Refugee explores relationships to host countries and Canada in posthumous memoir
Landbridge: Life in Fragments by Y-Dang Troeung available now
Y-Dang Troeung was a writer, an academic and a beloved mother, wife, daughter and friend.
She was also a refugee.
Troeung first became a household name in Canada before her first birthday when her family arrived in Montreal in 1980 as part of the federal government's Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program, which allowed refugees to settle here with support and funding from private or joint government-private sponsorship.
Their country — Cambodia — had been gripped by civil war, U.S. bombs, and starvation under the communist Khmer Rouge. In 1979, Vietnam invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge, and the chaos that followed led to the death and displacement of millions of Cambodians.
Her family landed in Canada, where their arrival was marked with a ceremony at Parliament Hill and a meeting with Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Later in life, Troeung recounted the racism and assimilation her family faced as refugees in small-town Canada. She became an expert in transnational Asian and Asian North American studies and in critical refugee studies and critical disability studies. And she authored the book Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia in 2022.
Troeung died in 2022 at the age of 42 from pancreatic cancer.
Now, in a memoir published posthumously, Landbridge: Life in Fragments, she examines the relationship between refugees and their host countries.
Her husband, Christopher B. Patterson and her friend Madeline Thien spoke with North by Northwest about Troeung's life and work.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you meet Y-Dang?
Christopher: We actually met in Hong Kong. I was working in Nanjing in China as a professor at the time, and she was at City University of Hong Kong. and she was organizing a conference on fashion and fiction, and I was writing about video games.
And so she had kind of heard a little bit about me because we've been to a lot of the same conferences I've been and I heard quite a bit about her. We had been in the same room together quite often, but we just never actually met face to face. And as soon as we met, it was just all in from there.
Immediately, I saw a kind of companion. I used to tell her this all the time, too, that I really fell in love with her when I could see kind of beneath the surface as we just learned more about each other, read each other's work and went to conferences together. We travelled all around Asia together. We had a very romantic first couple of years together. Neither of us ever wanted to get married. We were both the people who would always say we're anti-marriage, just not for us kind of thing. As soon as we met, we changed our minds about a lot of those kinds of things.
Madeleine: I met her in 2011 in Calgary. I had just published a novel called Dogs at the Perimeter about the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide. I was a bit depressed. I think the years spent reading and thinking about it and trying my best to put that history to the page, I struggled a lot, and so a friend told me that there was someone she thought I should meet. Y-Dang and I met and had dinner, and as friendships go, I think it was love at first sight.
What can you tell me about the title Landbridge?
Christopher: It encapsulates this time period when the Vietnamese had invaded Cambodia and were very protective of the borders. In order to get food and survival goods into the country, Cambodians and refugees would form lines of people basically because they weren't allowed to bring cars in and out. They would just bring rice from the refugee camps and other spaces into the country and form this land bridge.
I think it works metaphorically throughout the book because when absolutely everything is working against you to survive, people rely on each other and have each other's backs. It's from her perspective, but it is very much a collective memoir in a lot of ways. She was always a believer in all the different types and ways of research and ways of knowing, not just reading about things, not just interviewing people, but actually being there and getting to know all the artists, the leaders in those spaces. I think the book itself is a kind of expression of letting the sparks fly in all directions in a sense, or gathering from every community around and trying to express that through one voice.
What was your impression when you first read the version of the manuscript that she sent you?
Madeleine: Shock.
I'd read pieces of her academic work, but this was something very different. She talks about in Landbridge how, she had difficulty between the academic path and this very personal connection to the stories that she was carrying, these things that people carry and this way that she had of wanting to gather all these pieces into not something that would make a whole, but something that would gesture towards this larger, more complex, ever-changing picture of this existence of her community and of our shared history.
She was passionate about the telling of one's own story. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Christopher: From very early on, her image has been circulated in Canadian media and around the world. She would call herself a kind of refugee poster child. There was a consistent kind of checking in on how the refugee daughter was doing.
Even in Hong Kong, her image was used quite widely when she started winning awards. She knew it was going to happen anyway, that her story was just going to be out there, but she wanted to have control over it. And having that control made writing this book actually a very joyful experience.
WATCH | In an archival interview, Troeung describes life as a refugee:
There is joy in the book. A lot of people ask me if she was depressed while writing it because there were some really sad moments. But from what I remember most of her writing of it, especially in the last couple of years, it brought her a lot of joy and security. She was able to narrate it in a way that wasn't just about the Canadian state or wasn't just about gratitude but also not letting go of those things. She never really tries to tell the reader what to think or what to do because every time her story gets taken up, it's usually done for a particular political or institutional purpose. What's beautiful about the way that she would always write, but she was never trying to have that purpose be the main point. She wanted to share stories and history and love.
What does it mean to be here talking about this book now?
Madeleine: I was just thinking that, actually, over the last few minutes. How I miss her. I wish it was Y-Dang here talking about her book.
Until the end, she really hoped that she would defy the odds that the prognosis was very severe. It was about a year she was given when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was only 41, I think, at the time of the diagnosis.
She made me feel like she was gonna defy the odds. Until the very end, I wanted to believe that, and I think that in the book, it's clear that she's holding both things at once, the eternal hope and the remarkable pragmatism and facing the shape of her life and using Landbridge to hold that shape and to help it be for us and for Kai, her son, and for Chris, who she loves so much that the ending would not be an ending. That's in the shape of this book.
It always circles back and continues within itself. There's something infinite about this book.
It is also a love letter, isn't it?
Christopher: She had an ability to kind of joke about anything and to bring like love and hope to anything, which held a lot of gravity, I think, for some people.
The one thing, though, that I feel like she had a very difficult time with after the diagnosis was the loss that she was going to represent to our son. She was an absolutely amazing mother, but that last year especially, she just wanted to make sure that she could leave things as well as possible for him. Writing down her thoughts and her love for him, and her regret in not being able to be there to watch him grow up was really just on her mind constantly, and the book gave her an outlet for that. And at the hospital, weeks before she passed, she was still working on the book and still leaving videos for him and things like that. And so it was the one thing that she always took very intimately, very seriously. It was how to make sure that he was OK and felt loved.
He does come to book launches and to things like that and memorials and just sees how powerful her work is, and I wish she could be here to see, if her spirit isn't here already, but be here to see the way that he receives it, because he really loves mommy, as he says every day.
How will you remember Y-Dang?
Madeleine: She is light. She made everything come alive. The gift of her friendship, I think, is one of the most precious gifts I ever received.
We are so lucky. We were the lucky ones.
With files from Belle Puri and North by Northwest