Download or read book Afterparties written by Anthony Veasna So and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE’S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK WINNER OF THE FERRO-GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBTQ FICTION Named a Best Book of the Year by: New York Times * NPR * Washington Post * LA Times * Kirkus Reviews * New York Public Library * Chicago Public Library * Harper’s Bazaar * TIME * Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air * Boston Globe* The Atlantic A vibrant story collection about Cambodian-American life—immersive and comic, yet unsparing—that offers profound insight into the intimacy of queer and immigrant communities Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian-Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family. A high school badminton coach and failing grocery store owner tries to relive his glory days by beating a rising star teenage player. Two drunken brothers attend a wedding afterparty and hatch a plan to expose their shady uncle’s snubbing of the bride and groom. A queer love affair sparks between an older tech entrepreneur trying to launch a “safe space” app and a disillusioned young teacher obsessed with Moby-Dick. And in the sweeping final story, a nine-year-old child learns that his mother survived a racist school shooter. The stories in Afterparties, “powered by So’s skill with the telling detail, are like beams of wry, affectionate light, falling from different directions on a complicated, struggling, beloved American community” (George Saunders).
Download or read book A Nail the Evening Hangs On written by Monica Sok and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her debut collection, Monica Sok uses poetry to reshape a family’s memory about the Khmer Rouge regime—memory that is both real and imagined—according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the poems examine the inheritance of the genocide and the profound struggles of searing grief and PTSD. Though the landscape of Cambodia is always present, it is the liminal space, the in-betweenness of diaspora, in which younger generations must reconcile their history and create new rituals. A Nail the Evening Hangs On seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility.
Download or read book Golden Bones written by Sichan Siv and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the United States battled the Communists of North Vietnam in the 1960s and '70s, the neighbouring country of Cambodia was attacked from within by dictator Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge imprisoned, enslaved, and murdered the educated and intellectual members of the population, resulting in the harrowing "killing fields"–rice paddies where the harvest yielded nothing but millions of skulls. Young Sichan Siv–a target since he was a university graduate–was told by his mother to run and "never give up hope!" Captured and put to work in a slave labor camp, Siv knew it was only a matter of time before he would be worked to death–or killed. With a daring escape from a logging truck and a desperate run for freedom through the jungle, including falling into a dreaded pungi pit, Siv finally came upon a colorfully dressed farmer who said, "Welcome to Thailand." He spent months teaching English in a refugee camp in Thailand while regaining his strength, eventually Siv was allowed entry into the United States. Upon his arrival in the U.S., Siv kept striving. Eventually rising to become a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Siv returned with great trepidation to the killing fields of Cambodia in 1992 as a senior representative of the U.S. government. It was an emotionally overwhelming visit.
Download or read book In The Shadow Of The Banyan written by Vaddey Ratner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning, powerful debut novel set against the backdrop of the Cambodian War, perfect for fans of Chris Cleave and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labour, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyanis testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience. 'In the Shadow of the Banyanis one of the most extraordinary and beautiful acts of storytelling I have ever encountered' Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand 'Ratner is a fearless writer, and the novel explores important themes such as power, the relationship between love and guilt, and class. Most remarkably, it depicts the lives of characters forced to live in extreme circumstances, and investigates how that changes them. To read In the Shadow of the Banyan is to be left with a profound sense of being witness to a tragedy of history' Guardian 'This is an extraordinary debut … as beautiful as it is heartbreaking' Mail on Sunday
Download or read book Braving a New World written by Marycarol Hopkins and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 1996-10-21 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ethnography, based on a five-year field study, presents a holistic view of a nearly invisible ethnic minority in the urban Midwest, Cambodian refugees. Hopkins begins with a brief look at Cambodian history and the reign which led these farmers to flee their homeland, and then presents an intimate portrait of ordinary family life and also of Buddhist ceremonial life. The book details their struggles to adjust in the face of the many barriers presented by American urban life, such as poverty, dangerous neighborhoods, and unemployment, and also by the conflict between their particular needs and American institutions such as schools, health care, law, and even the agencies intended to help them.
Download or read book Ma and Me written by Putsata Reang and published by MCD. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award. Finalist for the 2023 Lesbian Memoir/Biography Lambda Literary Award "A nuanced mediation on love, identity, and belonging. This story of survival radiates with resilience and hope." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) "This openhearted memoir . . . opens the door to include queer descendants of war survivors into the growing American library of love.” —Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show When Putsata Reang was eleven months old, her family fled war-torn Cambodia, spending twenty-three days on an overcrowded navy vessel before finding sanctuary at an American naval base in the Philippines. Holding what appeared to be a lifeless baby in her arms, Ma resisted the captain’s orders to throw her bundle overboard. Instead, on landing, Ma rushed her baby into the arms of American military nurses and doctors, who saved the child's life. “I had hope, just a little, you were still alive,” Ma would tell Put in an oft-repeated story that became family legend. Over the years, Put lived to please Ma and make her proud, hustling to repay her life debt by becoming the consummate good Cambodian daughter, working steadfastly by Ma’s side in the berry fields each summer and eventually building a successful career as an award-winning journalist. But Put's adoration and efforts are no match for Ma's expectations. When she comes out to Ma in her twenties, it's just a phase. When she fails to bring home a Khmer boyfriend, it's because she's not trying hard enough. When, at the age of forty, Put tells Ma she is finally getting married—to a woman—it breaks their bond in two. In her startling memoir, Reang explores the long legacy of inherited trauma and the crushing weight of cultural and filial duty. With rare clarity and lyric wisdom, Ma and Me is a stunning, deeply moving memoir about love, debt, and duty.
Download or read book Leaving the House of Ghosts written by Sarah Streed and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2010-06-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 17, 1975, after five years of civil war, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas invaded Cambodia's major cities and forced the residents on a mass exodus to the countryside. Their leader, Pol Pot, established a government based on terror to bring about his dream of an agrarian society where work was done by hand--without what he believed to be corruptive influences. By the time the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh and ended this brutal experiment in communism in 1979, an estimated two million Cambodians were dead and hundreds of thousands had begun to flee the country for refugee camps in Thailand. Survivors of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge now living in the Midwest tell their stories in this work. Many of them were children during that time, unable to comprehend exactly what was happening and why, but now able to reveal the trauma they experienced. Noeun Nor and Sinn Lok recollect being wrenched from their families and put into labor camps around the age of five. Prum Nath talks about her mother encouraging her to eat the last grains of her family's rice. Sokhary You remembers giving birth on a mountain without a doctor or hospital and using rusty scissors to cut the umbilical cord.
Download or read book Cambodian Dancer written by Daryn Reicherter and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 37 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dance is a means to tell stories across cultures and in The Cambodian Dancer: Sophany's Gift of Hope, we discover how it can also be used as a way to overcome immense pain and loss. Daryn Reicherter's moving story and Christy Hale's beautiful illustrations introduce us to Sophany Bay and show us how central dance was to her life. When she was forced to leave Cambodia, dance became the means for her to heal and help others connect with the culture. This is an important book that reminds us all that no matter what happens, we need to live. We need to dance. --award-winning author, John Coy"
Download or read book Unsettled written by Eric Tang and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by years of confinement to international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and ‘90s. Unsettled chronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty. Eric Tang tells the harrowing and inspiring stories of these refugees to make sense of how and why the displaced migrants have been resettled in the “hyperghetto.” He argues that refuge is never found, that rescue discourses mask a more profound urban reality characterized by racialized geographic enclosure, economic displacement and unrelenting poverty, and the criminalization of daily life. Unsettled views the hyperghetto as a site of extreme isolation, punishment, and confinement. The refugees remain captives in late-capitalist urban America. Tang ultimately asks: What does it mean for these Cambodians to resettle into this distinct time and space of slavery’s afterlife?
Download or read book I Survived the Killing Fields written by Kok-ung Seng and published by Seng Kok Ung. This book was released on 2011 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Never Fall Down written by Patricia McCormick and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This National Book Award nominee from two-time finalist Patricia McCormick is the unforgettable story of Arn Chorn-Pond, who defied the odds to survive the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 and the labor camps of the Khmer Rouge. Based on the true story of Cambodian advocate Arn Chorn-Pond, and authentically told from his point of view as a young boy, this is an achingly raw and powerful historical novel about a child of war who becomes a man of peace. It includes an author's note and acknowledgments from Arn Chorn-Pond himself. When soldiers arrive in his hometown, Arn is just a normal little boy. But after the soldiers march the entire population into the countryside, his life is changed forever. Arn is separated from his family and assigned to a labor camp: working in the rice paddies under a blazing sun, he sees the other children dying before his eyes. One day, the soldiers ask if any of the kids can play an instrument. Arn's never played a note in his life, but he volunteers. This decision will save his life, but it will pull him into the very center of what we know today as the Killing Fields. And just as the country is about to be liberated, Arn is handed a gun and forced to become a soldier. Supports the Common Core State Standards.
Download or read book Cambodian Buddhism in the United States written by Carol A. Mortland and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2017-07-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive anthropological description of the Khmer Buddhism practiced by Cambodian refugees in the United States over the past four decades. Cambodian Buddhism in the United States is the first comprehensive anthropological study of Khmer Buddhism as practiced by Khmer refugees in the United States. Based on research conducted at Khmer temples and sites throughout the country over a period of three and a half decades, Carol A. Mortland uses participant observation, open-ended interviews, life histories, and dialogues with Khmer monks and laypeople to explore the everyday practice of Khmer religion, including spirit beliefs and healing rituals. This ethnography is enriched and supplemented by the use of historical accounts, reports, memoirs, unpublished life histories, and family memorabilia painstakingly preserved by refugees. Mortland also traces the changes that Cambodians have made to religion as they struggle with the challenges of living in a new country, learning English, and supporting themselves. The beliefs and practices of Khmer Muslims and Khmer Christians in the United States are also reviewed.
Download or read book A Path of Stars written by Anne Sibley O'Brien and published by Charlesbridge. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A touching story of family, loss, and memory. Dara's grandmother, Lok Yeay, is full of stories about her life growing up in Cambodia, before she immigrated to the United States. Lok Yeay tells her granddaughter of the fruits and plants that grew there, and how her family would sit in their yard and watch the stars that glowed like fireflies. Lok Yeay tells Dara about her brother, Lok Ta, who is still in Cambodia, and how one day she will return with Dara and Dara's family to visit the place she still considers home. But when a phone call disrupts Lok Yeay's dream to see her brother again, Dara becomes determined to bring her grandmother back to a place of happiness. Anne Sibley O'Brien's dreamlike illustrations beautifully complement this fictional story based on real-life experiences. Back matter contains information about the admission of Cambodian refugees into the United States, specifically Maine, after soldiers forced them out of their homeland in the 1970s. An author's note and glossary are also included. A PATH OF STARS was originally developed for the New Mainers Book Project, part of the Maine Humanities Council's Born to Read program. The Project sponsors high-quality children's picture books created from the experiences of Maine's refugee communities, to preserve and present their cultural heritage and to promote their English language literacy.
Download or read book When Broken Glass Floats Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge written by Chanrithy Him and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001-04-17 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A gut-wrenching story told with honesty, restraint, and dignity." —Ha Jin, National Book Award-winning author of Waiting Chanrithy Him felt compelled to tell of surviving life under the Khmer Rouge in a way "worthy of the suffering which I endured as a child." In a mesmerizing story, Chanrithy Him vividly recounts her trek through the hell of the "killing fields." She gives us a child's-eye view of a Cambodia where rudimentary labor camps for both adults and children are the norm and modern technology no longer exists. Death becomes a companion in the camps, along with illness. Yet through the terror, the members of Chanrithy's family remain loyal to one another, and she and her siblings who survive will find redeemed lives in America. A Finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.
Download or read book Ethnic Origins written by Jeremy Hein and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2006-04-13 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Immigration studies have increasingly focused on how immigrant adaptation to their new homelands is influenced by the social structures in the sending society, particularly its economy. Less scholarly research has focused on the ways that the cultural make-up of immigrant homelands influences their adaptation to life in a new country. In Ethnic Origins, Jeremy Hein investigates the role of religion, family, and other cultural factors on immigrant incorporation into American society by comparing the experiences of two little-known immigrant groups living in four different American cities not commonly regarded as immigrant gateways. Ethnic Origins provides an in-depth look at Hmong and Khmer refugees—people who left Asia as a result of failed U.S. foreign policy in their countries. These groups share low socio-economic status, but are vastly different in their norms, values, and histories. Hein compares their experience in two small towns—Rochester, Minnesota and Eau Claire, Wisconsin—and in two big cities—Chicago and Milwaukee—and examines how each group adjusted to these different settings. The two groups encountered both community hospitality and narrow-minded hatred in the small towns, contrasting sharply with the cold anonymity of the urban pecking order in the larger cities. Hein finds that for each group, their ethnic background was more important in shaping adaptation patterns than the place in which they settled. Hein shows how, in both the cities and towns, the Hmong's sharply drawn ethnic boundaries and minority status in their native land left them with less affinity for U.S. citizenship or "Asian American" panethnicity than the Khmer, whose ethnic boundary is more porous. Their differing ethnic backgrounds also influenced their reactions to prejudice and discrimination. The Hmong, with a strong group identity, perceived greater social inequality and supported collective political action to redress wrongs more than the individualistic Khmer, who tended to view personal hardship as a solitary misfortune, rather than part of a larger-scale injustice. Examining two unique immigrant groups in communities where immigrants have not traditionally settled, Ethnic Origins vividly illustrates the factors that shape immigrants' response to American society and suggests a need to refine prevailing theories of immigration. Hein's book is at once a novel look at a little-known segment of America's melting pot and a significant contribution to research on Asian immigration to the United States. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology
Download or read book From the Land of Shadows written by Khatharya Um and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a century of mass atrocities, the Khmer Rouge regime marked Cambodia with one of the most extreme genocidal instances in human history. What emerged in the aftermath of the regime's collapse in 1979 was a nation fractured by death and dispersal. It is estimated that nearly one-fourth of the country's population perished from hard labor, disease, starvation, and executions. Another half million Cambodians fled their ancestral homeland, with over one hundred thousand finding refuge in America. From the Land of Shadows surveys the Cambodian diaspora and the struggle to understand and make meaning of this historical trauma. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with survivors across the United States as well as in France and Cambodia, Khatharya Um places these accounts in conversation with studies of comparative revolutions, totalitarianism, transnationalism, and memory works to illuminate the pathology of power as well as the impact of auto-genocide on individual and collective healing. Exploring the interstices of home and exile, forgetting and remembering, From the Land of Shadows follows the ways in which Cambodian individuals and communities seek to rebuild connections frayed by time, distance, and politics in the face of this injurious history.
Download or read book Exiled written by Katya Cengel and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2023-03 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of four Cambodian families as they confront deportation forty years after their resettlement in the United States. Katya Cengel weaves their remarkable stories together into a single moving narrative--one that reveals a disquieting cycle of violence, safety, and loss.
