Landbridge

Life in Fragments

By: Y-Dang Troeung

Narrated by: Christine L. Nguyen, Chris Patterson

Brought to you by Penguin.

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 Khmer Rouge-era Cambodia.

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 unpicks the demand for 'testimony' and the conflicting demand for disinterested academic rigour; she delves into the necessary 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.

In fragmentary chapters, each with the vivid light of a single candle in a pitch-black room, Landbridge is both a courageous piece of life memoir and a bold, ground-breaking intervention in the way trauma and migration are recorded.

©2023 Y-Dang Troeung (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Y-Dang Troeung's presence feels so alive in these pages, where wonder and sorrow, motherhood and history trace one another across time, and unspool the shape of our present. Landbridge has forever altered what I know, how I love, and what I hope" (Madeleine Thien, author)

"Landbridge is the most courageous act of love from an academic who has pared back all the pretensions of academia, a writer who understands the true gift of voice and interrogates who gets to 'gift' it, a book that illuminates with laser-bright insight the duty of the 'survivor.' Y-Dang's wisdom, stoicism and brilliance survive in this masterpiece to console and guide generations to come" (Alice Pung, author)

"Landbridge is the most unforgettable book I've read in years, a work of astounding humanity and honesty in the face of unimaginable grief. It is no small undertaking, to wrestle with the generational toll of genocide, migration, upended pasts and unreachable futures, yet this is what Y-Dang Troeung does. In their totality, the fragments that make up this memoir are a vital, visceral reminder that, across all manner of tragedy and violence and even time, we are bound to one another by love. For all the pain it charts and of which its author manages to make meaning, Landbridge is, above all else, a love story, one that will be remembered" (Omar El Akkad, Giller-prize winning author)