We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who influenced them. This month, we spoke with Booker Prize nominee Madeleine Thien (The Book of Records, Do Not Say We Have Nothing) about the “stone on stone” prose of her friend Y-Dang Troeung (Landbridge, Refugee Lifeworlds), who succumbed to cancer in 2022 shortly after completing a memoir relating her family’s experience as refugees in the wake of the Cambodian genocide.
You chose to discuss an author you knew personally. What does her memoir Landbridge mean to you?
I know that I’m going to live with this book for the rest of my life, that it’s always going to be a source of light, and also sorrow and illumination. She was my best friend, so I had the privilege of this intimacy with a writer who understood that she had one chance to say everything she'd been carrying throughout her whole life.
Did she begin working on it after her diagnosis or before?
Before. Back in 2017 she began sending me fragments—and she called them this, she called them my fragments—and she didn't know what they were. Initially they were pieces that had been part of the academic book she was working on—Refugee Lifeworlds—and she had been told all along that they didn't fit. So she had these fragments, and she knew they were maybe at the core of what was so important for her to express, but she didn't know the form they should take. And when I first read the fragments I just thought, it's her life work. This is the book she's meant to write and that she'd been working on it all along. And then, when the diagnosis came in 2021, there were a couple of things she wanted to aim towards. One was to see her son's first day of school in kindergarten, and one was to finish this book.
I feel like many writers are to some degree compelled by the hope that they’ll get their story out before it’s too late. What do you think Y-Dang’s experience says about that?
The responsibility she felt was so profound—to tell her family story, to write about Cambodia, to put so many of these pieces together and make something whole. And I think for years there was this fear that there was no language that could hold it, or that she didn't have the capacity, that she would let people down, and that there was just always more than she could fit into the work that she was doing. And I think that when she knew there might not be that much time, it clarified her belief that she did have the language and she'd had it all along, and now it was just putting the pieces together and understanding the completeness and the wholeness of what she was creating.
What do you think of her writing on a page level?
It’s hard for me to go back and reread parts of it. I went back over the last few days and started reading again, and I was struck all over again by how unalterable each sentence is, how precise every line is. There's no excess. The thing is, she knew that she would likely not have the longer editing process she might have wished for. The book was edited by Dionne Brand, and Y-Dang knew she might not have time left for the depth of editing that would usually come with working with Dionne. And so I think in that last year she was really writing with a knife, with stone on stone. She was meticulous. And she had lived with this. She had done the research for decades. At this point she knew she had done so much research, she had it all in her, and she just put it down.
I was struck by how pared the language was. If gives it great power and emphasis.
Yes, when we talked about writing, we would often talk about this distillation. That she had gathered so much, and now what was left in the writing was that gesture. Just that one moment of moving the line across the page. I know that nothing in this book came easy even at the end, when she was moving quite quickly. It came from, I think, the slowness of the long process up until that moment, and then it crystallized.
She wrote about intensely painful experiences. What do you think is the most difficult part of doing that from the vantage of memoir?
I think for her it was partly that she always understood it as a collective memoir. That it was a family memoir, and that she was the vessel for many stories that were braided together. And I think some of the most difficult things that her parents and her brothers endured, she tried to just set them on the page in that crystalline way where her family would not feel estranged from their words and their voices and their experiences. That sense of the choral. The fact that she had been given both this weight and this privilege of holding the stories of so many people, I think, was one of the most difficult things for her, but also, she was grateful that she could do this for the people she loved.
When you read her descriptions of the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s Year Zero in Cambodia, it is frighteningly similar to what is happening currently in the U.S. and around the world. Do you think she was consciously worried about that recurrence as she wrote or was that just a happenstance of history?
I think she recognized her history everywhere, and also that things were still continuing. I agree with you entirely. And I also think this collective punishment, these mass bombing campaigns, the complete destruction of civilian infrastructures…what she's also writing about is the US bombing of Cambodia, and how the Khmer Rouge goes from almost a marginal group, a much smaller group, then suddenly gets this influx of people who've lost their land, their homes, their farming areas, who have seen such horrific destruction, and how the Khmer Rouge manipulated these feelings of helplessness. There's no doubt in my mind that she recognized this everywhere, these dynamics, these forces, what this destruction unleashes.
What do you think writers should learn from her work or her life?
I think, for her, the act of writing was an afterlife. It was a way to not let even the most painful forces sever history from the present, that she was always tracing these lines backwards and forwards, she was always trying to show us our present and to do that with love against what sometimes felt like anger at the forgetting and anger at the cruelty that occurred. And I think she had to answer that almost unanswerable question of, what is writing for in the end? Why are we doing this? What is it that we hope to convey to those born after us, to those who live alongside us, to those who we will never meet? And she really thought that writing had a force in the world.
