WP2 Short Narrative Fiction: Chai, “Saving Sourdi” files:
File folders: Click on the links below to download and read these documents regarding some of the historical and cultural settings for Chai’s short story “Saving Sourdi”:
Selected pages from May-Lee Chai’s memoir Hapa Girl which describes the racism she endured growing up in eastern South Dakota. Elements from her life appear in fictionalized form in her short story “Saving Sourdi”. Hapa Girl is available as an electronic book at our college library. Search on “Hapa Girl” as Title in the book catalog.
For a glimpse of Cambodia before 1975 Khmer Rouge regime and what Ma may have been like as a young woman, watch this interview about a new documentary film: “‘Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten'” Uncovers Cambodia’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Era Before the Khmer Rouge”
For a full and shocking account of the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge genocidal regime, see Australian journalist John Pilger’s 1979 documentary film Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia to set in context Sourdi’s journey across the minefield and her family’s struggles and losses.
Setting in May-lee Chai’s “Saving Sourdi” (69)
Setting of the actions of the characters in the present tense of the story. The literary present in which the characters themselves act. Evidence in text Evidence outside text
South Dakota. Des Moines, Iowa.
Locations named throughout narrative. Author incorporates and fictionalizes elements of her own biography and life experiences. See May-lee Chai’s books Hapa Girl (available in SMC Library as an e-book) and Girl from Purple Mountain.
Early 1980s?
Page 81 paragraph 176: Reference to Madonna’s popular song “Lucky Star” (1983). Nea says Sourdi carried Nea across a minefield presumably in Cambodia when Sourdi was nine years old and Nea was four. So if Sourdi is approximately eighteen years old in the narrative’s present, then Sourdi’s earliest birth year (based on the release date of the Madonna song) could be 1965(?) which means Sourdi could possibly have been nine years old somewhere between 1975-79 during the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia.
(However, another textual reference that undercuts or contradicts 1980s setting = Snoop Dogg first on music scene in early 1990s? Author error in time frame?)
See Yale Cambodian Genocide Program described below.
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Setting in past action (Past = action prior to the actions of the characters in the present of the story) Evidence in text Evidence outside text
Family emigrates first to Texas from Cambodia.
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Family emigrates from Cambodia probably sometime in the late 1970s.
Page 73 paragraphs 45-53: Sourdi’s panic attack in the cornfield. Symbolic link to Sourdi’s minefield story which links to Khmer Rouge genocide?
Page 81 paragraph 176: Nea’s early childhood memory of story Sourdi told her about carrying Nea across a minefield strewn with human corpses.
Page 76 paragraph 88: Ma used to be a stylish young bourgeois woman in Cambodia: clue about family’s fate later under the Khmer Rouge.
Page 78 paragraph 122: Ma’s remark to Nea, “You not like your sister. Your sister knows how to bear things!” Raises the question: What past experiences exactly are Sourdi and Ma bearing into the present narrative moment?
History of Cambodia from 1960 through 1980s, especially the Khmer Rouge (leader Pol Pot) regime (1975-79). One online source for the Khmer Rouge holocaust is Yale University’s Cambodian Genocide Program.
Also, the so-called secret US bombing of Cambodia (1969-1974) as the prelude creating conditions for the Khmer Rouge rise to power. See “U.S. Involvement in the Cambodian War and Genocide” (Yale Cambodian Genocide Program)
See also William Shawcross’s books The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (in SMC Library) and Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia (available in other libraries). The irony of Nea’s family finding refuge in a country that both helped destroy the family’s country of origin and in the 1980s was defending the Khmer Rouge government’s right to occupy Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations.
See US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s support for the Khmer Rouge on page 8 of the 26 November 1975 “Memorandum of Conversation” including his strategy “to get the Chinese into Laos and Cambodia as a barrier to the Vietnamese.”
Also as a very current connection, one could research through newspaper and magazine articles the current and on-going war crime trials in Cambodia of the surviving Khmer Rouge officials and soldiers.
Why does Nea describe her sister Sourdi as “more than beautiful”? What is the source of this extra beauty?
Page 72 paragraph 38: description Sourdi’s beauty as somehow divine.
Page 84 paragraph 84: Cambodian legend of the Naga statues at Angkor Wat raises symbolic link: Is author linking Sourdi’s beauty to the Apsara or Devatas celestial maiden figures [and here] also found with the Naga at Angkor Wat and elsewhere in Cambodian temples?
Research the legends of the Naga and the Apsara in Cambodian Hindu religious tradition
Research the temple complex at Angkor Wat.
