Landbridge

Born in, and named after, Thailand’s Khao-I-Dang refugee camp, Y-Dang Troeung was – aged one – the last of 60,000 Cambodian refugees admitted to Canada, fleeing her homeland in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s brutal Khmer Rouge regime. In Canada, Y-Dang became a literal poster child for the benevolence of the Canadian refugee project – and, implicitly, the unknowable horrors of the place she had escaped. In ‘Landbridge’, a family and personal memoir of astonishing power, Y-Dang grapples with a life lived in the shadow of pre-constructed narratives. She considers the transactional relationship between a host country and its refugees; she delves into the contradictions between ethnic, regional and national identities; and she writes to her young son Kai with the promise that this family legacy is passed down with love at its core.