Life Beyond Debt

Y-Dang Troeung and Anthony Veasna So’s Intergenerational Lifeworlds

Abstract

Literature on the Cambodian diaspora is framed around the aftermath of the Cold War and its legacies of violence and trauma. What remains understudied is how the genocide structures the lives of what I call, after Marianne Hirsch, postmemory generations, with scholars often assuming that younger generations inhabit intergenerational trauma and memories as forms of borrowed identity. I decentre the trauma as a foundational aspect of diasporic Cambodian identity in favour of debts connecting generations to one another. Analyzing Y-Dang Troeung’s memoir Landbridge: [life in fragments] and Anthony Veasna So’s short story “Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly,” I argue that 1.5- and second-generation Cambodian refugees have accumulated memorial debt to the humanitarian nation-state and their families, which provokes them to perform gratitude as requital. I explore how these generations can circumvent this debt and make their lives more livable through intergenerational lifeworlds, acts of resistance, reconciliation, and refusal of tragedy and trauma.