Epiphytic Lives: Cambodian American Nonmemory and the Value of Silence

This essay troubles the application of Marianne Hirsch's concept of “postmemory” to the Cambodian postwar generation's relationship to the Khmer Rouge regime and the war, instead proposing the term “nonmemory” as a description of what we who are not survivors of that war tend to understand as an absence of narrative regarding the war and the regime. In doing so, it calls attention not to the silence of Cambodian survivors but to Cambodian American second‐generation treatments of survivor silence. Instead of “breaking the silence,” it offers for the purposes of deep and critical contemplation the figure of the kapok tree, reputable and fabled to Cambodians, toward a concept of the epiphytic, understood as a multilayered life‐giving, anti‐ and de‐colonial force in nature.