Knopf Canada
2023
In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang’s father’s hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang’s head. Forty years later, in her brilliant, astonishing book, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy “arrival,” and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family.
About the Author
Y-Dang Troeung
Y-Dang Troeung (click to hear) was an Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She researched and taught in the fields of transnational Asian literatures, critical refugee studies, global south studies, and critical disability studies. Her monograph, Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia (Temple University Press), was published in August 2022. She was a faculty affiliate of the Asian Canadian Studies and Migration Program (ACAM), an Associate Editor of the journal Canadian Literature, and a 2020 Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. Her recent publications can be found in Canadian Literature, Brick: A Literary Magazine, Amerasia Journal, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.