Dedication to Cambodian literature earns international award

By Rebecca Villaneda,

Peninsula News

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Rancho Palos Verdes resident and Cal State Long Beach professor Teri Yamada will receive the Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award administered by the Association of American Publishers for her work with the Nou Hach Literary Project. The project promotes literature and is a publishing outlet for Cambodian writers.

When Rancho Palos Verdes resident Teri Yamada became a college professor, she noticed a lack of Cambodian literature among a large Cambodian community in Long Beach. Yamada then started the Nou Hach Literary Project — a publishing outlet for Cambodian writers — that is earning her international recognition through the Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award administered by the Association of American Publishers.

This month, Yamada and the project’s director, Kho Tararith, will be honored with the award at the annual PEN gala in New York. PEN International is a worldwide association of writers founded in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers everywhere.

To Yamada, the award signifies protection for the Cambodian writers she has been working with since 2001.
“Because of the threats that they’ve been getting, I’ve been trying to initiate that the Nou Hach Literary Project become part of the international PEN Center,” Yamada said. “The award [is going] to the project itself.”

With Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge era of 1975 to 1979 now a memory, writers are slowly beginning to get the courage to embrace literature along with the help of the Nou Hach Literary Project. Many writers, as well as artists and poets, were killed during this period, while many others fled the country.

To add to the pause in creativity, there currently is only one writer’s association available to Cambodians. As members, they have to belong to the government’s political party where topics are censored.

“The fact that artists and writers in general seem to be more on edge — the edge of being critical on society and wanting to improve things — you can see that in many countries,” Yamada said. “The [Nou Hach Journal] is the only publication of modern Cambodian literature in the world.

“We are getting critical essays on literature, which there were few in the ’50s and ’60s, so it’s like we’re trying to re-establish a literary tradition and a critical literary tradition as well,” she added.

Yamada mostly works with younger writers “because that’s where the modern Cambodian literature is going to be,” she said. “I was actually very fortunate to hook up with some young writers who were interested in promoting modern literature because nothing was really happening in Cambodia.”

Yamada has traveled to Cambodia every summer since 2002, each time spending about five weeks organizing the annual conference tied to the project.

Writers from around the world come and share their trials of becoming a published author.

Last year Yamada took along a young American filmmaker who works on the set of the TV show “Medium.” He had done a short film on a famous Cambodian singer who was killed during the Khmer Rouge period. The filmmaker held a workshop for Cambodians, and it was the first they had ever experienced being on film.

This year the project received more than 600 poetry submissions and 130 short stories — a genre that was never well developed in Cambodia and “totally wiped out in the ’60s.”Writers tackle whatever topic they want, but Yamada said they tend to write socially critical themes, “which would be a lament on the comodification processing that’s happening in Cambodian society and the get-rich-quick political corruption and on the declining values — traditional versus modern.”

Yamada expects about 300 attendees for the June 7 event.Karen Quintiliani, an anthropology professor at Cal State Long Beach, said Yamada is an inspiration to her.

“Without the [journal] being produced, people don’t recognize the scholars coming out of Cambodia,” Quintiliani said. “I think her contribution in both Cambodia and here, in creating that intellectual environment in which people’s works are published and recognized, will end up in the long term really putting Cambodia back on the map as a key intellectual center of Southeast Asia.”

Backed by a bachelor’s degree in Asian studies, a master’s degree in South and Southeast Asian languages and literatures and a doctorate in Buddhist studies, Yamada fell in love with the Asian culture as a teenager.

A native Californian, Yamada is of European and Native American descent. She married a Japanese man she met while living in the country for eight years.

Blair Ashton, a student of Yamada’s East Asian literature and culture course, said her teaching style is open and progressive.

“It was interesting and expanding to observe the varied results from my classmates that her style engenders. I feel like she allows for growth both academically and emotionally by raising the bar, which then allows the student to rise to the occasion of their own expectations,” Ashton said. “She makes a concerted effort to know each and every person without being intrusive or judgmental. Perhaps her Ph.D. in Buddhism and the practice of its precepts have something to do with her persona. If that is so, she is certainly a person to emulate.”

Without question, Yamada said there’s still work to be done, mostly in regard to funding. But the Laber Award will help that.

“It’s really difficult to get your work published unless you’re going to pay someone to publish it,” Yamada said.Along with the award, the Nou Hach Literary Project will receive a $5,000 grant that will help publish this year’s journal.“It’s amazing the fact that the conference has been so successful,” Yamada said. “We’re the only group that I know of that has actually brought in writers from outside of Cambodia to talk about what it’s like to be a writer.

“I’m working with some really incredible young, creative writers who are totally dedicated to doing this … I was there at the right time and met some great people that I meshed with, and it’s just taken off way beyond expectation,” she said.