Peauladd Huy - Poetry

Peauladd Huy - Poetry

Peauladd Huy was born in Phnom Penh. She was eight when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975. Peauladd lives on the eastern coast of the U.S. with her family.

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Peauladd Huy Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand 

Peauladd, it is so good to have you back in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. Publishing your work a few years ago was one of my defining moments as an editor. Your poems are powerful and scream inside my chest. You seem compelled to inform other people about what happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge – and, more importantly, how it felt (and feels) to survive it. What is the value of educating and informing people?

Thank you so much for everything. Without the bigheartedness of Connotation Press, this story would not be where it is today. 

Airing on optimism, I want to say invaluable; of course, it’d require one to be blind or assumed complete ignorance of current horrors (due to war, suppression of basic freedoms, and other inhumane things) being experienced by people around the world today. Basing on these horrors, one has to say that the value is yet to be learned or yet to be heard of. And I believe this is what drives me to keep trying, to keep hoping that the story will be read, then hopefully the lesson will be learned. In a way, the value is in my hope and faith that what happened in Cambodia should be a lesson to prevention. It may not be a lesson for other countries at the moment, but it should at least be in Cambodia, that the very next Khmer generation should never permit this terror, this robbing of the essence of humanity to rule again. In some odd way, I am hoping to reach the next leaders (the children of, may they be of the current government or previous Khmer Rouge) to not mimic the cruel behaviors of their fathers and mothers. I believe the probability is there, that one or two will pull through the hunger of power and greed and will put the welfare of the people first. Really, I want to do as much as I can to reach out, but how it is received is all hope.  
 
Why did you choose poetry as your medium for helping people understand what happened in Cambodia and its effects on you and others? Have you done other things to educate people, too?


Words are hard to come by when one is sad or in the midst of grief or anger. At least for me. One feels so much, but the crowding won’t let loose. It’s only after everything is expelled that words and feelings are sorted, and then one is able to express oneself properly. For me, poetry is this way somehow: it is built on a few words then digresses in limitless ways. There are so ways to feel a poem.

I did a short story and a few short essays. For one of the essays, I participated in a panel discussion at AWP (Boston) for the anthology, That Mad Game: Growing up in War-Zone. I gave the books to my children’s teachers.  
 
You’ve written a manuscript arising out of your experience in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which Connotation Press is gratefully planning to publish. Would you tell us a bit about that manuscript and what you had in mind when you put it together? What is it, for you?

Thank you again. It reflects what a generous heart everyone is at Connotation Press.

In the manuscript I had hope to reveal what a nightmare the Khmer Rouge was, and that that nightmare is still exerting its force of destruction amongst each survivor today. For me, it is just in recent time, almost forty years later that my nightmares seem to subside somewhat. Then again, sometimes, in the evening when the sun is setting with those certain colors, I feel my heart drops suddenly, as if someone were being taken away from me again. (My mother was taken in the evening, just before the sun was setting.)    

The manuscript has always been intended as a gift to be given later.    

What does it mean (or take) to survive?

This story is not my story. Really. It is the story of each of us, here or long perished. It has to be put together because my survival, my life itself is owed to too many people. And most are not here today. And the few who survived cannot speak up or have since refused. To say that I am not weighed down by having survived is a lie. And to say that I know my ultimate purpose for this life is a complete lie. I don’t most of the time—I don’t know why I live. I shouldn’t have. I was always sick and frail. But for those little spans of time I know, I’ve always wanted my effort for the writing to reciprocate everyone’s effort, the ones who are gone, the ones still here, and the ones who have made it possible or not easily for me to shy away (when I’d tried to weasel my way out – thank you, Kaite, Ken, Meg, and everyone who was in Chicago that evening).

This story cannot be another story a hundred years from now. It should be history. I hope.  
 
What brings you joy?

An elderly couple holding hands. A smile on a child’s face. A genuine worry on my six-year old’s face, about Brown Dog’s sleeping arrangement last night, who was acquired earlier on a trip to a farm. She, in her PJs running from the bed to dresser, where her jewelry boxes were (contents in the jewelry boxes: acorns, rocks, cherry pits, rambutan seed, and other jewelry things), stopped and then faced up to me, asking with her poor sad eyes if poor Brown Dog could sleep in the bed tonight, given it’s his first night with us. (She sleeps with me. Still.) I quickly replied “no.”

Brown Dog is a miniature pumpkin. Orange.