APIA Author Panel: Overcoming Loss of Identity and Trauma
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2020-07-22

Authors, Joy Ma, Katya Cengel, Sieu Sean Do will discuss their books, and the common thread which unites them, loss of identity and trauma through cultural violence. 

Author, Sieu Sean Do - A Cloak of Good Fortune: A Cambodian Boy's Journey From Paradise Through A Kingdom of Terror traces one Cambodian child's coming of age from the idyllic, peaceful years of childhood in rural Cambodia through his family's forced exile by the Khmer Rouge.

Sieu Sean Do is a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide and the war between Cambodia and Vietnam, which raged in Southeast Asia between 1975 and 1978. Currently, he works for a government agency in California serving victims of consumer fraud. Since 2012, he has worked on a planned two-volume memoir in honor of those who died in the violence and the lives of those who survived in the country he loves. Sieu Sean holds a Master of Humanities from the New College of California.

Author, Katya Cengel - Exiled: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to California and Back, the story of four families confronting deportation forty years after the beginning of large-scale resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees in America following the fall of the genocidal Khmer Rouge. 

Katya Cengel has written for New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post among others. She is the author of Foreword Indies 2019 Finalist “From Chernobyl with Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union” (Potomac, 2019) and “Bluegrass Baseball: A Year in the Minor League Life” (Nebraska, 2012). She has been awarded grants from the International Reporting Project, the International Women’s Media Foundation and the International Center for Journalists. Her series on the families of the Lost Boys of Sudan received a second place feature writing Society of Professional Journalists Green Eyeshade Award and her 2017 article “My brother’s killer is now my friend” was named one of BBC’s “Best big reads of 2017”.

Author, Joy Ma - The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment. The book is the untold account of the internment of 3,000 Chinese-Indians after the Sino-Indian War in 1962 .

Joy Ma grew up and was educated in India until she left for graduate school at the New School for Social Research in the US. She enjoys travelling, meeting people and writing. Joy lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, two sons, her mother and Willie, the family dog. She was one of a handful of children born in the Deoli internment camp in Rajasthan. She is working on her mother’s biography. 

Co-author Dilip D’Souza (who will not be at the panel) was educated in Pilani, Providence, Delhi, Rishi Valley, Bombay, Cambridge, Austin and places in between. Once a computer scientist, he now writes for his suppers: about political and social issues, travel, sports and mathematics. His writing has won him several awards, including the Statesman Rural Reporting Award, the Outlook–Picador India Non- fiction Prize and the Newsweek–Daily Beast South Asia Commentary Prize. He has published seven books, most recently Jukebox Mathemagic: Always One More Number.