Cambodian Americans

So my name is Sophia Tsang, she, her pronouns, and I'm an assistant professor here at California State University, Long Beach.

I've been in my position since 2021, so I'm relatively new, but I've been working on my project, looking at Cambodian Americans and the Khmer Diaspora and Buddhism for over the past, I think since 2013.

So it's been quite a while.

In terms of formal research, prior to that, I had worked abroad and I had lived in Japan for four years as an English teacher.

So I just never thought I would be in academia, but I always felt like I missed being in school.

So what happened was I got here and I started...

There was like, I was like a bilingual volunteer teacher for like at a senior citizen center for, because Long Beach actually where I live has the largest, I don't live here, but where I work has the largest Cambodian American population, Cambodian population outside of Southeast Asia.

And so I got to know a lot of people and I was living at home and taking the bus, but then the anthropology, I was in Asian studies, but the anthropology department hired me to work as their teaching assistant.

Definitely.

And Ms. Sam, how do you see your books reaching the next generation of Cambodian Americans who may be disconnected from their heritage? What kind of response have you gotten from younger readers?

Oh, I love that question.

So that's actually one of my biggest hopes.

Well, thank you for sharing that story to us.

And to wrap up our discussion for today, What advice would you give to aspiring writers who want to share their own culture through storytelling but worry about getting it wrong, facing criticism from within their community, or not finding an audience?

yeah that i tell them that no one can really tell their story exactly the way and the way they can meaning if they're planning to write about their own culture with humility respect and genuine willingness i don't think they should be scared of sharing it i think every community is more diverse than we realize no single book can represent everyone's experience and that's okay i think um Some people, you know, may not have liked my book about the gay Cambodian Americans, and that's OK.

My goal has never been to speak for every Cambodian.

And the aggregate statistics obscure the reality of Asian American populations that came here for other reasons, like being refugees.

The Hmong community, Cambodians, Laotians, they're facing systemic challenges and poverty at rates similar to, if not worse than, other minority groups.

And this isn't to say that Asian Americans haven't dealt with their own slew of serious policy problems like Japanese internment camps or the Chinese Exclusion Act, but it is to say that this current average of Asian American data isn't necessarily representative of everybody.

And what I'm not going to do here is pit two minority groups against each other and try to compare them because this whole conversation has never been apples to apples to begin with.