Landbridge
life in fragments
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Shortlisted for the Jum Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes • A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year • One of CBC’s Best Canadian Nonfiction Books of the Year • 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 accompanied by moving black-and-white visuals, 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The late author and academic Y-Dang Troeung invites us on an intimate journey through her past in this powerful memoir. Beginning with her birth to Cambodian parents fleeing genocide in a Thai refugee camp, Troeung guides us through public history and personal experiences. Short, insightful chapters, some including gorgeous black-and-white photos, take us through the moments that defined her family’s history. From the violent bullying her brothers endured during their childhood in Ontario to her baby facing a life-threatening illness while they were living in Hong Kong to the day Troeung herself was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Landbridge is a moving ode to living life to its fullest, despite the seemingly unsurmountable hurdles that can get in the way. Complete with emotional letters to her son that had us reaching for tissues, this is a memoir that will stick with you long after you’ve read the final page.