The thing I like about the Singapore Writers Festival is that it exposes me to new writers and new books. I tried to keep up but there are so many books out there that sometimes you just need that push to read that book that is under your radar.
I have heard good things about Tian Veasna’s Year of the Rabbit (Drawn & Quarterly, 2020) but never got the chance to explore it. Until I got to moderate a panel related to Southeast Asian comics for SWF 2021. I proposed the panel and Tian’s name came up, so why not? Any gentle nudge to read a new book is good.
And I am glad I did as Year of the Rabbit is one of the best books I have read this year. Tian was born three days after the Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in 1975 and this book detailed his family eventual escape to the Thai border in 1979. It is a harrowing story told with much of the actual violence taken place off panel (intentional of Tian). He is not the ‘hero’ of the story as he was only a baby between 1975 and 1979, but this family story of running, hiding and the years of living dangerously had a big impact on him and his psyche. I have always wondered how people live their lives during wartime and in long periods of chaos and instability. It is to be in a constant state of stress but the human mind is an amazing thing - you adapt and you adjust. I realized that after visiting cartoonist friends in Jakarta in 2000, just two years after the riots and the physical city was still recovering from the violence.
What struck me about the Year of the Rabbit is why this book had taken off. I am revealing my vintage, but stories of Indochinese refugees have been in my cinematic consciousness since the 1980s. From Hong Kong, we have Ann Hui’s The Story of Woo Viet (1981) and Boat People (1982). The actual events of Khmer Rouge’s Year Zero were explored in The Killing Fields (1984), the Oscar winning film. In recent years, the experiences of Vietnamese refugees have been documented in GB Tran’s Vietamerica (2010) and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017). Online, there is also Matt Huynh’s interactive comic, The Boat (2015).
For what happened in Cambodia, Tian is not the first comic artist to mine his family history. French-Cambodian comic artist, Sera is probably the first to do so. He is older than Tian and could remember entering the French embassy with his French national mother in 1975 but his Cambodian father could not enter the compound. His father did not survive and for years he was angry with the French for letting his father die. We invited Sera for SWF in 2017 and we had beer and makan at Newton Circus. Benjamin Dix, who wrote the graphic novel, Vanni, about the Sri Lanka civil war and refugee crisis, was also a guest of SWF in 2017.
So, in my mind, what happened in Cambodia was not that remote or unfamiliar. I was teaching Southeast Asian history in the late 1990s and saw together with my students history unfolding in front of us - the final defeat of the Khmer Rouge by Hun Sen, the death of Pol Pot and the arrest and trial of the Khmer Rouge leaders.
During our discussion, I asked Tian have the people really forgotten about the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields. He shared that that was one of the reasons he did this book. Other than to find out more about his own family history and to make sense of who and where he came from, from his visits to Cambodia, he had realized that many of the young people in Cambodia did not know about this tragic past. He felt that such stories need to be told and retold and every generation should be reminded of what happened in 1975. It was not a story with lessons confined to Southeast Asia but it has parallels to similar events in Serbia, Croatia and Rwanda. I am reminded of my own trip to Cambodia many years ago. I saw many young people and old folks but the in-betweens I was told by a local guide were killed. The person i spoke to is the only survivor in his family. I looked at the young people in the streets of Phnom Penh and they were just hanging around, doing the things young people all over the world do, and I wondered if they knew.
Tian’s answer is that many of them don’t. And thus the Year of the Rabbit. To me, the book testifies to the power of comics in telling stories, in communicating, in putting us in communion with the past and learning about ourselves and our failings. There are still many stories to tell - the Rohingya crisis and what is happening in Myanmar now. I wondered how the political cartoonists I met in Yangon are doing.
Tian will be featured in this SWF panel on 10 Nov, 7-8 pm.
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