I have always been a reader. Traveling anywhere, I carry a book or three with me. Physical books.
Last year, I took one to California—The Golden Voice—and sat with my mom, asking her about the singers listed on the last few pages. I read their names the way they were written on the page. In English. Anglicized. Not the way they are actually spoken in Khmer.
My mom, my ម៉ាក់, gently corrected me.
Not sharply. Not critically. Just...precisely.
This history is not abstract. It is lived. It is remembered differently by the people who survived it.
So when I read Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, I felt two things at once.
Admiration. The dialogue is sharp. The pacing is tight. The structure holds. It is a really good play. I will see it again, and I will bring my husband and my friends.
And distance. Because the Cambodia in the play—and the Khmer people—are partially mine, but not fully. They are constructed from truths I recognize—Pol Pot, the music, the loss—but arranged through someone else’s lens.
Yee wrote this before 2020, before authorship became a louder, sharper conversation. Before people began asking more publicly: who gets to tell these stories? And what does it mean when they do?
Sitting next to my ម៉ាក់, hearing her correct the names of singers whose voices shaped a generation, those questions feel less theoretical.
They feel personal.
And still, I would rather this story be told, even imperfectly, than not told at all.
Because there aren’t enough. Not enough plays. Not enough essays. Not enough voices telling these Khmer stories from the inside.
I spent years finding my voice. And while I was searching, other people were already telling parts of my story.
I am 42. I survived. My parents survived worse. I have built a life that would have been unimaginable in Khao-I-Dang.
And now, standing in all of that, I am asking what I owe—to the stories, to the music, to the names my mother pronounces correctly—and whether I am finally willing to be the one who writes them.
I think the answer is yes.
I finished reading the last few scenes of Cambodian Rock Band in a room full of other writers, waiting for a write-in to begin. The ending is heavy. We learn how Chum survives. This play needed at least one trigger warning.
I think about this. My substack. About how my family and friends read what I publish. They encourage me, and I am grateful. But I don’t write for them.
I write for me. To say what I want to say. To keep getting better at saying it.
That night, in that writing room, I chose to share what I had just written.
That was new.
A play asks you to listen closely—to the dialogue, to the silences, to what is said and what is omitted.
I am learning to do the same with my own voice.
I am still finding it.
But I am done waiting for it to be perfect.
I am now willing to show up just as I currently am.
