Koan Khmer

Koan Khmer is the debut novel of Cambodian American writer Bunkong Tuon, first published in 2024. It follows Samnang Sok, an orphaned child survivor of the Cambodian genocide, from Cambodia through the refugee camps of Thailand to a new life in the United States.

Book details
Author	Bunkong Tuon
Book type	Fiction
First published	2024
Original language	English
Publisher	Curbstone Books
ISBN	9780810147430
Subjects	Literature & Storytelling; Migration & Diaspora; History & Remembrance
Creator pages	Bunkong Tuon

About the book

The title can be rendered in English as "son of Khmer," tying Samnang's own story to Cambodian identity. In Khmer, koan means "child." The name Samnang means "luck" or "lucky."

Told in the first person, the novel is set mostly in Massachusetts and later in Long Beach, California. It turns to war trauma, displacement, racism, family memory and cultural identity, and to the part that literature and writing play in rebuilding a life and making a home. The book moves through notable or symbolic moments in Samnang's life. Its chapters are short and can each stand alone as a story, while together they form one larger narrative. Dreams recur throughout, among them a vision of a mermaid in the Gulf of Thailand and a dream of a crowned man on horseback, and they connect to the idea of the American Dream. The novel also carries an older Cambodian worldview, in which spirits live in a parallel world and dreams may foretell the future.

The novel is closely based on Tuon's own life as a Cambodian refugee. Samnang's grandmother, Lok-Yeay, is modeled on Tuon's grandmother, and the mermaid scene comes from a true event. Tuon has said the book grew from his wish for a "Great Cambodian American Novel," set in the United States and true to how Cambodians feel in America.

The story

The novel is in four parts. It opens with Samnang asking his mother's relatives, "What was my mother like?"

The first part, "A Cambodian Family Portrait," covers life under the Khmer Rouge, the escape to the refugee camps and the move to the United States. Samnang's mother dies when he is about three. The Khmer Rouge had killed the trained doctors in the village and replaced them with peasants who treated the sick with bark dipped in honey. His father leaves to marry another woman, and his grandparents take him in. After the deaths of his mother and two uncles, and repeated hunger, the family leaves Cambodia in 1979, when Samnang is five. Lok-Yeay carries him through the jungle. Kirkus names Lok-Ta as Samnang's grandfather; East Wind calls him a stepfather, a former Buddhist monk whom the Khmer Rouge forced to leave the monastery and marry. He teaches Samnang about education, faith and equanimity. In a United Nations refugee camp in Thailand, Khmer Rouge soldiers attack, and the family hides in a communal toilet.

The second part, "Surviving in America," spans about ten years in the suburbs of Boston. The family reaches Boston in 1982 and first lives in the home of a pastor who sponsored them, at a time when Southeast Asian refugees were arriving in large numbers in Revere, Lynn and Chelsea. In Revere and later Malden, the family meets racist violence, and police search their home after claiming that neighborhood dogs have gone missing. Samnang is one of the only Asian students at his school, and his cousins are the only Cambodian children he knows. He first learns about the genocide partly through the film The Killing Fields, since he was too young to remember much of it himself. He turns to skateboarding to express his feelings, and he becomes so alienated that he considers suicide.

The third part, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Cambodian American," follows Samnang to Long Beach after high school, where his aunt and uncle run a small doughnut shop. The family is caught in the racial tension of the 1992 riots. In the Cambodian community of Long Beach, in the area later called Cambodia Town, Samnang can speak Khmer, eat Cambodian food and hear Khmer music, and he visits Cambodian restaurants, markets, music stores and video stores. Working a night shift for a cleaning company, he finds Charles Bukowski in a public library. He goes back to community college, grows interested in English literature and begins to write. A professor, Brandon Liu, becomes his mentor, and Samnang later studies comparative literature at a university.

The last part, "Koan Khmer," shows Samnang becoming a university professor, writing and working to preserve Cambodian culture. Writing becomes a way for him to face painful experiences, though the novel does not present it as a full healing of his trauma.

Writing

Tuon began drafting the novel as a graduate student in comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts. Early versions experimented with autofiction and mixed in encyclopedia entries, song lyrics and family conversations. Publishers turned the manuscript down, and over the years Tuon revised it into a straightforward narrative. He has said it keeps the core of a story he first drafted more than twenty years earlier. Tuon left Cambodian family terms and the names of Khmer dishes unitalicized, so that readers would take them as part of the English of the United States.

Publication and editions

Northwestern University Press published the novel under its Curbstone Books imprint in Evanston, Illinois, on August 15, 2024, as a 256-page book, ISBN 9780810147430. Tuon is a Cambodian American writer and poet. His publisher calls him a Pushcart Prize winner, and World Literature Today nominated his poem "How to Defeat Pol Pot" for a 2023 Pushcart Prize.

Reception

Kirkus Reviews gave the novel its "Get It" verdict and found that it closely mirrors events in Tuon's life. Genny Lim, in East Wind, called it an impressive first novel. Charles Rammelkamp reviewed it for World Literature Today in May 2025. Christine Su called it a welcome addition to Southeast Asian American literature, one that explores the lives of 1.5- and second-generation Cambodian Americans.

Access

• Northwestern University Press

References