Writer Vichet Chum Says ‘To be a Cambodian is to be a Multitude of Things’

As a Cambodian American artist, Vichet Chum uses his platform to uplift the community, writing about the varied experiences of Khmer folks from all backgrounds.

The New York-based playwright's latest project is no different. Kween, Chum’s debut YA novel, comes out Oct. 3 and is an adaptation of his play of the same name. It follows Soma, a young queer Cambodian American girl from Lowell, Massachusetts (which has the second-biggest Cambodian population in the country) whose spoken word video goes viral. As a result, she enters her school’s upcoming spoken word contest. On top of that, her sister’s wedding is also coming up, but things are looking bleak as their father has been deported back to Cambodia, and their mother has gone back as well to help him get settled.

Cambodian American representation in western literature is pretty sparse—and what is out there, is usually about the Khmer Rouge and the trauma our community has experienced as a result. So when I first heard about Kween, a contemporary YA story that doesn’t directly involve the genocide, I was ready to bow down at Her Majesty’s feet. No questions asked.

I recently spoke with Chum about Kween and the excitement of seeing our generation of Khmer creatives thriving as we work to raise our community’s profile.

“It's amazing to be a part of our community, to be a part of the greater ecosystem and to watch you thrive in your space,” he says, “and then find ways we can cross pollinate or ways we can just support each other from afar. You know, it's amazing.”

During our conversation, we were also both struck by our similarities. At 37, and as fellow Cambodians, we bonded over writing bad poetry as teens, not being Long Beach or Lowell Cambodians, the chaos that is a Khmer wedding, and proving the stereotype true and actually enjoying Hennessy—or “the national drink of the Cambodian people,” as he calls it.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Samantha Pak: Can you tell me a bit of how you got into writing and storytelling?
Vichet Chum: I was always writing stories. My sophomore year of high school, I had this English teacher—this small, bookish white woman—who saw that I was quite creative and that I had a knack and passion for writing, and so she was always very encouraging.

And then in my third year of graduate school, I wrote a play about my relationship with my parents’ legacy and the Khmer Rouge, and what it means to inherit that sort of history—this solo show that was my first big play (Knyum). A lot of people were really encouraging, and so I kept writing that play once I moved to New York, to become an actor.

Fast forward to 2018, I got to do that solo show at Merrimack Repertory Theater in Lowell, Massachusetts. I point to that moment professionally, artistically, just personally, where I was like, “This is actually what I should be doing. I should be writing plays, I should be creating spaces and populating them with people that I know, people I care about.”

SP: Kween started out as a play first, right?
VC: Yeah. I was commissioned by Merrimack Repertory Theater. I would walk around Lowell and see these kids with swagger. Just witnessing that kind of confidence, and to be the dominant culture in a very industrial, white town. It just felt so fascinating to me. And so I was like, “I want to write a play that has a young Cambodian protagonist in it.”

I did a couple of workshops with that virtually, during the pandemic. And then my friend, Jennifer Ung, who is the editor on Kween, the YA version—she's Khmer too—saw it and she was like, “I think this could be a YA book.”

SP: You chose specifically a female protagonist. What was the thinking behind that? And how was it writing a female protagonist from your perspective?
VC: It's not a responsibility I take lightly. If I'm going to write outside of my social location, I want to make sure I'm honoring that in some capacity and then also leaving a lot of space for the acknowledgement that I could never know everything about this experience. But I think for me, it just came organically. Walking through Lowell, I witnessed a lot of young, Cambodian high schoolers who were femme or female, and they just had this exuberant energy in a way that I never quite was privy to, growing up in a predominantly white space.

Kristian Espiritu (top) and Pisay Pao as Soma and Dahvy, respectively, during a virtual workshop of Vichet Chum's play, "Kween."

Courtesy of Vichet Chum

SP: (Kween) is something I would have wanted growing up. I read so much and there was so little, not just Asian representation, but Khmer representation. I had one book growing up (Children of the River by Linda Crew), but it was written by a white lady. Now there's you, and Afterparties (by Anthony Veasna So)—
VC: Oh, yeah, for sure.

SP: That was the first time I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is how I grew up. This is my life.” And when I was reading your book, and they're talking about the details of the wedding, like the hair-cutting ceremony, I know exactly what you're talking about. And then you mentioned the sword and I was like, “I forgot about the sword at weddings!” (laughs)
VC: All my work is framing parts of Cambodian culture, people and our experiences. I'm very aware of what happened in the ‘70s. That is all foundational to who we are as Cambodian people in 2023. And I'm not scared to mention those things—they are a part of our experiences, to a certain degree. But I am interested in moving the legacy forward.

To me, Kween is very much that. This book is an expression of how I feel when I'm in Lowell, and when I'm among people who have had similar experiences to me. And then at the same time, I am evoking things that happened in my childhood.

So much of Cambodian culture is so theatrical, too. So I understand why our generation of artists are thriving—because it's always been within us. The theatrics, it lives so deep within us, and that stuff can never die.

We come from refugee immigrants. There's nothing pristine. It is rough and tumble. We are survivors, and we're kind of a mess, but we're beautiful.

SP: And you know, during the Khmer Rouge, actors, artists, musicians, they were among the first to be targeted and killed. And I love that despite that, we’re still trying to preserve the culture here in the U.S. It just shows, they tried to take us down, but it's just something that's a part of us.
VC: Yeah. And I think that we feel that—our generation of artists, art makers, culture makers. We feel that intrinsic inheritance, that responsibility to make sure we are able to bring those customs, those rituals forward. And also then to bring them into a very contemporary context, and have it live in uneven ways with the realities that we experience.

That's what I loved about Afterparties, to reflect on that book. There's something so nuanced and textured about the way Anthony described our experiences—because we come from refugee immigrants. There's nothing pristine. It is rough and tumble. We are survivors, and we're kind of a mess, but we're beautiful. And I love, in my own work, capturing that dichotomy, that dissonance. We are trying and we are not the model minority. We are survivors.

SP: Yeah. And also Soma’s family's story of her dad being deported, that story’s being told a little bit more about Southeast Asians. I really appreciated that you showed that. Because this shit is happening right now.

VC: That's so meaningful to me. The best I can do as a writer is to show that our community is not homogenous. There are a multitude of varied experiences. That comes with us just being a community. And so it was important to me to frame this thing that is happening to the Cambodian community. And it is an untidy experience. It's not so cut and dry in terms of, “I committed this crime and then I should be put in jail.” There are so many factors that could play into the deportation of this 1.5 generation of Cambodians. It's heartbreaking and it's something we are wrestling with as a community.