Language Loss and Return in the Cambodian Diaspora: A Sociological Memoir

Abstract

Written as a memoir, this essay contemplates who is absent and present in family pictures—who has died and who has outlived the dead—to frame a conversation about how my own Cambodian family has come to speak with one another. I reflect on the incapacity to speak about trauma and the loss of native language skills as braided processes. Drawing inspiration from the practice of Du Boisian autoethnography, as well as the work of Cambodian scholars and memory workers, my memoir offers self-reflection to probe a history of how colonialism and whiteness engendered the Cambodian genocide and shape their sonic reverberations: wounds that repeat within and across generations. Yet a return is more than a reliving of injury. I describe how so through four relationships and their varied returns: with my mother, my father, myself, and my son. Fifty years after the Cambodian genocide, this essay embraces the power of memoir writing in the face of social loss, interrogates empire’s aphasic relationship with Cambodia, turns the gaze on the dark shadows of refugee impairment, and examines how broken language allows me as a language broker to translate forms of affirmation for refugees and their children.