Cambodian American scholarship has largely interpreted Cambodian history and

people within frameworks of violence and implicitly claims that today’s Cambodian diaspora is

legible only against the backdrop of unimaginable horror. The epistemological and ontological

stakes of defining the Cambodian experience within structures of violence has profound impact

on the personal and institutional understanding of Cambodian subjecthood. Through visual

culture and photographic analyses of my family’s own photographs from the Khao-I-Dang

refugee camp in Thailand circa 1980s-1990s, I introduce the concept of fictions of memory to

reimagine my family’s social life following the Khmer Rouge. Fictions of memory is a partial

analytic designed for second-generation Cambodians facing the generational trauma that often

structures their relationships to family and history. With a silence-informed approach offered

through fictions of memory, such trauma can be respected while also becoming a site of

speculative reimagination. This reimagination is facilitated through a reading of photography as

selectively “orphan”, or removed from their narrative intentionality, which is often

generationally inaccessible due to silence. Furthermore, the mundane reimagination of this

silence shifts away from conventionally violent interpretations of Cambodian legibility. This

reframing does not intend to replace extant scholarship on Cambodian subjectivity by dislocating

the real and often violent conditions of the Khmer Rouge and refugee camps, but hopes to exist

alongside such theorizations as possible alternatives for understanding Cambodian being.

The everyday lives of Southeast Asian Americans are filled with the complex connections to the historical trauma in Southeast Asia, absence of memories, and silences in intimate spaces. A new political generation comprised of the 1.5th generation and 2nd generation are rising to address the issues in the community through a refugee feminist epistemology. Their youth organizing uses strategies of resilience and healing that are both transformative and empowering. This thesis examines the ways in which youth-centered organizations such as Khmer Girls in Action in Long Beach, California and the Southeast Asian Student Association at the University of California, Irvine are crucial for these processes to occur. I emphasize themes of memory, intimacy, and intergenerational transmission in the analysis of the organizations’ cultural productions in order for Southeast Asian American youth to make meaning of their lives. Not only are they talking about their families’ culture and history, they are creating intimate relationships in these community spaces. In addition, the predominately female leaders and activists in these organizations are performing gendered care, carrying on the responsibility of emotional connection and social reproduction. Hence, this thesis is centered on the resilient spirit of Southeast Asian American youth, with a particular focus on women and girls, who perform the gendered care of fostering intimacy for Southeast Asian American youth to enable them to connect with their families and communities.

Refugee trauma profoundly shapes Vietnamese American collective identity, as is evident in the largest Vietnamese diasporic community located in Orange County, Southern California. Trauma resulting from the violence of the Vietnam War and the process of refugee resettlement led Vietnamese Americans to uphold certain gendered ideologies as traditional. Doing so centered a particular type of family as the basis for community restoration. This refugee family project placed pressure on daughters to be obedient and responsible for the continuation of the family line. This way of thinking prevented women from pursuing personal endeavors to attain individual empowerment. Instead, they were to focus on taking care of the family and home. However, as the experiences of three Vietnamese 1.5 generation women, Mai-Phuong Nguyen, Nicole Nguyen, and Tu-Uyen Nguyen, demonstrated, this was not the only way of being. Through their involvement with Project Ngoc, a humanitarian student organization at the University of California, Irvine, these women transformed traditional Vietnamese gendered ideologies that prioritized community empowerment to also include individual empowerment. They created a new form of political leadership for the 1.5 generation that focused on the community and the individual. In doing so, they created an alternative understanding of kinship and community responsibility. They practiced a political form of generational and community transition, one that empowered youth, particularly young women, to pursue individual growth and community development.