Research Mondays: “To me and the people I knew, the war seemed far away: Cambodian Memoirs and New Perspectives on the Vietnam War”

Abstract

The Vietnam War is a conflict which still looms large in the American imaginary. However, because the United States is the principal lens through which we interpret the war, whether it is the successes or failures of individual military operations or the massive anti-war rallies on the homefront, the experiences of Southeast Asians, and Cambodians in particular, are peripheral at best. By examining four memoirs written by Cambodians who relocated to the United States following the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime (Dr. Haing S. Ngor’s Survival in the Killing Fields, Luong Ung’s First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers, Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge, and Chileng Pa’s Escaping the Khmer Rouge: A Cambodian Memoir), I uncover unique readings of the Vietnam War, disrupting dominant themes in the conflict’s historiography.

In this paper, I argue that Khmer memoirs exhibit three interrelated “structures of feeling” that nuance current understandings of the Vietnam War. First, countering what I consider the arguably teleological contributions of scholars of Cambodia to the field of Vietnam War historiography, narrators situated in Phnom Penh during the 1960s display an affective distance to the war in Southeast Asia, demonstrating little connection between the conflict and the eventual rise of the Khmer Rouge in the mid-1970s. Additionally, Cambodian authors view the escalation of the war in the late-1960s as an extension of Vietnamese aggression towards Cambodia rooted in the region’s history, downplaying Cold War geopolitics and thereby displacing the United States as a key actor in the Vietnam War. Finally, unlike the critical work of the New Left in the United States, represented in this paper by the work of Noam Chomsky, the Khmer authors depict the United States as a site of rebirth after experiencing years of violence rather than strictly as an imperial power. In fact, at times, the United States is favorably portrayed when it is mentioned at all, and often viewed as a defensive rather than offensive force against one of the main antagonists of Cambodian life stories: Vietnamese peo