Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian-American writer, critic, and teacher. He is the author of three poetry collections: Gruel (NYQ Books, 2015), And So I Was Blessed (NYQ Books, 2017), and The Doctor Will Fix It (Shabda Press, 2019). His poetry recently won the 2019 Nasiona Nonfiction Poetry Prize. He teaches at Union College in Schenectady, NY. You can follow him on Twitter @BunkongTuon.

1) When did you fall in love with writing or start feeling an urgent need to write?

I started writing in the early ‘90s when I was an undergraduate student in Long Beach, California. I was very lost and hurt at that time. I had all these painful memories that I was carrying with me—memories that had to do with the Cambodian Genocide, losing my mother to starvation and sickness, being separated from my father, leaving Cambodia, living in refugee camps in Thailand and Indonesia, experiencing the feeling of deep alienation and estrangement from growing up racially and culturally different from my peers on the East Coast in the 1980s. I had to write, put these memories down and thereby release some of that pain and try to make sense of my life. Writing for me, at the very beginning, had to do with a kind of emotional survival. And in the process of writing about my life, I also wrote about my family—i.e. my uncles, aunts, grandmother, grandfather. In a way, especially in my first book, Gruel, I was honoring family members with my writing.

2) One of your poems that stops me in my tracks is "Unhappy Father's Day," which links your family's history as refugees to the sorrow and despair of families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border. Tell us a little about that poem.

That poem is from my forthcoming collection, The Doctor Will Fix It. It’s a book about raising one’s children in the age of Trump. As you know, we are living in a particularly challenging time of great political and cultural upheavals. The central question I ask in this book is: how do you raise a child, particularly a bi-racial daughter, in these trying times, in this day and age of the Me Too and Time’s Up movements, where walls are ideologically built to keep those who look like me and my daughter out of the country?

The poem “Unhappy Father’s Day” was written right after Father’s Day of last year. My wife and daughter made me this cute Father’s Day card and gave me gifts in celebration of this special day. But this was around the time when news broke about immigrant and refugee families being separated, locked in cages at our southern border, where some fathers committed suicide because they felt helpless, unable to care for and protect their wives and children.

In the back of my mind, I thought about those families, those children who were afraid, terrified, and those fathers who couldn’t do anything for their families. As a father and as someone who came to this country as a refugee, I had to do something, to speak out and against. I had to write.

3) In addition to being a writer, you're a professor and have been the director of the Asian Studies program at Union College. Are you able to protect some time for your creative process? Does your work as a teacher and administrator even feed it sometimes?

My three-year term as director of Asian Studies concluded in 2019. I learned a lot about the program and how the college operates, particularly about the relationship between programs and departments. I was also trying my hardest to balance administrating, teaching, and parenting. I remember my daughter saying to me, “I miss you, Daddy. Do you have to go back to school? Let’s go out and play.” In all honesty, it was a struggle. Not knowing if I found the perfect balance, all I can say, looking back at this time period, was that I did my best. And I have no regrets, only the feeling of being grateful for such an opportunity to learn.

As a teacher, scholar, and writer, I lucked out. My teaching, research, and writing feed off of each other. I explore similar thematic terrains in the courses I teach, the research I’ve done, and the poems and stories I’ve written, examining the lives of Southeast Asian Americans, paying careful attention to issues of war, trauma, home, displacement, and identity. In my creative writing, I seem to be obsessed currently with the experience of Southeast Asians in America, how we have built our lives and make a home in the United States. Although we have been writing about America since the 1990s, the publishing market and academic institutions have largely focused on the Cambodian Genocide, which occurred almost forty-five years ago.

Overall, I think I’m somewhat successful because of this synergy between teaching, research, and writing. And I find the entire enterprise quite meaningful as these issues are near and dear to my heart.

4) You've dedicated a course to Toni Morrison this fall, and you've got regular installments #HonoringToni on Twitter. Tell us a little about that course and the desire to honor her as so many mourn her loss.

I was a graduate student at UMass Amherst when I first read Toni Morrison. I found theory to be intellectually and politically stimulating, but I felt something was missing. I wanted to return to literature and re-experience its psychic, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical energies. Particularly, I wanted to read African American literature. I had a hodgepodge knowledge of authors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, etc. from various undergraduate classes. But I wanted a survey of African American literature where I could connect the dots. Lucky for me, I found Joseph T. Skerrett in the English Department and he agreed to work with me on an independent study. We read Beloved for one of the readings, and I remember bawling my eyes out when I read about Sethe and her daughter. I was this Khmer kid in graduate school, this orphaned refugee kid, and I was crying when, in the book, Sethe acknowledges Beloved as her murdered daughter and there is this beautiful scene of mother-daughter unity. I hadn’t felt such heavy emotions for quite some time. That’s the power of literature. And the book is so beautifully structured and plotted. There are times when I read that book and think, this is pure poetry. Morrison is truly a beautiful writer, and sad to say, I don’t think we will have another writer of that caliber any time soon. I’m grateful to Joe Skerrett for introducing me to Morrison, and I want to do the same for my students. When Morrison passed away this summer, I decided to revamp my Morrison seminar in honor of her memory. And lucky for me, my students are excited about the readings and discussions. They are good-natured, enthusiastic, and spirited kids, and they recognize immediately that she is an author who demands deep respect.

My regular installments of #HonoringToni are my way of honoring her memory with the world outside of our little seminar. I want someone on Twitter to stumble onto #HonoringToni tweets, get inspired, pick up one of her books, and read. I want them to rediscover Toni Morrison and keep her memory and spirit alive.

5) Who else, or what else, sustains you in this nightmarish cultural moment?

Besides poetry and music, my daughter sustains me. I do what I do because of her. Writing about her is not only my way of expressing my love for her, but it’s my way of examining the many challenges of raising a biracial daughter in these trying times and figuring out how to do better by her. My wife, in particular our friendship and the many conversations we have had about culture and politics, has also helped sustain me. It makes sense that my forthcoming poetry collection, The Doctor Will Fix It, is dedicated to her. Besides family, friends both at the college and outside of academia continue to inspire me and make me do right by them. The bottom line: I can’t do it on my own. I have good people in my life.