
Bunkong Tuon’s debut novel, Koan Khmer, follows the seldom-told story of a young Cambodian boy displaced by the regime of the Khmer Rouge and forced to find a new home in the United States. While the devastation caused by the Khmer Rouge is often at the center of literature about Cambodian refugees, Tuon’s work chooses to shed light not just on the direct and tangible effects of the Khmer Rouge, but also a continued and often internal conflict faced by Cambodian refugees following their escape. The book, closely based on Tuon’s own experiences as a Cambodian refugee, highlights the struggle of rebuilding a sense of self in the shadow of immense trauma and loss, the importance and complexity of family in the midst of that loss, and the power of carving out space for a personal narrative in the literary canon.
Tuon has previously published several poetry collections, and the unflinching clarity of his poetic voice as well as the vibrancy of his image-rendering in those collections has been harnessed to incredible effect in Koan Khmer. The novel itself moves anecdotally through the life of the protagonist, Samnang, as each chapter considers notable or symbolic moments through Samnang’s life. The chapters stand alone as works of short fiction, but in synthesis, they become much more than the sum of their parts. In my interview with Tuon, I was able to ask him about his choices in structuring the book this way, some of the specific anecdotes that he included, and how his own personal experiences influenced the construction of Samnang’s story.
Phoebe Chan: Did you, like Samnang, undergo an interview process with your family members, and what was that process like in terms of finding a singular narrative view to write the book from?
Bunkong Tuon: I didn’t arm myself with a recorder and microphone as depicted in the opening chapter of Koan Khmer. But I did ask questions when I visited family during the holidays. During downtime, while we were watching TV, I asked a question here and there. I’m also a scholar on Cambodian American history and literature. I used my expertise in this field and the snippets of conversations I had with my aunts and grandmother to stitch together a narrative and patch it on to the overall plot in Koan Khmer, which is Samnang’s life in Cambodia, the refugee camps in Thailand, and in the United States.
Much of your background is in poetry as well, and Samnang is even a character who becomes deeply connected to poetic forms of expression. Can you tell me a little bit about how this poetic background informed your writing process? What is it like putting together a collection of poems vs. constructing a full-length novel?
Poetry for me is condensed, concentrated language. The novel is an expansion of language. The two impulses, generally speaking, are different from one another. This doesn’t mean that a novel can’t be poetic or a poem can’t be straight-out narrative. But the narrative drive in novel writing is expansive and, for me, challenging. I have to be detail-oriented, consistent, and logical in a two-hundred-plus–page manuscript. That’s tough, since a poem is usually one to two pages long.
As a poet, I was taught by experience to cut out unnecessary details. As a result, the chapters in Koan Khmer aren’t too long. Every detail, every anecdote, is consciously placed to create tension in the narrative. The pacing is generally fast. These are the elements that shape the form and rhythm of the novel.
This question gets me to think about live readings. Reading poetry in front of an audience is more self-contained and under control. I have line breaks which give me a sense of when to slow down or pause. Because it’s short, I know when to accentuate certain words and phrases and how the poem starts and when it ends. With reading from a novel, I choose passages that are contained stories. I don’t read the longer chapters in their entirety. I don’t want to torture my audience.
What did this book look like to you in its earliest iterations, and how did it change over time?
I began drafting Koan Khmer when I was a Comparative Literature graduate student at the University of Massachusetts. At the time, autofiction was all the rage. I did a bit of experimentation. Some passages were very “meta,” where the narrative focused back on itself and its literary choices. Encyclopedia entries, song lyrics that were supposed to capture the various moods, conversations with family members, were included. I was also influenced by the turn in theory in Anthropology and Translation Studies; thus, there were moments where the authoritative stance of the “I” narrator was interrogated. I sent the manuscript out to publishers and it was rejected. Over the years, I made changes, shifted different points of view, and smoothed out the narrative. Now it’s a straightforward narrative that captures the heart of the story I drafted twenty plus years ago; I’m pleased with the way Koan Khmer turned out.
Something I love about this book is how frank and unafraid it is about pain and about Samnang’s experiences with suicidality and his feelings of not belonging anywhere. How did you choose to approach this difficult topic in this very frank and direct way?
I’m primarily a poet, and I’m the kind of poet who could be described as “heartfelt” and “honest” when it comes to writing about subjects that are near and dear to his heart. I tend to write about my grandmother, uncles, aunts, and kids. It comes naturally to me and it makes the writing more meaningful. I basically transferred these “skills” (maybe “inclinations” is the more accurate word) to writing about Samnang’s struggles. But sometimes I felt so bad for Samnang that I created moments of reprieve. Do you remember the scene where “BK” beats up Samnang’s bully? I thought that was funny, and I hope readers who know me as “BK” do too.
I am so fascinated by the mermaid anecdote, and it’s an image that only truly appears in scene once. Can you tell me a little bit about that scene and what motivated you to write it?
That mermaid scene is actually true. It’s one of many reasons why I decided to call Koan Khmer a work of fiction. I thought about categorizing it as nonfiction, but I was afraid that readers might question the book’s veracity and possibly the entire project. When I wrote that chapter, I was trying to make the emotional connection between the mermaid and Samnang’s mother. Samnang interpreted the mermaid as his mother reassuring him that he would be safe. When it happened to me, I don’t think I was making any of those emotional connections. I don’t remember what I was feeling and thinking. This was forty plus years ago. But with fiction, you have the freedom to make the story more meaningful and thus beautiful.
Samnang experiences several spiritual moments throughout the piece, from his dream about the man on the horse to the mermaid to the moments of introspection during his attempted suicide. As I was reading, this really struck me as a beautiful moment of intersecting genre, as the supernatural came to inform what was clearly a piece based strongly in realism and an autobiographical base of experience. What drove you to include those sections and supernatural experiences for Samnang?
I was trying to capture the reality of the old Cambodian way of seeing the world, where there is another world that is alongside this world. This is the world of ghosts and spirits, where dreams can foretell the future and one’s destiny, where the trees and forests, the water and sky, all contain spirits. I remember my grandmother visiting my apartment in Amherst, MA, where I was living as a graduate student. The first thing she did was light three sticks of incense and ask the spirit of Amherst for permission for me to stay there and for their protection. That was my grandmother’s reality. I wanted to capture that world, that old way of seeing and acting in the world. It’s an important part of Koan Khmer, and I’m so glad you ask this question. It’s why I consider Koan Khmer to be a Cambodian-American novel. Note the hyphen in this spelling: both Cambodian and American.
Samnang is a character with such a rich inner world and strong convictions about what he calls “infecting” the literary world with the narratives of Cambodia writers. What does this “infection” look like to you? What do you hope for young Cambodian/Cambodian-American writers to take away from your work?
The notion of “infection” was something that I argued for in my seminar papers on postcolonial translation studies. Basically, it’s a celebration of the once-colonized using and thereby changing the colonialist’s language—in this case, English. In other contexts, that language could be French, Spanish, or any language that was used to control, oppress, and colonize a group of people. In Koan Khmer, I used Cambodian familial terms, Khmer dishes, culinary practices, etc., and I didn’t italicize those words thus marking them as “foreign.” I wanted those words to be a part of the English lexicon. I wanted my readers to experience those words as something that is part of the United States’ cultural and literary landscape.
As for your second question, I hope Cambodian-American writers are inspired to tell their stories in a way that reflects their realities. Koan Khmer is just one of many Cambodian American stories. I want them to tell their stories as honestly as they can—but don’t exoticize us.
Samnang’s journey from Cambodia to the refugee camps to America is saturated with the duality of unfiltered, vivid suffering and also a deeply human reflection of the connections of family, particularly with his Lok-Yeay. Can you talk a little bit about how you chose to balance those two in Samnang’s view?
I do feel bad for Samnang for all that he has gone through in this novel. I was trying to find ways to help him, to give Samnang a reason to keep going. I created Lok-Yeay, who is based on my own grandmother, to balance out Samnang’s suffering. She represents unconditional love (which he truly needs), hard work, and deep commitment to family. But, as you see later in the novel, Lok-Yeay’s love isn’t enough. Samnang needs literature to help him articulate his condition, speak for himself and his people, and find way to imagine a better future. Koan Khmer is, in this sense, about education and the power of literature.
Was this book always something you wanted to write, or was there a particular incident that spurred you to write it?
In college, I was introduced to the idea of the “Great American Novel.” The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick were identified as examples of these great books that capture the American zeitgeist. I thought to myself, why not have a “Great Cambodian American Novel”? And the novel should take place in the US and capture the emotional experience of Cambodians in America. Those were the seeds of Koan Khmer.
Phoebe Chan (she/her/hers) is an Asian-American writer and a student of Emerson College’s Creative Writing Program. Her work has been featured in Bonk Comics, The Trident Poetry Collective chapbooks, Stork Magazine, and TaiwaneseAmerican.org.
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