Landbridge: Life in Fragments by Y-Dang Troeung

In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada.As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head. Forty years later, in her brilliant, astonishing book, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy "arrival," and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family.

In precise, beautiful prose accompanied by moving black-and-white visuals, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son's illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Through it all, Y-Dang looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence, refusal of gratitude, becoming a scholar, and love. (From Knopf Canada)

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Y-Dang Troeung was a researcher, writerand Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her first book,Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, explored the enduring impact of war, genocide and displacement. She died of pancreatic cancer in 2022.

More aboutY-Dang Troeung

Y-Dang Troeung: 'Life was very hard'

5 years ago

Duration 0:59

Troeung describes her memories of early refugee life in Goderich, Ontario.