courtroom were thus poised to deliver justice in ways
not attainable in Cambodia. Taken together, Horn’s journalistic commentary and Hum’s
legal strategy reinforce, firstly, the idea that the Khmer Rouge were the sole perpetrators
of mass violence and, secondly, the pervading belief among mainstream observers that
Pol Pot’s death and the conviction of three gang members for the murder of a Cambodian
refugee hero symbolized the end of the fear and suffering wrought by Cambodian war
and street criminals.
On April 16, 1998, on the same day those three young men, two of whom were of
Cambodian descent, received near-life sentences for the murder of Ngor, whose death
many continue to believe was the result of speaking out against the Khmer Rouge,

156
See Ngor’s memoir Survival in the Killing Fields for his retelling of Huoy’s death. Huoy became
pregnant with their first child during the Khmer Rouge regime. Although Ngor was a trained gynecologist,
he could not help his wife as she experienced childbirth difficulties because, as he says, the Khmer Rouge
would have killed both of them. Ngor was tormented by the fact he could not save her.
157
Tak Sun Tan et al., “The people of the State of California, plaintiff, vs. Tak Sun Tan, Jason Chan and
Indra Lim, defendants” (reporter’s daily transcript of proceedings, Los Angeles, April 1-2, 1998), 2158.
81
photographs and even live video of a lifeless body laying atop a bamboo platform bed in
the Cambodian jungle circulated far and wide through global news outlets. Pol Pot was
dead. Was he, in fact, the Khmer Rouge’s final victim, or was Ngor? If Ngor, then who,
or what, shall be held responsible for the incarceration of Tak Sun Tan, Indra Lim, and
Jason Chan? On that fateful day, there would be no public mourning for Pol Pot, and the
world moved forward believing one less evil would threaten the so-called free world.
Neither would there be public mourning for the three young men given near-life
sentences, and many moved forward believing the streets of Los Angeles were safer as a
result.
I discuss in this chapter the Haing S. Ngor murder case and the convictions of Tak
Sun Tan, Indra Lim, and Jason Chan to near-life sentences in the US prison system. I
argue the murder trial performed a public acquittal of US war crimes committed in
Cambodia by positioning the three youth gang members as responsible for the terror
inflicted upon Cambodians. Building on Cathy Schlund-Vials’s (2012) and Robert Eap’s
(2014) textual analysis of Roland Joffé’s 1984 The Killing Fields, I maintain that the
prosecution’s resolve to deliver a guilty verdict for a national audience must be
understood in light of two things: 1) Asian American gangs in 1990’s Los Angeles and
2) Ngor’s role in the Hollywood epic. Ngor, whose famous last words in The Killing
Fields gave reassurance to Americans that there was “nothing to forgive” (in other words,
that Americans had committed no wrong), came to represent for Americans redemption
and forgiveness for its war crimes in Cambodia.
82
As Eap argues in Contested Commemorations: Violence and Memory in
Cambodia, Ngor was “ostensible proof of the viability of American meritocracy.”
158

Having come to the US as a Cambodian refugee, Ngor found meaning and purpose in
helping other Cambodians navigate US bureaucracies in order that they might lead
productive lives in America while putting the past behind them, whether through his
work as a counselor at the Los Angeles Chinatown Service Center or through his
portrayal of Dith Pran in the phenomenally successful The Killing Fields.
159
Tan, Lim,
and Chan, on the other hand, represented the perpetrators of violence done to
Cambodians. Framed in the language of “good” and “bad” refugees,
160
the defendants
took the proxy role of the Khmer Rouge while Ngor, Hollywood celebrity, was cast as
hero. Thus the trial, covered widely by mainstream national news, enabled prosecutors
and law enforcement officials to launch an assault on the growing threat of Asian gang
violence in Los Angeles during the 1990s by sending a message to active gang members
while setting a precedent for court sentencing. On a local level, by apprehending three of
its core members, city and law enforcement officials were able to dissolve the Oriental
Lazy Boyz gang, whose membership was comprised largely by young people who
arrived to the US as refugees from Cambodia, notorious in the Chinatown and Echo Park
regions of Los Angeles, and a network of Asian American street gangs as well.
Finally, by focusing on the discursive construction of “good” refugees and “bad”
refugees, I demonstrate how the figure of the refugee performatively produces and

158
Robert Eap, “Contested Commemorations: Violence and Memory in Cambodia” (PhD diss, University
of Southern California, 2014), 134.
159
Ibid.
160
See Yen Le Espiritu, “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press Coverage of the
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon,’” American Quarterly 58, no. 2 (2006): 329-352 for her
discussion of the trope of the “good refugee” figure as the “purported grateful beneficiary of U.S.-style
freedom.”
83
reproduces the narrative of US benevolence, superiority, and the justification of military
intervention. Following Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, I discuss the
“performativity of the refugee” by pointing to ways the refugee figure is not only
racialized but gendered as well. The gendering of the refugee figure as in need of rescue
and liberation supports the narrative of US as provider of freedom and democracy, of
equality and of refuge, ultimately enabling the US to continue to carry out imperialist
agendas around the world.

The Murder of Haing S. Ngor and the Conviction of the Oriental Lazy Boyz

In 1995, a killing spree by one of the local chapters of the Los Angeles Asian
Boyz gang had LAPD scrambling to capture any suspected gang members and rid the city
of its Asian American gang problem. Law enforcement officials described the Asian
Boyz gang, rivals of the Oriental Lazy Boyz, as engaging in a cold-blooded summer
killing spree: six murders, eight attempted murders, and three conspiracies to commit
murder. In addition to engaging in drive-by shootings on Los Angeles freeways and
committing execution-style murders in pool halls (which were caught on security
cameras, also depicting teenaged Asian American bystanders showing no trace of fear or
remorse as their peers were gunned down mere steps away
161
), Asian American gangs ran
extortions of locally-owned Asian immigrant small businesses, committed grand theft
auto, engaged in drug and weapon sales, prostitution rings, home invasions, and more.
By 1999, four young men were charged and convicted for the summer killing
spree. Defense lawyer Jack Stone, who represented Roatha Buth in the trial of The People
v. Buth, Sothi Menh, Bunthoeun Roeung, and Son Thanh Bui, pleaded with the jury to

161
For a more detailed discussion of these events, see Kevin D. Lam, Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling:
Vietnamese American Youth in a Postcolonial Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Chapter 3.
84
understand the circumstances that led his defendant to the courtroom. Buth, a Cambodian
teen, was six years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power. As Stone reportedly told
the jury: from age six through ten, Buth worked in chest-high water harvesting rice for
the regime. He watched two siblings die of starvation and was so malnourished himself
he could not even swat flies from his own face. Stone argued further, “All of this
evidence is not intended to play on your emotions. It’s intended to show who he is and
why he is.”
162
All four defendants were convicted and sentenced to life in prison without
the possibility of parole.
In a separate case, though also in connection to the Asian Boyz gang, David
Evangelista, Ky Tony Ngo, and Kimorn Nuth were sentenced for murder, conspiracy, and
six attempted murders. The three faced a minimum of 45 years and six life terms. Nuth,
who was 17 when the killings took place, was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life
without possibility of parole for five murders, plus 120 years for two attempted murders
and gun enhancements. Unlike the defense, Deputy District Laura Baird and Hoon Chun
argued that the boys deserved the death penalty. Baird stated, “They’re responsible for so
many victims. There was no reason for it, and they took great pride in it. They enjoyed
killing.”
163

Stone’s argument is neither new nor unique. Scholars, activists, community and
family members have long highlighted the relation between political and economic
conditions and the criminalization of youth in urban neighborhoods. Kevin D. Lam’s
research on Vietnamese American youth gang formation in Los Angeles, for example,

162
Evelyn Larrubia, “Battle Over Death Sentences for 4 Asian Gang Members Begins,” Los Angeles Times
(Los Angeles, CA), March 16, 1999.
163
Evelyn Larrubia, “Asian Boyz Case Ends in Mistrial,” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, CA), April 29,
1999.
85
provides insight and analysis on how racism in American inner-city schools and on the
streets work together to impact and inform gang formation.
164
Although studies exist
which examine the criminalization of Black and Latino youth, and of the effects of the
model minority image on Asian Americans, there is little research on the criminalization
of Asian American youth and gang members.
Lam’s larger book project examines the ways in which the Vietnamese American
youth gang phenomenon is itself an extension of the US conflict in Southeast Asia.
Although Asian American (Chinese and Japanese American) gangs have existed in urban
cities since the late 1960s and 1970s, Vietnamese American gangs were the result of
“selective immigration policies and the aftermath of the US war in Southeast Asia over
the last five decades.”
165
He argues that Vietnamese American youth gang subculture
materialized in the context of US military and economic intervention in Southeast Asia
dating back to the 1940s.
166
Like defense lawyer Stone, Lam argues that the experiences
and actions of young gang members must be situated within the context of militarization
and war.
167
Lam argues, “Vietnamese youth gang formation and criminality emerged
much before their arrival on US soil.”
168

Although Lam, himself a Vietnamese refugee, focuses on Vietnamese American
youth, his argument and discussion can be applied to Cambodian American as well as
Hmong and Lao American youth as well. Although the model minority image continues
to pervade mainstream media and popular culture, most of the American public is not

164
Kevin D. Lam “Racism, Schooling, and the Streets: A Critical Analysis of Vietnamese American Youth
Gang Formation in Southern California,” Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and
Advancement 7, no. 1 (2012).
165
Kevin D. Lam, Youth Gangs, Racism, and Schooling (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 9.
166
Ibid., 6.
167
Ibid., 11.
168
Ibid., 11. Lam arrives at this argument via interview with formerly imprisoned intellectual Viet Mike
Ngo.
86
aware of the history or events surrounding Asian American gang culture. With large
numbers of Southeast Asian refugees in Los Angeles and Orange Country, law
enforcement officials became concerned with a rise in violent crimes committed by Asian
street gangs. Membership of gangs like the Oriental Lazy Boyz, Asian Boyz, Tiny
Raskals Gang, Viet Boyz, and Black Dragon were largely composed of Chinese
immigrants and those with Southeast Asian refugee backgrounds. Other notorious gangs
like Pinoy Real, Temple Street, Satanas, or Jefrox were composed of primarily Filipino
and Korean membership. Rather than addressing the issue at its root through alternative
community-based methods of prevention and intervention, city officials looked to
policing and incarceration as its solution.
The Haing S. Ngor murder trial and the conviction of three defendants can be
better understood in the context of Los Angeles’s 1990s Asian American gang formation
and the criminalization of Asian American youth. It should also be understood in relation
to Ngor’s portrayal of Dith Pran in the 1984 film The Killing Fields. In his chapter “The
Killing Fields Saga: Reading Sydney Schanberg and Haing S. Ngor,” Robert Eap offers
an analysis of two central figures in the film: American journalist Sydney Schanberg,
portrayed by Sam Waterston in the film, and Haing S. Ngor, who in the film portrays
Schanberg’s Cambodian translator Dith Pran. In contrast to Roger Ebert, who praised for
the film for centering Pran’s narrative alongside Schanberg’s, Eap argues the film “more
accurately depicts the death and life of Sydney Schanberg.”
169
Building on Espiritu’s
essay in which she demonstrates how mainstream media coverage of 25
th
anniversary
Vietnam War commemoration strategically deploys the figure of the refugee to help
advance a “good war” narrative, Eap argues that the Los Angeles Times coverage of

169
Eap, 108.
87
Ngor’s story “reinscribes the viability of American meritocracy while also locating its
contradictions in racial difference.”
170
As he puts it, “[Ngor] demonstrated the requisite
fitness under capitalism demanded of US subjects and had been rewarded generously
because of it. His murderers presented the opposite: they were unemployed and drug
addicted gang members who provided an exceptional portrait of the threat posed by
capitalism’s unproductive subjects.”
171
Eap argues that these two figures are allegorical
of a historical US-Cambodia military relationship, in which “…Pran’s refugee status
relieves Schanberg of his guilt by ensuring that any negligence or malevolence
contributing to Pran’s vulnerability was ultimately corrected”
172
and “Schanberg, with
Pran’s authorization, is absolved of wrongdoing and, as an allegorical figure, further
authorizes the framing of the US-Cambodia relationship as one defined by rescue.”
173

Concerned with the ways in which the tandem representations of Schanberg and
Ngor erase “a malicious history of militarized destruction on behalf of US imperial
interests”
174
Eap asserts that Ngor’s death compromises the coherence of what Yen Le
Espiritu calls the “we-win-even-when-we-lose” syndrome. As the embodiment of the
American dream, the “preeminent symbol of American opportunity,” Ngor was not
supposed to die a premature death—not in the “killing streets” of Los Angeles.
175
I add to
this that the trial was intended to convict and imprison three gang members as much as it
was intended to redeem the narrative of the American dream. According to Schlund-
Vials, Joffé reportedly conducted extensive research interviewing Schanberg, reading his

170
Ibid., 110.
171
Ibid.
172
Ibid., 108
173
Ibid., 109.
174
Ibid., 111.
175
Ibid., 109.
88
and Pol Pot’s writings, Ngor had never even met Pran, the man he was to portray in the
film. Instead he drew upon his own experiences under the regime, impressing the casting
team with the “authenticity” of his performance.
176
“By stressing a shared subjectivity—
at the level of horrors and endurance, between Ngor and Pran—Freedman gestures
toward the film’s representational politics, which in part engendered an iconographic
reading of the Killing Fields era through characterizations of interchangeable Khmer
Rouge perpetrators and universal Cambodian victimhood”
177
(emphasis mine).
The sentencings of Asian and Southeast Asian American youth in the city’s
courtrooms allow us to view US imperialism as a global project of racist warfare both
abroad and at “home.” The murder trial, which was the focus of national attention,
discursively (re)produced Southeast Asian refugee youth and Asian American gang
criminality as the binary opposite of the “good refugee.” This, in effect, freed the state
from bearing responsibility as a system of power that ultimately relies on the binaristic
production of good and bad subjects. In this “democratic” theater, members of the
Oriental Lazy Boyz were pinned with the role of the absentee Khmer Rouge while the
US’s own violences were justified in the name of freedom and democracy.
When LAPD patrol units came racing up the narrow alley behind Ngor’s
residence on the night of February 25, 1996 with lights flashing and sirens blaring, no
one was surprised. Police presence in the close-knit Victor Heights neighborhood, home
to a mix of remaining Chicano families, Chinese immigrant families, and Cambodian and
Vietnamese refugee families, was not unusual. But while car theft, muggings, and
apartment break-ins were commonplace, shootings—and killings—were not. Out of a

176
Cathy Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 82.
177
Ibid.
89
fear of harassment by police, retaliation by others, or being implicated in precarious
situations, many residents here tended to avoid the police more often than not. That night,
however, the red, white, and blue lights were summoned by a 911 call from the
neighborhood. A tenant in the seven-unit apartment building at 945 Beaudry Avenue
made the call after discovering her neighbor’s body in a pool of blood in the carport. Dr.
Haing S. Ngor, famously known in the neighborhood as a “movie star,” often returned
home from filming Hollywood movies with a smiling face covered in fake blood, much
to the confusion of this local community and even dismay by those who disapproved of
his participation in the Hollywood industry. This time Dr. Ngor was not covered in fake
blood, or on set. This time, he was dead.
Although police presence here was not out of the ordinary, Ngor’s gun murder
was the first (and the last) in the neighborhood in at least 16 years.
178
While there were
the usual neighborhood concerns of cliques of teenaged boys hanging out in the alley,
smoking cigarettes, and ditching school, the shooting shocked and puzzled many
residents in the neighborhood. Initially, police investigators had no suspects. Robbery
was ruled out, since Ngor’s wallet and $3000 in cash left in plain view in the backseat of
his gold two-door Mercedes Benz remained untouched. In conversation with Ngor’s
niece, Sophia Ngor, who occasionally lived at her uncle’s apartment, it was discovered
that his gold Rolex watch, one that he often wore, was missing. In addition, it was
reported that the gold chain locket containing the last photo of his late wife Huoy, who
died in childbirth during the Khmer Rouge regime, was also not found.
179
These missing

178
I was born and raised in this neighborhood, where I still reside. I was sixteen years old at the time of
Ngor’s murder. His was the only in the time I have been alive.
179
Ngor’s family members complained that LAPD would not provide them with an inventory of personal
items gathered at the crime scene nor the coroner’s report despite repeated requests. It remains unconfirmed
90
items would play a crucial role in the prosecution’s theory that Ngor’s death was the
result of a robbery attempt and not politically motivated as many of his friends, family,
and neighbors believed. The missing items and murder weapon have never been
recovered, not even after the arrest of three suspects. The three defendants, young
members of the Oriental Lazy Boyz gang, were arrested two months later, on April 26,
1996 and charged with first-degree murder and second-degree robbery.
Despite theories that Ngor’s killing was politically motivated—he was outspoken
in his views against the Khmer Rouge and active in rebuilding Cambodia after the war—
Deputy District Attorney Craig Hum argued to the jurors that Ngor’s death was the result
of a robbery wherein the defendants shot him twice (once in the leg and then in the chest)
when he refused to give up his locket. Ngor’s colleagues disagreed with Hum’s theory.
David Hinckley, former regional director of Amnesty International, stated, “Haing was
fighting against it [the Khmer Rouge], and that’s what we all suspect got him killed.”
180

Ginetta Sagan, an authority figure of human rights violations in Southeast Asia, met Ngor
at an Amnesty International event in the mid-1980s. She too shared Hinckley’s
suspicions, as did Sandy Arun Blankenship, a leader of Long Beach’s Cambodian
community. Moreover, an anonymous scholar, who harbored deep concerns about the
case, phoned LAPD twice in the week following Ngor’s death to insist that police
investigate the political motive in the shooting. He believed that Ngor’s killing was “a

whether those specific items were already missing when the police arrived on the scene on the night of the
shooting. More specifically, it was impossible to rule out the possibility that the gold Rolex and chain
locket were taken during the course of the investigation. See Peter Manso and Ellen Hawkes, “Who Killed
Haing Ngor?,” Los Angeles Magazine, June 1996, 87.
180
Ibid., 89.
91
deliberate murder [by the Khmer Rouge] to intimidate people all over the world,
especially in America.”
181

Indeed, Ngor seemed determined to live. On the day he was killed, Ngor spent the
afternoon in Long Beach with a friend, sharing his excitement over winning a dump truck
at a local auction two days prior. He paid $10,000 in cash for it and planned to ship it to
Cambodia, along with other supplies he had collected for schools and orphanages there.
His flight there was booked for March 4
th
, a week from the day he was killed. This was
certainly a person with big plans for the future. Journalists Peter Manso and Ellen
Hawkes believed Ngor’s murder to be more than a random violent act. “None of Ngor’s
family, friends or the hundreds of Cambodians who honored him during his ten-day
Buddhist funeral service are willing to accept the murder as simply another act of random
violence, another of LA’s marginal street crimes.”
182

Ngor’s alleged refusal to give up the locket confounded many of his friends and
family, as well, who did not believe that he would hold on to a locket if it meant his
life—even if it contained the supposed last remaining photo of his late wife. The Los
Angeles Magazine’s investigation of Ngor’s death relayed a general consensus among
those who knew Ngor best. Friends were perplexed when the story of Ngor’s murder over
the locket emerged. He had worn it ever since his wife died in his arms during the Khmer
Rouge regime, but Ngor’s friends unanimously agreed that he would never have risked
his life in such a way. That is, he would never have chosen death over a gold chain
locket. “He always said that if you were mugged, you gave them everything,” confirmed
one Cambodian friend, who spoke with legal protection of anonymity. Another friend

181
Ibid., 90.
182
Ibid., 91.
92
agreed, “After all he’d been through in Cambodia, he valued his life too much to lose it in
a robbery. He was a survivor, and he knew how people could be violent. He would never
have struggled, not even over the locket.”
183
Not only did Ngor’s friends, family, and
colleagues confirm that his refusal to give up the locket in the face of death was out of
character for Ngor, it was later verified that Ngor possessed several copies of the photo,
along with the original kept safely in his apartment.
Facing difficulties with locating witnesses, the trial lasted two years. Hum
persuaded the jury that the three teenagers were gang members and “crack heads”
184
who
terrorized witnesses and scared them from giving testimony for fear of retaliation.
Already adverse to law enforcement and state officials, many were simply unwilling to
participate or cooperate with police because they did not want to deal with the
consequences of “snitching.” Others, perhaps, did not want to get caught up in the
investigation lest they become subjects of an investigation themselves. Evidence that
would suggest the defendants’ innocence was ultimately disregarded. While Hum’s
theory of a robbery-turned-murder had the boys running down the hill, where they were
picked up by a friend and taken to a fellow gang member’s house, the defense called
upon key witnesses to testify that they had heard a car speeding uphill following the
sound of gunshots. The Los Angeles Magazine reported that an unfamiliar man had come
knocking on doors at the apartment complex the day before Ngor’s murder to ask about
“‘Asians who lived in the building’—who they were and which apartments they
rented.”
185

183
Ibid., 87.
184
Tak Sun Tan et al., “The people of the State of California, plaintiff, vs. Tak Sun Tan, Jason Chan and
Indra Lim, defendants” (reporter’s daily transcript of proceedings, Los Angeles, April 1-2, 1998).
185
Manso and Hawkes, 90.
93
The prosecution’s arguments to convict the three defendants relied on emotions
invoked by a national memory of Cambodia during the Vietnam War era. Drawing on
tropes of America as savior and land of equal opportunity, Hum’s legal strategy played
on the liberal sympathies of the jurors and called upon them to remember “what was done
to [Ngor] in Cambodia.”
186
He argued,
This case is about the robbery and the murder of Dr. Haing Ngor. This case is
about the tragic death of a man who suffered unimaginable pain, unimaginable
cruelty. He came to our country seeking safety and a better way of life, but he
never forgot what he left behind.
187

On one level, Hum was referring to the fact that no leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime
had yet been held accountable for the two million deaths that occurred between 1975 and
1979. America, self-proclaimed nation of “freedom” and “democracy,” could and would
provide for Cambodians what its own nation was incapable of: justice for the atrocities
committed on Cambodians by Cambodians. On another level, Hum’s argument reflected
a national guilt in the memory of US-Cambodia relations. Mired in guilt or at least an
acknowledgement of the US’s role in the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power, Ngor’s death and
the murder trial presented Americans the opportunity to “deliver justice” to Ngor and by
proxy all Cambodians.
Painting Ngor as a martyr and humanitarian whose death was an insufferable loss
to the community and society at large, Hum’s legal strategy represented the three
defendants as criminal derelicts of no value, as if Ngor did not have a complicated past of
his own and as if the three defendants themselves did not possess histories of
“unimaginable pain, unimaginable cruelty.” The defense, however, pointed out Hum’s
attempt to invoke images of racialized criminality in order to play on jurors’ fears by

186
Tak Sun Tan et al., “The People of the State of California,” 2158.
187
Ibid., 2169.
94
repeatedly using the terms “gang members” and “crack heads” to refer to the three
teenagers. They argued that Ngor’s migration history to the US and his experience in
Cambodia were irrelevant—reminding the jury that their task was to determine
specifically whether or not the three defendants could be proven guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt for the murder of Haing S. Ngor. The defense also reminded the jury
that neither the young men’s membership in the Oriental Lazy Boyz street gang, nor their
use of drugs, were on trial. As Deputy Alternate Steven J. Schoenfield asked, “Did the
prosecution present any evidence at all that my client killed Dr. Ngor, was involved in
killing Dr. Ngor, by aiding and abetting or was involved at all in any way in this
incident?”
188
The answer was a resounding no. The evidence was flimsy, and the
prosecution’s theory did not hold, and yet the three defendants were convicted as guilty
for the murder of Dr. Haing S. Ngor.
Tak Sun Tan, 21, was sentenced 56 years to life, double the expected term due to
a prior robbery conviction. Jason Chan, 20, who had an existing record dating back to
when he was 13 years old, was sentenced to life in prison without chance for parole for
his alleged role as gunman. The prosecution could not prove he was the gunman—the
decision rested on the fact that he owned a gun that might have looked like the one used
to kill Ngor. Indra Lim, 21, was sentenced 26 years to life. Each of the three defendants
maintained they did not kill Ngor. Before the sentences were delivered, Chan stated, “I
know the law requires you to sentence me to a very harsh sentence. Before you do, I want
the families and world to know I had no part in this murder and robbery and I don’t know
who did.”
189

188
Ibid., 2197.
189
Steve Berry, “Three Get Long Prison Sentences in Actor’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, May 20, 1998.
95
In its coverage of the trial, the Los Angeles Times reported that presiding judge J.
D. Smith believed that “Ngor’s killing should serve notice that stiffer sentences should be
imposed earlier in people’s criminal careers.”
190
The city of Los Angeles’s method for
dealing with urban issues reveals a deep investment in the expansion of its legal
apparatuses and the prison system as catchall solutions.
Following the convictions of Tan, Lim, and Chan, the Oriental Lazy Boyz, many of them
teenagers who arrived in the US as refugees of war, disbanded and never fully regrouped.
By the late 1990s, the Victor Heights, Chinatown, and Echo Park neighborhoods were
effectively cleared of remaining gang members and their affiliates. The murder trial of
Haing S. Ngor, which garnered national attention, produced and reproduced a discourse
of Cambodian and Southeast Asian refugee youth and Asian gang criminality that was
the antithesis to the figure of the “good refugee,” described by ethnic studies scholar and
sociologist Yen Le Espiritu as the “grateful beneficiary of U.S.-style freedom.”
191
This, in
effect, freed the state from owning responsibility in its production of “bad” subjects via
its own military excursions and acts of war waged upon Cambodians, in Cambodia and in
the US diaspora.

(Re)producing US Empire

Key to protecting this hegemony is the refugee figure—specifically, the
Cambodian refugee figure. Eric Tang points out that US President Jimmy Carter
approved a “massive Southeast Asian refugee resettlement program which he hoped
would legitimize the United States as a leader in a new global humanitarian cause and

190
Ibid.
191
Espiritu,“‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome,” 329.
96
simultaneously obscure its ongoing relationship with Pol Pot.”
192
In 1979, the US, along
with China, supported the Khmer Rouge in order to denounce and curb the power of the
North Vietnamese government. As Viet Thanh Nguyen observes, the Southeast Asian
subject is chiefly relegated to a traumatized supporting role as “a powerless … silent
figure whose presence is only of isolated significance in the movements of armies,
nations, and capital, and one that is ultimately the object of others’ politics.”
193
This is
true of Cambodian refugees who essentially came to be “cannon fodder to protect
American lives,” as Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan argue.
194

Despite the US Constitution’s declaration that all men are created equal, the
adoption and enforcement of state and federal laws—and with it a totalizing intrinsic
violence—have never ushered in equality but rather the selective, strategic, and deliberate
inclusions and exclusions of racialized people. Maria Cristina Garcia’s research on
politics of refugee policy argues that the US assisted Cubans precisely because they were
fleeing a communist government at the height of the Cold War. She states, “Laws were
bent if not broken to accommodate them.”
195
The same is true for Southeast Asian
refugees, who fled a region that fell to communism. When Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and
Nicaraguan immigrants began to arrive in the US as a result of US-backed coups and
malevolent foreign policy during the 1980s, however, “the administrations of Reagan and
Bush insisted that those who fled the civil wars in Central America were not true

192
Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2015), 36.
193
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 108.
194
Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia,” The Walrus (2006): 67.
195
Maria Cristina Garcia, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and
Canada (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), x.
97
refugees, but rather economically driven migrants.”
196
These political stances were
popularized despite the mobilization of supporters from refugee advocacy groups in the
US who argued that the US had “a moral obligation to help the displaced because of the
country’s [the US] long history of economic exploitation of the region and the role it
played at the time in supporting corrupt military regimes and death squads.
197

In a 1981 essay tracing the legislative history of the 1980 Refugee Act and the
goals which Congress sought to achieve, Senator Edward M. Kennedy noted the Refugee
Act gave “new statutory authority to the United States’ longstanding commitment to
human rights and its traditional humanitarian concern for the plight of refugees around
the world.”
198
In Title I of the Refugee Act, it is declared that
[I]t is the historic policy of the United States to respond to the urgent needs of
persons subject to persecution in their homelands, including, where appropriate,
humanitarian assistance for their care and maintenance in asylum areas, efforts to
promote opportunities for resettlement or voluntary repatriation, aid for necessary
transportation and processing, admission to this country of refugees of special
humanitarian concern to the United States, and transitional assistance to refugees
in the United States. The Congress further declares that it is the policy of the
United States to encourage all nations to provide assistance and resettlement
opportunities to refugees to the fullest extent possible.
199

But, Kennedy also stated, “the United States is likely to accept only those for whom the
American people feel a special concern.”
200
He wrote, “Under the Refugee Act of 1980
the test is whether their admission is ‘justified by grave humanitarian concerns or is
otherwise in the national interest.”
201
Only three months after the historic reform was
made did the US face its first test when Cuban refugees began to arrive on American

196
Ibid.
197
Ibid., x, 4-5.
198
Edward M. Kennedy, “Refugee Act of 1980,” International Migration Review 15, no. ½ (1981), 142.
199
Ibid., 142-143.
200
Ibid., 155.
201
Ibid.
98
shores. Instead of using the new law to help Cuban refugees, the burden of resettlement
was dumped on state and local agencies due to fiscal concerns that the cost would be too
high in admitting Cubans as “refugees” and this legislation would establish a precedent
that would invite millions more to come to the US. Kennedy makes clear, “…refugees
pose critical foreign policy issues for the United States and the international community.
We know from recent history that massive refugee movements can unbalance peace and
international stability. Threats to the peace do not come only from an arms race or a
political or military confrontation.”
202

It seems the Refugee Act and its stated goals remain inextricably connected to US
empire and war-making around the world, further enshrining its self-proclaimed role as
“leader of the free world. These limited applications of “humanitarian concerns” become
systematic procedures for dealing with the human costs of war. In numerical terms, the
cost of resettlement in the US was approximately $4000 per Indochinese refugee.
203

Following the 1979 Geneva Convention Conference, most participating countries
doubled the number of Indochinese refugees they were prepared to admit. Numerous
faith and religion-based organizations sought sponsors who would provide housing, food,
and other assistance for a certain period of time. Their own financial contributions to
resettlement efforts were offset by the fact that the federal government funded the entire
process through the 1975 Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, which gave
the voluntary agencies $500 for each refugee processed.
204
The extent to which the
enthusiasm displayed by voluntary agencies was influenced by this monetary award is

202
Ibid., 156.
203
Ibid., 147.
204
Sucheng Chan, Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2004), 83.
99
unknown. While there were reports of especially generous sponsors, there were also
reports of absent or abusive sponsors who took advantage of refugees. The enthusiasm by
voluntary agencies to find sponsors for refugee families was compounded by the fact that
the vast majority of refugees were in fact working and supporting themselves in their new
communities and, after a few years, even paid back in federal income taxes more than the
cost it took to resettle them in the US.
205

Thus, not only where but how Cambodians, as the so-called sideshow to the
Vietnam War, would be resettled and assimilated would be crucial to ensuring a postwar
win despite a devastating war loss for the US. Ong (2004) points out that Cambodians
arrived at a conspicuous moment in the US political economy. According to her study,
Cambodian refugees arrived at a time when the media and the state were in collusion to
reduce government aid to racialized minorities whom, in their view, were dependent on
welfare and lacked the self-motivation to lift themselves out of poverty. More
specifically, in the early 1980s, they worked in collusion to “refine the idea of the model
minority in terms of race and class.”
206

Journalists and policymakers came to distinguish between two categories of Asian
Americans: on the one hand, the model minority ethnic Chinese immigrants from
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China along with Vietnamese immigrants; and on the
other, the “new underclass” said to be represented by refugees from Cambodia
and Laos.
207

And yet, because of the challenging and impoverished conditions many Cambodian
families lived in the US, Cambodian youths “were drawn into gangster networks and
engaged in criminal activities as a way to make pocket money or even a living.” These

205
Kennedy, “Refugee Act of 1980,” 147-148.
206
Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2003), 78.
207
Ibid.
100
youths certainly did not fit the image of the model minority; instead they were viewed as
“ripe for any kind of criminal activity or subversive leadership.”
208

Catherine Ceniza Choy’s study on international Asian adoption by US families
draws similarities between refugees and adoptees as displaced, dispossessed populations.
The strategy of incorporating a threat in order to neutralize it is not new. Choy shows
how an International Social Service (ISS) report written in the aftermath of World War II
about the “problem” of mixed race children fathered by US servicemen (both Black and
white) warned explicitly that adoptees are “a generation dispossessed and rejected, [and]
could become adults ripe for any kind of criminal activity or subversive leadership” in
ways that would harm the US.
209
Thus officials especially encouraged “proper” and
normative American families who could help assimilate the adoptees to the American
mainstream to adopt mixed race children and facilitate their migration to the US so they
would not remain in their home nations. Official reports and popular attitudes combined
resulted in the widespread view that mixed race children should be brought to their
adoptive homes in the US as soon as possible in order to “save them from a lifetime of
discrimination and abuse in their country of birth.” Simultaneously, these discourses
engaged discussions on “how an adoptive child of a different racial background could
become a real part of a new family in a new setting.”
210

Similarly, the screening process for Cambodian refugees and the task of
assimilating them into the American mainstream took into account the same concerns.
Anthropologist Carol A. Mortland describes how the screening process for Cambodian

208
I borrow this wording from Catherine Ceniza Choy, Global Families: A History of Asian International
Adoption in America (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013), 23.
209
Ibid.
210
Ibid., 16.
101
refugees was intended to ensure that those selected for sponsorship to the US “could be
transformed into healthy bodies and minds fit for America.”
211
This transformation was
accomplished via a process that involved the “critical phases of adaptation, capability
building, and disengagement” which would allegedly “result in changing a ‘displaced
person’ into an “Individual Well Equipped for Life in His Country of final destination
[sic].’”
212
Describing the amount of funding and resources poured into the screening
processes and subsequent health care given to Cambodian refugees, Ong suggests “the
extraordinary medical attention they [Cambodian refugees] received and the money spent
on the effort were worthwhile: although more than seven hundred Southeast Asians [at
the time] have settled in the United States since 1975, they never became a threat to
public health.”
213
But the screening process was also intended to prevent the possibility of
a political threat—and this was much harder to screen for. As Ong documents,
Cambodians in the Thai refugee camps maneuvered humanitarian infrastructures by
performing characters or naming symptoms they believed officials were looking for
214
—
just as many of them had done during the Khmer Rouge regime to avoid execution.
Encapsulated within this fear was also a concern about protecting the US nation-
state’s status as a leading world power. Grewal notes, at the end of the 20
th
century, one
could not speak of state power without also considering the ways in which state power
was linked to global power.
215
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire argued that
American imperialism, through deterritorialized power and governance, was replaced by

211
Carol A. Mortland, “Transforming Refugees in Refugee Camps,” Urban Anthropology 16.3-4 (1986):
385.
212
Ibid.
213
Ong, 95.
214
Ibid., 93, 107.
215
Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 2005), 20.
102
a new sovereignty produced by a decentralized power.
216
They argue that this new power
is global rather than centralized within the US nation-state as the world’s leading
superpower. Further, they continue, the US does not form the center of an imperialist
project. “Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern
European nations were.”
217
Grewal however argues that when decentralization occurred,
new centers were developed. Deterritorialization did not result in the elimination of
territory but rather its re-territorialization. In this way, the US remains an undiminished
source of both decentralized and centralized power. She states, “The United States
remained a hegemon, and its source of power was its ability to generate new forms of
regulation across particular connectivities that emerged as independent as well as to
recuperate the historicized inequalities generated by earlier phases of imperialism.”
218

In her essay “The ‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome: U.S. Press
Coverage of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the ‘Fall of Saigon’” Yen Le Espiritu calls
for us to think about the Vietnam War not as an isolated event that has fallen to the
wayside of history but to see it as connected to a long history of wars of the past as well
as the present moment. Espiritu contends that the Vietnam War has the potential to
unsettle the master narrative of US rescue and liberation that positions the US as the force
of salvation that “rescues desperate people from tyrannical governments and reforms
them ‘into free and advanced citizens of the postwar democratic world.’”
219
Espiritu’s
previous works which think about Vietnamese refugees also hone in on this theme; she
cautions that “transnationalism must be understood as a contradictory process—one that

216
Cited in Grewal, 21. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000), xi-xv.
217
Quoted in Grewal, 20. See also Hardt and Negri, Empire, xiv.
218
Grewal, 20-21.
219
Espiritu, “‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome,” 329.
103
has the potential to break down borders and traditions and create new cultures and hybrid
ways of life but also to fortify traditional hierarchies, homogenize diverse cultural
practices, and obscure intragroup differences and differential relationships.”
220
This is
true of Cambodian refugees as well. US headlines and academic titles often depict
Cambodian refugees as fleeing a fascist, barbaric, and communist regime—which is not
untrue—towards a purely free and democratic in the US—a notion that could and should
be examined, complicated, and debunked. It is this “good war” narrative, Espiritu argues,
that portrays the US as triumphant and moral, that legitimizes and valorizes US military
intervention around the world.
221

The US rescue and liberation trope and narrative of freedom and democracy relies
on the idea of the refugee and the refugee body itself. Writing about gender, Judith Butler
argues that “the body is not a self-identical or merely factic materiality; it is a materiality
that bears meaning, if nothing else, and the manner of this bearing is fundamentally
dramatic.” By this she means that the body is not merely physiological or biological
matter but “a continual and incessant materializing (emphasis in original) of
possibilities.”
222
This argument, she explains, signifies two things. First, the body’s
appearance in the world is not predetermined by an interior essence or a “natural” self.
Second, the body’s expression in the world must be understood as “the taking up and
rendering specific of a set of historical possibilities.”
223
For our understanding of gender,

220
Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives Across Cultures, Communities, and Countries
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 214.
221
Espiritu, “‘We-Win-Even-When-We-Lose’ Syndrome,” 329.
222
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 521.
223
Ibid.
104
Butler illuminates various forces at play that construct one’s gender identity. Where
Butler states:
The body becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised,
and consolidated through time. From a feminist point of view, one might try to
reconceive the gendered body as the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a
predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence or fact, whether natural, cultural,
or linguistic.
224

Butler’s theory of performativity enables a reading of the gendered refugee figure and of
US Empire in two ways. The first is that the refugee figure is produced through a series
of acts of war that are continually renewed, revised, and consolidated over time. The
second is that people become refugees—but they become so in gendered and racialized
processes that ultimately result in a productive American ethnic identity. Those who are
viewed as intractable, or who fail to conform to American norms and ideals of propriety
are punished and oftentimes harshly so—evidenced by the case of delinquent and “at
risk” youth who act within conditions not of their own making and receive lengthy or life
sentences in prison as a result. While killings are not acts that should be taken lightly, we
have to consider the world we live in that exonerates, even condones, acts of killing by
the state. It is no coincidence that some gang-affiliated persons’ undertakings resemble
tactics and strategies often deployed in war (i.e. home invasions, kidnappings, extortion
and bribery, executions).
In Butler’s theory of gender performativity, we see that societal norms create and
shape perceptions of gender according to one’s biological sex. For example, when a baby
is born, it is assigned a gender in accordance with its biological sex. It is also expected
that this baby will grow up to fulfill its life as either a boy or a girl, depending on its sex.
The theory of gender performativity challenges this conception of gender, which

224
Ibid., 523.
105
problematically and inaccurately relies on a dichotomy of either/or. In saying that gender
is performative, Butler demonstrates that human beings enact or perform series of acts
that consolidate the impression of gender. As one example, a child of the female sex
wears pink, dresses, plays with dolls, so on and so forth, and thus consolidates the
impression that this child is a “girl.” Beyond the dichotomy of “good” and “bad”
refugees, there are those who are neither, both, or something else altogether: complex
human beings with complex relationships to power and violence.
We see in the case of the Cambodian refugee that individuals are compelled to
perform in certain ways in order to be legible as legal subjects in the US. Refugees, as
political subjects produced via “the work of institutions and discourses,”
225
(i.e.
imperialist war and the idea of America as savior) enter the sociopolitical landscape of
the US nation-state already positioned as a population of people who embody an
ideological labor force and who perform (willingly or not) the work of reinforcing certain
ideas and discourses.
As Inderpal Grewal notes in her discussion of Sikh refugees, the issue of
“credibility” and the need for applicants to prove they were not terrorists created new
narratives for refugee asylum. Applicants were required to prove they were being
persecuted by the state; moreover, they had to prove that their persecution was not the
result of “terrorist” activity and that they were not connected to radical political groups.
As such, applicants for refugee asylum were careful when saying which groups they
worked with and/or what kind of work they did, and had July to express political opinions
in a way that immigration officials deemed legitimate.
226
In turn, the US nation-state

225
Grewal, Transnational America, 14.
226
Ibid., 187.
106
looked for certain kinds of refugee subjects—those who fit the criteria and image of
“victim,” those who were governed by shame and honor, ones who were obedient and
shy, and ones who were persecuted for familial connections rather than their own
political opinions and beliefs. Anything beyond this set of criteria rendered the applicant
a risk and they would be rejected. “The safest narrative,” she argued, “thus minimized all
kinds of agency.”
227
Framed within what Grewal and Caren Kaplan call a “transnational
feminist cultural studies,” Grewal extends her argument that human rights discourses
[produced subjects who saw themselves as ‘global citizens’ and ‘global feminists’] at the
end of the 20
th
century to how human rights discourses managed the crisis of a growing
population of refugees in order to maintain the nation-state system and to sustain national
identities.
228
She further asserts, “human rights, a juridical mechanism, change into a
governmental tool when used to decide which persons can be granted refugee asylum.”
229

Indeed the mass influx of Southeast Asian refugees to the US, in just the decade prior,
factored in to the emergence of neoliberalism in foreboding ways. Once positioned under
US bombs, these populations were now positioned in the US alongside US technologies
of war.
Mainstream portrayals of Cambodian refugee communities typically characterize
these populations as abject, suffering high rates of mental illness, fleeing a backwards,
tyrannical country of origin and finding salvation and freedom in America. These
characterizations sever the link between war—specifically US warmaking—and its
legacies, of which mental health issues are a symptom. As historian Mae M. Ngai
reminds us, “migration to the United States has been the product of specific economic,

227
Ibid., 191.
228
Ibid., 158
229
Ibid.
107
colonial, political, military, and/or ideological ties between the United States and other
countries […] as well as of war.”
230
Migration, she adds, is not “a unidirectional
phenomenon, in which the hapless poor of the world clamor at the gates of putatively
disinterested wealthier nations.”
231
Rather, the US along with other imperial nations have
had central roles in producing the migrations that have reconfigured global
demographies. The incorporation of Cambodian refugees into the US body politic
following their mass migration should be seen as an extension of the war and part of a
nation-building project that serves to (re)produce American identities and for the
fortification of US nationalism, as Yen Le Espiritu argues.
232

Since the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) and a 2002 repatriation agreement between the US
and Cambodian governments, at least 1500 (and the number continues to grow)
Cambodians in the US have received deportation orders. These individuals were marked
for deportation to a country they have never known for possessing criminal records
containing aggravated felony convictions. The majority of these individuals arrived in the
US as children. Like Kevin D. Lam, who maintains that the experiences and actions of
these young people should be understood within the context of militarization and war,
legal scholar Bill Ong Hing explains that “refugee families … were not provided with the
tools necessary to raise their children in inner-city environments, where crime was
rampant and culture was radically different from where they came. As a result, many of

230
Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press 2004), 10.
231
Ibid., 11.
232
Yen Le Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US
Scholarship,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, nos. 1-2 (2006): 411.
108
the refugee children, products of their US environment, have turned to crime.”
233
Hing,
and many others, have reiterated the terms of involvement and culpability on the US’s
part. He writes, “Sadly, many Cambodian families who survived the killing fields of the
Khmer Rouge, have lost the battle to survive in America. The battle was lopsided; they
were given no tools to adjust after being uprooted by a genocide with which the United
States is all too familiar and all too connected.”
234
Challenging the moral basis for these
deportations, Hing asks whether justice is really being served. The same can be asked of
the three youth—now adult men—who currently remain incarcerated.
In 2005, Tak Sun Tan, Indra Lim, and Jason Chan filed an appeal arguing the
prosecutor committed misconduct in three ways: by arguing facts for which there was no
evidence, presenting as true a fact that was proven false, and appealing inappropriately to
jurors’ passions and prejudices. To the state and in the eyes of the public, Ngor was the
symbol of freedom and democracy attained in the US after surviving the Khmer Rouge
regime and fleeing Cambodia. As the court transcript states, “Dr. Haing Ngor [was] a
man well-known for the tragic experiences he endured in Cambodia during the reign of
the Khmer Rouge and for the Academy Award he received for portraying life under the
Khmer Rouge in the movie The Killing Fields…”
235
As a doctor in Cambodia, he
represented the top tier of his countrymen. He was among the most educated and
successful, and thus respectable. In the explanation for why the court appeal should be
overturned and the defendants’ sentences reinstated, the court once again highlighted
Ngor’s normative domesticity as a reason why a sentence that placed the value of his life

233
Bill Ong Hing, “Detention to Deportation—Rethinking the Removal of Cambodian Refugees,” U.C.
Davis Law Review 38 (2004-2005), 891.
234
Hing, 970.
235
Tak Sun Tan v. Runnels, July 7, 2005, http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1469934.html.
109
and death would and could not be overturned. Having set foot on a path of ambition and
success, he “met a girl who he planned to start a family with. But things don’t always
work out as we plan.”
236
Huoy’s life was cut short by the Khmer Rouge, taking their child
with her. In Cambodia, under the communist Khmer Rouge, “doctors were often killed
simply for their profession.” To add insult to injury, Ngor, this well-to-do gynecologist in
a country deeply plagued by inequality and poverty, was relegated to laboring in the rice
fields—a job implicitly reserved for the working poor. In the US, prosecutors reasoned,
Huoy would not have died, and Ngor would be free to pursue his dreams and live his life
as only he could live it. But that, too, was cut short—not by the Khmer Rouge, but by
three “crackhead gangbangers,” as the prosecutor kept referring to them. While the court
allowed Ngor’s personal history to enter the trial for consideration, the backgrounds and
experiences of the three youth were never afforded the same treatment. Ngor’s death
came to represent an attack on freedom and democracy and what Ngor symbolized to the
American public. He wasn’t supposed to die here, they reasoned.
The murder trial presented the state with the opportunity to construct a narrative
around the issue of US war crimes in Cambodia by somehow delivering justice to Ngor
for what happened to him both in Los Angeles and in Cambodia—of which the US
apparently took no part. And so with words, the prosecutor Craig Hum, on behalf of “the
people,” argued,
Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Ngor survived the killing fields of Cambodia where
over a million people died just to be murdered in the killing streets of Los
Angeles…. Dr. Ngor never got justice for what was done to him in Cambodia, but
justice is in our hands now, and let’s make sure he gets justice for what was done
to him in Los Angeles.
237

236
Ibid.
237
Tak Sun Tan et al., “The people of the State of California, plaintiff, vs. Tak Sun Tan, Jason Chan and
Indra Lim, defendants” (reporter’s daily transcript of proceedings, Los Angeles, April 1-2, 1998), 2158.
110

In the Court of Appeal, US District Judge Margaret M. Morrow granted Tak Sun Tan,
Indra Lim, and Jason Chan their appeal after concluding that the prosecutor did in fact
commit misconduct and that “the state court’s decision concerning the prosecutorial
misconduct allegations was contrary to and an unreasonable application of clearly
established federal law.”
238

Then, on July 7, 2005, a three-judge panel reversed Judge Morrow’s ruling.
Arguing that prosecutors did not commit misconduct in the aforementioned ways, they
reinstated the convictions of Tan, Lim, and Chan. They stated that the appellees’ claims
were meritless particularly on the point that the prosecutor appealed to the jurors’
passions and sympathy by describing Ngor’s life in Cambodia because “the telling of Dr.
Ngor’s life story ‘was relevant to the People’s theory of the case.’” That is, Ngor’s
“extraordinary personal history would have made him resist the killers’ attempt to steal
his gold necklace” and thus “there [was] no prosecutorial misconduct in arguing this
theory.” And yet the use of “extraordinary personal histories” in trials that sought and
resulted in life and near-life sentences for Southeast Asian youth involved with gangs as a
result of conditions not of their own making were rejected by the court. Instead they were
cast as street terrorizers and whom the state offered no solution but to hand them life
sentences in prison in a nation notorious for using prisons as a catchall response for social
problems. Their second chance was never granted; their lives cut short—this time within
a different kind of war zone: the American criminal “justice” system.

238
Tak Sun Tan v. Runnels, July 7, 2005, http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1469934.html; and
Kenneth Ofgang, “Court Revives Convictions in Murder of ‘Killing Fields’ Survivor, Metropolitan News-
Enterprise, July 8, 2005. http://www.metnews.com/articles/2005/tanx070805.htm.
111
In a sense, this trial can be understood as a microcosm of the larger theater of US-
Cambodia relations during the war and which had transcended the formal cessation of the
war. In the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge defeat and the relocation of hundreds of
thousands of Southeast Asian refugees to the US, there remained the issue of how to
resolve the vexing issue of US war crimes in Cambodia. In the courtroom, and to the
American public, Ngor symbolized the values of heroism, rescue, and neoliberal
capitalist (market) freedom while the defendants symbolized the menacing threat to the
aforementioned values. Here, they stood as proxy for the Khmer Rouge. Ngor’s death had
to be avenged, not only for him but for the nation, and it was done so within one of the
most insidious ways that war is waged on populations living within the bounds of the US
nation-state: the legal arena and the so-called criminal justice system. By imputing
Ngor’s death onto these young defendants—Ngor’s own community kin—the state was
able to give the impression of closure for the vexing issue of US war crimes during what
they believed was a virtuous war against freedom, democracy, and capital. Even more
egregious was the presumptuous undertaking of delivering justice by a court under
American jurisdiction. In effect, it promoted the US on a platform of godliness and
virtuosity and granted vindication on its own crimes against humanity.

112
CHAPTER THREE

Fruits of the Harvest: U.S. Empire and the Conscription of the
Cambodian Refugee Figure

They have got to go in there [Cambodia] and I mean really go in … I want everything
that can fly to go in there and crack the hell out of them. There is no limitation on
mileage and there is no limitation on budget. Is that clear?
—Richard M. Nixon
December 9, 1970
239

…The United States and Israel must be closer than ever, stronger than ever and more
determined than ever to prevail against our common adversaries and to advance our
shared values. […] This relationship has always been stronger and deeper than the
headlines might lead you to believe. …[A]s president, I will make a firm commitment to
ensure Israel maintains its qualitative military edge.
—Hillary Rodham Clinton
March 21, 2016
240

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’
(Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. […]
Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is
firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this
enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
--Walter Benjamin
“Theses on the Philosophy of History”
241

On April 14, 2010, the Shoah Foundation and the Levan Institute at the University
of Southern California hosted an opening reception for the travelling exhibit “Artifacts
from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge Trial.” Featuring photographic and archival materials, as
well as guest speakers, the exhibit comprised a part of the Documentation Center of
Cambodia’s (DC-CAM) efforts to raise awareness about the Khmer Rouge regime that

239
Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia,” The Walrus (2006): 66,
http://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabombing_oct06.pdf.
240
See Ryan Teague Beckwith, “Read Hillary Clinton’s Speech to AIPAC” Time Magazine, March 21,
2016, http://time.com/4265947/hillary-clinton-aipac-speech-transcript/ for 2016 presidential Democratic
candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton’s speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee concerning
the United States relationship with the state of Israel.
241
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.
113
took place in Cambodia from 1975-1979. In a manner that can only be read as strategic,
large portraits of Khmer Rouge leaders on tall wooden easels lined the corridor of the
walkway to the reception area, as if to visually imprint their faces with a conviction as
guilty. Upon entrance, guests were individually handed large, oversized printed booklets
with the word “GENOCIDE” printed in block letters across the front cover. Underneath
the word “genocide,” a subtitle read: “Who Are the Senior Khmer Rouge Leaders To Be
Judged? The Importance of Case 002.”
242

Commencing the event, Executive Director of the Shoah Foundation Stephen
Smith pressed his palms together at his chest and bowed to an audience of university and
Cambodian community members—Khmer Rouge survivors—who travelled from Long
Beach, CA for the occasion. Chum reap sor, he greeted the audience, most of whom
smiled and sompeah’d in response. Despite the tragic and macabre content of the exhibit,
the mood at the reception was festive, even celebratory. The contents of the exhibit, and
DC-CAM’s work in general, was meant to forward the agenda of DC-CAM and its allies
to identify and convey as responsible the Khmer Rouge for the deaths of approximately
two million Cambodians during the four years in which the regime held power. More
than that, however, the exhibit and its conjoined efforts attempted to remove the four-
year regime from a longer history of Cold War conflict. By framing the regime as an
isolated event, narratives emerging thereafter thus precluded any speculation of US
culpability in the events that took at least two million Cambodian lives before, during and
after the US’s withdrawal from the Southeast Asian region in 1975.

242
The trial for Case 002, slated to begin later that year, sought to hold four defendants—Nuon Chea,
Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Ieng Thirith—responsible and prove the Khmer Rouge regime made
decisions that caused the deaths of nearly 2 million Cambodians. Ieng Thirith, the only woman to be tried,
was later released from detention because she was found “unfit for trial.” She was diagnosed with
Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Ieng Sary, her husband, died March 2013.
114
Marking the first formal appearance of collaboration between the USC Shoah
Foundation and the DC-CAM, it perhaps was not a coincidence that the exhibit’s opening
reception took place on the same day as the Cambodian New Year, a day meant to enjoy
and celebrate the bounty of the harvest season before beginning preparations for the next.
Although the collaboration with the Shoah Foundation was reportedly initiated by the
DC-CAM, an institute now based in Cambodia and maintained by Cambodians, this was
not merely an instance of two independent interest groups collaborating to document
historic events—namely, genocide. Rather, the DC-CAM’s origins as a US State
Department project suggests at the offset there has always been a political hand in its
formations and subsequent undertakings.
This chapter investigates the collaboration between DC-CAM and Shoah
Foundation. I argue that this collaboration is an extension of imperial warfare. More
specifically, this chapter makes the argument that the global movement to amass survivor
testimony under the auspices of the Shoah Foundation is constituent of ongoing efforts to
contain and discipline radical opposition to not only the US but also Israel’s nation-
building project. The title of this chapter, “Fruits of the Harvest,” refers to the emergence
of the Cambodian refugee figure as one result of a war in which the US was a central
force (the Khmer Rouge being the other). Following Yen Le Espiritu’s argument that “it
is the presence of the refugees … that enables the United States to recast its aggressive
military strategy as a benevolent intervention,”
243
this chapter examines ways the
Cambodian refugee figure has been deployed and proven useful—continues to be used as
a solution, demonstrating Eric Tang’s contention that the Cambodian refugee figure is

243
Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2014), 18.
115
“held in perpetual captivity so that she can be used over and over again”
244
—in the
consolidation of US and Israel global hegemony and their contemporary imperial and
colonial projects. If Cambodia was a sideshow during the “Vietnam War,” Cambodians
in the Shoah Foundation’s digital archive are now centered instead, allowing Zionist
political agendas to deploy Holocaust survivor testimonies in the name of an Israeli
settler-colonial project. Moreover, this chapter draws attention to the digital warehousing
of Cambodian refugees on an Internet platform, an idea that deserves serious
consideration as the 21
st
century modern world increasingly becomes more situated on
the World Wide Web, formerly known as the “Information Super Highway.” In this
regard, I understand the Cambodian refugee figure to be a central weapon in the
ideological arsenal of imperial and colonial warfare.
When the “era of frontier homicide” ended, that is when the US’s westward
expansion driven by their belief in manifest destiny reached the Pacific seaboard, not
only did the US push through the coastal border to illegally claim and colonize the
Pacific Islands, it also began its quest to conquer space, technology, and the mind. The
latter decades of the 20
th
century can be defined by artificial intelligence and new
technology, ranging from electronic devices to the invention of the World Wide Web and
Internet applications. Understanding these occurrences [what?] as “structural genocide,”
as Wolfe urges, enables an understanding of genocide not as a thing of the past but a
mode of settler colonial control, a structure in abeyance whose potential to resume or
recur is always present, and that which we who are concerned with human rights for all
and not human rights for some should be careful to guard against and actively battle.

244
Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2015), 14.
116
Thus the incorporation of the Cambodian refugee figure into the US must, I argue, be
understood not as the result of western benevolence but as part of a nation-building
project that began when Christopher Columbus allegedly “discovered” the Americas.
More than that, what I am describing as “the conscription of the Cambodian refugee
figure” into the imperial power’s digital archive, its virtual territory, needs to be
understood as a force in the revival of genocidal measures taken against indigenous
populations resisting colonialism.

The Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-CAM) and the USC Shoah
Foundation: Towards a Collaborative Future

In spring 2009, three young Cambodian staff members from DC-CAM visited the
Shoah Foundation for a three-month internship to learn the Shoah Foundation’s system of
collecting, cataloguing, indexing, and disseminating testimonies from Holocaust
survivors and other witnesses so that they could apply those same methods to Khmer
Rouge survivors in Cambodia and the US.
245
The DC-CAM, which is said to spearhead
the project to collect “Khmer Rouge survivor” testimony, is often if not always described
as an “independent” NGO. This naming however obscures its origins as a project funded
and managed by US-based political giants.
Originally operating out of the “Cambodian Genocide Program” at Yale
University following the passage of the 1994 Cambodian Genocide Justice Act signed by
then-President Bill Clinton, the DC-CAM’s mission was to “record and preserve the
history of the Khmer Rouge regime for future generations [and] to compile and organize
information that can serve as potential evidence in a legal accounting for the crimes of

245
USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education, “Cambodian Genocide,” last
modified February 4, 2014, http://sfi.usc.edu/collections/cambodian.
117
the Khmer Rouge regime.
246
The purpose of the DC-CAM was not merely to “record and
preserve” the history of the Khmer Rouge regime but to narrativize that history in such a
way digestible to a US status quo. As previously stated, it may appear the collaboration
with the Shoah Foundation was initiated by the DC-CAM, an institute based in one of the
poorest nations in Asia and the world, suggesting an eager and voluntary desire to “learn”
from and be mentored by a sophisticated Western foundation. However, this was not
merely an instance of two independent interest groups collaborating to document
respective historic events. Rather, the DC-CAM’s origins as a US State Department-
funded project suggests at the offset there has always been a political hand in its
formation.
The 1994 Cambodian Genocide Justice Act reads: “It is the policy of the United
States to support efforts to bring to justice members of the Khmer Rouge for their crimes
against humanity committed in Cambodia between April 17, 1975. And January 7, 1979.”
Intended to “advance US commitment to the pursuit of justice for the victims of
genocide,” the passage of the act allowed the US State Department to establish the Office
of Genocide Investigations, tasked with investigating the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979.
In January 1995, this office was awarded a $499,000 grant to Yale University to create
the “Cambodian Genocide Program.” In anticipation of the grant’s expiration in 1997,
DC-CAM was relocated to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. From Yale to Cambodia, the DC-
CAM operated with Youk Chhang, a survivor of the regime who was resettled in Dallas,
TX, as Executive Director.

246
Documentation Center of Cambodia, “History and Description of DC-CAM,” last modified April 23,
2013, http://www.d.dccam.org/Abouts/History/Histories.htm; and Yale University Cambodian Genocide
Program, “Yale University Assistance to the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), 1995-2005,”
last modified February 9, 2014, http://www.yale.edu/cgp/dccam.html.
118
By January 1997, the DC-CAM became an independent research institute,
receiving funding from a wide range of international sources.
247
The year 2001 marked
the seventh year of Yale’s one million dollar commitment to establish the DC-CAM as a
“self-sustaining organization governed and operated by Cambodians.”
248
Since its
inception, the DC-CAM has catalogued approximately 155,000 pages of primary
documents and more than 6,000 photographs. It has assembled extensive bibliographic,
biographic, photographic, and geographic databases, such as maps of prisons, mass
graves, and genocidal memorials throughout Cambodia. In 2005, the United States
Agency for International Development (USAID) established a permanent $2 million
endowment for the DC-CAM, intended to demonstrate that “the Endowment provides
further evidence of the US government’s longstanding commitment to DC-CAM
[emphasis included].”
249

Founded in 1998 by the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University’s
MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Cambodian Genocide Program
(CGP) is an archive documenting the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia between 1975
and 1979. In addition to preserving information and documents towards a more critical
and analytic understanding of the Khmer Rouge regime, the CGP’s purpose is to gather
and make available information about the Khmer Rouge regime to “a court or tribunal
willing to prosecute surviving Cambodian war criminals and genocide suspects.”
250
In his
dissertation Contested Commemorations: Violence and Memory in Cambodia, Robert

247
Ibid.
248
Ibid.
249
Documentation Center of Cambodia, “US Establishes $2 Million Endowment for DC-CAM,” last
modified August 5, 2011,
http://www.d.dccam.org/Abouts/Office/US_Establishes_$2_million_Endowment.htm.
250
Yale University Genocide Studies Program, “Introduction to Cambodian Genocide Program,” last
modified June 26, 2017, http://gsp.yale.edu/introduction-cambodian-genocide-program.
119
Eap examines the CGP’s presentation of Tuol Sleng mug shots, arguing that the mug
shots are arranged and presented in such a way that “neutralizes the political capabilities
of the genocide’s survivors, characterizing them instead as perennial victims.”
251
Tracing
the transformation of the Tuol Sleng prison into a genocide museum, a project initially
taken on by the victorious North Vietnamese and for whom “the propaganda value of
exhibiting such horrific evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocity […] justif[ied] the
Vietnamese invasion as a humanitarian necessity,”
252
Eap’s argument calls attention to
the “political utility”
253
of the dead, whom, constructed under the CGP’s authority,
possess neither complexity nor individual subjectivity. Instead, Eap writes, “each
prisoner is instead just a microcosm of a swarm that smothers viewers with the immensity
of their dying.”
254
The CGP’s work is among other representations of the Cambodian
genocide that Eap examines, in order to “highlight commemorations that […] authorize
the continuation and heightening of US military killing power.”
255
Further, he argues that
Cambodian genocide memorialization often results in the erasure of the US’s and US-
sponsored destruction of Cambodia and neighboring Southeast Asian nations as well as
“the pacification of the political lives of Cambodian genocide survivors.”
256

Eap’s argument follows Yen Le Espiritu’s; in her survey of US mainstream
media’s representations of Vietnamese refugees, she arrives at the conclusion that
popular portrayals of Vietnamese refugees are neither coincidental nor without
consequence. Rather, she finds that persistent projections of Vietnamese refugees as

251
Robert Eap, “Contested Commemorations: Violence and Memory in Cambodia” (PhD diss, University
of Southern California, 2014), 20.
252
Ibid., 77.
253
Ibid., 20.
254
Ibid.
255
Ibid., 3.
256
Ibid.
120
racialized “objects of rescue” function as reinforcements of the idea that the war, no
matter how controversial, was “ultimately necessary, moral, and successful.”
257
There is
much at stake in the joint production of these images within both popular culture and
mainstream scholarship on Vietnamese refugees. She states, “…this ability to conjure
triumph from defeat—the ‘we-win-even-when-we-lose’ syndrome—constitutes an
organized and strategic forgetting of a war that ‘went wrong,’ enabling ‘patriotic’
Americans to push US military intervention around the world, most recently in the
Middle East.”
258

While Eap’s work examines Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program and
the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, I examine in this chapter the
representation of Cambodians as “Khmer Rouge survivors” (Khmer Rouge victims) and
the folding of their testimonies into the domain of Shoah Foundation authority and, to use
the Shoah Foundation’s language, under their “guardianship,”
259
which promotes not only
“the moral authority of U.S. leadership on the world stage”
260
but of its allies as well—
namely, Israel—as benevolent nations of freedom, democracy, modernity, progress, and,
their rights to exist as imperative to the future of humanity.
Stated differently, this chapter examines the ways historical narratives shaped and
produced by imperial powers concerning the Khmer Rouge regime and the so-called
“Cambodian refugee experience” are part of a revisionist project that produces a
particular type of US Cambodian subject—the “Cambodian American” figure—

257
Yen Le Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US
Scholarship,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1-2 (2006): 410, 421.
258
Ibid., 421.
259
USC Shoah Foundation, Testimony: The Legacy of Schindler’s List and the USC Shoah Foundation
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014), 195.
260
Espiritu, Body Counts, 103.
121
discursively serving Western empires. What kind of ideological labor(s) does the
Cambodian refugee figure provide to the operation of empire and global militarism? How
does the USC Shoah Foundation define genocide and how does it determine which
nations and peoples to include in its archival efforts? What qualifies Cambodia and
Khmer Rouge survivor testimony as a viable genocide for its work? Can—or will—the
USC Shoah Foundation accommodate those genocides and survivor testimonies—even
those that might potentially challenge and disrupt the operations of western hegemonic
powers and the logic of military incursions in the name of “freedom” and “democracy”?
For that last question, I believe the answer is no.
History and culture are used to garner power. Such stories, passed on from
generation to generation, or laterally across populations, play an important role in
creating the social structures within which we live—particularly, they tell us who we are
and where we come from. These stories tell us who others are. But as Linda Heidenreich
argues in her study on how national identities are created by media and educational
curriculum, “these basic stories, told at both a national and a local level, are the stuff that
nation building is made of.”
261
Or, as Marita Sturken writes in Tangled Memories: The
Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, “the way a nation
remembers a war and constructs its history is directly related to how that nation further
propagates war.”
262

In one of the most important texts about history, power, and the production of
historical narratives, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-

261
Linda Heidenreich, This Land Was Mexican Once: Histories of Resistance From Northern California
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 2.
262
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 122.
122
Rolph Trouillot presents the idea of “history as fiction.”
263
This idea of “history as
fiction” is certainly not to say that history is or has been fabricated, or that it is merely a
literary excursion in imagination, but rather to call attention to the ways historical
narratives tell a story that involves “the uneven contribution of competing groups and
individuals who have unequal access to the means for such production.”
264
In other
words, so-called “official” histories (his story) in the West are often told from a particular
point of view, in service of a particular agenda. To advance the argument that “any
historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences,”
265
Trouillot discusses the Haitian
Revolution, which was the largest and most successful revolt led by enslaved people in
world history, and how the mythical year 1492 came to be attached to the world’s most
famous and yet most directionally-challenged and farcical navigator, the laughable
American God Christopher Columbus, as clear examples of the silencing, or erasure, by
Western historiographies of particular historical events and people. With this in event in
focus, Trouillot offers a framework through which the production(s) of history and
historical narratives can be better understood.
266

For Trouillot, processes of historical production contain layers of silence at four
crucial moments. The first is the “moment of fact creation,” or the making of sources,
followed by the “moment of fact assembly,” or the making of archives, the “moment of
fact retrieval,” or the making of narratives, and the “moment of retrospective
significance,” or the making of history.
267
Another example of the “uneven power in the

263
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Massachusetts:
Beacon Press, 1995), 5-6.
264
Ibid., xiii.
265
Ibid. 27.
266
Ibid.
267
Ibid., 26.
123
production of sources, archives, and narratives”
268
discussed by Trouillot is the memory,
or memorialization, of the Jewish Holocaust, which remains one of the world’s best-
documented events. Adding to Hayden White’s argument, in which Hayden states, “The
main relevance of the dominant Holocaust narrative is that it serves to legitimate the
policies of the state of Israel [and] to establish moral authority,” Trouillot adds that the
central facts of the dominant Holocaust narrative serve to “perpetuate various state
policies in the United States” as well.
269

As Eap argues, for Western institutions such as the CGP, the curated slideshow is
a vehicle through which a representation of the genocide can be circulated, in ways that
help to reinscribe the hegemonic force of the US
270
and giving it “narrative authority over
culpability and criminality.”
271
He states,
[T]he CGP slideshow offers an entry point into thinking about the ways in which
victimhood can be mediated through representation to compel sympathetic
audiences to endorse configurations of power reflecting institutional concerns.
Although the CGP certainly cannot be reduced to a reflection of state interests,
neither can it be completely disassociated from its relationship to the state when
weighing its memorial effects.
272

At stake in Eap’s project is “a disruption of the narrative of uncomplicated obedience
when faced with genocidal violence.”
273
Scholars have shown that those living under
such regimes, whether in wartime Vietnam, postwar refugee camps, or under Khmer
Rouge rule, drew from hitherto untapped sources of strength, ingenuity, and even
imagination in unfavorable settings that often were unrelenting upon their misery and

268
Ibid., 27.
269
Ibid., 12-13.
270
Eap, “Contested Commemorations,” 87.
271
Ibid., 51.
272
Ibid., 88.
273
Ibid., 31.
124
suffering.
274
Espiritu’s Body Counts spends a chapter discussing the “creative capacities”
of Vietnamese refugees in such landscapes; numerous memoirists and documentary films
have demonstrated this capacity, and I have done so in previous publications as well.
From a different angle, I would add to Eap’s argument, while Khmer Rouge atrocities are
hyper-documented, the social and political reasons, and motivating factors, for their
revolution remain obscured. Painted simply as inhuman and evil, and divorced from its
larger cold war politics, Khmer Rouge politics have not been given much serious
consideration in scholarly humanistic works. I discuss this later in the chapter.
Returning to Eap’s point that “victimhood can be mediated through representation
to compel sympathetic audiences to endorse configurations of power reflecting
institutional concerns,”
275
I wish to discuss the Shoah Foundation’s move to acquire—by
now the acquisition has already been set into motion—testimonies from “Khmer Rouge
survivors.” Why Cambodia, and Cambodians? What makes Cambodia a viable candidate
for inclusion, given the controversial politics that perhaps undergird and motivate the
Shoah Foundation’s vision, which to date remain buried under narratives of, to use Eap’s
term, perennial victimhood?
Working from Trouillot’s theory that silences are encoded in historical production
at four key moments, archival studies scholar Michelle Caswell states, “Not all events are
recorded; not all records are incorporated into archives; not all archives are used to tell
stories; not all stories are used to write history.”
276
It should be understood, rather, that
“power is implicated in each of these moments; which stories get told, which get

274
Espiritu, Body Counts, 50.
275
Eap, “Contested Commemorations,” 88.
276
Michelle Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory, and the Photographic Record in
Cambodia (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 10.
125
forgotten, when, and by whom, is inextricably linked to the power to tell and to remain
silence.”
277
Caswell’s book, Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Power, and the
Photographic Record in Cambodia, is an examination of mug shots of Cambodians killed
at the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious interrogation prison. Situated within the field of
archival studies, Caswell’s research contributes to an understanding of how the mug shots
are not just objects, photographs, or images, but also records, defined as “persistent
representations of activities that travel through space and time.”
278
Her work aims to
introduce scholars working in other fields to the contributions that archival theory could
potentially make in ongoing discussions of evidence, power, and historical production.
Towards this end, Caswell “challenge[s] archivists to embrace their own power to
counter the silences embedded in records, particularly records that document human
rights abuse.”
279
Her engagement with Trouillot in discussing the archive in general is
productive, clearly outlining the relationship between power, archival sources, and the
creation of historical knowledge.
But where Trouillot states, “That some peoples and things are absent of history,
lost, as it were, to the possible world of knowledge, is much less relevant to the historical
practice than the fact that some people and things are absent in history, and that this
absence itself is constitutive of the process of historical production.”
280
It is perhaps from
this point that Caswell departs, embarking on a project that will center the people
“silenced” in the Khmer Rouge’s photographic records. The restoration of absent people,
their names, voices, back into history can be viewed as a noble but still incomplete or un-

277
Ibid.
278
Ibid., 6-7.
279
Ibid.
280
Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 48-49.
126
whole project. Because the Tuol Sleng prison housed primarily members of Cambodia’s
elite class, as Caswell herself acknowledges, and documentation efforts have been
focused primarily on a material record, research is already skewed towards this stratum of
Cambodian society. In fact, most of the Cambodians who died during the regime did not
die in the regime’s prisons. Instead they died of some combination of hunger, hard labor,
and illness. Those who died at Tuol Sleng were, on the other hand, members of
Cambodia’s elite.
Among these dead were everyday people, whose experiences may not be fully
reflected in the literature given the ways ethnographic methods may tend to attract those
with a stronger disposition to speaking about their experiences and speaking to figures of
official or professional status. For example, a person of a more privileged background
from Phnom Penh, having more familiarity and exposure to Western customs, might be
more inclined to speak with interviewers than someone from a rural and working class
background, who may have an aversion to authority figures. Finally, in limiting her focus
to the Khmer Rouge regime and its surveilling apparatuses however, Caswell
unfortunately reinforces a dominant Cambodian genocide narrative that positions
Cambodians as perpetual victims, neutralizing their political capabilities, whether in
service of a pro-West capitalist or anti-West communist or socialist agenda, and
reinscribes the hegemonic force of western powers like the US and Israel by granting a
narrative authority perhaps not afforded to those situated outside or on the margins of
Western institutions.

“We must work silently, through education and infection’
281

281
Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create
Israel (IfAmericansKnew.org: 2014), 13.
127

The USC Shoah Foundation is currently considered the foremost academic
authority on the study of the Holocaust.
282
Founded in 1999 as the “Survivors of the
Shoah Visual History Foundation,” the Institute’s mission is to gather video testimony
from survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. Between 1994 and 1999,
testimonies were collected primarily from Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but came to
include those from liberators and liberation witnesses, rescuers, aid providers, and those
who participated in the war crimes trial as well. In order to find participants, an outreach
flyer in 20 languages was distributed around the world. Headlined “So Generations Never
Forget What So Few Lived To Tell,” the flyer asserts the importance of sharing and
recording eyewitness testimony so that “one of the most devastating events in human
history is never forgotten.” As another incentive, potential participants would be given
video copies of their own testimonies. This, according to the Institute, was the most
compelling promotional factor and, thereafter, “word of mouth became as powerful as
any media campaign.”
While shooting Schindler’s List in Krakow, Poland, director Steven Spielberg
said to producers Jerry Molen and Branko Lustig, “You know, I just heard the most
amazing story from a woman named Louisa. She kept saying, ‘Can you write this down?’
But I didn’t have a pencil on me. So she said, ‘Well, can I speak into a tape recorder!
[sic]” According to Spielberg, this was the moment that led to the founding of what is
now known as the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. “I

282
Other audiovisual history projects exist in the US, such as the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust
Testimonies at Yale University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
For more information on these projects, see Noah Shenker, “Through the Lens of the Shoah: The Holocaust
as a Paradigm for Documenting Genocide Testimonies,” History and Memory 28, no. 1 (Spring/Summer
2016).
128
don’t believe Louisa’s alone,” Spielberg said. “I wonder if we could get all the names of
all the Holocaust survivors all around the world, camera crews, and send them to every
country where the survivors are living?” Almost immediately, Spielberg put his plan into
action, and within several years his collection would come to include 52,000 video
testimonies in 32 different languages from 56 countries around the world.
In January 2006, the Institute found a permanent home in the College of Letters,
Arts & Sciences at USC and became the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual
History and Education (hereafter referred to as the Shoah Foundation).
283
Reflecting the
name change, the Shoah Foundation broadened its mission to “overcome prejudice,
intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of
the Institute’s visual history testimonies.” Backed by a multimillion-dollar effort, the
Shoah Foundation then “adopted a new strategic plan that aims to increase the
educational and scholarly significance of the video testimonies in its Visual History
archive” and identified academic outreach, teacher education, access to the testimonies,
preservation, and the acquisition of new content as key areas vital to the success of its
mission. With a clear focus and emphasis on the academic apparatus (schools,
universities, and museums) as vehicles through which to disseminate its content, the
Shoah Foundation “hope[d] to encourage widespread use of the archives and its contents
among undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and secondary school teachers.”
Using state-of-the-art technology to duplicate en masse the 52,000 (54,000 as of January
2017) testimonies in digital format, the Shoah Foundation’s endeavor “make[s] it easier
than ever before to share the testimonies with people around the world.”

283
In 2011, USC received a $200 million gift from Dana and David Dornsife, the largest single gift in USC
history. The College of Letters, Arts & Sciences then became the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts &
Sciences.
129
Aspiring to be the world’s academic authority on the study of genocide and
personal testimony, beginning in 2007 the Shoah Foundation expanded its archive to
include new collections of genocide testimony from countries, first Rwanda, and then
Cambodia, and more recently Guatemala, though the archive also includes testimonies
from individuals descending from China and Armenia as well. Regarding the Shoah
Foundation’s mission to collect as many Holocaust survivor testimonies as possible—a
feat they consider accomplished—Noah Shenker observes, “…[A]s the [Holocaust]
survivor community dwindles, these institutions have reached an impasse. No longer able
to devote themselves exclusively to collecting testimonies, they must decide how to
expand their missions.”
284
Shenker’s statement suggests that genocide survivors
elsewhere (Cambodia, Rwanda, Guatemala) potentially perform ideological labor that
lends further power and perhaps credibility to a victim-based and Holocaust-centered
archive, whose own survivor population—and ideological power—is dwindling.
Relatedly, journalist Alison Weir argues in her book Against Our Better
Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used To Create Israel that Zionists
found Holocaust survivors’ trauma to be an exploitable and viable path to settling a land
that could become a Zionist state. In ways similar to the founding of the US, the Zionist
colonial project first tried to buy up the land with hopes that its inhabitants would
emigrate. When this plan failed, they used violence to force them out.
285
Weir’s research
shows that Zionist leaders deployed a variety of methods in their quest to create a state
where people of Jewish descent could escape anti-Semitism.
286
According to Weir, “there
are various documented cases in which fanatical Zionists exploited, exaggerated,

284
Shenker, “Through the Lens of the Shoah,” 141-142.
285
Weir, Against Our Better Judgment, 43.
286
Ibid., 27.
130
invented, or even perpetrated ‘anti-Semitic’ incidents both to procure support and to drive
Jews to immigrate to the Zionist-designated homeland.”
287
In addition, she reports, the
work of historians demonstrate that Zionists “sabotaged efforts to find safe havens for
Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in order to convince the world that Jews could only
be safe in a Jewish state.”
288

Bonds of affection and alliance between the US and Israel should by now come as
no surprise, even if this was not always the case. One need only refer to the recent 2016
presidential elections to be reminded of the US’s unwavering commitment to its ally—the
only bastion of democracy, it is said—in the Middle East, or perform a cursory glance of
each colonial nation’s history of conquest, settlement, and colonial methods to note a
shared vision for a respective national and global future, including a shared repertoire of
strategies used to deal with indigenous populations. Patrick Wolfe points to some of these
strategies in his widely renowned essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the
Native.” Thomas Philip Abowd’s Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of
Identity and Difference in a City of Myth, 1948-2012, demonstrates “how colonialism, far
from being a fixture of the past as is often suggested, remains a crucial component of
Palestinian and Israeli realities today.”
289
In other words, settler colonialism is neither a
thing of the past nor an event but, as Wolfe argues, a structure. Using this framework, I
contend that the arrival of Cambodian refugees to the US and their subsequent integration
into the rubric of Asian America continued the function of the model minority figure,
providing reinforcement to racial hierarchy and power not only in traditional ways but

287
Ibid.
288
Ibid., 29.
289
Thomas Philip Abowd, Colonial Jerusalem: The Spatial Construction of Identity and Difference in a
City of Myth (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014).
131
towards new frontiers as well. More specifically, I am referring to the domain of the
Internet and online spaces—the “Information Super Highway”—as new routes to power.
In any case, Shenker’s essay on the use, or application, of the Holocaust as a
paradigm for documenting other genocide testimonies is an important meditation on the
pros and cons of collecting survivor testimonies. Specifically, Shenker calls into question
and thus highlights the Shoah Foundation’s methods of collecting testimony from
survivors as being developed in a specific Holocaust context, and that this context may
not—cannot—be neatly or easily applied to other survivor experiences outside of the
Jewish experience. His discussion of the Shoah Foundation’s “comparative turn” to
include recent genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Guatemala calls attention to the
ways “testimonies are created by the particular institutional culture of archives.”
290
That
is, the Shoah Foundation’s methodologies play a role in “framing testimonies even before
they are recorded on camera.”
291
Although Shenker initially appears to be critical of the
Shoah Foundation’s expansive reach and “comparative turn,” pointing out that the Shoah
Foundation’s mediations of Khmer Rouge survivor testimony obscures historical and
cultural specificities to the regime not identical or even similar to the Holocaust, he
ultimately concludes that the Shoah Foundation’s mediations ultimately contribute to an
important movement to preserve and record the Cambodian survivor experience.
292
For
Shenker, despite significant limitations in the Shoah Foundation’s mediations of survivor
testimonies in different racial contexts, these shortcomings contribute at the very least to
a broader understanding of the process of testimony, in productive ways.
293
By

290
Shenker, “Through the Lens of the Shoah,” 141-144.
291
Ibid., 144.
292
Ibid., 141.
293
Ibid., 144.
132
concluding with the importance of documentation efforts at all costs, Shenker’s position
appears dismissive of the centrality of the historical and cultural specificities that give
rise to these events, which the Shoah Foundation and others like it seek to document. The
Khmer Rouge regime’s own historical and cultural specificities which are, as Shenker
admits, obscured by the Shoah Foundation’s mediation, cannot be overlooked as they are
crucial to the understanding of the afterlives of war and trauma, and constitute a critical
link between the regime’s relation to and vis-à-vis global imperial powers during that era.
Although Shenker does not go into detail about the political context through which the
Khmer Rouge regime emerged, he does point out that interview methods are never
neutral
294
—contrary to research that reinforces the Khmer Rouge regime as an “isolated
tragedy.”
The question for this chapter is: how does Cambodia, and by extension
Cambodians, factor into this equation of power across the globe? Once in the US,
Cambodian refugees were dispersed across the US via military camps and churches as a
federal strategy to avoid overburdening the resources of any one locale, to encourage
refugees to assimilate into the US body politic, and to avoid a critical mass of refugees in
any given region. The arrival of Cambodians to the US was a watershed moment, given
the distinct nature of their migration as refugees of war not as voluntary immigrants like
their Asian American counterparts. Furthermore, the arrival of Cambodians as refugees
was part of the shift from traditional politics in which refugee status was bestowed to
nonwhite people (Cubans were granted refugee status prior to Cambodians and other
Southeast). A central concern of the state was how these new refugees would be
integrated into the nation. Their incorporation, I contend, involved, among others, one

294
Ibid., 142. See also Caswell, Archiving the Unspeakable, 89; and Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 48.
133
major aim: given the social, economic, and political climate of the US during that era,
humanitarian and state responses to the refugee crisis figured a way to position the
presumably anti-communist Cambodians against third world liberatory movements
occurring both outside and within the US. Although Cambodians arrived in the US in the
wake of, and, one could argue, in part as a result of the civil rights and anti-war
movements, there was no automatic solidarity between Cambodian (and other Southeast
Asian) refugees and the constituents of those social movements.
As Viet Thanh Nguyen contends, “Wars are fought twice. Once on the battlefield,
again in memory.”
295
To state Nguyen’s claim differently: not all wars are fought with
military grade weapons. Kenneth Conboy, former Deputy Director of the Asian Studies
Center in Washington, DC, is author of the first intensive examination of the US CIA’s
role in Cambodia from 1970-1975.
296
Conboy’s study sheds light on what is now known
as the Military Information Support Operations (MISO), formerly known as
Psychological Operations (PSYOP),
297
which refers to planned operations to convey
selected information to certain audiences in order to influence their emotions, motives,
objective reasoning, and the behavior and decisions made by organizations, groups, and
individuals. The most known practice of PSYOP was the air delivery of leaflets over
battlegrounds in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq to convey messages and evacuation orders
to civilians below.
These strategies are neither uncommon nor unique in political/military history.
Historian John Lewis Gaddis’s critical appraisal of US national security policy since

295
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 2016), 4.
296
Kenneth Conboy, The Cambodian Wars: Clashing Armies and CIA Covert Operations (Kansas:
University Press of Kansas, 2013).
297
Ibid.
134
World War II sheds light on the centrality of US military strategy in maintaining and
reproducing US hegemonic power.
298
Placing importance on the idea of “containment,”
whieh he defines as a term “generally used to characterize American policy toward the
Soviet Union during the postwar era [which] can be seen as a series of attempts to deal
with the consequences of that World War II Faustian bargain,” he explains that the post-
World War II goal was to prevent the Soviet Union from using the power and position it
acquired from allying with the US to reshape international order. Gaddis explains that the
US and Great Britain collaborated with an enemy in order to achieve a fast victory,
demonstrating an old Balkan proverb that then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt was
known to recite often to convey his approval of “the use of questionable allies to achieve
unquestionable objectives.”
299
The concept of containment arose from this dilemma, as
Gaddis explains, since both parties (the US and Great Britain) were upon victory faced
with what to do with the false alliance they formed in order to win the war. In this chapter
I have attempted to draw out what appears to be a triangular relationship between the US,
Israel, and Cambodia. Robin D.G. Kelley highlights a “special relationship” between
Israel and the US by pointing out Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign
assistance since World War II.
300

“Be Careful Which Graves We Exhume”
301

298
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security
Policy During the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
299
Gaddis, 3.
300
The US has also vetoed all UN resolutions that condemn Israel’s abuse of human rights. See Robin
Kelley, “Defending Zionism Under the Cloak of Academic Freedom,” Mondoweiss: The War of Ideas in
the Middle East, accessed January 4, 2014. http://mondoweiss.net/2014/01/defending-zionism-
academic.html.
301
This section’s subheading comes from Adam Garfinkle, “Be Careful Which Graves We Exhume,” Los
Angeles Times, January 24, 1999. I cite this journalistic piece later in the chapter.
135
More than a quarter century after the war, Bill Clinton’s 2000 trip to Vietnam was
the first time any US president visited Vietnam since Richard Nixon’s presidency.
Researchers Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen note, US media coverage of the trip focused
primarily on US soldiers still missing in action, obscuring the passage of the Cambodian
Genocide Justice Act 1994.
302
This “small act of great historical importance,” as they
described it, was “Clinton’s gift” to Cambodians, intended in part to release US Air Force
data on all American bombings of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between 1964 and 1975
helping efforts to identify areas with unexploded ordnance left by US bombings.
303

The newly classified data revealed more bombs were dropped on Cambodia than
previously thought: 2,756,941 tons worth by 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites, beginning
four years earlier than believed—in 1965, not 1969, and under Lyndon B. Johnson’s
presidency, not Nixon’s. The rationale for the bombing, research has confirmed, was to
destroy (North Vietnamese) enemy forces in Cambodia and keep them at bay long
enough to allow US troops to withdraw from Vietnam. The Vietnamization of the war, as
it was called, was intended to shift the responsibility of battle to Vietnamese troops
instead of American, since American troops were dying at increasing rates and the US
government was coming under unrelenting pressure from the anti-war movement to
“bring the boys home.” One major effect of this military strategy, Kiernan and Owen
explain, was that “Cambodians essentially became cannon fodder to protect American
lives.”
304
Although US government officials claimed the bombs were dropped on areas
without civilian presence, evidence points to the contrary. US government officials
ordered the bombing despite possessing information regarding Cambodian civilians who

302
Owen and Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia,” 62.
303
Ibid.
304
Ibid., 67.
136
might be killed or displaced as a result.
305
Finally, Kiernan and Owen conclude, the data
released by the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act made the bombing’s impact “clearer
than ever”—that is, the data confirm the argument that “civilian casualties in Cambodia
drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively
little support until the [US] bombing began.”
306

While it is not entirely clear whether Kiernan and Owen present the information
to critique or justify US military interventions around the world both past and present, I
would argue that their assessment of the information contributes to the latter. They make
no clear or direct statements in opposition to US militarism; instead, they allude to the
role of US imperialism and militarism in producing insurgent movements if only to
highlight the “Cambodian experience” as a teaching moment. As Kiernan and Owen
explain, “the data demonstrates that the way a country chooses to exit a conflict can have
disastrous consequences.”
307

If the Cambodian experience teaches us anything, it is that miscalculation of the
consequences of civilian casualties stems partly from a failure to understand how
insurgencies thrive. The motives that lead locals to help such movements don’t fit
into strategic rationales like the ones set forth by Kissinger and Nixon. Those
whose lives have been ruined don’t care about the geopolitics behind bomb
attacks; they tend to blame the attackers. The failure of the American campaign in
Cambodia lay not only in the civilian death toll during the unprecedented
bombing, but also in its aftermath, when the Khmer Rouge rose up from the bomb
craters, with tragic results. The dynamics in Iraq could be similar.
308

Civilian casualties, in their analysis, should be better calculated to avoid resistance or
opposition from those living underneath US bombing attacks whom might be compelled

305
William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Destruction of Cambodia exposes the
Operation Menu bombing in more detail. See William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the
Destruction of Cambodia Revised Edition (New York: First Cooper Square Press Edition, 2002).
306
Owen and Kiernan, 63.
307
Ibid.
308
Ibid., 69.
137
to join insurgent movements. Read in this light, Kiernan and Owen’s publication might
be understood as part of a lineage of agencies that conduct research in order to improve
rather than abolish military effectiveness such as the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit
think tank originally founded to conduct research and development (hence the acronym
“RAND”) for the US military.
While the US’s bombing of Cambodia was once considered “secret,” scholars are
increasingly doing the important work of acknowledging the US’s role in destroying the
Cambodian landscape and facilitating the Khmer Rouge regime’s rise to power. Sucheng
Chan does so in her discussion of Cambodia’s first civil war that preceded the regime,
demonstrating how the bombing, instead of driving the North Vietnamese out of
Cambodia, was counterproductive not only because it drove the North Vietnamese deeper
into their neighboring country but also created an enraged populace who joined the
revolutionary troops on the basis of fighting US imperialism.
309
Aihwa Ong’s study also
supports the inclusion of this historical background, paying particular attention to how
Cambodian peasants traumatized and displaced by US bombings took action by joining
the Khmer Rouge.
310
Likewise, Cathy Schlund-Vials notes “the Khmer Rouge found little
resistance from Cambodians wary of [the US’s] illegal bombings,”
311
Eric Tang points
out that “the Khmer Rouge’s most vital recruitment tool was the relentless U.S.
bombing
312
, and Khatharya Um cites William Shawcross’s contention that “Khmer

309
See Sucheng Chan, Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2004), Chapter 1.
310
See Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2003), Chapter 1.
311
See Cathy Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 1.
312
Tang, Unsettled, 31.
138
Rouge violence was the result of their brutalization by American carpet bombing.”
313

Rather than simplify by characterizing a regime that resulted in the deaths of
approximately two million in four years merely as “evil” or “backwards,” I wish to
highlight lesser-discussed aspects of the regime and its political visions toward a fuller
understanding of the events that transpired in Cambodia.
As reiterated by David P. Chandler, the formation and outcome of the Khmer
Rouge regime was complex, to say the least. While the Khmer Rouge are known for
atrocities such as political executions, forced labor, or forced marriage, Chandler reminds
readers of the regime’s roots in revolutionary anti- capitalist and imperialist struggle.
314

He argues that “calling him a ‘moon-faced monster,’ a ‘genocidal maniac,’ or ‘worse
than Hitler’ has no explanatory power.”
315
To complicate the situation further, over the
course of his research, Chandler’s conversations with individuals who knew Pol Pot
before he became “Pol Pot,” when he was still Saloth Sar, either as a peer, schoolteacher,
or comrade in the regime collectively painted a picture of a “sweet-tempered, equitable
child,” even those whose family members died under Khmer Rouge power. His
schoolmates, as well, described him as “a mediocre student but pleasant company,” and
his students remembered a “calm, self-assured, smooth-featured, honest, and persuasive,
even hypnotic” teacher.
316
Even former Khmer Rouge members, after defecting, “came
away with memories of a man they regarded almost as a saint.”
317
A compelling aspect of
Rithy Panh’s The Elimination, for example, is how human Duch (Kaing Guek Eav)

313
See Khatharya Um, From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian
Diaspora (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015), 76.
314
David Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Chiang Mai, Thailand:
Silkworm Books, 1993), 3.
315
Ibid., 4.
316
Ibid., 5.
317
Ibid.
139
appears to be, despite the widespread urge to demonize him as un-human
318
, thus
reminding us that social disasters occur not because of some unexplainable phenomenon
but rather, are engineered by everyday people—particularly those who wield power.
Moreover, Chandler argues as others have that without the US-Vietnam war, the
Khmer Rouge regime would not have come to be. Rather, the regime was a product of its
time, deeply influenced by Mao Zedong, as were the Viet Cong and US revolutionary
groups like the Black Panthers. As one Cambodian survivor describes, the regime’s
vision was appealing in theory, but when disastrous when they failed to implement it
accordingly. Of the elements that were appealing, this particular survivor points out, was
the aim of balancing wealth and resources so that there were “no more rich people, no
more poor people.” This person also believes that wealthier and more privileged people
had a harder time during the regime than poor people, who were already accustomed to
hard labor and having so little. These complexities however do not emerge in mainstream
narratives, which tend to identify Pol Pot as the sole or main architect of the regime who
was “worse than Hitler” and that the regime sought only to kill irrationally and force
people to work as “slaves.” There were more people who died from starvation and illness
than were grotesquely executed; further, Tuol Sleng was not the regime’s only prison. It
is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a more in-depth and detailed explication of
the regime’s aims but it is worthwhile to explore some of the claims made by its leaders.
Among the surviving top leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime is Khieu Samphan,
a man often referred to as the regime’s chief ideologue and economist.
319
Currently jailed

318
Rithy Panh, The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant
of the Killing Fields, trans. Christopher Bataille (New York: Other Press: 2014).
319
Robert Mackey, “The Economist Behind the Khmer Rouge” New York Times—The Lede, June 27, 2011,
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/the-economist-behind-the-khmer-rouge/.
140
for life following conviction by the UN-backed tribunal of crimes against humanity,
Khieu Samphan’s doctoral thesis, completed while studying at the University of
Montpellier in France, is worth examining especially in light of the fatal errors committed
by the regime in the name of revolutionary change. At the age of 23, in 1954, Khieu
Samphan received a scholarship to study in France, where he met Ieng Sary (deceased
since 2013) and Hou Yuon (deceased since 1975). Approximately two decades later the
three would become leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime. Khieu Samphan’s thesis, titled
“Cambodia’s Economy and Industrial Development,” was published in the September
1976 issue (over a year into the Khmer Rouge’s reign of power) of the Berkeley-based
Indochina Chronicle, a publication of an American policy think tank aiming to stop US
bombings of Southeast Asia.
In this issue, the editors, Martha Winnacker, Lowell Finley, and Candace Falk,
describe Khieu Samphan’s thesis as “the first systematic application of Marxist economic
theory to the specific problems of Cambodia.”
320
They understood his central idea to be
that “underdevelopment is caused by colonial exploitation, which distorts the colony’s
economy so badly that it cannot develop.”
321
Nearly a century of French colonial control
set Cambodia back and rendered it unable to develop on par with advanced capitalist
countries. Instead, Cambodia became “an appendage of the dominant French and
international capitalist economies.
322
In line with others who study underdevelopment in
Third World countries (i.e. Latin America), the editors believed integration of Third

320
Martha Winnacker, Lowell Finley, and Candace Falk in Introduction to “Underdevelopment in
Cambodia” by Khieu Samphan, Indochina Chronicle (Sept/Nov 1976): 3.
321
Ibid., 3
322
Ibid.
141
World economies into the world economy by supplying cheap labor to foreign capital
results in the perpetuation and deepening of inequality and poverty.
Drawing parallels between the US and France, Khieu Samphan argued the only
solution to the problem of underdevelopment and inequality in Cambodia was for the
small country to withdraw from the world economy altogether and restructure its own
local economy, after which it would be able to reenter the world economy on its own
terms.
323
“From a strictly economic point of view,” he argued, “the effect of French
intervention in Cambodia from 1863 was to ‘open up’ the country to trade with
France.”
324
However, he explained,
[T]he present economic structure of Cambodia issues from this free and
unfettered contact between a basically precapitalist Khmer economy and a more
advanced, French capitalist economy. […] The confrontation here is unequal. One
of the economies concerned is already more advanced and more dynamic,
propelled by exchange and search for profit. The other is stationary, living
essentially on the principle of immediate gratification of needs and ignoring
exchange and profit.
325

For example, he expressed distaste at “other goods imported under the rubric of
American aid,” which be believed were really “publicity samples to raise demand for
luxury goods [that] encourage[d] the desire of a particular part of Khmer society to
imitate the American way of life.”
326
By flooding the Cambodian market with imported
goods at low rates, local crafts and industry that could not compete ultimately
disappeared.
327
In essence, the underlying basis of Cambodia’s underdeveloped economy
was precisely the penetration of foreign and French industrial products, leading not only

323
Ibid.
324
Khieu Samphan, “Cambodia’s Economy and Problems of Industrialization,” trans. Laura Summers,
Indochina Chronicle (Sept/Nov 1976), 10.
325
Ibid.
326
Ibid., 25.
327
Ibid., 12.
142
to an economic reliance on foreign primary materials but also a situation in which
Cambodians themselves came to seek and pursue what he termed an “American way of
life”—that is, lives of luxury built upon the exploitation of cheap labor and land.
328

Moreover, Khieu Samphan believed US aid to be a farce. Of the US’s $172.2
million aid injected into the Cambodian economy from 1955-1957, $112.9 million (66%)
was reserved for the military, which was beholden to US interests. Thus he argued that
US “aid” was just another element of the US security program: “The point seems all the
more evident when it is remembered that our two neighbors who benefit in addition from
the active sympathy of the United States use their ‘aid’ in arms and planes to provoke
multiple border incidents.”
329
What he highlights here demonstrates the ways military and
imperial strategies are masked as benevolence and humanitarianism, calling attention to
the cyclical narrative of support and destruction that frames certain US foreign policy
relationships. As 24-year-old Tamer al Masri noted as he surveyed the destruction of his
home in Beit Hanoun, Gaza, his brother dead underneath the rubble: “What I don’t
understand is why the Americans give us food and then give bombs to Israel to kill
us.”
330

Since Israel’s founding in 1948, nearly every US Secretary of State has been
dispatched to the Middle East to broker peace talks.
331
During her term, Condoleezza
Rice made several trips to the region to aid negotiations and peace talks between Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as did former
Secretaries of State Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, and Warren Christopher before

328
Ibid., 10.
329
Ibid., 24.
330
Jesse Rosenfeld, “Under American Bombs in Gaza,” TheDailyBeast.com, August 4, 2014,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/04/under-american-bombs-in-gaza.html.
331
Ibid.
143
her,
332
and Hillary Clinton after her. And yet, as Khieu Samphan gestured towards in his
argument, these visits do not necessarily aim for peace—not considering that US military
aid to Israel amounted to $2.775 billion in 2010, $3.07 billion in 2012, and $3.15 billion
per year from 2013-2018.
333

Journalist Philip Short points out, “That Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Khieu Samphan
and other Khmer Rouge leaders committed crimes is beyond dispute. But if they are to be
put on trial it should be for crimes against humanity, of which they are guilty and for
which they may legitimately be convicted, not for genocide, of which they are
innocent.”
334
Short further asserts that “if the term ‘genocide’ has been widely accepted
in Cambodia’s case, it is because the enormity of what was done in this small Asian
country seems beyond the power of ordinary words to convey.”
335
Explaining that the
term was first used by the Vietnamese in the spring of 1979 as they transformed the Tuol
Sleng prison into a museum intended to invoke images of the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp in northern Germany where approximately 50,000 people died, Short
points out that “the US, too, found ‘genocide’ to its advantage.”
336
He argues that this
particular representation and linkage of Khmer Rouge deaths with Holocaust deaths
“touched a chord of guilt and horror in the Western subconscious that was politically
extremely rewarding.”
337
Reminding the reader of the US’s instrumental role in enabling
the Khmer Rouge to rise to power, he too points out that yet another US Secretary of

332
Terence Cullen and Bill Hutchinson, “John Kerry is the latest Secretary of State to seek peace talks in
Israel,” New York Daily News, July 21, 2014, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/secretaries-state-
negotiations-middle-east-article-1.1874990.
333
Michael B. Kelley, “Here’s How Much America REALLY Spends on Israel’s Defense,” Business
Insider, September 20, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-america-really-spends-on-
israels-defense-2012-9.
334
Philip Short, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004), 446.
335
Ibid.
336
Ibid.
337
Ibid.
144
State—Madeleine Albright, under Bill Clinton’s administration—was the one who
launched the American effort to try surviving Khmer Rouge leaders in an international
tribunal and thus “allow the US to turn the page with honour and regain the moral high
ground.”
338
And so Short concludes that genocide has itself become a political
commodity, “to be exploited by each outside institution, each outside power, in
whichever way best fits its own interests.”
339

In her capacity as the most recent Secretary of State (at the time of writing this
dissertation), Hillary Clinton visited Cambodia in 2010. During this trip, Clinton urged
Cambodia to “confront its tortured past by ensuring the Khmer Rouge are brought to
justice for crimes against humanity in the 1970s and improve its current human rights
record,”
340
revealing US State Department efforts to once again center and refocus
attention away from the record of US military aggression and towards the Khmer Rouge
and Cambodian government instead. Adam Garfinkle, executive editor of the National
Interest, a quarterly foreign policy magazine in Washington, holds a different perspective.
Writing about the announcement of an international war crimes tribunal that sought to
hold accountable high-level Khmer Rouge officials, Garfinkle warned, “Be careful which
graves we exhume.”
341
Noting that international tribunals are not unique—in fact, there
were tribunals already established to deal with the genocides of Rwanda and Bosnia—he
argued that efforts to include the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia under the category
of genocide would be “odd” and proceeded to list reasons why the Khmer Rouge failed to

338
Ibid., 447.
339
Ibid.,
340
“Hillary Clinton Urges Cambodia to Bring Khmer Rouge to Justice,” FoxNews, November 1, 2010,
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/11/01/hillary-clinton-urges-cambodia-bring-khmer-rouge-justice/.
341
Adam Garfinkle, “Be Careful Which Graves We Exhume,” Los Angeles Times, January 24, 1999,
http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jan/24/opinion/op-1098.
145
qualify for a US-supported tribunal on genocide. He argued that the final, and perhaps
most compelling reason why
the American pronouncement is strange is that it is liable to dredge up no little
amount of embarrassment about the American role in recent Cambodian history.
One need not accept the ‘sideshow’
342
thesis—that everything that has transpired
in Cambodia since the days of Lon Nol is the fault of the U.S.—to recognize that
we were indeed there at the creation of Cambodia’s recent troubles. For purely
prudential reasons, then, a U.S. initiative aimed at exhuming our own policy
ancestor, so to speak, seems very ill-advised.
343

Garfinkle’s caveat was a concern that the tribunal to convict Khmer Rouge leaders would
come at the expense of exposing US culpability. Nevertheless, plans for the tribunal
moved forth, with state-funded mass archival projects growing alongside—under the
banner of the mainstream narrative that positioned the Khmer Rouge regime as sole
perpetrator and the US as benevolent savior. Clinton’s statement on that 2010 visit
reflects this warped logic:
A country that is able to confront its past is a country that can overcome it. […]
It’s a very disturbing experience. And the pictures—both the pictures of the
young Cambodians who were killed and the young Cambodians who were doing
the killing—were so painful” but she hoped that “democratic institutions [would]
become stronger in Cambodia and that the space for political expression is big
and that people have the right to be critical of the government.
344

But if, as Garfinkle suggests, excavating this history would result in exposing the US for
war crimes—and it would be nearly impossible to successfully bury this history—then,
logically US media attention would be focused on trying Khmer Rouge senior leaders for

342
“Sideshow” is a reference to William Shawcross’s 1979 book that told the “truth” about the US’s secret
bombing campaign of Cambodia from 1969-1973. Shawcross exposed how Henry Kissinger and Richard
Nixon treated Cambodia as a sideshow to the war by dropping mass bombs on the country to destroy
alleged North Vietnamese smuggling tunnels. He argued the bombings essentially spread the conflict and
led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. See Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of
Cambodia.
343
Garfinkle, “Be Careful Which Graves We Exhume.”
344
Seth Mydans, “In Cambodia, Clinton Advocates Khmer Rouge Trials,” New York Times, accessed
January 28, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/world/asia/02cambo.html?_r=0.
146
the destruction of Cambodia. This also explains why the shape of survivor testimony and
the methods for extracting them require examination, since a guilty verdict relies heavily
on survivor testimony.

Problems—With or Without Passports

USC’s Problems Without Passports is a program that began in 2008 as three field-
research courses providing students with “the opportunity to travel and gain firsthand,
feet-on-the-ground experience investigating issues with international scope.”
345
In this
section I explore student publications and their findings from the Problems Without
Passports program in Cambodia. Though the narratives in the students’ findings did
conform to dominant portrayals of Khmer Rouge survivors, this chapter highlights
moments that complicate or challenge the notion of the tribunal as a necessary and
effective channel through which to deliver justice to Cambodians.
Originally beginning with three course offerings, by summer 2010 USC’s
Problems Without Passports grew to include nine countries and a variety of subject areas.
“International Relations 318: Conflict and Resolution and Peace Research” was one of
those courses. Led by Kosal Path, himself a Khmer Rouge survivor, ten USC
undergraduates travelled to Cambodia during the summer of 2009 to “examine the
politics of bringing the Khmer Rouge leadership to justice for crimes they committed
during their rule in Cambodia (1975-1979).” The course was designed by the Shoah
Foundation and comprised one week of Cambodian history (taught by Path) and another
week of training to collect testimonies from Khmer Rouge survivors (taught by Karen
Jungblut of the USC Shoah Foundation). The aim of the course was to enable

345
Wayne Lewis, “A World of Learning,” USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, November
1, 2008, http://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/355/a-world-of-learning/.
147
undergraduate students to “assess the extent to which the Extraordinary Chambers in the
Courts of Cambodia [met] the expectations of Cambodians and addresse[d] the need for
societal rehabilitation after the denial of justice for three decades.” Students attended
trials and worked with the DC-CAM to document court procedures and testimony,
conducted interviews, and surveyed Cambodian citizens’ reactions to the tribunal.
The following summer, in 2011, a publication in the USC newspaper authored by
senior writer and assistant editor for USC’s College Communications Staff Pamela
Johnson, entitled “Getting to the Roots of Evil: Undergraduates in Problems Without
Passports Learn about Shades of Grey in Cambodia, 35 Years after the Khmer Rouge,”
lures the reader’s attention by beginning with a description of “the killing tree.” Per
Johnson’s description, the killing tree was “a tree against which Khmer Rouge soldiers
bashed the delicate skulls of infants and small children, tossing their lifeless bodies into
open pits.”
346
“The weary oak,” she wrote, “carries the burden of a hideous past … As if
weeping, a deep crimson stain runs down the oak.” One student commented, “It was
impossible for me to comprehend. I looked at the tree and felt sick to my stomach. You
don’t want to believe these things really happen.” The students’ apprehension of the
Khmer Rouge killing tree is not problematic, yet the patronizing American view of the
racialized other while lacking the ability to think critically of similar atrocities committed
in one’s own nation—in the US—is demonstrative of the US and more generally the
American inability or refusal to view itself as perpetrator of violence and instead
choosing to view it- and oneself as savior for the less fortunate in “backwards” countries.
Johnson’s assertion that “the massacre began when the Khmer Rouge came into power”

346
Pamela J. Johnson, “Getting to the Roots of Evil,” USC News, January 18, 2011,
http://news.usc.edu/#!/article/31397/getting-to-the-roots-of-evil/.
148
is entirely incorrect; arguably the massacres began when the US deposited astronomical
amounts of bombs in the Cambodian landscape, killing civilians, displacing others, and
destroying the earth upon which Cambodian life flourished. More specifically, the image
of a “killing tree” conjures not only images of murdered children in Cambodia but of
killing trees used in 19
th
and 20
th
century lynchings of Black people by white mobs in the
US.
Demonstrating the ways culpability is assigned onto a few individuals for the
efforts and contributions of an entire world order, another student remarked, upon
discovering several Khmer Rouge leaders were awaiting trial in detention cells nearby,
“It was chilling being so close to such ruthless and heartless murderers. Just seeing the
building where the five are being held confirmed for me that I hope they get what they
deserve.”
347
Another student remarked about Tuol Sleng, “S-21 is horrifying. It’s eerie,
it’s disturbing and it’s shocking. It’s every emotion that will twist your stomach and
make you want to curl up in a ball and cover your eyes and ears because it doesn’t seem
like it could have been possible,
348
despite the more than two million currently held in
captivity in the US.
Are these instances of willful ignorance, an innocent lack of awareness, an actual
belief in the moral superiority of Americans, demonstrative of the shortcomings of US
history curriculum, or its propagandic value in indoctrinating young patriots who will
extend the life of the American nation? These opinions, limited in scope and reach,
continue to bolster the idea that the US is a beacon of freedom and democracy, of
modernity and progress, and first-world civilization, ultimately enabling the US—and its

347
Ibid.
348
Ibid.
149
allies—to commit acts of violence, some genocidal in nature, without consequence. In
recalling the American firebombing of Japan during World War II, Robert McNamara
had this to say:
We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo—men, women and
children. […] LeMay [General of the Army’s Air Forces] said, ‘If we’d lost the
war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He—
and I’d say I—were behaving as war criminals.
349

Laudable only to an extent, McNamara’s comment concerning a potential prosecution
had they lost the war continues to be disingenuous if not a mockery of justice. While the
US did not lose World War II, the US lost the war with Vietnam—and ultimately
managed to turn it into a victory by controlling its narrative outcomes.
Perhaps the tremendous amounts of funding, resources, and human labor—nearly
$300 million dollars and over a decade’s worth of convening—poured into the tribunal
give Cambodians and others the impression that the tribunal was a worthwhile pursuit; it
would be difficult to challenge or surmount a court of such gargantuan power. Many
Cambodians support the tribunal, believing it will bring long-awaited closure for
suffering endured during and since the regime. For example, the DC-CAM’s Executive
Director Youk Chhang believes “[the tribunal] could provide answers to many questions
Cambodians have about the Democratic Kampuchea era, as well as an opportunity to
bring some justice to the Cambodian people by punishing those responsible for their
suffering and for the deaths of their loved ones.”
350
According to one report, much of
what drove Chhang to work relentlessly at researching and documenting crimes by the
Khmer Rouge was a desire for revenge and a belief the Khmer Rouge leaders must be

349
Tim Weiner, “Robert S. McNamara, Architect of a Futile War, Dies at 93,” New York Times, July 6,
2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/us/07mcnamara.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
350
Brian Eads, “Youk Chhang’s Journey to Justice,” Reader’s Digest Asia, January 15, 2010,
http://www.rdasia.com/youk_chhang_s_journey_to_justice_2645.
150
brought to trial and incarcerated, thus undermining claims of neutrality in his work.
351

Arguably, neutrality is often impossible, even rejected, and so any project of this scope
should acknowledge the implicit biases in its work. To a small extent, Chhang’s personal
vendetta for punishing the Khmer Rouge is not unlike the Khmer Rouge’s policies of
executing individuals formerly affiliated with “the enemy.” While Chhang does not
actively participate or encourage swift executions of “the enemy” without due process, he
is part of a political agenda that doles out unequal life chances and slow death for
members of certain populations. Those who subscribe to this worldview will strongly
disagree with this statement, as expected.
On the other hand, there are those who do not believe the tribunal will deliver
justice to those most impacted by the crimes committed during that era—by the Khmer
Rouge, the US, and/or the Vietnamese. As Eap puts it, the tribunal “isolates just a
segment from the decades of political violence that have been influential in Cambodia
before and after the genocide, and assumes that confining these years for legal remedy
will adequately account for the complex expressions of power that contributed to the
violences of this period.”
352
Not only will the tribunal inadequately account for the
complex expressions of power that contributed to the violences of that period, its
narrative outcomes result in the gross simplification of what took place during the war.
For example, popular understandings reduce Cambodian mass death during that era to
“Pol Pot,” or the Holocaust to “Hitler,” despite the fact that multiple powers were
involved in producing that outcome.

351
Ibid.
352
Eap, “Contested Commemorations,” 2.
151
Obviously, not all people of Jewish descent believe in the importance or
effectiveness of gathering testimony. The USC Shoah Foundation reported encountering
resistance and from some survivors who felt strongly against sharing testimony, or
against sharing testimony in the manner arranged by the Shoah Foundation. For example,
the Shoah Foundation sought to emphasize a “home environment” and include survivors’
family members in their video testimonies. This came under criticism by some Holocaust
experts, who believed this practice shifted the focus of Holocaust reflection “away from
death and toward survival.
353
I would add that this focus on “home” is prelude to a
Zionist future. The Shoah Foundation responded to this criticism by citing a journalist
from Der Spiegel, who wrote in a 1996 article, “Those who only want to see the
traumatized and wish to hold on to the images of skeletons created from the misery of
spring 1945 can only regard as frivolous the presentations of Holocaust victims as
comfortable pensioners in the bosom of their family in Florida.”
354

Nor do all Cambodians believe in the value of the Khmer Rouge tribunal or even
giving testimony (I explore this in Chapter 4). For these Cambodians, the tribunal will not
bring justice, closure, or improve their postwar lives in any way. Johnson’s article
provides an illustrative example: a Cambodian woman named Chut So whose husband
was killed by a Khmer Rouge soldier discovers years after the regime was toppled that
the soldier responsible for her husband’s death lives in the same village as she. In a video
of the interview that takes place in Cambodia, a USC undergraduate student with
Problems Without Passports asks So, “When you see your neighbor … how do you
interact with him?” So replies, “The anger before was worse than now. I try to ignore

353
USC Shoah Foundation, Testimony: The Legacy of Schindler’s List and the USC Shoah Foundation
(New York: Newmarket Press for It Books, 2014), 206.
354
Ibid.
152
him. But it is hard to see him. Something in my heart always reminds me that he is the
man who killed my husband.” The student continues, “Can you ever forgive the
perpetrators?” So’s response is profound. She answers, “Maybe if he asked for an
apology. I might forgive him. But no one has asked for an apology.”
355
At the core of her
response is a longing for a mode of accountability and redress much more intimate than
the tribunal can offer—a sincere apology for one’s actions without attempting to explain,
excuse, or lay blame elsewhere. So’s response sheds light on a different (and not
uncommon) perspective to our understanding of what justice for Cambodians looks like,
and the limits of the tribunal. While the tribunal may accomplish the important task of
documenting select parts of the regime for a worldwide audience, in a manner deemed
most legible to the world order, it also creates a situation in which the ultimate aim is to
maintain one’s innocence at all costs.
Even Chhang, who is depicted above as unrelenting in his quest to convict and
incarcerate Khmer Rouge leaders,
356
and for whom the UN tribunal is the most efficient
way to accomplish this, describes a transformation in his perspective upon meeting with
the village chief responsible for the death of his brother-in-law and niece. In trying to
understand what led the chief to do what he did, Chhang developed a relationship with
his loved ones’ killer.
Chhang has calmed his own demons. When he confronted Chhoung [the village
chief], who was responsible for the death of his brother-in-law and niece, he
asked the old man to explain what had gone wrong. Chhoung confessed that many
people under his control had died. ‘Decisions came from the top down and I
obeyed,’ he said.

355
Johnson, “Getting to the Roots of Evil.”
356
Eads, “Youk Chhang’s Journey to Justice.”
153
Over the next few years, Chhang met the Khmer Rouge cadre several times.
Slowly he came to see him not as a bad man but as a man who had done bad
things because the revolution promised him a better life and society.

Chhang wasn’t ready to forgive, but he no longer felt angry or hungry for
revenge. ‘I was blank,’ he says. ‘No anger, no hatred, no forgiveness. Later I
realized he was no longer part of my life.’

Chhang’s experience concerning the village chief gestures toward the transformative
possibilities of addressing harm and seeking accountability not via a court system, but
intimately between two participants of an event. As So hinted above, at a base level there
is a desire for and productive outcome in admitting culpability—not merely so it can be
perpetually held against a perpetrator but in order to move forth and transcend the
traumatic experiences that are, for some, guaranteed by the current world order. Despite
this revelation—despite his belief that “they are us, and we are them” and that “crimes
are committed by human beings, by people just like me,” or “that people like Mr. Sous
Thy [a former Khmer Rouge cadre] and people like himself could quite easily have
changed plaees,” Chhang nevertheless holds to the belief that “when one of them is in
jail, […] it will be mission accomplished.”
357

Similarly, Kosal Path, who led USC students to Cambodia with the Problems
Without Passports course, stated in a 2012 interview that it is important to hear stories
from “perpetrators” (Khmer Rouge) as well in order to better understand the complexities
of war and systematic violence. When asked why he used the word “perpetrator” in scare
quotes, he explained:
To be honest with you, I went to Anlong Veng, the last stronghold of former
Khmer Rouge regime military and political leadership with the perception that
these people were criminals—these people were killing my family members. So it
was very tough, to be honest with you, very tough to look straight in the eyes and
try to think that these are human beings. But over time, I realized after listening to

357
Ibid.
154
the stories, my perception of them changed a bit. Changed a bit in the sense that I
began to see them as human beings, the fallibility of human beings, and the
historical events, the wheels of history beyond our ability to control, that they
were just brought into this movement, they was [sic] sucked into the movement,
and no way of getting out. So, that’s not to say that these people are not guilty;
obviously we have a lot of evidence, historical evidence, testimony, that they
were part of the killing machine. But by interviewing them, listening to the story,
being open-minded about it, you can see that it’s a very complex issue and you
begin to see them as human being. I think that every survivor, if they had the
chance to talk to these people, and I think that perhaps their perception may
change a bit, perhaps their suffering or maybe perhaps they feel more that these
people are human being [sic], perhaps we can talk to them, we can understand
what motivate them to be part of this. So I think it’s really important by listening
to the story, it really encourage you to feel that they’re human being, to feel that
perhaps empathy would—something would be possible in the case of
Cambodia.
358

Taken together, the perspectives shared by So, Chhang, and Path compose the most
radical response towards the path to justice for Cambodians. In these fleeting moments,
the urge to strike back and thus perpetuate cycles of violence and trauma is overcome by
active listening and a sincere effort to understand rather than judge and convict. While
some may write this off as naïve, even insulting to survivors of genocidal violence, and
despite my own long-held critiques of non-violent forms of protest and rebellion, I
believe these emotional responses, currently ephemeral, can hold, sustain, and fulfill, and
are ultimately vital in one’s journey away from tormented to peaceful existence.
Through consistent interaction with, and a real commitment to, understanding
individuals who are former Khmer Rouge cadre, and why they did the things they did,
Path’s perception of them transformed from viewing them merely as criminals and killers
to viewing them as human beings caught up in the politics of the time. As he states, this
revelation is not to excuse them but rather points to the limits of the victim/perpetrator

358
USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education, “The Many Faces of Genocide:
Interview with Kosal Path,” Itunes video, May 4, 2012, https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/the-many-
faces-of-genocide/id518836366?mt=10.
155
binary as the most framework most commonly used to decide culpability. Chhang, who
admittedly began his work out of a desire for revenge and punishment after repeated
encounters with former Khmer Rouge cadre at work but came to find a sense of kinship
with the people whose actions he abhorred,
359
had this to say:
The overseas Cambodians have one demand for justice, the ones who stayed back
have another view, the prime minister has his own view, the former Khmer Rouge
leaders want it a different way, and my mother wants it a different way. […] In
our case, my mother has forgiven the Khmer Rouge village chief who ordered the
death of my sister. He went to my mother’s house with a gift of bananas after the
Khmer Rouge was defeated to ask forgiveness. She accepted it as karma, you
know, a very Buddhist way of viewing the situation.

But what I want, from the end of it all, is to see an end to being viewed as a
victim. The ‘Duch’ [Kaing Guek Eav] trial should help draw that line, to define us
as no longer victims. I don’t want that, hate that, want to move on. I want to be
just known as Youk Chhang.
360

The centrality of the victim/perpetrator binary in popular assessments of harm leads me
to question: if one is no longer a victim, does one merely embrace the title of survivor,
actively working for peace? Or does one become, in a twist of fate, a perpetrator of
violence—whether via active participation in committing harm or by complicity in
structures and systems of harm? If the former, how can one actively work against the
perpetuation of cycles of violence? What would it take?
Israeli academic Yehuda Elkana wrote, “From Auschwitz came, symbolically,
two peoples. A minority that proclaims this will never happen again and a scared and
anxious majority who proclaims that this will never happen to us again.”
361
Elkana is
among a growing resistance movement, including people of Jewish descent, which seeks

359
Mydans, “Survivor Gently Adds Voices.”
360
Marwaan Macan-Markar, “Q&A-Cambodia: People Seek Justice, More in Khmer Rouge Trials,”
HighBeam Business, March 27, 2009, http://business.highbeam.com/409433/article-1G1-
196459265/qcambodia-people-seek-justice-more-khmer-rouge-trials.
361
International Socialist Organization, “Never Again for Anyone,” SocialistWorker.org, February 1, 2011,
http://socialistworker.org/2011/02/01/never-again-for-anyone.
156
to spotlight and bring an end to Israel’s dehumanizing treatment of Palestinians. On
International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2011, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist
Network (IJAN) launched a countrywide speaking tour entitled “Never Again for
Anyone.”
362
IJAN’s mission states:
As Jews of conscience, we reject the claim that the Nazi Holocaust, or the long
history of Jewish persecution in Europe, justifies [a Zionist] state and the
systematized oppression of Palestinians necessary to establish and maintain it.
Self-segregation, political control and the persecution of others is never an answer
to oppression and persecution.

The Anti-Defamation League, an organization seeking to “stop the defamation of the
Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment to all…”
363
, deemed the tour anti-
Semitic. Whereas IJAN argues that the history of Jewish persecution has been deployed
to justify the existence of Israel, the Anti-Defamation League alleged the tour was “a
blatant attempt to exploit the memory of the Holocaust as a tool to demonize Israel.”
364

Elkana’s distinction between those who proclaim they will never again be victims of such
persecution and those who seek to ensure genocidal violence never happens again, to any
group of people, highlights a prominent tension in the debates about Israel’s right to exist,
the war on Palestinians, and the victim/perpetrator binary. As the late Edward Said
argued, “[H]istory is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and
rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and
disfigurements tolerated, so that ‘our’ East, ‘our’ Orient becomes ‘ours’ to possess and
direct.”
365
The inclusion—conscription, as I argue—of Cambodian survivor testimony as

362
Ibid.
363
Anti-Defamation League, “Our Mission, last modified June 26, 2017, https://www.adl.org/who-we-
are/our-mission.
364
Rehmat’s World, “‘Never Again for Anyone’ Tour Irks ADL,” Rehmat’s World, February 8, 2011,
http://rehmat1.com/2011/02/08/never-again-for-anyone-tour-irks-adl/.
365
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), xviii.
157
reinforcement to Zionist ideological arsenal makes clear that, as many have affirmed, the
world continues to be in a perpetual state of war. Said points out a difference between
“knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding,
compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand
knowledge—if that is what it is—that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation,
belligerency, and outright war.”
366
Further, Said continues, there is a difference “between
the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of
horizons, and the will to dominate for purposes of control and external dominion.”
367
My
concern has been that the USC Shoah Foundation’s acquisition of Cambodian survivor
testimony will prove to be the latter.
The USC Shoah Foundation dedicates its work to the memory of the Holocaust,
and “to the survivors, the witnesses, and all who gave testimony so that future
generations might know a world free of prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the
suffering they cause.”
368
Those of us who committed to bringing an end to war and
violence are obligated to take a stand against oppression of all kinds, against all people—
“whether in Warsaw 1943, Soweto 1976, or Gaza 2011 [to present].”
369

366
Ibid., xix.
367
Ibid.
368
USC Shoah Foundation, Testimony.
369
Ibid.
158
CHAPTER FOUR

Epiphytic Lives: Cambodian American Nonmemory and Silence as
a Condition of Possibility

“We are the literal manifestation of Pol Pot’s attempt to erase Cambodia’s history
and culture,” writes Pete Pin, Cambodian-American documentary photographer and
author of Time magazine’s photography project “Displaced: The Cambodian
Diaspora.”
370
The February 2012 article is accompanied by a series of photographs (22 in
total) chronicling the lives of the Cambodian community in Philadelphia, PA, Lowell,
MA, and the Bronx, NY. Among the images are: a refugee ID card from a Thai-
Cambodian border camp; two girls lying beside their grandmother, the only surviving
elder member of their family; Khmer Rouge leader Nuon Chea listening to a translation
device at his international trial; and a photograph of football trophies belonging to a
young man in the Bronx where, according to its caption, “Cambodian youth in the
Fordham area play league football for ‘racial respect’ in the neighborhood.” If, as the
adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, or, that an image can tell a story just as
well as—or better than—the written word, these images in Pin’s collection of
Cambodians living the aftermath of war reflect a wealth of history that may, in fact, be
better articulated than with words.
Pin’s work highlights a silence maintained among Cambodian survivors of the
Khmer Rouge regime. It is not uncommon to hear second generation Cambodian
Americans lament the absence of familial and collective historical narratives. “Such

370
Pete Pin, “Displaced: The Cambodian Diaspora,” Time Lightbox, February 6, 2012,
http://lightbox.time.com/2012/02/6/displaced-the-cambodian-diaspora/#1.
159
conversations [about the Killing Fields] were non-existent at home,” says Pin. For Pin,
histories come in the form of “a long shadow cast on the lives of Cambodians.” He adds,
“It bleeds generationally, manifesting itself subtly within my own family in ways that I
am only starting to comprehend as an adult. It is ingrained in the sorrow of my
grandmother’s eyes; it is sown in the furrows of my parents’ faces.”
371
Certainly, the
weight of this silence manifests in myriad ways and forms. Pin uses photography to
capture, document, and transform the “shadow” into a material form. In this way, he
identifies himself as part of “a growing movement of young and empowered
Cambodians—academics, artists, musicians, and activists—who are trying to bridge this
generational chasm.”
372

Many young Cambodians and Cambodian Americans have taken on the task of
“breaking the silence” of the survivor generation. One of the most notable efforts of this
campaign is Socheata Poeuv’s 2008 documentary film New Year Baby, the first
Cambodian autobiographical documentary film to hit the American mainstream since
Roland Joffé’s 1984 feature film The Killing Fields. Poeuv, whose website states, “There
is a culture of silence surrounding the Cambodian genocide. And we’re taking steps to
break that silence,” contends that telling your own story promotes agency, as survivors
becomes authors of their own story instead of objects being acted upon.
This chapter offers a reading of New Year Baby that calls attention not to survivor
silence but to the second generation’s treatment of survivor silence.
373
Because I
understand survivor silence to be deliberate and careful, I begin by providing a context

371
Ibid.
372
Ibid.
373
Poeuv was born in a refugee camp in Thailand but grew up in the US. Technically, she should be
considered part of the “1.5 generation” (those who came to the US as children) but it would not be untrue to
consider her a member of the second generation as well.
160
for the phenomenon of silence among survivors. In doing so, I intervene in narratives that
have, inadvertently or not, resulted in pathologizing of survivors and the treatment of
silence as a social ill that must be eradicated at all costs. I argue that Cambodian
survivors are neither silent nor passive victims but rather, actors of volition under an
unforgiving totalitarian regime. I highlight moments in the film that often slip our
detection but challenge the narrative of the “Khmer Rouge victim”—which I hold as
distinct from “Cambodian survivor” because the former strategically erases US
culpability. I trouble the application of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” to
the Cambodian postwar generation’s experience. Instead, I offer the term “nonmemory”
first, as a descriptor for the Cambodian postwar generation’s relation to the survivor
generation—that is, to describe a general impossibility for nonsurvivors to know the true
experience of war, gesturing towards the (problematic) ways in which nonsurvivors
might go about demanding survivors speak about their experiences. Secondly, with this in
mind, I forward this term to encourage critical thought and analysis among Cambodian
Americans regarding: our relationship to war and war’s victors, our ethical responsibility
for war and war’s casualties, then and now. Lastly, in this chapter I offer the concept and
framework of the “epiphytic,” which I understand as anticolonial in nature, as an
alternative to “breaking the silence” of survivors.

Excavating Silence

During the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodians learned to dam doeum kor, which
means “plant a kapok tree.” Writer and Khmer Rouge survivor Ronnie Yimsut explains,
“This Khmer term uses word play to transpose kor (kapok) with ko (mute). ‘Dam doeum
161
kor.’ Plant a mute tree. We learned to look away. We learned to keep our lips sealed and
eyes closed.”
374
Similarly, memoirist Pheara Am writes,

Like Mom said, to survive in any environment, we had to use the experiences that
we had learned during the Khmer Rouge regime. That was ‘rean dam doeum
kor’—to be silent. We compared this to ‘kor tree’ where one had to pretend that
s/he did not hear anything and no one spoke openly about anything. Like the
saying during the Khmer Rouge time, if the authority did not ask you, you did not
need to answer, just keep what you know in secret.
375

Yet another example can be found in the memoir of doctor-turned-actor, Khmer Rouge
survivor and later Academy Award winner for his role in the 1984 feature film The
Killing Fields Haing S. Ngor. Ngor tells that many warned against the dangers of
attracting fatal attention from Khmer Rouge soldiers. Like Yimsut and Am, he explains
in his memoir that Cambodians learned to “dam doeum kor, which literally means ‘plant
a kapok tree’. The word kor, however, also means ‘mute’
376
, as in ‘Keep your mouth
shut’. Stay quiet. Plant a kapok tree. Bodies disappear. The warnings were muttered and
indirect, but the meaning was clear…”
377
Testimonies given by Khmer Rouge survivors
affirm an understanding of the necessity of dam doeum kor/planting a “mute” tree as a
survival tactic. While Am interprets the saying as “to be silent,” Ngor interprets it as
“keep your mouth shut and stay quiet.” Historian Henri Locard also offers an explanation
of the saying “plant a kapok tree.” He asserts that the idiom should not be taken literally,
that it is perhaps a hint for something else. He argues, for example, that the slogan

374
Ronnie Yimsut, Facing the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Journey (New Brunswick, New Jersey:
Rutgers University Press, 2011), 66.
375
Pheara (Peter) Am, Blessing Over Darkness: A Real Life Journey From Darkness to Blessing (New
York, Bloomington: iUniverse, Inc., 2009), 112.
376
Here, Ngor uses the word kor to refer to both the tree and muteness, although Yimsut makes a
distinction between kor and ko. There is only a slight difference in the pronunciation of the two words.
377
Haing S. Ngor, Survival in the Killing Fields (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003), 253.
162
advises one not to be completely silent but rather, to use better judgment and “know
when to hold one’s tongue.”
378

Vocalizing, especially in opposition to the regime, was sure to guarantee your
death, yet a steadfast commitment to silence was not enough to protect one’s self. Under
the oppressive Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodians devised creative methods of
communication and survival tactics such as speaking with one’s eyes and body, utilizing
the dark of night as cover instead of the daytime sun to forage for food, burying wet rice
in a pouch in the earth underneath rather than atop a fire to avoid drawing attention while
cooking, and a multitude of tricks to outsmart soldiers. To plant a kapok/mute tree was
not simply to abandon one’s agency nor to lose one’s will to survive. On the contrary, to
plant a kapok/mute tree meant that one had to do whatever it took to survive.
On the trail of mainstream misperceptions of Cambodian muteness is the lament
by young Cambodian Americans that our parents “never talked about the war.” In
particular, second generation college students, who are likely influenced by multiracial
activist campus settings, adopt the mantra “our silence will not protect us” which was
famously written by Audre Lorde—even if Lorde’s admonition was not merely to do the
inverse simply by breaking said silence.
379
While women of color feminists, including

378
Henri Locard, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2005), 115. It is important to note that Locard also explains that dam doeum kor is actually a
traditional Khmer saying that existed prior to the regime’s hold of the country. He suggests that the saying
could, in some instances, be taken in the form of “friendly counsel on the part of local Khmer Rouge
leaders to protect those under their charge. Thus, it is an indication of the collusion that could exist between
village or group heads and inhabitants in order to escape the Angkar’s wrath.” While it is beyond the scope
of this chapter to analyze Khmer Rouge leaders’ and soldiers’ subversions of Angkar’s dictatorship, readers
may be interested in Rithy Panh’s 2003 documentary film S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine. Panh’s
film focuses on two survivors of the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 prison as they return to the prison and confront
former guards who were not colluding with subjects of the regime but, conversely, insist they were only
following orders as they doled out punishment and carried out executions.
379
Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,” in Sister Outsider: Essays
and Speeches by Audre Lorde (New York: Ten Speed Press, 2007), 40-44.
163
Lorde, speak out against the dispossessing nature of keeping silent, they also point out
that vocalizing one’s concerns is not guaranteed to set you free either. King-kok Cheung
writes, “Many women and racial minorities, growing up in an America where voice is
tantamount to power and where they have been traditionally muzzled, have also forsworn
silence in order to have a say in society.”
380
Yet Cheung reminds us that silence speaks
many tongues: “While the voice is indisputable, pronouncing silence as the converse of
speech or as its subordinate can also be oppressively univocal.”
381

Many young Cambodian Americans, as I’ve mentioned, endeavor to “break the
silence” by conducting oral histories with their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles
using methods and analyses that are more likely than not informed by American or
Western-centered modes of informational retrieval and knowledge production that are
often problematic or culturally incompatible. While second generation Cambodian
Americans complain that their parents never talk about the war, the domain of mental
health research teems with Cambodian survivor narratives—files upon files containing
survivor memories and detailed notes of postwar struggles are neatly stored away. Family
members of mental health clients, however, often lack access to what takes place in the
doctor’s office due to issues of confidentiality and, in many cases, survivors choose to
share with professionals matters they may not feel inclined to share with their children.
The field of performance studies, in particular, offers a useful and productive
entry point to this predicament. Where words lack, or are lacking, performance theory

Audre Lorde’s words, rooted in the specific context of Black struggle and life, have served many—Black
and non-Black alike—as a proverbial source of inspiration and empowerment. As she tells it, “To question
or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. […] I was going to die, if not sooner then later,
whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect
you.”
380
King-Kok Cheung, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Joy Kogawa
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 2.
381
Ibid., 6.
164
highlights modes of communication that emphasize or even rely on bodily language,
peculiar habits and mannerisms—a multitude of communicative strategies that exceed the
verbal. Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in
the Americas, for example, highlights performance as an epistemology—a “system of
learning, storing, and transmitting knowledge,”
382
while Erving Goffman’s The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life theorizes ways people perform various versions of
the self depending on the particular circumstances of any given face-to-face interaction.
Under the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodians were required to perform in order to
survive. In Ngor’s memoir, he recounts on at least two separate occasions that he had to
act in certain ways, and act out certain personas, in order to hide his true self and
demeanor to fool Khmer Rouge soldiers. In a different way, Socheata Poeuv’s mother
describes in the documentary film how she took on the role of storyteller and narrator,
retelling famous Khmer films to young peasant soldiers who had never had the luxury of
television in order to win their favor and distract them so her compatriots could steal rice
grains. I discuss these in greater detail later in the chapter.
The varying interpretations of dam doeum kor point to a deeper meaning of what
it meant to be mute during the Khmer Rouge regime. In this chapter, I challenge the
framing of silence as a “problem” by suggesting that it may not be an indicator of defeat
or surrender but rather, the basis of survival strategies and a foundation upon which
anything becomes possible. Taking inspiration from the idiom “plant a kapok tree,” I
seek to intervene in the ways this life-saving mantra idiom has been taken quite literally
and, importantly, how it has led to a paternalistic characterization of Cambodian

382
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2003), 16.
165
survivors as so mute and traumatized they are unable to speak for and of their own
experiences—that they must be led by the hand to overcome fear and shame so that their
progeny may know their history. Instead of this, this chapter imagines—visualizes—
silence as a space of infinite possibility. To elaborate further, I turn briefly to the kapok
tree.

The Great Kapok Tree

A giant of the rainforest, the kapok tree (ceiba pentandra) is home to epiphytes—
plants that grow on other plants but are not parasites, and do not harm the structure on
which they fasten their roots. Rather, they derive their nutrients from other sources, such
as the air, rain, and debris that accumulate around it. The word ‘epiphyte’ comes from the
Greek root epi, meaning “upon,” “surface,” or “in addition,” and phyte, meaning “plant.”
Countless species of animals and plants live and feed upon the kapok tree, demonstrating
its importance to the rainforest.
Kapok trees are typically among the tallest in the forest. Often their thick trunks
and branches are armed with thick conical spines to protect them from animals that might
chew at their bark. These thorns fall off as the trees get bigger and become older, and as
they firmly establish their roots in the earth. In dry conditions, the trees are able to adapt
and store water in their trunks, giving off a swollen or pregnant appearance. In their
branches above, the trees produce large ellipsoid capsules that are constituted by five
valves, which split open to disperse silky fibers and small seeds. Their fibers are lighter
than cotton, buoyant, and resistant to water. Their seeds are carried elsewhere by wind,
where they affix themselves in soil and grow to provide sustenance for other creatures
166
and organisms of the rainforest. Their limbs have been described as a complex
infrastructure of highways on which mammals move about in the rainforest.
383

These characteristics point to the ways an idiom such as “plant a kapok tree”
harbors and points to layered, overlapping, intersecting, parallel, even hostile life forms.
The epiphytes whom find a home on the tree “are not parasites but simply rely on their
host trees for support. In return, they collect enough light to manufacture energy and also
provide food and shelter for many organisms living in the treetops, such as insects, birds,
and other small animals.”
384
Unlike aphids, parasitic bugs that feed by sucking the sap out
of plants and thereby cause extensive damage to crops, epiphytes model an example of
living within a biological community of organisms that rely, depend, and interact with
each other and their physical environment in productive, not destructive, ways.
This chapter’s title features the concept and framework of the epiphytic in order
to propose an (already existing) model of relation for second generation Cambodian
Americans to first generation Cambodian refugees. Lowman’s explanation points to the
myriad ways epiphytes exist and rely upon one another as foundation, support, mutual
benefit, and harmoniously even if this last point was overly romanticizing. To be sure,
epiphytes do not exist by taking what is not theirs, stealing for one’s own gain,
demanding of another something they have not volunteered to give, forcing, ambushing,
attacking, destroying. Understanding our lives in the aftermath of war requires a decision
to receive with new eyes and new ears—or, as was often said during the Khmer Rouge
regime, “no eyes, no ears”—the stories and secrets we seek. If we think our parents never

383
Catherine L. Woodward, “The Ceiba Tree,” Ceiba Foundation for Tropical Conservation, December 7,
2012, www.ceiba.org/ceiba.htm.
384
Margaret D. Lowman, “Epiphytes,” Plant Sciences, Gale Virtual Reference Library, vol. 2, ed. Richard
Robinson, New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2001, 113-115.
167
talk about the war, perhaps it is because we are not listening. Thus I depart from an
ecological understanding of the epiphytic to consider more seriously of ways the postwar
generation might better model the epiphytic in our relations to others. How might second
generation Cambodian Americans approach and engage, even adopt, survivors’ silence?
How do we make sense of a past for which we were not present but for which we are
implicated, even responsible for? How are our historic experiences connected, if at all, to
the present moment, the present war?

bombs dropped
kapok planted
into the earth
from which
a new life form rose

Fruits of the Harvest

Heavy steel and Raw human

a new weapon

Approaching Survivor Silence: New Year Baby and the Cambodian American
Second Generation

Since the release of aka Don Bonus
385
in 1995, approximately one dozen
documentary films about Cambodian refugees have been produced in the US. Given
Cambodian migration to the US began only two decades prior, in the mid 1970s to early
1980s, the number of productions is impressive. While the proliferation of Cambodian-

385
aka Don Bonus (1995) is one part of a trilogy of documentary films produced by Spencer Nakasako in
the San Francisco Bay Area as part of the Vietnamese Youth Development Center’s media lab project. The
Vietnamese Youth Development Center is a grassroots community organization project that originally
emerged in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco to serve Vietnamese youth but has grown to serve all
underprivileged youth living in the area. The film features Sokly Ny, a Cambodian American refugee
youth, and his family and depicts their day-to-day life in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the state and
is credited as the first autobiographical documentary film co-produced by a Cambodian refugee, though it
did not enjoy mainstream success as New Year Baby did. I discuss this film in Chapter 1.
168
centered films can be attributed in part to the rise in popularity and increased utility of
media technology for marginalized communities like Cambodians in the US and their
allies, not all films are produced with the subaltern’s best interest in mind.
386
The
Hollywood movie industry is one example where those with the means to produce feature
films seek and in many cases appropriate and inaccurately or selectively represent the
stories and struggles of those without the means to produce on a mass scale, not merely to
provide entertainment but consequently influencing and shaping perceptions of a mass
audience. This holds true of nonfiction film and the documentary film industry as well. In
any case, the move for Cambodian refugees in the US from margin to center, within
academia or in mainstream media, either as documentary or fiction film, is an inherently
political act. A cursory examination of these films reveal, in my assessment, a tendency
to pathologize Cambodians as an abject and mute population, incapacitated by trauma
inflicted by the Khmer Rouge regime. This is simply not true.
Studies on Cambodian refugees focusing on mental health, for example,
demonstrate that survivors do speak about their experiences. In fact, Long Beach county
agencies were so overwhelmed by Cambodian clients that the Los Angeles Department of
Mental Health opened up an additional clinic to serve a predominantly Cambodian
refugee demographic there. Testimonies from Cambodian survivors make reference to
US bombing in addition to the four-year regime itself, but mainstream narratives tend to
occlude the former as prelude and central contributing factor to the regime. Family
members and loved ones may not have access to the kinds of conversations taking place
or issues that emerge in these settings, and the stigma around mental health issues—

386
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313.
169
compounded by an increasing reliance on prescription drugs to treat (and effectively
numb or suppress) one’s pain—make more difficult a genuine effort to address the needs
of those deeply impacted by war and governmental violence.
While ethnic studies university departments, public programs, social services, and
health care face or have been negatively impacted by federal budget cuts, millions of
dollars continue to be funneled into research to “[help] Cambodians heal the wounds of
the past by documenting, researching, and sharing the history of the Khmer Rouge
period”
387
—two workings I view as at odds with one another. Specifically I am referring
to the Khmer Rouge tribunal, which took over a decade and nearly $300 million to reach
a guilty verdict and life imprisonment for three individuals, Kaing Guek Eav (Duch),
Nuon Chea, and Khieu Samphan. Unlike aka Don Bonus, which was a community-based
production, Socheata Poeuv’s 2008 New Year Baby received about $1 million from a
consortium of funders toward production.
The film is about a young Cambodian American woman who uncovers a family
secret, a sensational storyline that has proven effective in enticing or appealing to
audiences who wish, vicariously, to discover the details of this family scandal. In her
project summary, Poeuv states her parents never told her how or why she was born in a
Thai refugee camp until one Christmas when her mother revealed a family secret. She
discovers her older sisters are in fact her cousins, adopted by Poeuv’s parents after their
own died during the Khmer Rouge regime. She discovers her brother is in fact her half-
brother, born from Poeuv’s mother’s first marriage to a man who, along with another
daughter, died also during the Khmer Rouge regime. Lastly, she discovers that her

387
Documentation Center of Cambodia, “Purpose,” last modified April 23, 2013,
http://www.dccam.org/#/our_mission/purpose.
170
parents met in a labor camp where they were “forced together by a brutal regime that
attempted to obliterate class differences by mandating marriages between people who, in
normal circumstances, would not have ended up together.”
388
The film’s title refers to the
Poeuv’s birth on the day of the Cambodian New Year in a Thai refugee camp following
the regime’s end, making her “the lucky one.”
Demonstrating what I have described above as pathologizing Cambodian life in
the US, New Year Baby was marketed using language such as: my parents “left the past
behind” or “desperately [tried] to forget their past.” Mainstream discussions of New Year
Baby describe a “natural” trajectory of the Cambodian refugee figure in the US in terms
of a “journey to becoming American,” without so much as a gesture towards the role of
America and Americans in helping to facilitate the rise of new American ethnic groups—
usually the result of migrations induced by political, economic, or social upheaval. This is
not an oversight but rather, narratives such as these are the result of repressive strategies
aimed to maintain social (and racial) order.
On the film’s webpage, the filmmakers write, “New Year Baby is my personal
documentary—a search for truth about how my family survived the Khmer Rouge
genocide and why they buried the truth for so long.”
389
In addition to perpetuating the
occlusion of US culpability, this sentence suggests, or claims, that “we” don’t know “the
truth” about how Cambodians survived the Khmer Rouge regime and that Cambodians
who survived the Khmer Rouge regime actively sought to bury and withhold “the truth”
from others likely due to shame. Through suggestive power, the film’s taglines forward

388
Socheata Poeuv, “Discussion Guide,” New Year Baby, last modified February 17, 2014,
http://socheatapoeuv.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Discussion-Guide.pdf.
389
Socheata Poeuv, “Project Summary,” New Year Baby, last modified June 24, 2017,
http://www.newyearbaby.net/project-summary/.
171
the assumption or false statement that knowledge of survivor experiences and the regime
do not currently exist—thus giving the impression of a fresh, blank slate upon which to
project the film’s narrative, in which the Cambodian refugee is constructed as passive
victim, incapacitated by trauma and shame. The alleged shame experienced by survivors
would not be only the result of surviving what some have called an auto-genocide, of
surviving violence caused by one’s own countrymen—as opposed to violence enacted by
a colonial power or warring nation, and as if violence has never occurred between various
populations within a nation—but caused by popular media (mis)representations and mass
reactions by global national audiences. “They would kill you just for wearing eyeglasses”
is a popular refrain among Cambodian survivors and nonsurvivors alike—reducing the
basis/es of Khmer Rouge policies to aesthetic values. For the record, those who wore
eyeglasses were assumed to be educated, or of the elite or a privileged class. To be clear,
I am not excusing, condoning, or reinforcing the Khmer Rouge’s practice of executing
individuals wearing glasses. I am however saying that a statement as simple as “They
would kill you just for wearing eyeglasses” is reductive.
The film’s narrative lacks a critical analysis of the US’s own record of military
aggression, focusing only on atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. Instead, it
celebrates the US as a superior nation upheld by ideals of freedom and democracy. On
her film’s webpage, Poeuv states, “The truth is that my parents carried me further than I
can imagine—across a border, over landmines and across the ocean to a new life in
America. My birth [in the refugee camp] marked the end of the horror and the beginning
of a future.”
390
The Internet Movie Database, a popular reference website for information
on films and television shows, offers the following description for New Year Baby: “Born

390
Ibid.
172
on Cambodian New Year in a Thai refugee camp, Socheata never knew how she got
there. After her birth, the family left the past behind and became American.”
391
Whereas
Cathy Schlund-Vials describes Poeuv as part of a movement of “Cambodian filmmakers,
writers, and artists [who] labor to make whole […] a historical truth that moves beyond
the amnesiac registers and politicized reaches of the Cambodian Syndrome,”
392
my
reading of the film and Poeuv’s work unfortunately reinforces the “amnesiac registers
and politicized reaches of the Cambodian Syndrome.”
393
While the film offers never-
before-seen footage and interview (with former Khmer Rouge cadre), it pays little to no
attention to the US policies and military excursions that would enable a fuller historical
understanding of the impacts of the latter 20
th
century on Cambodians. Because New Year
Baby highlights the four-year Khmer Rouge regime as the central if not sole reason for
Cambodian migration to the US, the film contributes to a confounded understanding of
how and why Cambodians emerged on the American political landscape—as refugees of
war, not voluntary immigrants.
Drawing on James Young’s work on Holocaust memorials and remembrance,
Schlund-Vials’s study on Cambodian American cultural production “analogously (yet
divergently) labor to rearticulate and reimagine the Killing Fields era…”
394
Against
“state-sanctioned directives to forget” the US’s role in the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power,
Schlund-Vials highlights Cambodian American cultural producers’ “resistive moves to
remember familial stories of survival narratives of forced exodus, and memories of

391
Internet Movie Database, “New Year Baby (2006),” last modified June 24, 2017,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0892087/.
392
Cathy Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 17.
393
Ibid.
394
Ibid., 3.
173
contested resettlement.”
395
Indeed for Schlund-Vials, Poeuv’s New Year Baby is among
various works that “confront historical amnesias and undermine frames of forgetting in
their country of settlement” and which offer “alternative modes for and practices of
justice.”
396

In her chapter on Cambodian cinematic memory work, Schlund-Vials juxtaposes
New Year Baby’s narrative with narratives of redemption and liberation such as the one
found in Roland Joffé’s 1984 feature film The Killing Fields. She argues that The Killing
Fields “instantiate[s] a master narrative of the killing fields era wherein US culpability is
eschewed in favor of a stateless humanitarianism.”
397
Further, The Killing Fields
“proffers an apolitical apologetics in its emphasis on individualized—and not state-
sanctioned—reconciliation,” exemplified by the film’s memorable ending scene. The
main character, American journalist Sydney Schanberg, is tormented with guilt for
abandoning his friend and colleague Dith Pran as it became clear that Phnom Penh had
fallen to the Khmer Rouge. Despite close brushes with death, Pran survives the regime,
and the two meet again. Upon apology by American journalist Sydney Schanberg,
portrayed by actor Sam Waterston, to Cambodian Dith Pran, portrayed by actor Haing S.
Ngor, Cambodian Pran assures American Schanberg that there is “Nothing to forgive,
Sydney. Nothing to forgive.” Schlund-Vials argues that it is the American Schanberg,
proxy for the US, and not Cambodian Pran, who becomes the chief recipient of reparative
justice. The Killing Fields, she argues, produces “a master narrative of Democratic
Kampuchea outside Cambodia that ultimately privileges … American subjectivity and

395
Ibid., 4.
396
Ibid.
397
Ibid.
174
leaves unattended larger issues of genocide remembrance, juridical nonaction, and
Cambodian agency.”
398

In contrast to the apology featured in The Killing Fields “invested as a means to a
reconciled American end,” Schlund-Vials argues that New Year Baby “pointedly
refocuses the attention of reparation and reconciliation on survivors of the Killing Fields
era.”
399
Unlike other films about Cambodians which highlight and privilege American
subjects and experiences, Schlund-Vials credits New Year Baby for centering the
perspectives and experiences of Cambodian survivors. Moreover, she argues that New
Year Baby falls under the work of Cambodian American cultural workers whose
messages comprise the articulation of “a collected historical truth through narratives
involving family stories of war, genocide, and relocation” crucial to the work of
undermining erasures of US culpability.
400
But this could be taken as a generous reading;
the scene most notable for its centering of Cambodian survivors is also one of the film’s
most controversial moments. As Mariam B. Lam writes, “Schlund-Vials offers a very
generous analysis of filmmaker Socheata Poeuv’s insistence on requisite apologies by ex-
cadres to family members as a strategy to mark fragmented personal histories, although
other viewers might find Poeuv’s tactics naïve, uninformed, and insensitive.”
401

Furthermore, the apology in this scene, from the ex-cadre to the family member of the
deceased, was not self-initiated but prompted by Poeuv and the film crew. The apology is
made to appear in the film’s final cut as a natural outcome of the encounter; viewers are

398
Ibid., 79.
399
Ibid.
400
Ibid., 17.
401
Mariam B. Lam, review of War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work, by Cathy
Schlund-Vials, MELUS 39, no. 4 (Winter 2014): 211.
175
privy to this backstory only if they view the director’s cut containing Poeuv’s
commentary.
The scene in question occurs when Poeuv surprises (ambushes) her father with a
visit to the home of a former Khmer Rouge cadre despite her father’s vehement protests.
Snuggled close to her father after an emotional visit to Preah Mliu, where Poeuv’s
parents met and where Pouev’s mother’s sister was buried, Poeuv finds an opportune
moment to ask her father: “Did you ever talk to a Khmer Rouge? Is there anything you
would want to say?” At its mere mention, Pa immediately and reflexively shakes his head
and looks away. He states very clearly: “I don’t want to talk.” Forming only incomplete
sentences, he uses hand gestures to express himself: “Because I need to [covers his mouth
as if he is unable to speak]. I’m scared. I’m [covers his mouth again, to demonstrate
going mute].” He appears to be triggered; his attempts to explain to his daughter that he
does not want, and is unable, to speak with the former soldier whom they have asked to
participate. Still en route to their meeting destination, Poeuv continues to prod:
Poeuv: If you could talk to one, right now, would you? Right now.
Pa: Right now? Talk with Khmer Rouge?
Poeuv: M-hm.
Pa: [laughs (my interpretation is that he laughs because the question, at this point,
is still hypothetical] But I don’t even know where the Khmer Rouge are. I don’t
know any. Who is red? Who is blue? At this time in our life, I don’t know which
is which.
Poeuv: But if you could …
Pa: [No longer laughing, speaks sternly] I don’t want to talk with them. I don’t
want to talk, I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to see. I hate.

Despite Pa’s clearly articulated protests, the film crew proceeds with the visit. Their van,
driven by a crewmember, stops outside a home. We hear the van door slide open, but
Poeuv and Pa remain seated. It is only after they have arrived at the home, presumably of
the Khmer Rouge cadre, that Poeuv informs her father of her plans. “Um, I need to tell
176
you what we’re doing.” Already studying his surroundings, Pa replies, allowing his
daughter the opportunity to explain. “Tell what?” Poeuv replies, nervously, “Um, right
now we’re, uh, we’ve found a Khmer Rouge cadre.” Pa’s demeanor has changed. It shifts
from emotional, vulnerable, and open, to one of cunning and skill—hinting to the
observant viewer that this is not the first time he has had to deal with danger, fear, or
anger under surprise and perhaps unfavorable circumstances. He loosens his shoulders, as
would a boxer upon entering the fighting ring. “Right here?” he asks, as if to better or
more thoroughly assess the situation he is about to enter. By this point, Poeuv has
become skittish, almost searching for words worthy of explaining their predicament.
Poeuv: M-hm. I just want to talk to him.
Pa: (Keeping his eyes on the house, he nods an acknowledgement) Mm.
Poeuv: I just want to see his face.
Pa: To see what he’s like?
Poeuv: Yes (in Khmer).
Pa: (He nods, his voice is rather polite now) Ok. Go ahead.
Poeuv: You ok with that?
Pa: (His answers are short) Yeah.
Poeuv: You come with me?
Pa: I can come with you. It’s ok.

While the inclusion of this staged encounter between “perpetrator and victim” sets the
film apart from other, older and perhaps by now mundane explorations of the Cambodian
survivor experience by featuring an actual Khmer Rouge soldier, the question of ethics
remains: how far are we willing to go to procure footage, or testimony, that might be
considered exciting for documentary production? At whose expense do these
procurements occur? Are we in fact exploiting others’ pain and trauma for educational
purposes, or for our own gains, or both?
For instance, this scene follows a particularly poignant moment shared between
Poeuv and her father at the site of her aunt’s grave adjacent to an outdoor latrine. As they
177
have come to honor her memory and pay their respects, Pa shares with Poeuv that the last
time he and Ma visited Cambodia, “Ma wanted to unbury her [to give her a proper
burial], but they often say if the soul seems at peace, then we should let her rest.” If
Poeuv, or the viewer, were looking to bridge generational chasms and fill emotional
voids, this moment might have been it. The film pursues instead something worthy of
reality television. Pa is chauffeured to the next stop. As Poeuv admits, “He had come
along for the chance to spend time with me. I invited him [and not Ma] because he was
easier to direct.”
After the meeting with the former Khmer Rouge cadre, whose name is Son
Soeum, and who was the district chief in charge of the 300-family camp where Ma and
Pa labored during the regime, Pa collapses in exhaustion. Standing above him with a
hand-powered fan, Poeuv questions, in a voiceover, her own motives. Reflecting on the
decision to corner her father into meeting with a former Khmer Rouge cadre, she
narrates: “I thought about calling off the rest of the journey. Maybe I’d pushed him too
far. I began to question my reasons for this trip. Was it to understand my parents or was it
just to ease my guild about being the lucky one?” While genuine inquiries into traumatic
events oftentimes occur through trial-and-error, efforts classified under “error” require
greater and more serious considerations.
In speaking engagements across the country, Poeuv often poses the following
question to her audience: “What does it take for both a country and individual to heal
from something like genocide?” This question, she explains, was formulated in response
to a critique she often receives from New Year Baby’s viewers. In her public talks, she
reports, there is always at least one person who asks the question: “If Cambodians were
178
so reluctant to talk, if Cambodians don’t want to tell their story, why would you push
them?” Poeuv’s response follows:
Having started my career in journalism and in media, I really believed in the
power of stories to educate, to tell the truth, and sometimes even to heal. Yet after
a number of presentations and screenings of New Year Baby, I would always
have at least one person in the audience ask me this question—and the question
was: If Cambodians were so reluctant to talk, if Cambodians didn’t want to tell
their story, why would you push them? And I take these questions very seriously,
because it brings up an issue that every person who wants to be of service to do
some good in the world to consider. Am I giving this person what they need or
what I want to give them? You know, it’s the kind of criticism that’s leveled
against international aid and development organizations constantly. You know,
why should I try to change or transform this behavior in Cambodians if it’s their
only coping mechanism? And the larger question is, you know, what does it take
for both a country and individual to heal from something like genocide?
402

Although Poeuv’s response affirms that she understands the question (critique), she
ultimately fails to provide an answer. Explaining that she “take[s] this criticism very
seriously [and had] recently read a few things that suggested to [her] … to be careful
about imposing our own cultural values about expressions onto Cambodians that may be
in an inappropriate way,” she concludes:
So through my work in New Year Baby and Khmer Legacies, I’m really
promoting the idea that telling your story or uncovering your parents’ story can
open the door for healing. And as I mentioned, the most common criticism of this
work is that Cambodians really just want to forget about what happened to
them—who am I to tell them that they should speak out?
403

And yet this may appear as disingenuous, considering efforts to gather Cambodian
survivor testimony in ways problematized continue to move forward. As discussed in
Chapter 3, a great amount of institutional support and funding have gone to US state-
sponsored organizations conducting research on the Khmer Rouge. Chapter 3 features the
Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-CAM), a Cambodia-based and Cambodian-

402
Socheata Poeuv, “Untitled Lecture,” presentation at Babson College (Boston, Massachusetts, April
2009), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4MIDJpMPXM.
403
Ibid.
179
maintained mass archival project initially housed under Yale University’s Cambodian
Genocide Program. Without a critical ethnic studies lens, projects such as these
ultimately propagate US imperial and military interests. New Year Baby is a significant
and important cultural production to examine because of its affiliation with Yale
University’s Cambodian Genocide Program, and for its stated commitment to contribute
testimonies gathered from Cambodian refugee communities for the UN Khmer Rouge
tribunal. Thus Poeuv’s work extends beyond the 80-minute documentary film—her
nonprofit organization Khmer Legacies encourages members of the younger generation to
gather testimonies from Khmer Rouge survivors, which are to be donated to and housed
under Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program, a project that aims to collect
information about the Khmer Rouge regime, an anti-US imperialist revolutionary
organization.
Poeuv’s inspiration to create Khmer Legacies came from the USC Shoah
Foundation’s model, an archive of 54,000 video testimonies from Holocaust survivors
around the world. In April of 2006, Poeuv met with three staff members from the USC
Shoah Foundation. She states, “I wanted to learn everything I could about their process
with a mind toward developing a project modeled after Shoah to archive videotape [sic]
testimonies from Khmer Rouge survivors.”
404
Like the USC Shoah Foundation, Poeuv
believes a similar project for Khmer Rouge survivors could help in three distinct ways.
First, it would open the door for healing for survivors by “allowing” them to share their
stories for the first time. Second, addressing her concern that the younger generation of
Cambodians and Cambodian Americans don’t understand where they came from and

404
Socheata Poeuv, “An Honor in Los Angeles,” (blog), December 5, 2008, http://socheatapoeuv.com/an-
honor-in-los-angeles/.
180
what their family legacies are, a project such as this would bridge the cultural divide
between the survivor generation and the younger generation. Third, stories collected from
survivors could be used as educational tools to build awareness about what happened in
Cambodia. She states, “While my short-term mission has been to preserve the testimonies
of survivors and the history of Khmer Rouge atrocities, my long-term goal is to add the
voices of Cambodians to the collective voice of communities speaking out against
genocide.”
405
That Poeuv’s work (she was also appointed US State Department Cultural
Ambassador to Cambodia in 2010) is aligned with and used to support a “necessarily
incomplete”
406
UN tribunal to prosecute Khmer Rouge leaders, and the USC Shoah
Foundation which aspires to be the world’s authority on what constitutes genocide, is yet
another reason to examine the political implications of New Year Baby and the
message(s) it espouses.

Cambodian American Nonmemory and Silence As a Condition of Possibility

In “The Value of Silence,” David L. Eng argues that silence is “not the opposite
of speech but, indeed, its very condition of possibility, the precondition of knowing and
meaning.”
407
In the aftermath of the World Trade Center’s collapse, Eng observed New
York City was “utterly silent.”
408
Struck not only by an “inescapable silence”
409
of
homemade posters for missing persons, he also noted a “complete silence”
410
of the
crowds of people who gathered around public shrines for the missing and presumably
dead. New York City’s moment of silence quickly dissipated, however, giving way to

405
Ibid.
406
Schlund-Vials, 15.
407
David L. Eng, “The Value of Silence,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (Mar 2002): 86.
408
Ibid., 85.
409
Ibid.
410
Ibid.
181
“incessant and increasing noise,” perhaps the noise of everyday life resuming in one of
the nation’s largest metropolitan cities. “In this mute space, the shock of trauma slowly
transforms into the reality of loss, and in this regard, silence might be considered that
moment before—that liminal space from which—loss is expropriated into its symbolic
meaning.”
411
The assertion that silence is not antithetical to speech but rather, is what
precedes the act of speaking and the production of narratives is fundamental to the work
that this (and the previous chapter of this dissertation) attempt to do.
I have discussed in this chapter and the previous the Cambodian “silent past”
412
as
a site of contestation and ideological struggle where histories are written, and nary are
they apolitical or objective. The term and concept of “survivor silence” appears to have
been widely accepted without question, seemingly without considering the possibility
that perhaps they are not silent but rather have been silenced. What I have discussed in
this chapter and the previous pertains to the construction of the Cambodians as
American—the “Cambodian American”—origin story, and the consistent and persistent
circulation of this origin story within the nation, meant to inscribe and reinforce social
roles for Cambodians in the US in the American imaginary. By rendering the survivor
population silent, which contains pockets of refugees who possess “the potential to upset
the well-worn narrative of ‘rescue and liberation’ in US history and to refocus attention
on the troubling record of US military aggression,”
413
the proliferation of other narratives
to abound and reach prominence becomes more possible and, which occurs through the
postwar/second generation while playing into the American gaze.

411
Ibid., 86.
412
Ibid., 88.
413
Yen Le Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in US
Scholarship,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1-2 (2006): 421.
182
Multiple instances throughout Poeuv’s New Year Baby for example, remind the
viewer of the filmmaker’s unmistakably American position. Introducing viewers to her
parents, she comments on their “strange” behavior. The viewer is positioned for
bemusement as she seemingly exposes her father for using a butcher knife to trim unruly
branches off trees, for watching non-stop Khmer karaoke music videos, shirtless and thus
scantily clad, and as opposed to, I suppose, re-runs of Roseanne or Married With
Children; viewers are shown footage of Poeuv’s mother cleaning fresh fish not on the
countertop (surely she does not purchase already clean frozen fillets from the chain
supermarket) but on the floor, atop a quintessentially Cambodian round wooden chopping
block placed on layers of old newspaper. But for whom is this behavior considered
strange? Do not Americans hang taxidermied heads of hunted animals on the walls inside
their own homes? Do not Americans participate in annual national college campus
traditions like the Underwear Run, in which students of all genders streak through
campus wearing only their underwear, for no clear reason? Are these not strange
behaviors? What about the practice of celebrating (the attempted and ongoing) genocide
of indigenous people every 4
th
Thursday of each November? Or holding people, elderly
and youth, in solitary confinement for 23 hours out of the day? What about those
behaviors?
The narrative espoused by Poeuv’s documentary film gives shape to what some
have called Cambodian American “postmemory.” As Khatharya Um points out, and
which I have also pointed out, “It is not uncommon to hear young Cambodian Americans
say that while they may learn of the Khmer Rouge atrocities from their college courses or
the media, their parents have never spoken directly about the deaths and disappearances
183
in their own families.”
414
She highlights Poeuv’s New Year Baby as one example in
which a young Cambodian American, armed only with postmemory, is motivated to
break the culture of silence. For Poeuv, there were images and behaviors that belied a
spectacular past but which she believes she never had direct access to.
The concept of “postmemory,” coined by Marianne Hirsch, has been prominent
not only in the field of Holocaust studies but beyond. Applied far beyond the context of
the Holocaust, others have utilized the framework in research concerning the Khmer
Rouge, the Dirty War in Argentina, or Rwanda, for example. In the field of Cambodian
refugee and Cambodian American studies, indeed the term has been applied widely to
describe the “intergenerational transmission of trauma.” In tension with the argument that
Cambodian survivors have maintained a deathly silence about their experiences under the
Khmer Rouge regime and within the larger Vietnam War, the concept of postmemory
holds that it is possible for a postwar generation to bear relationship and connection to the
survivor generation and their experiences without having experienced those events
themselves. I do not disagree with this, but I find Hirsch’s definition, which explains
postmemory as “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic
experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so
deeply as to constitute memories in their own right”
415
troubling for its assertion that we
who have not experienced the traumatic experience in question might lay claim to
ownership of it, and/or, that kinship to whatever traumatic experience in question is
required to fight for social justice.

414
Khatharya Um, From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Cambodian
Diaspora (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015): 226.
415
Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 103.
184
Relatedly, in an email seeking financial contributions and donations to the USC
Shoah Foundation, a USC Shoah Foundation intern told the story of his journey to the
work of collecting testimony from survivors. He wrote:
Just a few weeks after my Bar Mitzvah, I asked my great-grandfather Tony if he
would tell me about his experience in the Holocaust. After a lifetime of silence on
the matter, he finally agreed. Over the course of an afternoon, my life
permanently changed. My great-grandfather spoke of losing most of his family,
joining an underground resistance movement in Budapest and rescuing the love of
his life, my great-grandmother Susan. When he passed away months later, I
feared that, in spite of our connection, I had forever lost the opportunity to better
understand his experience and the story of my family’s survival.
416

While “postmemory” as described by Hirsch cannot be applied to each and every
descendant of Holocaust survivors, or even Cambodian or Rwandan survivors, the fact
remains that the Holocaust is one of if not the best documented and thus perhaps best
known event in world history. The USC Shoah Foundation now holds 54,000 audiovisual
testimonies, with multiple copies, in multiple forms, in multiple high-security vaults
across the country. Explaining how his academic experiences and coursework at USC led
him to the Shoah Foundation’s archive, the student intern appealed to the reader by
demonstrating to potential donors the importance of testimony, for cultural and national
identity, and what their contributions might make possible. The student intern further
appealed to the reader by demonstrating the effectiveness and reach of the archive: upon
searching through the Shoah Foundation’s 54,000 testimonies, he came across some
“referencing the events and stories [his] great-grandfather shared with [him], including
some that mentioned him [his great-grandfather] by name.”
417
Despite pointing out that
his grandfather maintained a “lifetime of silence on the matter,” this student’s discovery
of testimonies within the archive that make actual references to his great-grandfather

416
USC Shoah Foundation, e-mail message to author, December 6, 2016.
417
Ibid.
185
must have been startling if not illuminant of the existence of a community, even if
exclusive, that actively maintains the collective and individual memories of their
experiences. For me, this compels a shift in our perception in the so-called issue of
silence—perhaps a reframing of “my parents never talk about the war” to “my parents
never talk about the war with me/us,” or, even “We have not been paying attention.”
There are others who do not rely on a Holocaust-centric concept of postmemory
to describe the transmission of trauma. Grace Cho’s study on the effects of war on the
psyche of Koreans in Korea and the diaspora draws directly from Nicolas Abraham and
Maria Torok’s theory of “psychic concealment” and “transgenerational haunting” which
was based on their work with adult children of Holocaust survivors in the 1960s.
418
Cho’s
work is also informed by Avery Gordon’s concept of the haunting, ghostly figure; Cho
offers the figure of the yanggongju (often translated in pejorative terms; i.e. a “whore” or
“prostitute” who exists solely to serve sexually or domestically white American soldiers)
to call attention to people and events whom or which have been forgotten, or erased. In
addition, she does so to de-stigmatize the terms of their lives, their existence. In ways
similar to Hirsch, Abraham and Torok’s theory posits that repressed secrets are passed
down through generations through encryption. They state, “The phantom which returns to
haunt bears witness to the existence of the dead buried within the other (emphasis in
original).”
419
In Cho’s interpretation, this means that traumas do not die out with the

418
Grace Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 11; Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel:
Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994).
419
Abraham and Torok, 175; cited in Cho, 6.
186
persons who experienced them; rather it takes on a life of its own, emerging from the
spaces where secrets are concealed.”
420

Elaborating further on the relationship of children to their parents’ trauma, Hirsch
argues that postmemory is “powerful … precisely because its connection to its object or
source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and
creation.”
421
It is “the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that
preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the
previous generation, [and] shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor
recreated.”
422
Whereas Hirsch asserts that traumatic events that have passed may neither
be understood nor recreated, I posit that many traumatic events such as ones that have
passed (forms of slavery, conquest and colonialism, genocide, historic wars) continue to
exist in the world today. It is from here that I wish to trace backwards the proliferation of
US-centered Cambodian American narratives to their respective moment or space of
silence. If these narratives, and the “mania of nationalism,” which Eng describes as “the
externalization of a nation’s grief,” to which I would add guilt, are made possible by the
condition of silence, might we be able to demand, or write, by tracing current
understandings of our selves and the world to silence, “another story, another history?”
423

The answer is yes, and “nonmemory” makes this possible. To admit that it is possible for
us not to know the details of the most significant events to happen to our predecessors,
but remain informed nonetheless, or that it is okay not to know anything at all but still

420
Cho, 6.
421
Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 662.
422
Ibid., 659.
423
Eng, “The Value of Silence,” 94.
187
feel ethically and compassionately obliged to human rights around the world—this is the
condition of possibility, “the precondition of knowing and of meaning.”
424

The “post” in postmemory can be understood in (at least) two ways. In one
reading, “post” refers to that which comes after an event or thing. In another reading,
“post” refers to something that has successfully registered, as in a published post. Taken
in this light, postmemory can be understood as a memory that may or may not be true but
passes, is registered, and is widely accepted, as official (national) narrative. I thus offer
the term “nonmemory”; the “non” in nonmemory is intended to describe an absence,
perhaps a false or incomplete narrative taken as a whole truth, or perhaps to state a
refusal to participate in nation-building efforts based on strategically constructed
narratives. Nonmemory can be understood as the refusal to perform the act of
remembering histories of colonial nations at the expense of colonized populations. While
second-generation Cambodian Americans’ relationship to the survivor generation can at
times be described as postmemory, it is also true that there are moments when our lack of
connection to the survivor generation constitutes a nonmemory.
Speaking from my own experience and as a member of the postwar generation, I
do not have memories of the Khmer Rouge regime or the bombing that came before it. I
was not there, and I do not believe I can even begin to imagine life during or before the
Khmer Rouge regime. When I visited with my parents their labor camp in Battambang, in
Cambodia’s northern region, I felt confusion and a yearning to grasp at something that
was no longer there. My mother wanted to leave shortly after we arrived, even though it
took almost ten hours to reach the site. She said she would wait in the van while I
surveyed the site, striving to imagine the landscape full of black-clad Cambodians,

424
Ibid., 86.
188
hunched over from the baskets of dirt hanging from their shoulders and backs, working
like ants underneath the tropical sun. For all I tried, I was unable to bring the image to
life. I do not and likely, hopefully, will never know what it was like to move dirt and
build a canal using only human power, without adequate food, or to run for cover from
bombs, or to have no choice but to use as drinking and cooking water the same water in
which piles of your countrymen have been dumped to avoid the labor of a proper burial. I
have never seen dead bodies by the hundreds piled alongside the road, while recognizing
a few faces among them. I have never had to rock my baby sister-in-law to her death,
only to see Vietnamese soldiers defeat the Khmer Rouge regime just one week later. I
have never had to see my sons blown up by a bomb, after having reached the alleged
safety of the Thai refugee camps.
However, I do know that those events, for those who experienced them directly,
have and continue to shape them for long after the war ended—in the ways they live their
lives, how they interact with each other, their loved ones, with outsiders, and the
decisions they make. Never waste food. Always be prepared for an emergency. Your
body and your life are the most important things to preserve. Know the difference
between what you need and what you want. Know how to take care of yourself. Take
care of others, if you can. Be smart. Above all, do what is right and be a good person.
When I was growing up, these were values that were ingrained in us. I don’t believe I can
claim my parents’ memories as my own—but at the same time, I have my own memories
of growing up in the aftermath of war. That is enough to work with. I have memories of
watching people weep, of people becoming distant and dissociated in moments of crisis,
of people lashing out in anger. These memories I can claim as my own. While I was not
189
there in Cambodia, I have grown up in Los Angeles, a city with its own sociopolitical
particularities. I’ve witnessed and in some cases experienced firsthand the impacts of
social and economic inequality, of racist state violence, of martial law, of the city in
flames, with smoke billowing, military aircraft hovering menacingly above.
My point is that I do not feel that my life was overshadowed or overwhelmed by
the events of my parents’ lives, as Hirsch describes. My parents were among those who
rarely talked about the war, though for multiple and various reasons, ranging from being
too busy working in menial labor to simply not wanting to. They had moved on with their
lives and were struggling to survive—in America. This is where the concept of
postmemory as applied to the Cambodian experience falters. The concept of postmemory
posits that the second generation is overwhelmed by a plethora or overwhelming
abundance of narratives (photographs, images, behaviors) as imposed onto them by the
survivor generation. Unlike the experiences of descendants of Holocaust survivors, the
lives of the Cambodian postwar generation was not, I contend, “dominated by narratives
that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the
previous generation…”
425
For a period of time when I was growing up, it was difficult to
encounter a young person outside of my own community who had even heard of
Cambodia and Cambodians. In my conceptualization of nonmemory, I wish not to
highlight the alleged secondary effects of a survivor generation that has not adequately or
fully grieved for its own traumas but rather, the desire of the second generation to know
and to achieve that information at all costs, even if it means accosting survivors to
acquire that information.

425
Hirsch, “Past Lives,” 659.
190
Writing about Vietnamese refugees in the US, Yen Le Espiritu argues that these
perceived absences—the silences—enable the popular representation of Vietnamese
refugees as “grateful beneficiar[ies] of the U.S. ‘gift of freedom.’”
426
Also drawing from
Avery Gordon’s work on haunting, Espiritu argues that an engagement in war and
refugee studies requires looking for “the things that are barely there and to listen to
‘fragmentary testimonies, to barely distinguishable testimonies, to testimonies that never
reach us’—that is, to write ghost stories.”
427
Ghost stories are the stories we do not see
and the ones we do not hear about, but are there, lurking right before us, nonetheless. The
“endings that are not over”
428
resonate deeply in this chapter.
For many Cambodians, silence was a strategy for survival. Given the dire
conditions many Cambodian refugees encountered and continue to confront today,
perhaps a more productive discussion might emerge from considering the continuities of
war and warfare across time and geographic distance—as opposed to treating war and
trauma as a thing of the past. In his memoir, the doctor-turned-actor Haing S. Ngor
recalls being beaten by Khmer Rouge soldiers. He remembers what his father advised
him in order to avoid being taken away again.

When you were a young boy you were very hothearted. Since meeting Huoy you
have become less so, but you are still too angry underneath. You must cool your
heart even more. Keep your emotions under control, so they will not show on
your face. You have fooled many people but not everybody. If you were as smart
as you think you are, [the soldiers] would not keep taking you away.
429

426
Ibid., 2. and Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2012).
427
Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2014), 20.
428
Yen Le Espiritu, “Thirty Years AfterWARd: The Endings That Are Not Over,” in 30 Years AfterWARd:
Vietnamese Americans & U.S. Empire, eds. Yen Le Espiritu and Nguyen-Vo, Thu-Huong (Los Angeles:
UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2005), xiii.
429
Haing S. Ngor with Roger Warner, Survival in the Killing Fields (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers,
1987), 272.
191

Ngor’s response demonstrates he understood he had to outsmart the powers that held
control over his life. He explains:
My thoughts were so dark and gruesome that I never would have mentioned them
to anybody, but my father guessed them. And he was right again. It was more
important to avoid future suffering than to take revenge for the past. And to avoid
more suffering I was going to have to become a better actor than I had been
before. I was going to have to control and conceal my emotions.
430

Expectedly, examples abound in New Year Baby as well. Unlike the majority of segments
where both parents are seated (seemingly reluctantly) side-by-side for a standard talking-
head-style interview, two scenes included in the final cut were shot in the vehicle as their
family traveled about the country. Rather than sit formally in front of a camera and
respond to scripted questions posed by their daughter, in these scenes Ma and Pa speak
with more ease and, to an extent, more freely. Through whispers and uninhibited
laughter, Ma and Pa skillfully avoid answering their questions directly, instead skirting
around the question. From a scene in their rented van, Poeuv asks her parents to explain
to her how they survived the regime. “Tell me why you believe you survived the Khmer
Rouge when other people died?” With an earned braggadocio, Ma retorts, through
laughter, “This is my skill. I have good skill.” Pa contributes to the response by
elaborating, “The person who survives, does not die.” Ma corroborates this statement by
explaining that Pa did not die so therefore he survived. “The reason he [Pa] survive—
because he not die.” Aware that her parents are teasing her, Poeuv playfully exclaims,
“That’s not a good answer! Expand on that.” She prods for them to elaborate further. Pa
obliges, and explains:

430
Ibid.
192
Pa: You have to think ahead. Don’t be too daring, don’t be too scared. Take the
middle road. That means, when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go—but think
first.
Ma: He always—if there’s danger, let someone else go first. He stay “in the
middle road.” That’s Ba.
Poeuv: Follow the pack.

Without divulging details or giving in to perhaps voyeuristic demands for gory and
sensational stories, Pa passes on experiential wisdom and hones in on strategy instead.
Yet Poeuv’s response, “Follow the pack,” though intended to demonstrate she understood
the message behind Pa’s words, failed to grasp fully what her parents wished to impart.
Pa did not follow the pack. Instead he was keen to avoid being a part of the pack—
holding as most important the ability to assess and understand a situation and act
accordingly, and swiftly, and with a heightened sense of awareness. Their initial
responses—that Ma survived because this was “her skill” and that Pa survived because he
didn’t die—capture at once something simultaneously mundane and spectacular: that they
did not die, and to treat their survival as no big deal; more specifically, as an everyday act
not unique to their lives nor their part of the world.
Living under the intrusive eyes and ears of Khmer Rouge cadre, Cambodians
devised creative methods of communication to avoid unwanted deadly attention from
soldiers. People were conditioned to believe “Angkar [“The Organization”] has [the
many] eyes of a pineapple,
“431
one of the most valuable idioms to emerge from that time
period was, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter, “plant a kapok tree.” And yet
another version of the saying goes, “Angkar has the many eyes of a pineapple, but none
of them has an iris.”
432
The initial slogan was meant to instill fear and paranoia; the

431
Locard, Pol Pot’s Little Red Book, 112.
432
Ibid.
193
second, on the other hand, appears to subvert the initial. Henri Locard’s reading of the
phrase “plant a kapok tree” corroborates the others. He writes:
This slogan simply says, “you should know when to hold your tongue.” For the
“17 April” especially, this was essential, if they did not wish to draw the
authorities’ attention to themselves. Moreover, they had to know how to hide their
past, especially if they had been neither farmers nor simple workmen. Some, in
fact, owed their very survival to the fact that they had feigned muteness.
433

Those who lived through the regime understood they had to “mind their own business” to
avoid being killed. This, however, did not mean people became wholly passive subjects
who simply did as they were told, who lost the capability to feel sadness, fear, or rage at
events unfolding around them. When my mother shares her memories of the war, she
recounts how she had to act as though she had no eyes, no ears, and no mouth when
soldiers were in sight or within earshot. When soldiers were absent, however, the will to
survive quickly surmounted and restored what had been incapacitated. This was not true
for everyone, evidenced by the fact that approximately two million Cambodians perished
under the regime—the majority of whom died not by political execution but from a
combination of hunger, illness, and hard labor. Against popular representations of
Cambodians as an abject, mentally bereft people, as passive victims, I imagine what
strength, courage, and selflessness it takes for one to forgo a meal so that young children
may eat, or to sacrifice oneself so that one’s family may be safe.
434
When I think of
Cambodians of that generation, the image of the forlorn skeletal figure with short-
cropped hair and black pajamas is not what first comes to mind. Rather I think of those

433
Ibid., 115.
434
Chanrithy Him speaks about this in her memoir When Broken Glass Floats, as do Socheata Poeuv’s
sisters when being interviewed in New Year Baby. Numerous survivors have discussed the same or similar
experiences.
194
who risked their own lives and put themselves in harm’s way to protect another, to feed
another, to help another, and who continue to do so, long after the regime’s end.
Cambodian survivor Vaddey Ratner wrote in her New York Times bestselling
novel In the Shadow of the Banyan, “In the end only the deaf, the dumb, and the mute
would survive.”
435
Despite my critique of New Year Baby, a redemptive moment for me
comes through via one of the most compelling moments in the film. Early on in the film,
we watch as Poeuv’s parents repeatedly disengage with the film’s aim. We are led to
believe that they are behaving as usual—avoiding conversation about their experiences
under the Khmer Rouge regime. My reading of these moments however flips in a way
that interpretation. It is not Ma and Pa who are under scrutiny, but the viewer. Several
sequences show Ma and/or Pa peering questioningly into the camera lens. They
comment: Why do you keep recording me? Why does she keep following us? Day after
day—it never stops.
Interestingly, and I’d like to think this was intentionally included, just six minutes
into the film, viewers are introduced to Ma and Pa. Seated beside each other rather
awkwardly, Pa fidgets and readjusts himself as Ma sits motionlessly, occasionally
throwing a knowing smirk at the camera. Poeuv is the interviewer. Hinting at the
storyline to come (their forced marriage), Poeuv’s first question is directed to her mother.
“What do you like about Pa?” Her mother gives the camera a “look” and replies, “[What]
I like about Pa? When he not talking” [sic]. Pa chuckles, and retorts, “When talking, not
like?” By this point Ma is suppressing her laughter. Taking her glance off her daughter,
Ma occasionally looks directly into the camera. “Yeah,” she answers, confirming what

435
Vaddey Ratner, In the Shadow of the Banyan (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2012), 277.

195
she had already said. Poeuv requires clarification, and asks, “What do you mean?” Her
mother explains, “He’s a good listener.” At this, Pa lets out a hearty laugh, while Ma
shifts her tone, becoming more serious. She is aware she has our attention. In a slightly
solemn manner, she repeats, “He’s a good listener.” This statement should not be taken at
face value. It should be taken as a riddle.

History as Riddle

When Syria fell to rebel forces in late 2016, footage of Syrian civilians fleeing the
upheaval flashed across television, computer, and cell phone screens all around the
world. These refugees compelled sympathy from some, empathy from many, and
opposition from others. In the footage, images and videos (recorded and live) showed
Syrian refugees, faces filled with desperation, grief, fear, anger. They showed Syrian
refugees aboard rickety wooden boats inadequate for the weight they carried across the
ocean. An image of a child, five years old, who died on the journey, circulated widely.
Shortly thereafter, progressive media set to work creating short video commercials
featuring the refugees who became a part of the US nation over four decades ago. In a
number of these videos and public posts, Vietnamese Americans commented on the
likenesses and parallels of their war and this war. For many of them, the images coming
out of Syria were so striking as to trigger specific memories over forty years old. The
videos aimed to highlight the continuities of the US's involvement in imperial wars and
draw connections between populations similarly impacted by imperial and colonial
powers. Even before that, in 2006, when the US was bombing Baghdad, I remember
coming home to any mother standing hushed and small before the television. In my
regular-pitch, I began to speak when she interrupted me with, "Shhh." With a demeanor I
196
will never forget--my mother was in my memory and incredibly emotionally stable and
strong person, able to withstand the most ridiculous of fragile masculinities and greedy
bosses drunk with power--she whispered, very carefully, "This," she said, "this." She
explained that this war was just like her war, and then she had a moment. The next couple
hours of the night proceeded with as much calm and care as possible. Our voices were
gentle with each other. We were kind and respectful.
The Khmer Rouge risk for us, especially those of us in the US, is zero. But the
risks of the police, the immigration office, the welfare office, or even the federal
government, for many Cambodians and other Southeast Asians in the US are still
great. My parents had very little food to eat during the Khmer Rouge but also before it as
well. Both came from working families in small towns outside the country's busy capital.
My mother often comments on how the labor coerced during the regime was relatively
easier for people of the working class who were accustomed to toiling for long hours. But
my mother also told me that even after landing in the US, there was still very little to eat.
When social services helped my parents enroll in beginners' English-language courses at
Evans Adult School on Sunset Blvd, my parents had been living in a two-bedroom
apartment with my father's sister and her husband. Each couple had a room and they split
their rent of $400. Even with rent amounting to $200 per month, their meager welfare
checks were not enough. They were still responsible to their family still in the Thai
refugee camps. After everything, they were only able to afford a small pouch of room
temperature Jasmine rice, no meat, no vegetables. Nevertheless she was grateful to go to
school, something she was not afforded in Cambodia. And she was hopeful for the
opportunities that would come, though most never came. Nearing 60, my mother has
197
performed menial labor in the US for as long as I've been alive, earning as little as one
thousand dollars a month for double, sometimes triple overtime, in the 1990s to as much
as eighteen hundred dollars a month plus health benefits, finally, in 2017, for thirty five
hours a week. Capitalism--and the US aid a capitalist country--has its pros and cons. The
pros occur more often for those who have power, inherited wealth, all the right makings.
The cons happen, relentlessly, to those without the means to their own production. It can
be said that the only means to production within them takes the form of self-autonomy
and dignity. That alone is formula for fearlessness.
At the time of the US’s bombing of Baghdad, I was a master's student in the
Asian American Studies program at UCLA. While finishing this dissertation, the US was
bombing Syria. In 2006, I had been researching with frustration critical works on the
Cambodian refugee experience. Then, just ten years ago, those works were difficult to
find. Now there is a field and it is fast growing, but even now I struggle to find and piece
together crucial details that might illuminate a clearer understanding of my parents’ war.
But I remember a realization I had, in 2006, after that night's experience with my mother,
that if I wanted to understand my parents’ war that maybe I could start by paying
attention to the war that was happening in Baghdad. Now, as I scour various news
sources, from mainstream, right-wing, leftist, progressive, to alternative ones, I see
striking parallels between what is reportedly happening in Syria and what we know or
think we know to have happened in Cambodia and surrounding nations over four decades
ago. We need not look far to see history.

198
A Ghost Story

I’m wide awake. Staring into nothing. My grandmother sleeps beside me. I can
feel her breath on the back of my neck. My head rests on the inside of her arm.
Like a mold, my body fits perfectly in hers. The afternoon sun shines on my face,
forming little beads of sweat on my forehead. A searing frustration rages through
my body, warm blood trickles down my arm, but I do not move.

My mind

becomes numb.

I curl up, wrap my arms around my head and shut my eyes tight… but the sounds
of my grandmother’s snoring eats away at the insides of my head.

I try to catch a rhythm, match my breath with hers and perhaps, lull myself to
sleep – but then, I notice, the photograph beside the bed.

I’m two years old. Maybe three. The camera catches me in mid-air, my mouth
stretched open in what seems to be a smile, my face frozen in a shriek you can
almost hear. Like a baby on a bungee cord, my little body seems to explode from
all the joy. My grandmother sits with her back to the camera and you can’t see
her face but it seems: my face is a reflection of hers.

When I was a kid, my grandmother took care of me while my parents were at
work. After she fed me lunch, we would take a nap. At her age, afternoon naps
were necessary. At my young age, I didn’t have a choice. I was too young to be
left alone while she slept.

But I never slept. Instead, I would watch her sleep. Listen for words, names
muttered in a dream story, watch for expressions on her face, expressions that
betrayed the silence of her slumber. If I was lucky, she would slip into the depths
of her dream, and I would quietly sneak away. But I was never lucky…

Any loud, sudden noise, or the faintest movement, would startle my grandmother
and jolt her, whether she was awake or asleep, and then… who knew what would
happen next?

One day, my father was in a bad mood. It was the usual. He came home and
slammed the door behind him. My grandmother lurched forward and snatched my
arm.

I told her it was okay. It was nothing. Just my dad. When the smoke from his
cigarette made its way down the hallway and began to fill our bedroom, I got up
to shut the bedroom door, slamming it even harder.
199

I remember that day.

We had just gotten back from the hospital that morning. My grandmother had
been admitted for something or other, and that morning we went back and
brought her home. She was in and out of the hospital so often that I lost track of
what it was she was in for. She hated the hospital. We all did, though for different
reasons. She hated being there because, in her words, she wanted to die at home.
My father resented having to be the one to take care of her. She wasn’t his
mother, after all, and he reminded us of that all the time. I hated the way how
everyone treated her. And my mother was caught in the middle of it all.

My father carried her up and down one and a half flights of stairs from our
second story apartment unit to the car. What began as providing support for her
while she moved slowly, at her own pace, turned into carrying her on his back or
throwing her over his shoulder so we could get her to the hospital. He hated it,
and we never heard the end of it.

That morning, my mother went to speak with the doctors at the hospital. They
agreed to release my grandmother. They were probably happy to get rid of us, or
her, at least. According to their diagnosis, she was demented. Crazy. They said
she was “difficult.” The day before, a loud commotion had erupted in their
usually quiet hallway. The commotion? My grandmother. She had been crying—
wailing—loudly. In their attempt to calm her down, they escalated the situation.

That afternoon, when I walked into my grandmother’s room, I found her wearing
some kind of fish net vest, her wrists tied to the railing on either side of the bed. A
nurse passing by entered the room and explained that my grandmother had been
put in restraints “for her own safety.” The doctor popped his head in the room.
Accustomed to speaking with young people in cases where adults could not speak
English, he told me: “Just leave her alone. She was screaming earlier. Very loud.
We’re gonna put her on medication. If she says anything, just ignore it.” As
quickly as they came, they left. I stood there in the room, in complete silence.

My grandmother broke the silence. She whispered to me, while struggling to free
her wrists from the rails: “Watch out for that doctor!”

Her eyes wide with fear and defiance, she repeated: “Watch out for that doctor!
He raped the nurse!”

“Ok. Ok. I’ll stay away from him.”

She began to calm down, and then she began to cry. Shaking her head from side
to side, she said, “Grandma wants to go home. Please, take me home.”

200
“I know, I know.” I undid the white straps around her wrist. I bent over to give
her a hug, and as I rested my face on her chest, I felt her body rise and fall with
each frantic breath of air.
I began to feel the temperature rise in my ears, the blood boiling in my face. My
sinuses began to plug, and the tears began to rush through my eyes. I wanted to
kill somebody, but instead, I lifted my grandmother’s shoulders, one at a time, to
take the stupid cheap fish net vest off. As I slid the vest from underneath her, her
hospital gown slipped to reveal the ridged scar on the side of her body.

I knew that scar well. I used to be scared of it, but that day, its meaning began to
change.

My grandmother often talked about that scar. When I was a kid, I would climb in
and out of her bed while she slept. Sometimes, she would get up to make me food,
thinking perhaps that food would calm my restlessness. Other times, she would
tell me stories about Cambodia as we lay together in the twin sized bed. Hearing
a crack in her voice, I would look up at her and see tears in her eyes. When I felt
her arm move to lift her shirt, as she always did, I would curl up and squeeze my
eyes shut. “You had another uncle,” she told me. “His name was Kieng. Same
age as you. Here, look,” as she tried to show me her scar. “How unfortunate, we
lived in Pol Pot for four years and then he died when we reached Thailand. If he
came to America with your mom and dad, he would still be alive.”

Her youngest child, her baby, whom my grandmother insisted stay with her as the
family had to split up. My mother wanted to take her baby brother with her and
my father, but my grandmother refused. He was only eight years old—killed by a
bomb when they were walking to the refugee camp on the Thailand border after
the Khmer Rouge regime was over. Times like that, it never failed. She always
ended up talking about him, and all the others that died. She’d start crying, and
then lift up her shirt and show me the scar where the mortar hit her because her
son was walking only a few yards ahead of her when he was killed, but I was
always too scared to look at it. And as she pulled me in close to her and held me, I
just curled up and squeezed my eyes shut.

Shut up! I wanted to scream. Shut up! We’re not fucking there anymore. We’re
here, far away from that fucking war that I don’t want to hear about anymore.
This isn’t Cambodia, it’s Los Angeles, and I’m not your son. There’s no
fucking war here, so just shut up and stop your fucking crying. Stop it! I wanted to
scream. But I don’t say any of those things, because she and I both knew. The war
never ended.

If this was someone’s idea of a bedtime story, it was a fucked up story and I didn’t
want to hear it. But I didn’t have a choice. When I asked my mom, what
happened, why did so many people die? Why does my grandmother cry all the
time? Why is my dad always so angry? For years, my mother’s only response was
to sigh and breathe. “We work so hard, nothing to eat, people dying.” And that’s
201
all she would say, never once taking her eyes off the piece of clothing she was
sewing. She told me that their home was bombed sometime in the 70s and there
was a lot of fighting, and they had to move. And then, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge
came to power, and four years later they found themselves in America. She tells
me that I have to study hard, because she didn’t. Because she couldn’t. So I try,
and when I told her that it was the US that bombed her home, she looks at me and
says, How you know? You weren’t there. But by this point in the story, my mother
seems to be too exhausted to continue.

My mother doesn’t speak much, but I can hear her. I can hear her scream inside
when all that comes from her is silence

A silence so loud you can feel it

Like the silence of military jet planes piercing blue skies, the silence of missiles
falling like raindrops, the silence of bombs and landmines waiting in the earth,
the silence of two million and more, dead the silence of those who lived and
those who came after

It is the silence of war

My mother doesn’t speak much but I can see her words. I can feel them. I can feel
them in my own body, as I run my fingers over my own scars. Love, hate, death. I
could feel them when I would sit and get lost in my own nightmares, a razorblade,
the dull tip of a paperclip, anything I could find, to cut away at the strings that
held on to fear, and allow that fear and the anger to release in a slow, warm
trickle of blood. Blood that would remind me that I would have my own scars, but
that I was still alive. I am still alive.

My grandmother passed away in 2006. To this day, the sound of a person snoring
still takes me back to that little bed in the corner, where I lay awake next to my
grandmother, watching her dreams, her nightmares. That little bed in the corner
where I wrapped my arms around my head and covered my ears, begging for
silence, a silence that would not bring any peace, and now, I stand here in
silence, my arms wide open, longing to hear her scream once again as I find my
way through my own nightmares, and find comfort not in the warm trickle of
blood but in the dark ink that fills these empty pages, ink that bleeds love, rage,
and life, and I embrace the pain and the sadness. In it I am reminded that I am
still alive.

I am comforted by the spirit of my grandmother, my father, all of the dead, and I
remember what it is like to be filled with joy, and love, and I hold on to it, because
they are not merely memories. They are real.

And though my grandmother sits with her back to the camera, and you can’t see
her face, it’s clear:
202

my face

is

a reflection

of hers

203
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Agents of War: Cambodian Refugees and the Containment of Radical Opposition provides a critical genealogy of the “refugee” that does not reinforce or reimpose normative understandings of citizenship and belonging but rather, traces it back to a history of global racialized warfare and imperialist state violence. Drawing on theories of racial formation and triangulation, this dissertation rejects hegemonic narratives that cast the refugee figure as “objects of rescue” and instead provides an analysis of ways the Cambodian refugee is implicated in the American racial order and racialized vis-à-vis Black, Brown, and indigenous subjects. I argue that the incorporation of the Cambodian refugee into the US body politic is an extension of ongoing efforts to discipline and contain radical opposition to a US nation-building project founded on racism, genocide, war, and the colonization of racialized bodies.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Chea, Jolie (author)

Core Title Agents of war: Cambodian refugees and the containment of radical opposition

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 07/21/2017

Defense Date 07/18/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cambodian,OAI-PMH Harvest,Race,racialization,Refugees,US empire

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Kondo, Dorinne K. (committee chair), Keeling, Kara (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member), Norindr, Panivong (committee member)

Creator Email jchea@usc.edu,joliechea@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-406879

Unique identifier UC11264062

Identifier etd-CheaJolie-5573.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-406879 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CheaJolie-5573.pdf

Dmrecord 406879

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Chea, Jolie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA