Description: In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that Canada agreed to admit. Their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the prime minister shaking Troeung's father's hand and patting baby Y-Dang's head. Troeung became a literal poster child for the benevolence of the Canadian refugee project. She returns to this moment forty years later in her arresting memoir Landbridge, where she explores the tension between that public narrative of happy "arrival," and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to her family. In precise, beautiful prose, Troeung moves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son's illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Throughout this brilliant and astonishing book, Troeung looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence and dares to imagine a better future, with love.
Brief description: Y-Dang Troeung was a deeply loved mother, researcher, writer, and Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her first book, Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, explored the enduring impact of war, genocide and displacement. She co-directed the short film Easter Epic and organized the exhibition Remembering Cambodian Border Camps, 40 Years Later at Phnom Penh's Bophana Center;; and co-edited a special issue of Canadian Literature on 'Refugee Worldmaking'. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of forty-two.
Review Quotes: "Landbridge is a deeply moving memoir of love and loss after wars that are not ended, especially for those whose lives are indelibly marked by its injuries. The impact of a life in fragments--fragmented by war, death, trauma, and, finally, chemotherapy--is felt on every page as Y-Dang Troeung grapples with what it means to commit her memory of all these fragments to writing, for love of herself, others like her--Cambodian refugees--and her family, including her partner and son to whom she leaves this memoir."--Mimi Thi Nguyen, author of, The Promise of Beauty
"Landbridge is the most courageous act of love . . . a book that illuminates with laser-bright insight the duty of the 'survivor.' Y-Dang [Troeung]'s wisdom, stoicism, and brilliance survive in this masterpiece to console and guide generations to come."--Alice Pung, author of, One Hundred Days "Beautifully, elegiacally written."--Toronto Star "I know that I'm going to live with this book for the rest of my life, that it's always going to be a source of light, and also sorrow and illumination."--Madeleine Thien, Publishers Weekly