2. Sense memories of Cambodia as it was before the Khmer Rouge are incredibly important to all of the book’s characters. If you’re fortunate enough to live in a town or city with a Cambodian restaurant, consider having them cater your book club with Khmer delicacies. If the closest Cambodian eatery is too far away, try your hand at some simple snacks with easy-to-find ingredients, like this classic iced coffee drink ( cambokitchen.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/cambodian-coffee/) or a banana rice pudding ( karenskitchen1.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/going-bananas-for-rice-pudding/). To listen to the sounds of the traditional Khmer instruments described in the novel, including the ksae diev (lute) and sralai (oboe), a good beginning is The Music of Cambodia: Solo Instrumental Music, available for ordering at www.harmonies.com/releases/13076.htm/. You can also listen to the Khmer rock ballad that Narunn and Teera sing to each other, “Allo Oun, Allo Bong” at www.youtube.com/watch?v=HizwnxE9hpY/.
3. In the Shadow of the Banyan, Vaddey Ratner’s first novel, is based on the author’s own childhood experiences surviving the Khmer Rouge regime. Visit her website at www.vaddeyratner.com/ to watch her describe her effort to transform tragedy into art (the video in under Books > In the Shadow of the Banyan), listen to and read her interviews with NPR and others (under Press > Interviews), or read her short essays on storytelling, imagination, and human rights (under Press > Vaddey’s Writing).
4. View the collection of short videos providing vignettes of contemporary life in Phnom Penh at http://whitebuilding.org/en/media/films. Select one to share with your book group, and explain why you chose it.
A Conversation With Vaddey Ratner
Your first novel, In the Shadow of the Banyan, also dealt with the Cambodian genocide. Why did you decide to return to this topic for your second book? What aspects of the tragedy were you able to highlight here that you weren’t able to earlier?
An experience like this marks you forever. It defines not just your own history but that of your entire family, even the next generation. You can never stop asking questions about what happened and why. With Banyan, my paramount purpose in writing was to honor the lives lost, to honor the courage and love that made my own survival possible.
Music of the Ghosts is about the survivors—people like myself who were victims, as well as those who may have had a hand in the destruction. I truly believe that I would not be alive today without the humanity of others. I wanted to explore that humanity from all sides. The only way I know to do that is to put aside my own personal pain, my own loss, and turn the light on what the experiences of others might have been.
In examining atrocities around the world, there’s often an intense focus on an individual dictator, like Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot. It’s easy to look at these men and say, they’re an aberration, they’re not like the rest of us—unique in their appetite for power, their readiness to use violence toward that end. Yet a single person cannot will such an atrocity. I’m interested in the lives of those caught in the same events who end up on the wrong side. What choices did they make? What motivates people to support a cause that becomes so murderous?
On a personal level, to this day I’ve never learned what happened to my own father after he disappeared in the early days after the Khmer Rouge takeover. I’ve never learned how his life ended. So I feel a duty to understand the suffering of others in its fullest extent, including the suffering of those who didn’t make it.
In the novel, Teera asks the question, Why does such suffering recur again and again? Like her, I feel we have yet to honor the dead with an answer. We cannot hope to understand, we cannot hope to change, if we are not willing to see suffering in others that is equal to or greater than our own.
In the Shadow of the Banyan was both a critical and a commercial hit, receiving not only major prize and “best of” nominations, but also appearing on the New York Times bestseller list. What was your reaction to this sudden success? Did it affect your approach to writing your sophomore novel?
I was stunned into stillness. After absorbing that, the overwhelming feeling was just gratitude. It reaffirmed what I believed all along—that the world still cares, that we haven’t been forgotten. The world can be a noisy place, with so many voices competing to be heard. Sometimes you can’t raise your voice to be heard, but instead you must speak in a voice that is so quiet that people have to silence themselves to hear you. That’s the approach I took with Banyan—to write quietly, to write with the belief that if I have something important to say, the world will listen.
I took the same approach with Music of the Ghosts. After the buzz of media attention and touring, I felt I needed to remove myself. When my husband was offered an overseas position again with his environmental policy work, I seized upon the opportunity for us to move with our daughter. Now we live in Malaysia, where we’ve made a home on the Andaman Sea. The greatest noise is waves crashing on the rocks. Each morning, each evening, facing the vast sea, I am reminded of my insignificance, and I can’t help but ask myself again, Why am I here? Why did I survive, and what can I do with that survival? I wrote Banyan in solitude, confronting what I felt was most essential. In Malaysia, I’ve been able to recover the quiet in which to write, to probe.
The adage is that authors should “write what they know,” but topics like war, genocide, and the refugee experience are undoubtedly traumatic. How did you negotiate writing about these themes of your own experiences?
I don’t quite subscribe to this adage, at least not in a narrow sense. Often we assume that the fact of living through some episode imparts understanding. Yet, living through an experience sometimes gives you instead a glimpse of the immensity of your own ignorance. A single experience can be examined from so many different perspectives. You can explore your trauma, but you have to also be willing to see how the experience has affected others. As I writer, I see my experience as a beginning point, not a limit. Writing Music was extremely difficult, yet I also felt it necessary.
Very few novels have been written about the twentieth-century Cambodian experience, either in America or abroad. Do you feel the pressure of representation, with both Music of the Ghosts and Banyan? How do you negotiate this as an Asian-American writer?