Hearing Voices

Let me weep my cruel fate and sigh for my lost freedom. Let sadness shatter these chains of my suffering, if only out of mercy.

—Almirena, in Handel’s Rinaldo

I am standing in the chapel at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church, which is connected to the Juilliard School of Music and part of the Lincoln Center complex in New York City. I am singing the words of the Handel opera aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” that translates to “let me weep.” The character singing the aria, Almirena, has been kidnapped and held captive in solitude away from her true love. My voice teacher is telling me she doesn’t believe me.

I have spent years trying to find a way to express myself. Coming from a family of Cambodian refugees relocated to New York City, meeting basic human needs like shelter, food, and clothing dominated our daily lives. My parents had survived the Khmer Rouge, a brutal and genocidal regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Given their experiences, my teenage desire to pursue a path to music school was most certainly unwelcome.

Even attending the nearby high school of music and art, my parents’ anxious voices followed me into the school halls. They whispered that music wouldn’t take me anywhere; it would never provide a stable income. When I got to college, I played my last flute recital and accepted an English literature and classics scholarship. I developed a literary voice while analyzing dead writers and studying Latin. When I first wrote, I imagined the screams of tortured Khmers who died under the Khmer Rouge; I envisioned mounds of skulls. When I visited Cambodia, we held prayer ceremonies at temples to honor ancestors. I imagined ghosts swirling around the incense and saffron-robed monks.

These are the same ghosts who convinced my parents that life was solely about survival. As children to my parents, we learned to silence our wants and our needs, to keep from burdening them further—they were already taxed in maintaining the basic needs of our family, barely affording rent, food, and our school supplies. We were perceptive enough to see that something wasn’t quite right with our family. It’s clear now that many Cambodian refugees, including our parents, had undiagnosed and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder. Being thrust into a new country, culture, and language further complicated their attempts at healing. As Khmer Buddhists, we not only believed in reincarnation, but that birthmarks are signs of past lives. After she saw the birthmark on my knee, my mother was convinced that I was her deceased son, Sothear, reborn. Although my parents and my older brother survived, they were continually haunted by the ghosts of those who hadn’t. My mother says Sothear sometimes appears in her dreams.

It’s not in the Cambodian tradition to speak about trauma. My father has taken well to English idioms and dismissed my early inquiries with “the past is in the past.” I knew early on which battles to fight, although at a certain point, preparing for the fight was so exhausting, I eventually gave up. I even began to develop a defeatist attitude to most problems—it was easier not to try than to become invested only to fail. It didn’t help that my father’s household felt more like a dictatorship. I find family discussions to be a privilege that Western societies enjoy. My father lectured us and concluded with orders for us to follow. I vividly remember tracing my finger along the designs on our plastic covered couch as he laid out in a stern voice his expectations of us. Did his approach come from the TV sitcoms that taught us about American culture, which we watched daily, or from his days in the Cambodian military, where he was a master sergeant with twelve men under his command? Or worse, was this repressive approach a cultural remnant of his trauma living under a genocidal regime? With a father unwilling to speak in general, except to criticize, I knew I had to seek answers to such questions on my own.

During...