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          "After my aunt, Da, fled to the United States following the Cambodian genocide, she spent years writing letters back home. Many letters have never arrived; some took months, even years, to reach us. The letters my mother kept are now more than a decade old. Aunt Da never wrote about her life there or her memories. Her words were always simple, repeating the same quiet line:

"How is everyone at home? Is Grandma well?” Perhaps her words were a way of keeping home close.

          In Udon Thani, traces of what once was still linger. I often think about the box of family documents buried in my grandmother's yard, the slow journey of stamped letters in those years, and the extra chairs stacked in the storage room of an old cinema that once thrived, built just one year before the war came to an end.

          This work reflects how I feel about these fragments of letters, of objects, of places, forming a quiet archive of what remains. Between the lines of grand narratives, they whisper overwhelming stories and memories that travel gently across distance and time."

 

by

Marisa srijunpleang