<div>A powerful debut novel about war, immigration, and home Celebrating the power of literature to rescue a life from despair, Koan Khmer is the story of Samnang Sok, an orphaned child survivor of the Cambodian genocide who sets out to make a new life in America alongside his extended family. Struggling to cope with the traumas of his past, Samnang feels alienated from his American peers at school and disconnected from his aunts, uncles, and cousins at home. Inspired by the books he discovers along the way, Samnang begins piecing together information about the past through stories told by elders, family photographs, and his own memories and dreams. Based loosely on Tuon's life, the novel traces Samnang's difficult journey toward an answer to the question, How does one rebuild a life after genocide and displacement and create a home? Koan Khmer gives an unflinching voice to a distinctly Cambodian American sensibility. Tuon creates a refugee space that all Americans can visit in this bildungsroman that breathes life into cultural knowledge disrupted by loss and grief. &nbsp;</div>

Koan Khmer: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Tuon, Bunkong

United States

Curbstone Books 2

"Bunkong Tuon is saying something new and important in The Doctor Will Fix It. Exploring uncharted territory: How to raise his dazzling, bi-racial daughter to her fullest potential in today's America. The infatuated father, himself an outsider, searches for answers in these astonishing and tender poems which ponder gender and racial identity, and create a roadmap of what it means to love. This book is honest, frustrated, tender, and human." - Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Junkie Wife, poetry editor, Cultural Weekly "The Doctor Will Fix It continues the poet's primary theme: the importance of family. Tuon's previous collection, the heart-rending Gruel deals with the refugee experience, of literally being carried out of Cambodia on his grandmother's back and of his new life in America. And So I Was Blessed follows his new life as a husband, father, and teacher with a revealing journey to Vietnam where he learns about his late father's roots. Now with The Doctor Will Fix It, Tuon explores the vagaries of parenting, the misgivings and joys, the problems of biracialism and small-minded prejudice and how we deal with these realities. Ultimately, the poet's sense is that with love and hope, a better world that has such children as his will prevail. Even impossible dreams may come true." -Alan Catlin, poet, editor Misfit Magazine

The Doctor Will Fix It

Poetry

Shabda Press

In his first full-length collection, GRUEL, Bunkong Tuon documents the lives of Cambodian refugees and explores the poetic landscape of a Cambodian America. Written tenderly, with honesty, intelligence, and occasional humor, GRUEL is populated by survivors such as a boy who loses his mother to the Khmer Rouge regime, a grandmother who risks her life to steal a few grains of rice for her grandson, an uncle who is beaten by Thai military police for night fishing outside a refugee camp, an aunt who leaves the East Coast to buy a donut shop in California, a father who re-experiences the traumas of the Cambodian Genocide, a young man who discovers Charles Bukowski in a Long Beach public library, a professor who teaches about the horrors of war to college students at a private college in Upstate New York, to name a few. It's a book about memories, ghosts and haunting, personal loss and historical traumas, losing and finding home, discovery and self-invention; above all, it's a book about love, sacrifice, and hope.

Gruel

NYQ Books

And So I Was Blessed weaves together three narrative strands: a tourist visiting Viet Nam, a son sojourning to his father's village in the Mekong Delta, and a professor leading his students on a term abroad, all for the first time. Running throughout this poetry collection is the refrain of the central character--the tourist, son, and professor--missing the daughter he left behind. This is a book about history and memory, tourism and education, arrival and departure, loss and alienation, longing and misrecognition, and above all, a father's love for his daughter.

And So I Was Blessed

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Books by Tuon, Bunkong

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Tuon, Bunkong. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Koan Khmer: A Novel

The Doctor Will Fix It

Gruel

And So I Was Blessed