| Summary: |
"Our inaugural Alchemy title is a searing memoir by an exquisite writer who came to Canada as a baby, escaping war in Cambodia. A future classic, praised by Madeleine Thien and David Chariandy. 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 the 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 memoir, 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 or disguised truths of what happened to the complex people in her family. With devastating insight delivered in precise, beautiful prose, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her remarkable 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 the terminal cancer diagnosis she herself received late in 2021. Through it all, Y-Dang peels back layers to look with stunning clarity at refugee existence, refusal of gratitude, becoming a scholar, and love. This relatively brief, remarkable text, which holds multiple worlds, is accompanied by a handful of black-and-white visuals that provide another layer of revelation and complexity."-- |
Book
