Gruel by Bunkong Tuon (review)

My tongue has been cutto fit the meter of another world.

The words bounce off walls,deflated, a dead poem.

Excerpt from “Dead Tongue”

Babaw is the Khmer word for rice gruel, the quintessential Cambodian breakfast served with fried garlic, cilantro, chopped scallions, sliced chili, and a variety of other local flavors. It’s a way for Khmers to start their day; it’s also nourishment for loved ones when they’re sick. The word for rice itself, bai, even doubles as the word for food in Khmer. It’s telling that food is ingrained into the language, that the concept of taste and tongues extends beyond the culinary sense and into the cultural. In Gruel, Bunkong Tuon writes about episodes that feed his existence as a Cambodian American. We experience the components of his life that flavor his being, namely the loss of his parents and the complexities of his relationships with language and heritage.

The book’s publication is timely; 2015 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Khmer Rouge takeover in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in April 1975. Nearly two million Cambodians died during this failed communist experiment of an agrarian utopia. The horror of the four-year reign, though not the focus of the book, serves as a backdrop for Tuon’s experience in Cambodia to his adjustment and life in the United States.

This debut poetry collection takes us on a journey of Tuon’s life as a member of the “1.5 generation” of Khmers in America—born in Cambodia but coming of age here, dealing with the struggles that come with refugee status and a lower socioeconomic class to eventually becoming an English professor. Interspersed are the few memories of his parents, and retellings by his relatives of sacrifices by the woman ever present in his young life—Yiey, his grandmother-turned-mother.

One gets a strong feeling of Charles Bukowski in this book, whom Tuon has alluded to being his “literary father.” The book is separated into seven sections, titled after geographical associations and important personal relationships. Nearly all the poems deal with a memory, with devoted descriptions of surroundings. Similar to Bukowski, the poems themselves are a straightforward read, confessional and familiar, providing scenes of life on the margins, whether as a refugee, writer, or poor person. Tuon’s longer poems build on images of everyday life, and at times, adjustment to humbling economic circumstances. His shorter poems are powerful in their brevity, revealing the humor of situations, to the ache of loss and loneliness underlying the entire book.

A notable theme in this book is the loss of taste and tongues. For example, first generation Khmers (such as his parents’ generation) in this country stress that to lose one’s mother tongue is to lose one’s “Khmerness.” In “The Pavilion Dream,” the author wakes from a dream exclaiming to have forgotten his Khmer:

I tried to recollect that dream where I lostmy mother tongue, but before anything could happen,my body tensed, my heart ached, a fist-sized stone.

Having lost his own mother, he physiologically embodies loss of his mother tongue.

In “The Day My Worst Fear Came True,” he writes from a more culinary standpoint after losing his ability to handle spicy food:

I don’t wantto be walking on the streets of Portlandannouncing to the Pacific worldthat I have lost my Khmer tongue.

First, this idea of a Khmer tongue is literal, referring to losing his taste in the culinary sense. Secondly, it poetically expresses the loss of his cultural and linguistic tongue. His inability to handle the spicy chili, that which defines so much of Cambodian cooking, is a deeply personal failure.

On the impacts of being brown in America, he speaks rather succinctly to himself:

settling for invisibility disappeared into the whitenessbecame an absence,desired to escape the brownness that was always yours,a brownness that didn’t exist before.

This is from the poem “Losing One’s Name,” in which he writes of adopting “Sam” in favor of his...