“Girl with the sak yon tattoo”

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Sophia Sok, a Cambodian American college student, unexpectedly finds herself bizarrely entangled with Audrey Fischer after getting paired together for a class project. Through a series of strange events and a sak yon tattoo, Audrey gets a superficial glimpse of the Sok family’s lives and how it reflects her own place of privilege. Novels about or by Cambodians tend to focus on the genocide and survivors’ memoirs. While these are necessary, there is a lack of alternative narratives to their experiences. Thus, this short story seeks to write in a different genre to convey the humanness of the refugee experience that is not only of trauma, but also one that reveals the complexity of intergenerational relationships, and is filled with humor, healing, and life. This story also delves into ideas of cultural voyeurism, fetishisms, and appropriation. Writing this short fictional story gave me the opportunity to weave Cambodian cultural traditions and stories across spatial and temporal planes in order to reorganize narratives about the Cambodian American identity. Contributing to the collective efforts of second and third generation Cambodian Americans to bring forth generational kinship and a new reality for ourselves, it opposes the portrayal of victimhood brought forth by a history of US settler colonialism and militarism.