{"id":15344,"date":"2013-04-25T01:04:32","date_gmt":"2013-04-25T01:04:32","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-10-15T12:14:45","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T12:14:45","slug":"asian-american-studies-professor-earns-national-honor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=15344","title":{"rendered":"Asian American Studies Professor Earns National Honor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cathy Schlund-Vials was born in 1974 at the Udorn Royal Air Force Base, in the northern Thailand city of Udon Thani, to a Cambodian mother and American father.<\/strong> As fate would have it, her parents gave her and her twin brother up for adoption. Her adoptive parents, a Japanese mother and American father, brought both of them to the United States as children.<\/p>\n

Now director of the Asian American Studies Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Schlund-Vials recently published her second book, titled War, Genocide and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), which considers the legacy of the day-to-day lives of millions of Cambodians who were oppressed and killed by their government in the early 1970s.<\/p>\n

In part because of this work, she is being honored with the annual Early Career Award from the national Association for Asian American Studies. She will receive the award during the Association\u2019s annual meeting in Seattle, April 18-20.<\/p>\n

\u201cNobody has done a book like this on Cambodian Americans,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s based on what critic James Young originally termed \u2018memory work\u2019 in relationship to Holocaust memorials: How do people remember periods of suffering and oppression? How are genocides remembered and forgotten?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Killing Fields<\/h2>\n

The Killing Fields era in Cambodia was a period between 1975 and 1979 when about 2 million Cambodians \u2013 by some estimates 25 percent of the country\u2019s population \u2013 died from execution, famine, forced labor, and poor medical care. Led by communist dictator Pol Pot, the government, called the Khmer Rouge, forced people out of cities and into the countryside to work in the fields.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Killing Fields was a time where the government forcibly evacuated cities, prohibited currency, and prohibited the practice of Buddhism,\u201d says Schlund-Vials. \u201cThe idea was to go back to \u2018year zero,\u2019 before French colonialism and Western imperialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Survivors of the period, mostly senior citizens now, can be loath to talk about this horrible time in their lives. But their children, many of whom, like Schlund-Vials, came to the U.S. as children, have started to tell their parents\u2019 stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted to know how people of Cambodian descent, who now live in the U.S., remember that time,\u201d she explains, \u201cby talking to artists whose parents lived through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just the beginnin\u2019<\/h2>\n

This generation, which Schlund-Vials calls \u201c1.5-generation\u201d Cambodian Americans, has emerged in recent decades with artistic renditions of their parents\u2019 legacies.<\/p>\n

One example is hip-hop artist Prach Ly, whose stage name is praCh. His parents lived through the Killing Fields, and in 1999 he wrote and produced an album in his garage that included lyrics from his father\u2019s point of view, retelling his story of the atrocities and his survival.<\/p>\n

The album, called Dalama: The End\u2019n Is Just the Beginnin\u2019, was quintessentially Cambodian-American in its lyrics and its musicianship, says Schlund-Vials.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt fuses a Khmer backbeat with a hard rap beat,\u201d she describes. \u201cHe recorded it in his garage, not for fame, but for himself and his family. It memorializes the Cambodian-American experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

To his astonishment, a bootleg copy of his album found its way to Cambodia, where he became the #1 artist in the country in 2000. He\u2019s now credited with introducing hip-hop music to Cambodians.<\/p>\n

These types of grassroots memorials are important to the Cambodian legacy, and they\u2019re made even more so because the current Cambodian government has not erected a state-sanctioned memorial to the Killing Fields, Schlund-Vials says. Several important prison sites and fields are open to tourists, but ironically, she notes, Buddhist Cambodians tend to avoid such sites because their religion tells them the areas are haunted by those who suffered inauspicious deaths.<\/p>\n

Asian American scholarship<\/h2>\n

As director of the Asian American Studies Institute, Schlund-Vials has overseen the rapid expansion of the program in the past few years. Five new faculty members in the Center will join UConn in fall 2013, including Meina Cai, a political scientist who studies Chinese politics, and Bradley Simpson, a historian who studies Indonesian history.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I came to UConn, I was struck by the need to engage emerging transitional and diaspora studies,\u201d she says. With 40 students in the Asian American Studies minor and more joining each year, the affiliate base is steadily growing, she adds.<\/p>\n

When Schlund-Vials travels to give talks around the country, local Cambodian American community members turn out to hear her speak. This is especially satisfying, she says, because it bridges the often-wide gap among scholars and artists, and scholars and the public.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe task before me is to make relevant these experiences to a larger population,\u201d she says, \u201cto make issues of citizenship, migration, and oppression understood to us all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christine Buckley, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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