By Audrey Fong
In the wake of the 2024 election, writer Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote on Instagram that the U.S. was born from a fundamental contradiction: the beauty of democracy versus the brutality that made that democracy possible. On this contradiction and its impact on the U.S. public consciousness, he wrote, “So long as that contradiction is not resolved, it will return and the country–and the world–will be haunted by the original sins that made this country and are still a part of this country.”
This is all to say–we cannot understand the present or improve the future without addressing the long history that precedes it. Too often do we aim to heal the symptoms of a larger illness instead of addressing the cause of it, thus allowing the past to haunt our present.
This is where scholar Y-Dang Troeung’s memoir, Landbridge, succeeds. The memoir recounts a long history of U.S. violence and foreign intervention to address the issues facing Cambodia today and is part of a larger project of holding the U.S., and the West at large, responsible for the brutality it has subjected other nations to—the same brutality that Nguyen argues made Western democracy possible.
Composed of 118 memories, letters, reflections, and historical summaries, Landbridge covers a lot of ground in under 300 pages: the text reframes the way we view refugees; documents the history of family and friends who lived through Pol Pot time; and challenges both publishing and archival attitudes towards refugees. However, Troeung’s most successful feat is her focus on the cause of Cambodia’s debilitation, an attempt to hold the U.S. accountable for their role in Cambodia’s current-state.
The fragmentary chapters cover many of the ways the U.S. was involved in 20th-century Cambodia:
- how a “Cambodian head of state was ousted by a US-backed coup”
- “What about the justice demanded from the Americans who bombed Cambodia, who turned every day farmers into Khmer Rouge soldiers fighting for their right to live?”
- “To hide from the American bombs, we took shelter under a Buddhist pagoda.”
These are just a few examples among many, mostly focused on how the U.S.’s fixation on defeating communism in Asia led them to enact countless violences in Cambodia, such as bombing the land and supporting a figurehead prime minister, Lon Nol.
What interested me the most was her section, [debt], on the debt Cambodia owes the U.S. On this subject, Troeung writes:
Yet as I write this in 2021, the US is still demanding that the debt from the early 1970s–money spent on war munitions and to keep alive the army fighting the Khmer Rouge–must be repaid. It was $278 million in the 1970s; today the debt to the US stands at more than US$700 million.
In February 2017, US Ambassador to Cambodia William Heidt insisted at a press conference in Phnom Penh that ‘it’s in Cambodia’s interest not to look at the past, but to look at how to solve this [debt] because it’s important to Cambodia’s future.’
This section encourages readers to examine the cause of Cambodia’s poverty and devastation, to reflect upon what it means for the world’s richest nation to demand a much smaller, poorer nation to repay a debt it never asked for, for actions that caused and continue to cause harm across the nation. What is politically provocative about this is multifold: it paints the U.S. as greedy and as a bully; it demonstrates how war doesn’t end despite what the West may tout as the U.S. being out of wars or at peace; and it captures how the U.S. continues to debilitate Cambodia. It is just one example of many of the ways brutality is central to U.S. democracy.
Troeung elaborates on this debilitation, explaining how during the war, the U.S. bombed Cambodia, devastating civilian and agricultural infrastructure and contributing to food shortages, which led to the US stepping in with a loan to Cambodia in the form of agricultural commodities. This loan was made to the Lon Nol government, a regime that Cambodians felt the U.S. backed and therefore was not a legitimate representation of the Cambodian people. By including this context, Troeung taps into a larger history of colonizing powers debilitating colonized people, such as the debt European powers placed on Haiti for having a revolution, or the mass starvation that followed the bombing of Hiroshima. Troeung’s writing points to a long history of the U.S. debilitating people it views as other, disrupting its narrative as a morally good world police.
Troeung’s urging of readers to address the causes of violence and debilitation, not just the symptoms, is critical to understanding today’s violences. In The Right to Maim, Jasbir K. Puar is critical of our tendency to do the opposite when it comes to Israel and Palestine, writing that “addressing the debilitating effects of the occupation is a faux panacea that may deflect from challenging the causes of debilitation.”
We see this daily in humanitarian efforts regarding Palestine and Lebanon. For example, recently, British singer Mika, of Lebanese descent, partnered with UNICEF to launch an emergency appeal for the children of Lebanon. In the Instagram reel, he expresses concern about the hundreds of children being killed and for the hundreds of thousands of displaced people, ultimately calling upon his audience to donate to UNICEF. What’s noticeably absent from the video is any mention of the perpetrator or cause of the violence: Israel, thus proving Puar’s point. This narrative or way of thinking is common, that addressing the symptoms of violence is enough. However, Troeung and Puar both argue that this isn’t enough; we must address the cause. We must address the long history that led us to this point.
This is where Landbridge is not your typical memoir. Unlike other memoirs which may contain a narrative arc or focus mainly on the personal, Landbridge is very much a marriage of the personal (Troeung’s own life, her family’s history, etc.) and the political (history, criticisms, etc.). This mixture builds up to a critical argument: that we must address the cause of violence, not just the symptoms, and that the present must be understood through the lens of a much longer history. Only through this understanding can we improve the future and rectify the many wrongs of our past to escape that which haunts, and poisons, our beautiful democracy.
Audrey Fong is your stereotypical Southern Californian. She loves the beach, drinks more boba than the doctor recommends, and has an Insta-famous dog. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Soapberry Review.