Exiled: by Katya Cengel - Cambodian-Americans

Exiled: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to California and Back by Katya Cengel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

from “Healing Self, Others, the World,” Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, 24 August, 2023.

Katya Cengel’s Exiled: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to California and Back (2018) makes a good effort at exploring a sticky immigration policy problem after the horrific four-year plus of the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge Communist Peoples Party regime slaughtered somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million of their own people out of 8 million between 1975 and 1979. Like the Nazis in Poland, China’s “Cultural Revolution,” European invasions (“settlement”) of North and South America (Africa, Asia…), Julius Caesar in Britain and other “successful” (insane) empire builders -- Pol Pot’s genocide began by sending adventurous, propagandized and viciously “loyal” militia members and officers to round up the wealthy bourgeoisie, intellectuals, cultural creatives, “foreigners,” minority religious members and community organizers. If you didn’t “convert” and “buy in,” you were “eliminated” by various horrific means. 

In Cambodia, this caused chaotic mass emigration to nearby countries, particularly Vietnam and Thailand, and “political policy” spread to removals of workers, craftspeople and the peasantry from cities and homes, more “killing field” executions, starvation, agrarian work camps, death marches, disease and constant terror.

In the U.S., we had pulled out of Vietnam and ended up funding succeeding regimes in the “cold war” disruption that ensued. Our fluctuations in immigration policies paralleling the “Law and Order” expansion of courts and police powers clamping down on domestic drug and property crimes at that time caused many Cambodians who had emigrated to run afoul of the authorities here and face deportation in the ensuing 45+ years, like many of the “dreamers” who thought they were citizens already or misunderstood English, the complex, ever-changing laws and often struggled to find sustainable work and healthy living conditions.

The Trump administration exacerbated problems, and the families Cengel follows diligently, if not vividly descriptively, seem mostly cast adrift in a sea of misunderstanding; social, mental and physical illness caused by uprootedness, stress, poverty, cultural and racial prejudice, ancestral memory and/or PTSD.

This omnipresent fear, despair, struggle and visceral family memory unfortunately renders Cengel’s subject interviewees, insecurely isolated in a foreign land and language, almost mute, flat and unsympathetic to her readers. They literally “can’t talk about it” to us, even as Cengel tries valiantly to show them to us. 

This is the legacy of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the result of terror and abuse; which is almost impossible to “undo,” and vastly afflicts so many humans; individually, nationwide and globally.

This is a thorough piece of journalism and research, but unfortunately neither draws us in empathetically nor moves us towards a mindset or set of personal or political actions that might change this situation for her subjects.  

Maybe there are other ways for her and the community to make their distress better known, so that they can take action and changes can be made on a broader scale?

University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE.


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