Koan Khmer by Bunkong Tuon
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

Novel
Curbstone Books, 2024
$24.00, 256 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8101-4743-0
           
In the epilogue to this remarkable coming-of-age novel, the protagonist, Samnang (which means “lucky” in Khmer), comments, “From a distance, it looks like my life is the American dream realized.” Indeed, this is a novel with a happy ending, more or less. By the end, Samnang Sok has become a college professor, teaching literature and writing; he’s happily married, and he and his wife have a daughter with another child on the way. But getting there was never certain and took a lot of “luck,” self-discovery, hard work and perseverance.

The story opens on the eve of the murderous Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Samnang’s family are victims of the genocide. Because all of the doctors and nurses in his village were killed by the Khmer Rouge and she cannot get proper medical attention, his mother dies while he is still a toddler. “We felt helpless, watching her slip away before our eyes,” Ming Bonavy, her sister, tells Samnang years later in Massachusetts. 

Samnang is adopted by his grandmother, Lok-Yeay, and the whole family makes its way to various refugee camps in Thailand. Danger and privation characterize this episode and some incidents are heartbreaking and brutal. “No matter which camp, there was a heavy sadness and desperation in the air, fear mixed with the stench of  sweat and humiliation.” 

Eventually, an American family sponsors them, and after a stop in Indonesia for a cram course in English and American culture, they settle in Revere, Massachusetts, to pursue the American dream. The first of several prophetic dreams (an echo of “the American Dream,” perhaps) occurs to Samnang when he sees a mermaid during a storm on the rough passage to Indonesia. Is it an omen? “Ever since I’d seen this mermaid in the waves, I felt she or some benevolent spirit had been looking out for me,” he later confesses. His name certainly seems oracular.

In Boston, though, the family is beset by racist violence while trying to make their way in this new land. They are relatively safe and starting to prosper, but the feeling of being “other” is constant, pervasive and oppressive. Samnang is plagued by self-consciousness, by a sense of being “watched,” being “visible.” “Such visibility came from an awareness that we were a blemish in the sea of whiteness,” he observes.

Samnang feels so alienated in Massachusetts that he even considers suicide. He’s a bright kid, but despite the encouragement of adults both in his family and in school, he turns to skateboarding as an escape instead. When his uncle and aunt move to California to open a donut business shortly after Samnang graduates from high school, he goes with them.
His downward spiral continues until one day he has a dream while working the graveyard-shift for a cleaning company, late night janitorial work. He goes to the public library, where he discovers Charles Bukowski, and the whole world of literature opens for him, literally changes his life and perspective. Dreams are an important motif in Koan Khmer, from the vision of a mermaid in the Gulf of Thailand to the recurring dream of a man on horseback wearing a golden crown. How these all relate to “the American Dream” is a potent theme of the novel.

When their donut shop is robbed, Ming Binavy and her husband, Pu Vaesnar, move back to Massachusetts. His beloved grandmother Lok-Yeay goes with them, leaving Samnang on his own. He perseveres, though he is wretched and lonely. 

But Samnang has discovered literature, and this is what saves him from despair. Also, by the same inspiration, he is compelled to write. It is “like breathing. I had to write. For me, writing was survival.” 

Lok-Yeay’s husband, Lok-Ta, formerly a Buddhist monk until the Khmer Rouge demolished the Cambodian Buddhist monasteries, once reminded Samnang, “Never forget that you are and will always be a child of Cambodia, our Koan Khmer. Be proud of who you are.”  As Samnang later writes in an imaginary letter to  Lok-Ta, now dead, and Lok-Yeay, he also plans to translate Khmer folktales, novels and epic poetry into English for future generations of Cambodian Americans. “Stories are my way to suture the wounds of history.”

When he is admitted to the Comparative Literature department at a Pennsylvania state university, he returns east, his destiny in his own hands.

So is this the American dream? Samnang’s story certainly comes with its share of nightmare, the familiar immigrant experience of having the deck stacked against you, but at the end the reader exults in Samnang’s hard-won success. This does not come as a “surprise,” since the novel begins with Samnang already in the university, questioning his family about his mother and father, but the journey he describes is nevertheless harrowing and heartrending for its loneliness and alienation. Also, there’s that dark side of the American experience – the violence, the racism – that cannot be ignored. Bunkong Tuon’s insights into the uplifting, inspirational values of literature and writing are no less satisfying.