11 minute read
Saplings in 'the Killing Fields': A Fable of "Return"
from jungle azn vol. 1
by Brenda Tran
Saplings in ‘the Killing Fields’: A Fable of “Return”
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WORDS BY JUNE KUOCH
ILLUSTRATIONS BY BRENDA TRAN
As a child of the ’90s I didn’t have much of a fascination with plants. I was oversensitized by the new emerging technological developments of our generation chokers, CD players, and Nintendo. My closest encounters with plants were my grass-type Pokémon—I always picked Bulbasaur —and the yellow chrysanthemum I over-watered in kindergarten that my mother salvaged from Death.
My mother, however, loved to garden. Everyday while we, my siblings and I, waited for the school bus, she would tend to her plants as if they were her own children. It was as if our small suburban yard was her jungle. Mint grew all around our house. Our herbs set us apart from our neighbors. The smell was so pungent when you walked into our yard you would feel the aroma of a candy store. Mint blessed our home; it was the runway for ancestors to locate within displacement.
My mother used to tell me this old Khmer fable that was our version of Cinderella. In the story, the heroine is murdered by her evil stepmother so she cannot marry her true love, the crown prince. But love crosses many planes. The heroine reincarnates into a tree, which the sad lowly prince visits everyday to sulk. She haunts her evil stepmother and summons crows to peck her step siblings to death. Her business is not unfinished; the magical heroine makes a soup from her step siblings’ remains and feeds it to their mother. Horrified by what she has become, the mother rips her own eyes out. She fears seeing the monster that is herself. In the end, the tree, our heroine, blossoms and she is reincarnated again as a human! The heroine and the prince fall in love and live happily ever after.
They call us jungle Asians because we are savages, but these jungles have always been sacred to us. Being a first generation Asian American, specifically Southeast Asian, my understanding of my Khmer culture is lost on that boat that brought my parents to America. It is muted by the sounds of bombs dropped by the United States. It is blurred by the blood-stained minefields. It is haunted by the souls of those who could not survive. Empire has conditioned me to be whitewashed and westernized—to have no memory of the homeland—to sustain imperial futurity. Yet, we as children of refugees, from the war in Indochina, attempt to grasp at rice grains of connection that slip through our fingers.
I have had the honor and privilege to go back to Cambodia twice: the summer I turned ten years old and after I graduated college.
I say that I “returned” to the “homeland” of Cambodia, but what does it mean to return to a place that you have never been to? What was I coming back to? One thing was clear: I was reuniting with branches of my family tree that were hidden in the leaves of diaspora. Return feels like autumn: when trees begin to brown, flowers begin to wilt, and the cycle of life starts anew.
There is a wall of sorrow and anguish between Southeast Asian youth and their refugee parents because of the lack of “memory” [truth] surrounding the war. We as children of war carry more than we know. I feel as though I was transported back into my childhood. To remember is strange. To think back to a moment that was so mundane and insignificant, is now powerful and monumental.
I cannot tell when writing this: what is “truth”? What are “dreams”? And, what did I “fabulate”?
Black feminist scholar Sadiya Hartman writes about sitting in the tomb/archive [unknowable] as “critical fabulation.” Fabulation is a process of reimaging. It is to produce stories and narratives outside the realm of possibility.
But, to fabulate is to negate “knowledge” insofar, there the archival trap produces an impossible task. To further our pursuit of knowledge is to reproduce the colonial systems that demand voice from the subaltern. Yet, unknowing is an unsettling hermetic. For Hartman, fabulation is a process that came out of her work with Ghana’s archives about the transatlantic slave trade. Within these archives there is a mass amount of voyeuristic violence towards the enslavement of black women. Thus, fabulation is a means to sit within the precarity of unknowing:
To allow oneself to be open toward the ghosts of the present while in a state of oblivion, we must remember and critically reflect on the forgotten. For Hartman, it is an attempt to conjure the spirits of her ancestors, of those who were enslaved. For me, it is an attempt to grasp the memories that are locked away in the living, and to encounter ghosts who are anchored in the realm that is no longer home.
The fog of time alters the perspective of what we deem as reality. Memories are altered and change the ways our mind and body learn and unlearn trauma.
A Khmer scholar, Khatharya Um states, “Cambodian Americans hover on the margins […] as compared to other immigrant groups, scholarship on Cambodian Americans is especially scant, and that by Cambodian Americans is even more so.”² The injection of these insurgent memories for me becomes a collective practice. Memories are embodied forms of knowledge. It is through personal experience that we begin to know. Yet, Cambodian Americans don’t get control over our stories. Denial acts as an amnesiac. It’s to be an oracle: to welcome both fleeting feelings of the past and spirits of the present.
To fabulate and to remember is also to mourn. We mourn those whom Empire refuses to allow us to bury. Stories become more than language. Stories become spaces where child, parent, and ancestors encounter each other, yet not need to speak. It’s as if language doesn’t have the ability to encompass our interactions. Ancestral connection produces seconds of alterity.
I write this meditative reflection as I begin to prepare myself to “enter” civil society. I’m writing as I begin to feel racial capitalism’s breath on my face; it’s as if I am Sigourney Weaver in Alien running from the xenomorph. I write this to anchor myself as I leave the refuge [Minnesota].
To understand my own relationship with spectral violence, ghosts, and ancestors, I recall a time where I played with spirits. Back then I couldn’t realize the debt that was weighing me down. In 2007, I got my passport stamped with my Cambodian visa. It was marketed with a “K” meaning “Khmer,” Khmer in the diaspora.
It was an adventure that my parents had planned for their kin at the birth of a relationship. Ever since before they had children, they began saving money to take their future family back. A predestined voyage.
We saw ancient temples, family, and the horror of the Khmer Rouge. We visited “the Killing Fields,” we were transported to a time of Pol Pot, we saw bones of those who died.
Return produced an over-sensitized fleeting feeling of a world that once, yet never, was mine.
Walking around these haunted sites gave me a sense of dread. I tried to avert my eyes from all the trauma and horror. The ground was dry and airy. Dust stormed as if the Wicked Witch of the West was coming. Ash filled my lungs. I coughed to find a sense of clarity, to purify me. The bones of the undead joined my body to remind me of their unfinished presence. While my mind was wandering, the dust subsided, and a cold snap, like snow in July, came as soon as I recognized the presence of a strange tree—as if there was a mutual recognition of our presence. The tree captured my gaze as if it was Greco-Roman mausoleum. I was perplexed by my fascination with this piece of nature.
What possessed me to fixate on this tree? Why was I so drawn to something so mundane? I was entranced by it.
I tried to break my trance with the trees by looking at my mother. Her tears were flowing like the Mekong River itself. Tears of mourning. Although I was so young, I saw the memories flooding back behind her eyes. Memories of the camps. Memories of death and destruction. My mother always presented herself as a strong persevering woman; the violence that she saw when she was young didn’t determine her path in life now.
Was she mourning the loss of others? Or herself?
Observing my mother made me think of her mother. She rarely talked about my grandmother, my Má. My mother looked identical to my grandmother who died young, circumstance unknown, or so I am told. I don’t even know her name.
When I asked about my grandmother as a youth, all my mother would say was that she passed from a “heart attack.” However, I suspect that my grandmother was murdered in the killing fields. The precarity of the situation questions whether she, like many other Cambodians, received a proper burial. Buddhism is the prevailing religion in Cambodia—ritual practices with the dead are essential for spirits to move on. So, does she still walk the land of the living? Or does she dwell in the spirit world?
It wasn’t until my grandfather’s funeral in 2016 that I found out that she was married at seventeen. This was all I knew of her. Death allowed her ghosts to resurface. What was her life like in Cambodia? What does she look like? Did she have dreams, and if so what were they? I have only begun to come to terms with never knowing the truth. It is these questions that push me to write and fabulate stories of possibilities.
I became flushed with emotions seeing my mother cry, so rather than console her I let her emotions flow. All of these feelings that she had been bottling up since she left her homeland were coming back to her in this moment. Time stopped here. She was pushed back to a time when she was seventeen. She was in high school, where she loved to read and write. A time in which she was proudest of her mathematical achievements. Before “The Empire Strikes Back.” Seventeen, the oldest child of five, who soon would have to take on the responsibilities of an adult.
Tears streamed down her face. This was quite strange for my mother because she never cried. She brought herself back home, but this time she was not alone. We lacked the lexicon to speak of her memories, her traumas, and our history of the war because refugees are forgotten. But in that moment, when time stopped, she let go of her debts.
She could stand alone as a survivor.
I looked back at the tree that I had been staring at before. Its bark was a deep, auburn brown as if it was stained with something. I had the urge to touch its rough, rocky skin, but I couldn’t do it.
Chankiri Tree against which executioners beat children, the sign read.
“Chankiri” meaning killing. Killing Tree.
I was horrified. Who murders children?
Then and there at that moment, it clicked. The burgundy bark was from the blood of children. This tree is a living tomb.
Still, I lingered at the Chankiri. The summer wind whistled through the trees leaves like laughter. The encounter felt like I was being spirited away. My fascination with this tree felt like my attempt to approach kids at recess. Our spirits were intertwined; loss knit us together. None of us had an anchor to our realm.
As my parents lost their homes and sought refuge in the United States, so did I. America is not my home, but rather a new refugee camp in which diasporic loss is concealed by the gift of freedom and citizenship.
Is it selfish of me to only see the truth while encountering these ghosts? Did I make another demand for the dead that can never be fulfilled? Or did we really meet in a space outside of colonization?
These children didn’t get to grow up. These children didn’t get to have a proper burial, and yet the arrival of my presence brought them joy. Joy from intimacy because in our fast-paced neoliberal society no one stops to look at the trees. These children are chained to the Chankiri and bound by the killing. Their suffering allowed for me to “flourish abroad.” In life under the Khmer Rouge one had to embrace death. Mass killings were put on as performances. Everyone would have to participate through taunting and attacked those being persecuted or they too would suffer that fate.
Babies like my unnamed cousins who died from imperial wars; we are collateral damage.
What were their stories? What were their dreams? How could someone do such a thing to children and nature?
Not only did these spirits suffer, but so did nature. Genocide is inhumanity par excellence. Can we recover those who have been made into monsters? Or is deformity not abnormal but a condition of humanity itself?
The tree is forever bound to a spatial moment of trauma and suffering. A tree whose only desire is to grow, to boundless heights, to reach the sun. Now, it’s tainted with the blood of many. Militarized imperialist violence is now forever intertwined with these trees, the land, and its people. These children did not have the ability to go to school because they were not given the luxury of life. Their names and lives will never be remembered. These children will never receive a proper burial but are bound to a prison named the Chankiri. Even in their afterlife, I hope they can find solace. The Chankiri’s children laugh because it’s as if for the first time they are seen.
We are two sides of the same coin—the only separation is life itself.
Death is not an end. For many of my ancestors their murders will never be resolved. Cases have run cold because we have closed ourselves off from justice. As long as the US Empire exists, we as Southeast Asians displaced by war will always be haunted from the perpetual war of conquest. Familial spirits stuck in the cacophony of militarism flow in their children. To be a refugee, especially a child of refugees, is to live a “half-life.” We are indebted to the many sacrifices that gave us our lives. Yet, our sense of indebtedness should not bind us to a state of obedience. Rather, we should honor our ancestors by channeling that energy into transforming the world. A world where trees are not chopped down before they are able to reach the canopy top. A world where the jungle thrives.
For me, “refugee redress” arises from the unknown. It is pieced together from the ashes of an archive lost in the blazing fire of war. Memories are split hairs. Truth is a utopian desire; for many Southeast Asians within the diaspora it is a treasure we will never be gifted. Redress is a supernatural act. To embark on a journey of restoration, one must grapple with loss. Loss is not linear nor is it fatalistic. Ghostly encounters allow us to hold moments of alterity to grasp the dead. We fabulate life for our family that is bound to death. Fabulation as in formulation, as in possession.
We are our ancestors’ hopes and dreams. Their spirits flow through us. We must be in tune with our past and our elders. Ancestral knowledge can only flow through you when you begin to understand that we are all oracles. We are all haunted. Before we can begin our process of self-transformation we must locate our positionality within the system of life. Only through reflection can we really allow ourselves to mourn.
So my advice to you is to listen to the rustling of the leaves. Even in the killing fields, fruit is plentiful. Seed your future. Let yourself be spirited away. —J.
JUNE KUOCH (They/Them/Their) is an aspiring activist-scholar-writer-artist. June is a queer and trans-nonbinary child of Khmer refugees. They’re a local Minnesota community organizer. They were born and raised in the Twin Cities. They claim their midwest Asian American identity. Their activist works have been inspired by the Japanese American activist Yuri Kochiyama. Their other idol is Sailor Moon. They have worked with grassroots groups such as ReleaseMN8, TCJ4J (Twin Cities Justice 4 Jamar), RadAzns, and Shades of Yellow (SOY). Currently, they are pursuing their MA in Asian American Studies at UCLA.
Instagram: gucci_kuochie
