Sister Elana Killilea, Director of the Asian Center of Merrimack Valley in Lawrence, knew the power of stories for healing. She envisioned a project where home-bound seniors in the Cambodian community could come together and share their stories with each other—and ultimately the wider community—through a series of memoir workshops resulting in a publication.

When Sister Elana met Peggy Rambach, a writer who has taught writing workshops in many non-traditional settings, her vision came to life. With the assistance of translator Nikki Toeur, an outreach worker at the center, Peggy worked with a group of Cambodians from age 30-70+, for two hours, twice a week, for six weeks. She gently coaxed the specifics of their stories and recorded them in translation. The project resulted in the first of three publications about Southeast Asians through the Center: Under the Sugar Palm Trees.*

Peggy's reflection on the process of collecting the memoirs was as interesting to me as the powerful final product. As a writing instructor, she drew from a repertoire of strategies she uses in any workshop to encourage the concrete, sensory images that make stories compelling.

For example, in asking the participants to recall the games of their childhoods, instead of their childhoods in general, Peggy provided a narrowed focus that allowed for an engaging starting point.Participants were already very willing to tell their stories because they wanted to share them with their children, and they could tell them in Khmer, which allowed for fuller expression. As participants talked, Peggy asked guiding questions to encourage specificity: What color was the blanket on your bed? What did the bags of rice look like? What did your house smell like? In reading the memoirs, we appreciate the complex texture of the everyday lives that result, in part, because of these details.

In the introduction of the collection, Peggy discusses the title: "I also asked the participants to describe the landscape, and many of them mentioned the sugar palm tree. Its fronds provided shelter, and the sugar made from the nectar sealed marriages, and in trade, staved off starvation. It rose, a constant on the Cambodian landscape, no matter what happened beneath it." Peggy explained how she spent 30 minutes one session carefully recording the process of extac-ting the nectar from a sugar palm tree.

Peggy admitted that it was often a challenge to draw from such intense content: trauma, war, escape, resettlement. She noted that her role was not a therapist; in remaining detached from the emotion, she could better capture the sequence and details of the stories more accurately, thus serving and honoring the participants' need to tell their histories in the most powerful way possible.

Peggy edited the stories "for fluidity, without losing the storyteller's voice." This part was hard at times. Some of the participants were from tiny villages, difficult to find and name accurately. Peggy was lucky to get the assistance off an ESOL teacher, Elaine McKinnon, who helped look up history and provided context. She also drew from Bruce Sharp's A Short History of Cambodia. Friends designed the book, and the Asian Center had it published through a press in Maine.

As a finale to the first part of the project, participants did a reading of their work, a moving experience for them and their families, some of whom heard the stories of their parents for the first time.

To help orient the reader, Under the Sugar Palm Trees opens with a map of Cambodia and is followed by several pages of Sharp's Recent History of Cambodia. The history helps us understand the role of Cambodia in the Vietnam War and explains the vicissitudes of an often-corrupt government. The stories that follow form the heart of the book. These are tales of extreme loss and longing, escape and anguish, hunger and exhaustion. Some of the stories recount repeated separations and reconnections with family; others paint small interiors: still lifes with bags of rice and mosquito nets.

We learn about the scent of roach urine that permeated village huts and could sting the skin; of savage mutilations performed by the Khmer Rouge. The most difficult for me were stories of women who lost their children-from kidnapping, death, or separation during escape.

Despite the horrors, there a few places in the narratives where the celebratory spirit and humor of the participants shines through. Seng Yin tells of her marriage to Kry Nhean: "The celebration went on for two days and one night, and people danced the whole time."

As I was reading these narratives, I could hear the voices of my Cambodian students in Providence, the women who trusted me with their stories and allowed me insight into their journeys. I was also transported back to a brief journey through Southeast Asia. One event in particular came to mind: after visiting the site of a former detention center in Phnom Penh run by the Khmer Rouge, a museum with graphic depictions of death and torture, I stepped out into the sunshine to witness a long line of Cambodians across the street, dressed in finery and bearing plate after plate of food and gifts. They were celebrating a marriage, and the wedding ritual filled the area with promise and hope.

At the end of the collection, Peggy includes a helpful glossary. She also adds descriptions of the games participants played in childhood. This light touch softens the book with its humor and teasing. "Ban also remembered a game after Bo and Duch demonstrated theirs. And when she mentioned it, everyone else remembered it too. It's called "Fighting the Fire" or "Wy Gol Gol Pung." "Girls play it," Ban said, "with a small fire. Boys play it with a big fire because they like to show off."

I highly recommend this book as captivating and enlightening reading, especially for teachers working with Cambodian students. It offers an approachable historical summary and it touches the heart.

Lenore Balliro is the editor of Field Notes. She can be reached at lballiro@worlded.org