Cambodian American Studies and Culture
Aside from personal memoirs of coming to America, such as those by Loung Ung, a few books have been dedicated to studying the Khmer American population in the U.S., such as Khmer American: Identity and Moral Education in a Diasporic Community by Nancy J. Smith-Hefner. This book is an anthropological study of Khmer refugee families, largely from the perspective of the parental generation, residing in metropolitan Boston and eastern Massachusetts. This book was one of the early books among the few, circulating, that talks about this diasporic community. It portrays some understanding of both traditional Khmer culture and contemporary American society, but it is not a historical study of Khmer Americans. A more recent book is, Buddha Is Hiding written by Aiwha Ong, an ethnographic study that tells the story of Khmer Americans and their experiences of American citizenship. The study was largely investigating Khmer refugee in Oakland and San Francisco Bay Area. It portrayed what most Cambodian refugees experience with American institutions such as health, welfare, law, police force, church, and school. The book reveals through extensive ethnographic dialogs showing how Khmer refugees interpret and negotiate with American culture, often at the expense of their own cultural Theravada Buddhist cultural upbringing. This book revealed the contradictions in how Khmer American encounters with American citizenship as they negotiate with service providers, bureaucrats, and employers on how to be autonomous while the system and American cultural citizenship limits them within terms that labeled them as refugees in the context of ethnicity, race, and class.
Survivors: Cambodian Refugees in the United States written by Sucheng Chan, is a multidisciplinary study of Khmer American, drawing on interviews with community leaders, government officials, and other staff members in community agencies as well as common Khmer American to capture the perspectives of Cambodian Americans from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds.
A survivor of the Cambodian genocide, Dara Duong, has founded The Killing Fields Museum in Seattle.
Read more about this topic: Cambodian American
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