Faculty of Art
UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies program (ACAM) and Centre for Asian Canadian Research and Engagement (ACRE) invites you to a special screening + special issue launch event, Swirling into a Field of Life: Works in Conversation with Y-Dang Troeung on Tuesday February 3, 2026! Organized in partnership with Canadian Literature, this event will continue the sustained and vigilant remembrance of the beloved scholar, author and filmmaker, Y-Dang Troeung (1980-2022). Our gathering will celebrate two recently released works: Easter Epic, a short film written and co-directed by Troeung in the last months of her life, and “Swirling into a Field of Life: Works in Conversation with Y-Dang Troeung,” a special issue of the journal Canadian Literature collecting essays, poems, images, and tributes from thirty-eight contributors who each reflect on the lasting impact of Troeung’s life and work.
Always attentive to her own construction as a writer and public intellectual, Y-Dang persistently positioned her work within her experiences as a refugee, daughter, and mother shaped by the difficult histories of war, genocide, displacement, and resettlement. Y-Dang consistently wove the personal, historical, and political into her wide-ranging work, which included scholarly writings, memoirs, and film. She left behind a small but impactful archive: the academic book Refugee Lifeworlds: the Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia (Temple University Press, 2022); the trade-press book of autotheory, Landbridge [life in fragments](Knopf, 2023); as well as special issues, articles, and artworks expressing her unique refugee experience.
Hosted by her surviving husband, Christopher Patterson (GRSJ, UBC) and close friend Vinh Nguyen (ENG, University of Waterloo), this event will hold space and memory to reflect upon historical violences and their resonances in our bodyminds. We hope to do so with the playfulness, love and creativity of Y-Dang’s “refugee lifeworlds” that, in responding to unimaginable tragedy, seek to create, and create, and create.
We would like to acknowledge that this event will take place the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm Musqueam people. We would also like to thank the UBC Social Justice Institute, the UBC Department of English Language & Literatures, Canadian Literature, the Aoki Legacy Fund, and the ACAM Fund for making this event possible.
