Reviews with content warning for War - Landbridge: life in fragments

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and everyone that contributed to the existence of this book for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review!

This was a shattering book that brought tears to my eyes multiple times. It was also a beautifully written account of a tragic story that many refugees have to go through. The journal-like structure, build upon entries represented by fragments of history, sayings and stories, letters to her son and images, creates a complete perspective on the life of the author blending with the horrors of the past. I liked how the book started with explaining the title through a definition, while towards the end it came back to it again through a story, like a cycle. I also felt that the poetic style brought even more depth to it.

I felt that going through a terrible illness and writing something like this for the close ones is an emotional, but wholesome and brave gift to leave behind, a chance to pour everything out. Hope that the author will rest in peace, she seemed to have amazing book ideas that I would have liked to check out if she got to write them.

I would like to wrap up the review with a quote from the book that I really appreciated because of its meaning. I feel that it is a beautiful manner to describe the way in which different people can connect and provide help and support in times of need, teaching us to always be considerate to each other:

"With only our bodies and our hearts, we build a bridge."

Content Warnings

introvertsbookclub's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

When writing about war it is so easy to get it wrong, and end up with something that feels overly sentimental in a cheap way, or as though experiences of war are being mined for story and used to draw out a reflection on the present day that somehow makes the past all worth it. But Y-Dang Troeung's writing is that rare example of someone who can investigate and reflect on war, trace its impact to the present and highlight the strength and resilience (but also luck) that was needed to survive, while still condemning the trauma that continues to reverberate from it.

Her writing is fractured into small pieces, moving between various points in the past and the present, and allows for the failure of memory and record-keeping to always provide dates and times and numbers of people, instead relying on lived experiences and the conflicting memories that do remain to tell a story that feels more human and more realistic. The Cambodian Genocide is not a part of history I was familiar with, but she was able to convey nuances of politics, contradict accepted retellings of the Genocide with more honest ones and share intimate stories from the time that were far more impactful and informative than a textbook ever could be. Her meditations on refugees and the performance of gratitude that is expected of them in host countries that are less than welcoming, was another strand of her writing that moved beyond the expected and the presumed to pose questions about the greatest crisis of our generation and ask why we still aren't treating immigrants and refugees as real people.

This was both a larger story of the Genocide, and the story of one family's survival of it. Her family carried a burden of pain that was still harming their lives decades later, both emotional and physical. Her love for her son and her imagining of his future was filled with the hope of freedom from historical and familial trauma, but when we as societies are so bad at reckoning with history and taking responsibility for it, is liberation for those who are considered collateral damage ever possible?

'Landbridge' is such as incredible piece of writing, born from a lifetime of questioning and thoughtfulness. It is another book that I think everyone should read, or at the very least anyone working in our governments.

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lbelow's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative sad medium-paced

4.75

This family history/memoir is visceral, all the more so when I realized that the author is dead. Written as an accounting of her parents' experience with the Khmer Rouge as well as her experiences as a refugee in Canada and her work returning her to Cambodia in search of answers to the past, from time to time these accounts also include letters to her son after she is diagnosed with terminal cancer. This account educated me about the genocide in Cambodia in the seventies, but it also moved me deeply as a body of work written to connect a child of refugees to his family and roots in Cambodia. Such a beautiful memoir, and one I certainly recommend!

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james1star's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for accepting me as a pre-publication reviewer of this book. I cannot wait till October for this to be in print!

Wow. This book was truly phenomenal and I feel privileged to have read Troeung’s story. From the preface to the final letter, every part is expertly curated, telling the reader so much about Cambodian history but also the author’s personal past, present and future. The subtitle ‘Life in Fragments’ perfectly encapsulates what the book is trying to do as it acts as part memoir, non-fiction, and personal conversations to her son for him to read in the future with many small ‘chapters’ that really are fragments. This term is the most apt as the narrative is somewhat linear telling the story of her parents and brothers in Cambodia during the war and Pol Pot genocide, escaping to Thailand where she was born, moving to Canada and trying to adapt to life in a new country facing these challenges, and then her more up to date life as an educator in universities, starting a family and dealing with a cancer diagnosis that led to her premature passing. Despite following this path in essence there are many times she backtracks and on the whole it’s very much a fragmented tale - this method of telling her (family’s) story I think was incredible because, like a prominent message Troeung shares throughout, the diluted culture and tormented history of Cambodians from this period has left many in the diaspora community feeling slightly fragmented too.

It’s a hard book to say I loved or enjoyed given the contents but what I didn’t gain pleasure in reading about, I enjoyed being educated in a topic I knew extremely little about and I fell in love with Y-Dang and her family. The balance of memoir and non-fiction is absolutely perfect, I learned so much but also was able to get to grips with the person behind the storyteller, it was truly a reading experience not like anything I’ve come across before. Another thing I loved is that Troeung doesn’t shy away from telling things like it is, she recognises the nuances that come with hindsight and a contemporary lens but can still articulate her point well. Like how ‘many tourists have gaped at the horrors of Pol Pot's Killing Fields, have shaken their heads in astonishment at the sheer brutality of this regime, but few have cared to see the horrors committed before and after Pol Pot's time: the military aid that flowed from China to the Khmer Rouge, the bombs that the United States dropped on Cambodia, the refugees who were turned back at the borders.’ On the topic of refugees, she makes it clear at the start she doesn’t speak for all, for all Cambodians or even her family but she pleads the case for better treatment and acceptance of those fleeing conflict regions in contemporary society, like Syria for example. When refugees settle in a new country there is a lot of expectation they should instantly be thankfully and graceful which an argument can be made but there is a lot of nuance in such situations given the many people one might’ve lost or had to leave behind, not having a home anymore, being something new, not speaking the language and so on. This quote from the book I think perfectly articulates an argument Y-Dang is trying to make and in some essence what the book does achieve: ‘I long to write my story in a way that shows the cracks and fissures beneath the refugee's smile of gratitude. At the same time, I cannot deny that, for the kindness shown to my family, for the opportunities to research and learn and perhaps one day write, I am and continue to be grateful, genuinely grateful.

Struck between the smooth surfaces and the burrowed fissures, I am again stuck.’

Once again this year I did cry whilst reading this book but proudly so, there were many times where Troeung was telling us such heinous, harrowing stories that it’ll be hard to not be impacted. There are many but I’ll just mention three instances. The first was when her grandmother died (or killed as we don’t know) and her mother wasn’t allowed to see her body or perform any proper burial ceremony so her soul/ghost was left to remain alone just wandering around a ravaged country without the peace she deserved. Second was the picture and discussion around the Killing Tree where guards would beat and murder children, I was reading the sign in the photograph and just had to stop for a few minuets to let that sink in, just thinking of such an act is utterly repulsive. And lastly was the letters that Y-Dang began writing to her son Kai. They started so nice and I absolutely loved them with updates on how he was getting on, the struggles yes but things was okay. But then her cancer diagnosis came and she began writing letters for him to read in the future as she knew she’d not be there for him at that time. They chronicled the coming-of-age events like school and starting a family but what she really wanted to tell Kai was she would always be with him as a part of him, that her family will love him with everything and a hope for him to retain his cultural ties and goodness. They were bittersweet I’d say, beautiful but extremely heartbreaking and when I tell you I wept… floods came.

A final point to make was I admired the inclusion of cultural and linguistic aspects and how they held relevance. A key concept that I think I’ll take on board and hope to include in my own life when dealing with personal struggles is that of kamleang chet which her mother translates as ‘emotional survival, turning inward, mental willpower, not giving up.’ This is used as an example of how many learnt to keep quiet at the right time and basically survive, some scholarly work has undermined the genocide or force of Pol Pot’s regime given how some Cambodians ‘gave in’ but they didn’t really, they just internalised the fear and fight to try and get through. In a similar way, the metaphor of becoming ‘like the kapok tree’ is used to show how many kept silent or mute to get through the genocide and adapt to it. Throughout there are lots of references to Khmer words or phrases, many talked about in telling the story of her parents. Another importance is the power of names, Troeung says at the end how if you’re not even bothered to try and pronounce it that says a lot about someone when talking with her cousin. I liked how addressing this can spark conversations around how some people may edit/adapt their name to make it more easy to pronounce or go by a nickname and things but this is really not right given the pride we should take in our names, something our parents chose for a reason and usually holding value - Y-Dang was named for the Khao-I-Dang refugee camp in Thailand where she was born for example.

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