Representing the first two sustained literary treatments of the Cambodian genocide in Canadian literature, Kim Echlin's The Disappeared and Madeleine Thien's Dogs at the Perimeter employ the genre of fiction to contribute to the testimonial archive of the atrocities committed by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime while simultaneously deconstructing the foreignness of this historical trauma in relation to Canada's past. Mobilizing an aesthetics of entwined responsibility that claims Cambodia's history as a part of Canada's international history, the novels of Echlin and Thien prompt a consideration of the role of novels written by non-Cambodians in confronting issues of Western complicity in foreign human rights abuses and in mediating questions about alternative epistemologies of healing and trauma recovery in the aftermath of mass violence. This essay suggests that the failure of justice and accountability that has characterized Cambodia's international human rights movement speaks to the urgency and importance of such acts of literary responsibility.
Hong Kong received 223,302 Vietnamese “Boat People” beginning on May 3, 1975. The last camp in Hong Kong, Pillar Point refugee camp, was officially closed on May 31st, 2000, over 25 years after the end of the Vietnam War. The residuals of this violent past continue to haunt the collective memory of the Vietnamese in the diaspora, yet the Boat People’s “Asian passage” remains an untold chapter of Hong Kong’s national history. Exploring the complex relationship between global compassion fatigue, the camp state of exception, and storytelling as a refugee tactic, Vietnamese American writer Andrew Lam’s “The Stories They Carried” recounts the experience of Vietnamese refugees abandoned in Hong Kong throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in extra-territorial limbo between Vietnam and the West. This paper will discuss the experience of teaching Lam’s story to students in the local Hong Kong context, where refugee and asylum seeking policy continues to be a highly charged political topic. I consider the ways in which Lam’s text bears pedagogical resonance across the Pacific, arguing that the teaching of this piece constitutes the remembering of a missing chapter in both the Vietnamese American narrative and the history of Hong Kong.
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