THE DANCER'S SHADOW

In Phin’s novel, a queer Cambodian American searching for cultural connection time-travels to live through the history his family survived.

“Who are you?” is the recurring question that haunts Virak Chea, a queer second-generation Cambodian American. He feels like an outsider both in his corporate Oakland world and in his Cambodian community as he struggles with a contradiction: “He caught himself thinking he loved Cambodia deeply and, in the next breath, feeling something like rage toward it.” Virak can barely speak the language, which further separates him from the older generation he desires a relationship with. He tries to bridge this gap via lessons at a Khmer dance studio, but he finds himself on the outside again: “He watched himself in the mirror—a man who looked Khmer, dark hair, brown skin, almond eyes, but moved like someone translating from a language he’d only learned in adulthood.” He wants to understand his culture, but more pressingly, he yearns to connect with his family’s past, a history that included surviving refugee camps under the devastating Khmer Rouge regime and fleeing their home country in the late 1970s—experiences neither of his parents is keen on sharing. On Pchum Ben, a Cambodian festival during which “the gates between worlds open,” Virak discovers that, with an invocation, he can blur the lines of the living and the dead to connect with his ancestors. Virak winds up leaving the modern world and waking up in Cambodia in the 1960s. While he finds cultural differences, from the state of the restrooms to the era’s views of sexuality and gender, the community that surrounds him, while confused by the sudden appearance of this stranger with a foreign accent, is welcoming. They offer him both a place to stay and a way to develop his performance skills as a dancer, providing him with a cultural connection (and the possibility of a romantic one). As Virak further immerses himself in this somewhat familiar world, he’s frightened by his knowledge of the brutality to come: “In a decade—less than a decade—this world would be destroyed. The people here, this compound, these performers—most of them would not survive. He knew that. He carried it everywhere, the specific weight of knowing what these people didn’t.”

The novel is riveting in its use of time travel as a device to explore intergenerational trauma and ancestral connection. Virak is an alluring character, and Phin’s prose captures his rich and multifaceted inner world, which is characterized by humor (“I’m becoming a monk. Do Buddhist monks have to be straight? I should look into that”) as well as depth and restraint. Virak’s journey as a third-culture kid will surely resonate with many readers as he pursues answers to questions of identity, familial history, and the traumas of displacement. While readers (like Virak himself) will already know the fate of Cambodia during this time, Phin skillfully leverages this knowledge to build tension, resulting in a painful and haunting narrative that meaningfully grapples with the idea of seeking connection to one’s ancestral past.

A beautiful and thought-provoking addition to the growing canon of diaspora literature.