To provide some context for the larger events surrounding my grandmother’s story, I will give a brief and simplified overview of Cambodian history during the 20th century. Although I am providing this history, I want to note that history is never as simple as cause and effect or as chronological as it is presented. This brief summary will not encompass every single detail or nuance. Who tells the history greatly informs how history is relayed. High rates of illiteracy and political censorship throughout Cambodian history means that it is difficult to draw a complete picture of how Cambodian people felt during this time period. However, I think it is important to situate my grandmother’s story in the greater context of what happened. 

Cambodia as a French Protectorate

Cambodia was established as a French protectorate in 1863, and French control ebbed and flowed over nearly the next century. Rebellions opposing the Cambodian monarchy’s cooperation with the French occurred during the late 1800s. France reduced the monarchy’s power and introduced major changes, resulting in a restructuring of how Cambodian society has functioned for centuries. This included French officials administering operations in Cambodian towns, abolishing slavery, and institutionalizing land ownership, which the Cambodian elite did not support.

During the 1920s, French economic and political control increased, but their presence decreased. Instead, many Vietnamese officials took office. The economic boom in the 1920s ushered in Chinese entrepreneurs involved in export trade. Thus, there were many non-Khmer people in positions of power. Cambodian farmers were exploited by paying high taxes on their crops with little to no profit. Nationalist sentiment began to emerge at the same time as an intellectual renaissance since Cambodians became increasingly dissatisfied with Vietnamese and Chinese involvement in Cambodia. 

World War II weakened France’s grip on Cambodia and changed politics among the population, ultimately allowing Cambodia to have more autonomy in foreign and military affairs. Over the course of the 1950s, Communist guerrilla bands began to grow in number and strength and were supported by North Vietnam. The formation of these Communist groups was in part a reaction to growing anticolonial sentiment and a call for the liberation of poor and exploited farmers. The Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) was founded in 1951.

Independence

Cambodia gained official independence in 1953, along with military autonomy in 1954. King Norodom Sihanouk ruled from 1955 to 1970, considered a Golden Age in Cambodia compared to the time that preceded and followed that era. However, this time period was marked by political manipulation and extreme censorship. Cambodia tried to stay neutral, but the Vietnam War destabilized the country and extant tensions became exacerbated by Cold War dynamics. 

In 1963, Sihanouk stopped accepting US military aid, which significantly weakened Cambodian armed forces. He nationalized the import-export sector of the economy and closed privately owned banks in an attempt to cripple the Sino-Cambodian business elite. However, this caused more problems and led to economic decline. In 1966, the CPK started an armed struggle for territorial control around the country. Despite this political turmoil, my grandmother claims not to know much about it as it was happening, pointing to a disconnect between politics and the general population. 

Civil War & Khmer Republic

Frustrated with King Sihanouk’s failures in ruling, Prince Sirik Matak led a coup and overthrew him. With Sihanouk deposed, the Khmer Republic was established in October 1970 and ruled for 4 years with US military and economic assistance. Those four years were marred by civil war between the new Khmer Republic and the CPK. By 1972, the Khmer Republic controlled Phnom Penh, some provincial capitals, and most of Battambang. Everywhere else was controlled by Communists or not safe to govern. In addition to the secret bombing campaign that took place a few years earlier, the US dropped more than 100,000 tons of bombs in the Cambodian countryside in an effort to prevent complete Communist control. This ultimately failed and the CPK, also known as the Khmer Rouge, captured Phnom Penh in April 1975. 

Communism and Democratic Kampuchea

The CPK established Democratic Kampuchea and controlled Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979. The capture of Phnom Penh marked the end of the civil war, but led to a period of unfathomable violence as the Khmer Rouge embarked on its mission to radically transform Cambodia into a socialist state by abolishing money, markets, formal education, religion, private property, and restricting freedom of expression and movement. Their goal was to increase the national production of rice and export the surplus to finance the industrialization of the country, which required an extraordinary amount of labor. Young, rural Cambodians (many younger than 15) were the motive force behind the Khmer Rouge, and they truly believed they were leading Cambodia to become independent, self-reliant, and equal.

When the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, they forced its 2 million residents to evacuate to the countryside and work in labor camps to generate the crops needed to finance Cambodia’s transformation. The move was sudden and swift; those who could not make the move were abandoned and left to die. This is how my grandmother describes her time working in the labor camps:

[Everybody] in the country [became] farmers. Grow the rice. Nothing else. Nothing to do. Just grow the rice, whatever [...] they want us to do it, they order, do it, do it, do it. [...] Cannot refuse to do it. Just do whatever they [say]. That's all. Very [powerful]. And people at that time, they get killed a lot because [there is] no food to eat. [They] don't feed the people.

Treatment varied depending on the region of the country because different areas had various levels of experience and resources to administer the labor camps. Over the course of the Khmer Rouge regime, nearly 2 million people died. Many people died due to overwork, starvation, and neglect. To meet the agricultural production goals, rations were reduced and Cambodians labored for 10 -12 hours a day. Suspected enemies of the regime were mercilessly killed. The Khmer Rouge established an interrogation center, S-21, where at least 14,000 — likely innocent — people were questioned, tortured, and executed between 1975 and 1979. 

Vietnamese Invasion

China provided support to the Khmer Rouge, which provoked Vietnam. In December 1978, Vietnam attacked Cambodia and captured Phnom Penh by January 1979. Khmer Rouge leaders fled and Vietnam established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Most Cambodians welcomed the change in government because it meant the end of Democratic Kampuchea. The Communist Party of Kampuchea officially dissolved in 1981, but the leaders remained in positions of power up until the 1990s because they were politically aligned with China, Thailand, and the US. Vietnam eventually withdrew from Cambodia as the country became self-sufficient and aid from the Soviet Union decreased. By 1999, Cambodia was at peace for the first time since the 1960s, but still faced many problems.

Why does my grandmother’s, and my general family’s, experience matter to me? 

I did not face the suffering and hardship that my parents and grandparents endured, but their experiences and stories have shaped who I am and how I was raised. However, I have grappled with the question of whether it is appropriate for me to “claim” their stories when I did not experience them myself. What does it mean for me to be one generation removed from trauma, but still contend with the insidious effects of war, genocide, and displacement? 

Although my family is no longer considers refugees, the vestiges of that experience still lingers. Vinh Nguyen expands refugee status beyond its legal definition to a state of being, called “refugeetude.” Nguyen explains that refugeetude is “a form of subjectivity — an experience, consciousness, and knowledge that lingers even when legal designation is lifted or one that might be present before the designation comes into effect” (Nguyen, 114). Refugee status can last indefinitely, and even when the legal designation is lifted, it leaves behind a way of being that cannot be shed so easily. 

Learning about Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” fundamentally changed how I approached thinking about my family history. Hirsch created the term in response to Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the photographs included in the book. She defines postmemory “as a structure of inter- and transgenerational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience” (Hirsch, 106). The concept describes the relationship between the generation that experienced trauma to the generation that inherits the stories, images, and behaviors that follow. The traumatic experiences are passed on to the next generation so viscerally that they absorb the experiences as their own constituted memory. The connection to the past goes beyond recalling those memories into active and “imaginative investment, projection, and creation” of those experiences (Hirsch, 107).

Postmemory puts into words the struggle I had with learning about my family’s background, and what it means to be a descendant of such a history. Tying in this project’s themes of home, movement, and belonging, it helps situate my positionality as a first-generation American and demonstrates that even though my family’s literal migration ended when they arrived in the US, another journey of contending with the past and what that means for our present subjectivity in America began.

Chandler, David. A History of Cambodia. 4th ed, Westview Press, 2008.

Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia University Press, 2012. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/hirs15652.

Nguyen, Vinh. “Refugeetude.” Social Text, vol. 37, no. 2, June 2019, pp. 109–31. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1215/016424727371003.