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Landbridge : life in fragments

Available Formats:

  • Running Time: 06:10 hrs
    Publisher:
    Knopf Canada, 2023
    Note: This book was purchased with support from the Government of Canada's Social Development Partnerships Program - Disability Component.

Details:

  • Author: Troeung, Y-Dang
    Contributor: Nguyen, Christine L
    Edition: Unabridged
    Date:
    Created
    2023
    Summary:

    The inaugural title from Alchemy by Knopf Canada: A searing account by an exquisite writer who came to Canada as a baby, escaping war in Cambodia. In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head. Forty years later, in her brilliant, astonishing book, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy "arrival," and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family. In precise, beautiful prose, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son's illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Through it all, Y-Dang looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence, refusal of gratitude, becoming a scholar, and love.

    Subject(s): Cambodia | Canada | Refugees
    Original Publisher: New York, Knopf Canada
    Language(s): English
    ISBN: 9781039008809
    Collection(s)/Series: BC and Yukon Book Prizes 2024