This story is about singing. Often, singing is performed by some kind of vocalization, at times wordless, and at times full of verbiage. I came to better understand singing through the introduction of the language that remembering and learning from my elders offered me. Within that new context, I tried to figure out what to do with these songs. By telling this piece as a story and singing it as a song, I also want to point out that this narrative does not take the form of an essay that an academic readership might expect, and that the orality of its prose stems from traditions of writing from an undercommons “in, but not of,” the university.1 As such, this article refuses extraction organized by signposting and—like in any relationship—requires time. As I revisit with you later, I invite you here to be in relation with this story and to remember with me.We were supposed to talk about sound. Actually, we were supposed to talk about the Sound Studies Working Group at Rutgers’ Center for Cultural Analysis. My colleague Luke Madson, who is a Ph.D. candidate in classics, and I were recruiting members for the group's revival. In an e-mail, Luke introduced and described geography Ph.D. candidate Hudson McFann's work to me as an “archival oral history project [that] talks about song performance in Cambodian diaspora communities.”2 Excited at the prospect of meeting a colleague working on a topic so close to my own, I did some quick research and contacted Hudson in the hopes of an invitation to join the working group. In my brief look at his project and in his reply, however, I found that we were wrong in our presumption about Hudson's work. While his oral history project did indeed mention song performance in Cambodian diasporic communities in passing, his doctoral work was on a particular Thai refugee camp, Khao I Dang.3 This misremembering would be one of the first lessons memory would offer to my project.Khao I Dang was a name that I grew up knowing from my mother's stories of her youth. I quickly stopped in my tracks and my invitation became a personal one; our meeting would be much less about my own research on Khmer American performance and further still from a working group recruitment. Hudson agreed to meet me, even offering to bring some materials from the refugee camp, and he showed them to me along with his own work. We met at a café in New York City close to where I worked, we introduced ourselves as academics do, and he proceeded to show me the objects that he brought with him. Part of the project is digital, so he showed me some of the photos and mapping he did of the camp. My mother was available to us via text-messaging, and we asked her several questions about her time in Khao I Dang.4 She told us which section of the camp she lived in (Section 21); Hudson would then point that out to me on the map and show me how she would walk to temple, how she would walk to the health center, how she would walk to school. I was enthralled by walking through this space with him and my mother. He introduced one of the books to me in a manner wary of its mundanity, unsure if I'd find it interesting. Excited to learn anything, I assured him that this act was much appreciated. We then flipped through the book together.An artifact from the model refugee camp, this textbook was a demonstration of the place's ethos as a combined effort by the UNHCR, the Thai government as the host country, and Cambodian refugees. The design of the textbook was a mix of different sorts of educational material. Each page was a separate topic. We flipped through health and safety protocols, literature and mythology, and math sets. It was here that I froze. Hudson was noticeably confused as to why I stopped here and asked me. I pointed him to the top of the page where one might find a cartoon like frogs on a lily pad or some other benign iconography meant to entice children. The pictures that adorned the top of the page were not animals but rock musicians. It was easy to remind Hudson of the importance of these figures in this textbook in its time and place. The Khmer Rouge's ultranationalist regime was infamous for its (eventually indiscriminate) genocide of Cambodian people, and chief among its targets were any Western-leaning folk. Cambodian rock musicians, whose practice indexed the hopes of a modernizing nation, had their heyday just before the regime. They were no exception to the Khmer Rouge's targeting as nine out of ten musicians were killed or died in labor camps in Democratic Kampuchea.5 This picture on top of a child's worksheet in a textbook thus became a multilayered act of memory work and placemaking.We leafed through the pages—my excitement somehow growing still—and I stopped. I did not expect it, but there was a page of Western staff notation. Unable to read the text, we sent a picture of the song to my mother, who recognized it as a folk song she sang as a child.By closely reading these two musical artifacts—the rock ‘n’ roll iconography and the folk song in sheet music—I can discuss the methods by which Cambodian refugeehood created its own space through memory work. To understand these artifacts, we will think intertextually by walking together through Khao I Dang, sometimes known as a “bamboo city.” In our walk, I hope to honor the very real lives of the people who sing these songs. These musical icons represent the lives and memories whose stories are curated here in a temporal and even ghostly discussion. We will remember that the performance of both this material inclusion and collective vocalization in the context of education is an act of transgressive memory work by refugees, not only to remember and retain the homeland but also to create new spaces of dwelling. This music and its performances—especially mine and yours here—thus become, and always already are, more than American.This narrative is about my family's story, and while I am encouraged to share these memories, I hold them carefully and closely. I remember these stories with you now not only to highlight issues in these communities but to demonstrate some potential strategies for finding answers, especially when the difficulty of posing questions requires great care. In speaking, or perhaps singing, these stories into memory, I also engage in a Cambodian cosmology of performativity wherein speech effects change into existence. These discussions help me to explain and emphasize the stakes in a community-specific engagement and the kind of thinking in my nascent project called the “Bamboo City Archive.”Public work is often cast as working for the public (most commonly in verbiage among academics), but I argue that before imagining working for people, publicly engaged humanists have to learn by working with people. In introducing my project, I also stress that neither the efforts I put forth there nor the arguments I make here seek to understand what music is.6 Rather, I turn to performance studies to ask what music does. In my own institutional turn to performance theory from music studies and my application in public work, I will remember that a community-centered engagement where space for healing is paramount requires that the position of the researcher in this function privilege serving people rather than gathering knowledge. These can be concurrent activities but understanding the contours of a child's melody does not help my community to process. While I understand that multiple forms of public musicology can be practiced, I want to understand this writing as a means of conversation, and that what communities need is action. In these stories, I hope to provide one way of thinking toward a public musicology in which I bring to the fore the potential and stakes of working with people.Take care of this invitation. When you, my reader, come into relation with this story, my kin's story, I will ask that you listen and observe. You may have questions, and perhaps even comments, but now is not the time to voice them. That time will come. Think of this request what you will, so long as you pay attention to what is important—the story, the work, and, most importantly, the people. There will be a time when I directly address the white majority of readership in music studies and ethnography, but you will know when that time comes, and you are not now the audience I wish to address. For the time being, I invite you to learn these stories with me and my kin, and to remember the place of service in this work, and to remember that ethical listening, though not enough on its own, is itself a form of service. Now, I write and sing with my siblings in the second generations and on. I sing with those of us learning about ourselves through our family when our conversations are hard or even impossible. I sing with those of us with a queer (relation to) family. I sing in Khmer, English, Khmerican with those of us who exceed the imaginations of the academy and its discourses. I sing with and therefore listen to and move with you. This is our space, which is made open to us by our kin and our kinship. Let us listen in turn.Come.The Thai border was originally open to refugees from the country's neighboring areas. But with the growing chaos in the region and the exponential growth of people who needed safe shelter, the Thai government enforced strict border policies, often turning refugees back to harm and the very real threat of death.8 The atrocities of the Khmer Rouge and other heinous acts and mass suffering made the humanitarian crisis quite clear, and the need for refuge was insurmountable. Khao I Dang refugee camp operated from 1979, toward the end of the Khmer Rouge regime, until 1993,9 well through the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia (from the proclamation of the Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea on January 8, 1979, to September 1989, following the Thai and Vietnamese rapprochement).10 The many Thai refugee camps served various populations, with Khao I Dang equipped to host 140,000 Khmer refugees. Cambodian American scholar Cathy Schlund-Vials states, “Faced with famine, lack of medicine, no infrastructure, and persistent political uncertainty, approximately 510,000 Cambodians fled to neighboring Thailand; 100,000 sought refuge in nearby Vietnam.”11Hudson asked which section of the refugee camp my family lived in and showed it to me on a few maps he developed. In our ramblings, which were really just two academics on Manhattan's Upper East Side drawing lines with pixels, I was invited to do something I had never done: together, we walked with my mother from her dwelling to temple, to the health center, to school. This imagining of the mundane was so overlooked in my wanting to understand large scale narratives of her life: “When did you leave Cambodia? How did you get to Thailand? When did you get to Hong Kong? When did you get to the United States?” Her own voluntary stories focused on her life in Cambodia or her new adventures in Hong Kong and the United States. Walking together now, she sang to me songs I had not heard before.The photo in Figure 1 tells the story of a Khmer family during this time in Thailand, the Chhays. In this moment, I come into a careful etic/emic balance, but I understand my role as I stand beside the cameraman now as curator and not as someone who has even been imagined in this photograph. They are my uncles, my grandmother, and my mother. I sing this photo of domesticity in an earlier period of Khao I Dang and add resonance to a larger story I have heard. The image has yellowed with age, and in its digitization, it is clear that the photo has been kept with care through decades of travel from Thailand to Hong Kong to the United States. There is life and nourishment here. Here, where the bamboo are made into frames that support freely grown vines and planted fruit trees, their branches too young to bear their own weight. Here, where the cultivation and care of flora understands the amount of time that is expected to be spent in this dwelling. Here, where for just one moment, what is left of a family stands together to tell of their existence. “The photographer must have been Cambodian,” my mother tells me as we talk about this photograph. She explains that the “Westerners” (which here, figuratively and geographically, include the Thai administrators) were interested in documenting only daily life. So often in these cases elsewhere, they would take pictures to talk about the hardships of refugeehood and, many times, the poor conditions of various camps. These scenes of suffering were perhaps not as prevalent in Khao I Dang as the infomercials for many other narratives would betray to our Western voyeurism. Some of the photographs of Khao I Dang better document the successes of the camp's programs with children learning, with people talking and walking, with festivals, and even with royal visits. But such journalistic photographs—unlike my family photo shared here—tell more about the events of Khao I Dang to report to the world of the livelihood of these places, which we should not confuse with the lives of those dwelling here.Their eyes look back at us. They knew who they were. Their cleaned faces and upright posture do not tell the depths of their suffering in Khmer Rouge Kampuchea, from which they fled in the governed silence of the night in a later year of the regime. No. This family is poised. Their faces tell us stories of a clan of survivors and stories of existence. “The photographer must have been Cambodian,” my mother explains to me as we look at this picture together, because they all took the time to come together and to pose standing together in the clothes that they wanted to wear. These clothes sing of another song. It is worth mentioning—if only to move on from it in that form of healing that remembering allows—that these clothes are so distant from the black worker's uniform with the red krama of Democratic Kampuchea. The white and blue dress shirts my uncles wear on their chests probably contrast the most with the uniform they wore daily in the labor camps, not two years prior to this photo. Their pants, rippling with slightly excess fabric, were made in Khao I Dang and were either sewn for them or given to them as hand-me-downs. The more decorative pants of pink and red stripes on my mother's now oldest brother must have been given to him, she remembers, smiling. My mother's patterned skirt was made by her mother, and her own shirt, buttoned to the very top, is remarkably crisp and clean. My grandmother, the matron of the household, takes her position in the center. Her sarong, itself the most efficient use of cloth as a garment, is simple and elegant in its pleat. Her shirt is remarkable in its intricate beauty. The blouse is made of a lace exterior with a brilliant white inner lining. Surprised by the quality of this garment, I wonder if my grandmother valued it enough to have hidden it in Cambodia and brought it with her to Thailand. In my mind, outweighing the improbability of its inclusion during their journey on foot to Khao I Dang, the origin, I naïvely thought, was more likely not from this camp but from the comfort of their past lives in Battambang. My grandmother got it while she was in the camp where it was made, my mother remembers. She reminds me that the clothes they wore when they escaped were the only clothes they had upon their arrival. This lace blouse sings a similar song to that of her children's clothing. Here, we give audience to an archive of beauty, labor, and skill. Diana Taylor theorizes that: “Archival” memory exists as documents. . . all those items supposedly resistant to change. From arkhe, it also means beginning, the first place, the government. By shifting the dictionary entries into a syntactical arrangement, we might conclude that the archival, from the beginning, sustains power.12A lace blouse is intricate and complex and requires a great deal of artistic craftsmanship to be made. This garment is probably among my grandmother's most prized material possessions; that she wears it with her children in their own best clothes sings so that the beauty of their impact is not in the graceful lines and pleats but in their sheer presence. These beautiful clothes were reserved for special occasions, my mother says. They would only wear them for religious festivals and holidays, and they were separated from their daily wear. Few in number, their usual clothes were changed and washed every day. In this task, we hear the soft scrubbing, and the quiet drying wind, and the care taken in this labor, and the amount of pride in the garments themselves. Perhaps this is that same care that has kept this document, and maybe this pride is the same as that worn by these faces.Walking with my mother, we come to school in the morning (and in the afternoon). Khao I Dang's integrated system was highly successful, according to Supote Prasertsri's 1983 report, Education for Indochinese Refugees: A Programme for Cultural Revitalization and Durable Solutions. Earlier educational schemes were created in a formal Thai system, which meant Thai-language instruction especially geared toward their target demographic of young children. These same strategies would be used in adult literacy programs, where participation was low and dropout rates were severe.13 Prasertsri also tells us that the programs began to use newer methods for teaching beginning in 1980 and were more successful because of three major implementations: (1) teaching by experienced refugees; (2) decentering adult literacy programs to be taught nearer to residential areas; and (3) hiring Thai teachers who spoke the refugees’ language, thereby allowing for a bilingual approach.14 Moreover, the curricular design was impacted by the inclusion of Khmer refugee teachers to the extent that textbooks were written with their involvement.While it is important to remark on the pedagogical ramifications of inclusive textbook writing, in the remembering of Khmer history, it is necessary to note the importance of having these materials in the first place. Object possession was forbidden in the Khmer Rouge regime. The ownership of literature, a photograph, or a document of any kind was largely banned and, with the exponentially growing paranoia of the regime, a reason for interrogation and disappearance. Of course, icons that expressed ideologies deemed illegal or a threat to Democratic Kampuchea during this period were especially dangerous.15 Thus, the creation of a textbook with language and math and art and cartoons becomes a testament to the values held by the book's editors.The inclusion of cartoons at the top of a page of math sets is not an uncommon feature for children's textbooks. While these caricatures are not related in any real way to the set (the first problem, for instance, is 2,000 – 1,624), they can evoke a sense of imagination in the children answering these questions. It is in this imagination that play can sing with work, a feature not allowed in the labor camps of the Khmer Rouge. In an article, Prasertsri notes the time a young girl saw a man playing the tro in a labor camp who was taken away and likely killed by Khmer Rouge officers.16 This singing in memory, therefore, alludes to the roles these musicians played as the forefront of Cambodia's modernization project with the installation of the Norodom monarchy until 1970.Among the ramblings of cyclos and the dealings of open markets, the Cambodian soundscape included the reverb of amped guitar and drum sets. In remembering these sounds and forms, this cartoon serves as transgressive memory work. Here, I think of this concept as another means of answering Cathy Schlund-Vials's notion of Cambodian Syndrome: “a transnational set of amnesiac politics revealed through hegemonic modes of public policy and memory.”17 Schlund-Vials's conception is discussed in her analysis, using the memory work of 1.5-generation Cambodian survivors in their adulthood as they remember. Memory work, as Schlund-Vials uses it, is derived from James Young's conception as “places wherein multiple significations fuel critical debates of Shoah history, survivor memory, and juridical politics.”18 Working with and through these conceptions, transgressive memory work becomes a tactic of remembering in the face of erasure. This story remembers that these same survivors were teaching and learning, respectively, in these educational programs. Their editions of textbooks and their collective performance sing against this forgetting. By positioning these refugees in this historical documentation, we remember that the refugee camp, especially in the organization of Khao I Dang, became an immediate subversion of the mass erasure of the Khmer Rouge regime. Thus, the memory of the homeland in all of its temporal and geographic assumptions were more immediate than the geopolitical transnational memory work at play, which, as Kandice Chuh states, is a “cognitive analytic that traces the incapacity of the nation-state to contain and represent fully the subjectivities and ways of life that circulate within the nation-space.”19These cartoons evoke memory that transgresses their erasure in multiple layers of process. First, their material inclusion provides tactile ownership and belonging. Note that the questions in the textbook are not answered in the pages themselves. These textbooks were not just written in the camps but most likely printed there as well. They are precious resources and materials, and their care and value most likely extended to the children. My mother remembers at one point writing on chalkboards to answer the questions, and that when it became possible, this work was done on individual sheets of paper. I am struck by this dichotomy where the board erases only to build upon, with chalk marking and being wiped from the surface, its mineral leaving ghostly memory, while the paper is kept in its longevity but notable for its delicate nature. Thus, the archives kept here are myriad forms of performed memory. Second, the content of the cartoon here is remarkable for its edited inclusion. That is, the editors of this book not only remembered these figures, but they wanted children to remember their figures as part of Cambodian life. That act of inclusion becomes political as the weight of sonic memory and the many indices built around these musicians as projections of modernity come to mind. But look more closely at their faces. With smiles, opened eyes, and, in the case of the guitarist, furrowed brows, their musicking is done with both vigor and joy. They are working to play well and sound with one another, but they are also enjoying themselves. The time spent to be able to play music together is a far cry from the labor camps in which back-breaking, hushed work was the daily routine. This tactic of remembering is more than just random or mundane; it is a curation done with precise care. Third, we can remember the amount of time spent with these texts. Prasertsri notes the success of the education of children in Khao I Dang and mentions the excitement of learning in the camps. The camp's educational scheme was integrated into everyday schedules with a four-hour period in the mornings for half of the camp's children and another period in the afternoons for the other half. School sessions occurred six days per week, which Prasertsri notes is more than the amount of education children would have received in their villages in Cambodia if they were able to go to school. Not only were children taught to remember these practices, but the time they spent remembering these practices together becomes notable.I would have never imagined what I saw when Hudson and I reached this page of music, but the sight of Western-style five-staff notation in this textbook was exhilarating. My reading Khmer was non-existent then, and Hudson's was admittedly not strong, so we sent my mother a picture of this page for translation. Slowly, I tried sight-reading the melody on neutral syllables as we waited. In this interval of time—an interval well known to an immigrant class of utterance—a sonic evocation took place in the small corner of a very small café. Soon, we learned of a song about a bird, the sarika-keo, which Sam-Ang Sam notes was widely known among Khmer children growing up.20 I followed up with my mother, wondering if she learned this song in school. She could not remember singing this song in school, but she mentions that she was taught many songs by her mother, including “Sarika keo,” and that she would sing these songs with everyone in the camp. The repertoire performed by these survivors, which we now perform in this account, marks this place, as Diana Taylor reminds us, “the repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction ‘by being there.’”21 The collective power of song in this practice, and in its play, and in its remembering, thus performs the most important function of transgressive memory work: historiography. We, the audience of these performers, are decentered as readers of history. Instead, we are reminded and invited to remember that, in the face of total erasure, these songs were sung. We listen and we remember that these singers exist.Let's take another look at the family portrait (Figure 1), this time refocusing our scope to the larger frame. These are my grandmother, my mother, my uncles. I mentioned that the man in the decorative pants was my now oldest uncle, and it would be important to clarify that at the time this photo was taken, he was my oldest surviving uncle. My maternal grandfather is also missing from this photograph. In talking through this picture, which I'd stared at for hours on end for many years by now, and after asking so many questions, I asked my mother to remember and to speak into memory the names of her father and her eldest brother for me. In her recollection, I heard their names for the first time in my own life, and I can only guess at the decades during which my mother had not spoken them out loud.I remember them with you but do not speak them to you for one reason: this narrative is not for you. Once again, my position becomes caught in the balance as my autoethnography speaks from a very personal standpoint about a community including and far beyond from and still much unknown to myself. We must relinquish personal claims of ownership in order to center the communities with which we work. This concern must be foundational in any form of public engagement. Naming in historiography is a practice of power.22 But who gets to learn, who gets to remember, who gets to repeat these stories are questions we must constantly ask, and this kind of trauma-informed, community-based activism makes very clear the stakes that are involved.I am grateful for my mother's bravery throughout her many stages of life. I am grateful for the opportunity to take up this space today with you to remember these people, my family. But I must also remember that my mother is an outlier in the Khmer community. Among other people in the 1.5 generation, she is remarkably open about her history, though she takes care to remind me there are things about her life in Asia that she'll never admit to me. This conversation is a difficult one to have with refugees. In the Cambodian diaspora, we face many challenges to remembering these stories. Often, remembering is too difficult.Cambodian survivors are more likely not to speak their histories for various reasons. Predominant within this demographic are cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), where the refusal of memory is predicated on mental and emotional preservation. Added to this is the notion of mental health in psychiatric and psychological care, which in many cases is too foreign a system of medicine. Within Cambodian cosmologies, there is also the notion of “kat kal chaol,” or “disowning,” wherein the act of speaking about evil creates or recreates evil itself and is refused as such. Therefore, if the evils of the Khmer Rouge are not spoken, they cease to exist.23 Moreover, Khao I Dang, as a refugee camp, was still a carceral space, made readily evident by the jail located by its entrance and constant military presence. So, while I have demonstrated and pointed to many daily acts of subversive life, or living in and against genocide, we must remember the contexts of presence. There is also the reality of Cambodia's current government and its remnants of the so-called pineapple state with its many eyes. Here, it is important to point to Emily Howe's ethnomusicological research and note that there are still modes of political engagement in Cambodia's soundscape.24 In my own conversations with elders, however, I am still warned about my own safety and told to be mindful of what I say, or write, or remember.In my second-generation turn, however, I stress the need to document these histories after being told by our parents and grandparents time and time again to know a history that battles its own erasure in archive and repertoire. I am grateful to work with Hudson McFann in developing the Bamboo City Archive. Still in its planning phase, the project will build upon Hudson's own foundational historical work of archiving materials and engaging in oral histories. One of our goals is to continue to collect archival material for digitization. I, myself, am most focused on community engagement and developing a series of activities and questions that will invigorate intergenerational dialogue and build on Hudson's oral histories.We intend to have multi-site exhibitions engaging with Cambodian American communities across the United States. Our hope is to partner with local organizations developed for the welfare of Cambodian and Southeast Asian immigrant communities. This partnership would also provide resources like healthcare and support groups