Savannah Szymanski
Professor Conway
Freshman Honors Seminar
6 October 2014
Year
2014
While
sitting in the theatre awaiting the performance of Year Zero, I fully expected to spend the next three hours of my
night paying minimal attention to a history based performance that focused more
on a history lesson than actual story telling. Although the topic of Cambodian
immigration and individuals seeking refuge in America from Cambodian genocide
is an extremely serious and riveting topic, history based placed generally seem
to bore me rather than entertain. I personally seem to enjoy reading about
history rather than watching a documentary of it, therefore I had low
expectations for what I might gain from the play’s storyline and performance.
However, as the play began, I was kindly surprised. The performance started
with a peculiar and gripping scene where the protagonist speaks to a human
skull, begging for its guidance over his mother’s now deceased soul. The main
character, an adolescent teenage boy in his beginning years of high school, is
displayed as a frequently bullied Cambodian immigrant aiming to find a balance
between an unstable social life and the even more tormenting psychological
destruction that comes with losing a parental figure.
My
attention was immediately caught the moment the protagonist, Vuthy, began
speaking. To begin with, the character Vuthy speaks like a comedian, expression
in his voice accompanied by a sarcastic and dramatic undertone. His character
is shown to not only be a victim of the stereotypes inflicted upon him due to
his immigrant status, but also of his inability to fully adapt to his culture’s
traditions seeing that he is both Cambodian and American. In addition, Vuthy
has relationship conflicts with each other character with in the play,
including his sister Ra, Ra’s boyfriend Glenn, and his neighbor Han. With each
character having their own separate past, the play took a more individualized
approach to the immigrant experience where it displayed the effects of first
hand immigrants and the effects on the following generations. Year Zero included an intriguing plot
that proportionally combined modern personal conflicts and historical
background all with a Cambodian American motif.
Arguably
the most surprising portion of the play is something I discovered after the
performance. The play is based around the generation and following generations
of Cambodian refugees that fled their native country in order to escape the
racial cleansing and genocide being inflicted by Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. The
most shocking realization that resulted from this performance is the massive
amount of people who were unaware of the Cambodian genocide prior to the play.
It was in some sense baffling that a large portion of students who attended the
play had not been made aware of the happenings in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge
before they had prepared to view Year
Zero. Two of the most commonly talked about genocides amongst modern day
society are the Holocaust led by Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union Genocide led
my Joseph Stalin, followed by other well discussed conflicts such as massive
genocides in Syria and Darfur. Each of these extreme killings of populations
have resulted in large quantities of awareness amongst all communities. In contrast
to these frequently discussed tragedies, the Cambodian genocide and ethnic
cleansing is rarely among the most talked about mass killings, despite the fact
that the overall death toll as a result of the Cambodian genocide was roughly
one and a half million deaths. The idea that political uprising, dictatorship, and colossal
murder of generations of Cambodians is rarely learned about in most history
classes is almost saddening when examining how detrimental the events in
Cambodia were to not only the country as a whole, but general population of
individuals that can trace their ancestry back to the fateful events that took
place there. From personal experience, the Cambodian genocide was and remains obsolete
to my previous curriculum in public schooling while growing up, and most
students can say the same. The sheer irrelevance of genocide to most classrooms
is troubling especially when events such as the Holocaust are so widely discussed,
meanwhile the amount of deaths in the Cambodian ethnic cleansing is approximately
six and a half million deaths less than that of the holocaust and is therefore seen as irrelevant to classes that teach about major world genocides. Although these alternative
genocides are viewed as more world matters due to other country’s’ involvement to
end said genocides, the overall events in Cambodia should be much more recognized
throughout history classrooms nationwide, rather than just in areas with a high
population of Cambodian American students.
Year Zero Pamphlet (Includes cast, sponsors, and historical background information)
No comments:
Post a Comment