The EST/Sloan Project is committed to “challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact on our lives.” In that spirit, we offer this essay on the historical and cultural context of what you are now by Sam Chanse, the 2022 EST/Sloan mainstage production. what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3. You can purchase tickets here.
Passing on the Uncanny
by Soriya K. Chum, Dramaturg
Pia is a neuroscientist whose academic research is intensely enmeshed with the personal. Her scientific investigations concern “fear memories;” her mother is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. As Pia looks at the long road ahead of possibly breaking into her field with a proposal to rid the brain of traumatic memories, she wrestles with the omnipresence of her own family’s uncanny memories—their capacity to terrorize her mother at night, to induce in their home a stultifying silence, which Pia helps to maintain as a way of coping.
Memory is an intimate process. The experience of a specific memory is palpable not only to loved ones who remember, but also to those who share space intimately with them—so that family, too, can be immersed, by extension, in the pleasure, grief, or violence of a recollection we may not exactly call their own. The reach of memory is powerful, with a magnitude that in some cases is felt across generations, and for a community like Pia’s that once endured a massively traumatic event, their interdependent behaviors of remembrance can either inhibit or change the course of the group’s collective development.
From 1975 to 1979, a communist group known as the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia, enacting radical social, economic, and cultural reforms throughout the country. In the group’s pursuit of an agrarian utopia, they expelled entire urban populations and moved them to remote rural provinces where they worked in labor camps. The Khmer Rouge purported that the citizens of this new, classless system would work the land together and live off of it, equally. In the propagation of their doctrine, they sought to re-educate the public on the party’s values and to root out all dissent by punishing alleged loyalists of the former regime. As their paranoia intensified, the Khmer Rouge grew rampantly murderous, targeting intellectuals, capitalists, foreigners, ethnic minorities, and artists. As a result of their totalitarian reign, an estimated 2.5 million people died of execution, starvation, and disease. Those who survived, like Pia’s mother, fled to refugee camps in Thailand—few with families left intact, some alone, all shaped forever by a deeply formative past.
My mother is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. She evades questions still today about the losses she suffered. When I was a child, she would prepare dishes for our ancestors during the Cambodian New Year as a ritual expression of holding their hunger in the family’s memory. We’d patiently wait for our ancestors to eat first before lifting our forks. I’d crouch on the floor before a festive table presented with ample platters of roasted duck, oily noodles, pickled greens, and sour soup, while clasping sticks of champak incense in silent prayer, sending blessings of peace and comfort to them. My eyes would study the empty chairs, and I imagined I could draw into the seats my ancestors’ silhouettes with the rising, sweet smoke that escaped my hot fingers. I wondered if they could see me too—see us, the living, and how we struggled. I’d blush from the guilt of divining their tired eyes on me.
In what you are now, there is a scene in which Pia’s brother Darany makes a similar ancestral offering. He asserts, “Someone should be feeding us knowhatI’msayin / give us food to ease our suffering.” Embedded within his sentiment is a powerful question of what nourishment is given to people who haven’t passed, but who live on to bear difficult legacies. Darany’s assertion is an interesting counter-proposal to the survivor narrative that tends to centralize the memorialization of atrocious pasts. It is a suggestion that gently shifts our preoccupation with what happened, who we lost, and how we barely survived, to the untidy business of those living today, of nurturing present and future generations after the fact.
In the eighties, nearly 160,000 Cambodians migrated to the United States as refugees. Planning for their arrival, the federal government assessed cities that could equip the newly arrived with low-wage and low-skill jobs and affordable housing. The majority of Cambodians resettled in communities with pre-existing, high rates of poverty and crime. In the play, Pia’s family migrated to Lowell, Massachusetts, home to the second largest Cambodian community in America. Challenged by the stresses of resettlement—securing a job, learning a language, and adapting to new norms—while burdened with the anguish of having fled genocide, Cambodians found their hard start exacerbated by their placement in distressed areas. From their precarious point of inception in the States, a line can be drawn to many of the contemporary problems faced by Cambodian Americans decades later, including deportation, gang-related violence, underemployment, and mental health conditions.
In the last twenty years, we’ve seen tremendous advancements in research dedicated to helping us better understand the biological dimensions of trauma. Scientists now know that the posttraumatic stress individuals experience may be owed to changes to gene regions in the brain responsible for processing fearful stimuli. A person living with PTSD then, who shows signs of hypervigilance, reactivity, or avoidance, may be exhibiting these tendencies because of a past traumatic event that distinctly altered their DNA. These genetic changes extend beyond the life of the individual, branching out to the lives of their children and their children’s children, so that patterns of trauma are heritable down the bloodline.
To stop these effects, Pia is exploring through her research the viability of an intervention that could selectively target and blunt fear memories, so that typical triggers become more like reminders, unimbued of their painful associations. Though a pathway to implementing treatment models and therapies lags behind the research in her field, Pia’s belief in science and its potential to heal is persuasive, and there is, of course, her double-fold experience (as both a scientist and the daughter of a genocide survivor), which is a factor in our bet on her. The dramatic irony of Pia’s mission is how much skin she has in the game. We cheer her on when she perceives connections between her personal life and career with the clarity of an expert witness; and we cringe with compassion when she barrels full-steam ahead in her research with the unchecked zeal of a grief tourist, and forgets herself—her close orientation to the work at hand.
On a family trip to Cambodia in 2016, I insisted we visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh. The building once was a secondary school the Khmer Rouge repurposed as S-21, a prison camp and execution center. Now a museum, it displays the photographs of inmates, their discarded clothes, instruments of torture, and dusty chalkboards that spell of the place’s bygone innocence. In the main artery of the museum, my mother and I came to a large map on a free-standing wall. I took her hand to it. I asked her to trace her journey from Phnom Penh to labor camp to refugee camp for me. Confusion riddled her finger—starting, then stopping, falling, and breaking away from the map. In my abstract way of seeing back with her and urgently correcting the record, hovering over this map, a shade of disappointment rose in me for her failure to remember. My mother then turned and pointed to the open museum door, which looked to a sunlit courtyard lined with swaying palm trees, and she uttered just over the sound of a motorcycle zizzing by that her sister whom she loved lived once two blocks from where we stood.
For a scopic regime that deliberately annihilated the social foundation of a society by splitting up sisters, seeding distrust among brothers, rearranging marriages, and orphaning children, the most defiant act for Cambodians today against the perpetrators is keeping our families together. Like Pia’s family, it is a path of trial and error, closing the distance, and putting voice into the gulf of silence.
